Donna Tartt - The Secret History

And I accepted this explanation for much of Bunny's crabbiness at the end of the term, which subsequently I was to find was due to entirely different reasons.

What should I tell you? About the Saturday in December that Bunny ran around the house at five in the morning, yelling 'First snow!' and pouncing on our beds? Or the time Camilla tried to teach me the box step; or the time Bunny turned the boat over – with Henry and Francis in it – because he thought he saw a water snake? About Henry's birthday party, or about the two instances when Francis's mother- all red hair and alligator pumps and emeralds – turned up on her way to New York, trailing the Yorkshire terrier and the second husband? (She was a wild card, that mother of his; and Chris, her new husband, was a bit player * in a soap opera, barely older than Francis. Olivia was her name.

At the time I first met her, she had just been released from the Betty Ford Center after having been cured of alcoholism and an unspecified drug habit, and was launching merrily down the path of sin again. Charles once told me that she had knocked on his door in the middle of the night and asked if he would care to join her and Chris in bed. I still get cards from her at Christmas.)

One day, however, remains particularly vivid, a brilliant Saturday in October, one of the last summery days we had that year.

The night before – which had been rather cold – we'd stayed up drinking and talking till almost dawn, and I woke late, hot and vaguely nauseated, to find my blankets kicked to the foot of the bed and sun pouring through the window. I lay very still for a long time. The sun filtered through my eyelids a bright, painful red, and my damp legs prickled with the heat. Beneath me, the house was silent, shimmering and oppressive.

I made my way downstairs, my feet creaking on the steps.

The house was motionless, empty. Finally I found Francis and Bunny on the shady side of the porch. Bunny had on a T-shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts; Francis, his face flushed a blotchy albino pink, and his eyelids closed and almost fluttering with pain, was wearing a ratty terry-cloth bathrobe that was stolen from a hotel.

They were drinking prairie oysters. Francis pushed his over to me without looking at it. 'Here, drink this,' he said, Till be sick if I look at it another second.'

The yolk quivered, gently, in its bloody bath of ketchup and Worcestershire.7 don't want it,' I said, and pushed it back.

He crossed his legs and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. 'I don't know why I make these things,' he said. 'They never work. I have to go get some Alka-Seltzer.'

Charles closed the screen door behind him and wandered listlessly onto the porch in his red-striped bathrobe. 'What you need,' he said, 'is an ice-cream float.'

'You and your ice-cream floats.'

'They work, I tell you. It's very scientific. Cold things are good for nausea and -'

'You're always saying that, Charles, but I just don't think it's true.'

'Would you just listen to me for a second? The ice cream slows down your digestion. The Coke settles your stomach and the caffeine cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy. And besides, it makes you metabolize the alcohol faster. It's the perfect food.'

'Go make me one, would you?' said Bunny.

'Go make it yourself,' said Charles, suddenly irritable.

'Really,' Francis said, 'I think I just need an Alka-Seltzer.'

Henry – who had been up, and dressed, since the first wink of dawn – came down shortly, followed by a sleepy Camilla, damp and flushed from her bath, and her gold chrysanthemum of a head curled and chaotic. It was almost two in the afternoon. The greyhound lay on its side, drowsing, one chestnut-colored eye only partly closed and rolling grotesquely in the socket.

There was no Alka-Seltzer, so Francis went in and got a bottle of ginger ale and some glasses and ice and we sat for a while as the afternoon got brighter and hotter. Camilla – who was rarely content to sit still but was always itching to do something, anything, play cards, go for a picnic or a drive – was bored and restless, and made no secret of it. She had a book, but she wasn't reading; her legs were thrown over the arm of her chair, one bare heel kicking, with obstinate, lethargic rhythm, at the wicker side. Finally, as much to humor her as anything, Francis suggested a walk to the lake. This cheered her instantly. There was nothing else to do, so Henry and I decided to go along. Charles and Bunny were asleep, and snoring in their chairs.

The sky was a fierce, burning blue, the trees ferocious shades of red and yellow. Francis, barefoot and still in his bathrobe, stepped precariously over rocks and branches, balancing his glass of ginger ale. Once we got to the lake he waded in, up to his knees, and beckoned dramatically like Saint John the Baptist.

We took off our shoes and socks. The water near the bank was a clear, pale green, cool over my ankles, and the pebbles at the bottom were dappled with sunlight. Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, an old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting. A wind rustled through the birches, blowing up the pale undersides of the leaves, and it caught in Camilla's dress and billowed it out like a white balloon. She laughed, and smoothed it down quickly, only to have it blow out again.

The two of us walked near the shore, in the shallows barely covering our feet. The sun shimmered off the lake in bright waves – it didn't look like a real lake but a mirage in the Sahara.

Henry and Francis were further out: Francis talking, gesticulating wildly in his white robe and Henry with his hands clasped behind his back, Satan listening patiently to the rantings of some desert prophet.

We walked a good distance around the lake's edge, she and I, ^ then started back. Camilla, one hand shading her light-dazzled V eyes, was telling me a long story about something the dog had done – chewing up a sheepskin rug that belonged to the landlord, their efforts to disguise and finally to destroy the evidence – but I wasn't following her very closely: she looked so much like her brother, yet his straightforward, uncompromising good looks were almost magical when repeated, with only slight variations, in her. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.

I was looking at the side of her face, listening to the sweet, throaty cadences of her voice, when I was jolted from my musing by a sharp exclamation. She stopped.

'What is it?' M She was staring down at the water. 'Look,' In the water, a dark plume of blood blossomed by her foot; as I blinked, a thin red tendril spiraled up and curled over her pale toes, undulating in the water like a thread of crimson smoke.

'Jesus, what did you do?'

'I don't know. I stepped on something sharp.' She put a hand on my shoulder and I held her by the waist. There was a shard of green glass, about three inches long, stuck in her foot just above the arch. The blood pulsed thickly with her heartbeat; the glass, stained with red, glittered wickedly in the sun.

'What is it?' she said, trying to lean over to see. 'Is it bad?'

She had cut an artery. The blood was spurting out strong and fast.

'Francis?' I yelled. 'Henry?'

'Mother of God,' said Francis when he got close enough to see, and started splashing towards us, holding the skirt of his robe out of the water with one hand. 'What have you done to yourself?

Can you walk? Let me see,' he said, out of breath.

Camilla tightened her grip on my arm. The bottom of her foot was glazed with red. Fat droplets ticked off the edge, spreading and dispersing like drops of ink in the clear water.