Donna Tartt: The Secret History

'Well, I'm the registrar, not the switchboard. But I might know. Who is it?'

'Julian Morrow.'

'Oh. him,' she said, surprised. 'What do you want with him? He's upstairs, I think, in the Lyceum.'

'What room?'

'Only teacher up there. Likes his peace and quiet. You'll find him.'

Actually, finding the Lyceum wasn't easy at all. It was a small building on the edge of campus, old and covered with ivy in such a manner as to be almost indistinguishable from its landscape.

Downstairs were lecture halls and classrooms, all of them empty, with clean blackboards and freshly waxed floors. I wandered around helplessly until finally I noticed the staircase – small and badly lit – in the far corner of the building.

Once at the top I found myself in a long, deserted hallway.

Enjoying the noise of my shoes on the linoleum, I walked along briskly, looking at the closed doors for numbers or names until I came to one that had a brass card holder and, within it, an engraved card that read julian morrow. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked, three short raps.

A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me. It was a small, wise face, as alert and poised as a question; and though certain features of it were suggestive of youth – the elfin upsweep of the eyebrows, the deft lines of nose and jaw and mouth – it was by no means a young face, and the hair was snow white.

I stood there for a moment as he blinked at me.

'How may I help you?' The voice was reasonable and kind, in the way that pleasant adults sometimes have with children.

'I – well, my name is Richard Papen '

He put his head to the side and blinked again, bright-eyed, amiable as a sparrow.

'- and I want to take your class in ancient Greek.'

His face fell. 'Oh. I'm sorry.' His tone of voice, incredibly enough, seemed to suggest that he really was sorry, sorrier than I was. 'I can't think of anything I'd like better, but I'm afraid there isn't any room. My class is already filled.'

Something about this apparently sincere regret gave me courage.

'Surely there must be some way,' I said. 'One extra student '

Tm terribly sorry, Mr Papen,' he said, almost as if he were consoling me on the death of a beloved friend, tiring to make me understand that he was powerless to help me in any substantial way. 'But I have limited myself to five students and I cannot even think of adding another.'

'Five students is not very many.'

He shook his head quickly, eyes shut, as if entreaty were more than he could bear.

'Really, I'd love to have you, but I mustn't even consider it,' he said. 'I'm terribly sorry. Will you excuse me now? I have a student with me.'

More than a week went by. I started my classes and got a job with a professor of psychology named Dr Roland. (I was to assist him in some vague 'research,' the nature of which I never discovered; he was an old, dazed, disordered-lookiiig fellow, a behavioralist, who spent most of his time loitering in the teachers' lounge.) And I made some friends, most of them freshmen who lived in my house. Friends is perhaps an inaccurate word to use.

We ate our meals together, saw each other coming and going, but mainly were thrown together by the fact that none of us knew anybody – a situation which, at the time, did not seem necessarily unpleasant. Among the few people I had, net who'd been at Hampden awhile, I asked what the story was with Julian Morrow.

Nearly everyone had heard of him, and I was givm all sorts of contradictory but fascinating information: that he ivas a brilliant man; that he was a fraud; that he had no college degree; that he had been a great intellectual in the forties, and i friend to Ezra Pound and The. S. Eliot; that his family money iiad come from a partnership in a white-shoe banking firm or, conversely, from the purchase of foreclosed property during the Depression; that he had dodged the draft in some war (though chronologically this was difficult to compute); that he had ties with the Vatican; a deposed royal family in the Middle East; Franco's Spain. The degree of truth in any of this was, of course, unknowable but the more I heard about him, the more interested I became, and I began to watch for him and his little group of pupils around campus. Four boys and a girl, they were nothing so unusual at a distance. At close range, though, they were an arresting party at least to me, who had never seen anything like them, and to whom they suggested a variety of picturesque and fictive qualities.

Two of the boys wore glasses, curiously enough the same kind: tiny, old-fashioned, with round steel rims. The larger of the two – and he was quite large, well over six feet – was dark-haired, with a square jaw and coarse, pale skin. He might have been handsome had his features been less set, or his eyes, behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank. He wore dark English suits and carried an umbrella (a bizarre sight in Hampden) and he walked stiffly through the throngs of hippies and beatniks and preppies and punks with the self-conscious formality of an old ballerina, surprising in one so large as he. 'Henry Winter,' said my friends when I pointed him out, at a distance, making a wide circle to avoid a group of bongo players on the lawn.

The smaller of the two – but not by much – was a sloppy blond boy, rosy-cheeked and gum-chewing, with a relentlessly cheery demeanor and his fists thrust deep in the pockets of his knee-sprung trousers. He wore the same jacket every day, a shapeless brown tweed that was frayed at the elbows and short in the sleeves, and his sandy hair was parted on the left, so a long forelock fell over one bespectacled eye. Bunny Corcoran was his name, Bunny being somehow short for Edmund. His voice was loud and honking, and carried in the dining halls.

The third boy was the most exotic of the set. Angular and elegant, he was precariously thin, with nervous hands and a shrewd albino face and a short, fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen. I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince andjack the Ripper. Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez. (Later, I discovered that they weren't real pince-nez, but only had glass in them, and that his eyes were a good deal sharper than my own.) Francis Abernathy was his name. Further inquiries elicited suspicion from male acquaintances, who wondered at my interest in such a person.

And then there were a pair, boy and girl. I saw them together a great deal, and at first I thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend, until one day I saw them up close and realized they had to be siblings. Later I learned they were twins. They looked very much alike, with heavy dark-blond hair and epicene faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of Flemish angels.

And perhaps most unusual in the context of Hampden – where pseudo-intellects and teenage decadents abounded, and where black clothing was de rigueur – they liked to wear pale clothes, particularly white. In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory, or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party. It was easy to find out who they were, as they shared the distinction of being the only twins on campus. Their names were Charles and Camilla Macaulay.

All of them, to me, seemed highly unapproachable. But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing past at the wheel of a little white car, with Julian in the passenger's seat; Bunny leaning out of an upstairs window to yell something at the twins on the lawn below. Slowly, more information came niy way. Francis Abernathy was from Boston and, from most accounts, quite wealthy. Henry, too, was said to be wealthy; what's more, he was a linguistic genius. He spoke a number of languages, ancient and modern, and had published a translation of Anacreon, with commentary, when he was only eighteen. (I found this out from Georges Laforgue, who was otherwise sour and reticent on the topic; later I discovered that Henry, during his freshman year, had embarrassed Laforgue badly in front of the entire literature faculty during the question-and-answer period of his annual lecture on Racine.) The twins had an apartment off campus, and were from somewhere down south. And Bunny Corcoran had a habit of playing John Philip Sousa march tunes in his room, at full volume, late at night.