Donna Tartt - The Secret History

He shrugged, a funny little one-shouldered shrug, a mannerism he and his sister had in common. 'Search me,' he said wearily. 'I guess we should go.'

When we got to Julian's office, Henry and Francis were already there. Francis hadn't finished his essay. He was scratching rapidly at the second page, his fingers blue with ink, while Henry proofread the first one, dashing in subscripts and aspirants with his fountain pen.

He didn't look up. 'Hello,' he said. 'Close the door, would you?'

Charles kicked at the door with his foot. 'Bad news,' he said.

'Very bad?'

'Financially, yes.'

Francis swore, in a quick hissing underbreath, without pausing in his work. Henry dashed in a few final marks, then fanned the paper in the air to dry it.

'Well for goodness' sakes,' he said mildly. 'I hope it can wait.

I don't want to have to think about it during class. How's that last page coming, Francis?'

'Just a minute,' said Francis, laboriously, his words lagging behind the hurried scrawl of his pen.

Henry stood behind Francis's chair and leaned over his shoulder and began to proofread the top of the last page, one elbow resting on the table. 'Camilla's with him?' he said.

'Yes. Ironing his nasty old shirt.'

'Hmnn.' He pointed at something with the end of his pen.

'Francis, you need the optative here instead of the subjunctive.'

Francis reached up quickly from his work – he was nearly at the end of the page – to change it.

'And this labial becomes pi, not kappa.'

Bunny arrived late, and in a foul temper. 'Charles,' he snapped, 'if you want this sister of yours to ever get a husband, you better teach her how to use an iron.' I was exhausted and ill prepared and it was all I could do to keep my mind on the class. I had._, French at two. but after Greek I went straight hack to my room and took a sleeping pill and went to bed. The sleeping pill was an extraneous gesture; I didn't need it, but the mere possibility of restlessness, of an afternoon full of bad dreams and distant plumbing noises, was too unpleasant to even contemplate.

So I slept soundly, more soundly than I should have, and the day slipped easily away. It was almost dark when somewhere, through great depths, I became aware that someone was knocking at my door.

It was Camilla. I must have looked terrible, because she raised an eyebrow and laughed at me. 'All you ever do is sleep,' she said. 'Why is it you're always sleeping when I come to see you?'

I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.

'Come in,' I said. s She did, and closed the door behind her. I sat on the side of * the unmade bed, feet bare and collar loose, and thought how wonderful it would be if this really were a dream, if I could walk over to where she sat and put my hands on either side of her face and kiss her, on the eyelids, on the mouth, on the place at her temple where the honey-colored hair graded into silky gold.

We looked at each other for a long time.

'Are you sick?' she said.

The gleam of her gold bracelet in the dark. I swallowed. It was hard to think what to say.

She stood up again. 'I'd better go,' she said. 'I'm sorry to have bothered you. I came to ask if you wanted to go on a drive.'

'What?'

'A drive. It's all right, though. Some other time.'

'Where?'

'Somewhere. Nowhere. I'm meeting Francis at Commons in ten minutes.'

'No, wait,' I said. I felt sort of marvelous. A narcotic heaviness still clung deliriously to my limbs and I imagined what fun it would be to wander with her – drowsy, hypnotized – up to Commons in the fading light, the snow.

I stood up – it took forever to do it, the floor receding gradually before my eyes as if I were simply growing taller and taller by some organic process – and walked to my closet. The floor swayed as gently beneath me as the deck of an airship. I found my overcoat, then a scarf. Gloves were too complicated to bother with.

'Okay,' I said. 'Ready.'

She raised an eyebrow. 'It's sort of cold out,' she said. 'Don't you think you should wear some shoes?'

We walked to Commons through slush and cold rain, and when we got there Charles, Francis, and Henry were waiting for us.

The configuration struck me as significant, in some way that was not entirely clear, everyone except for Bunny – 'What's going on?' I said, blinking at them.

'Nothing,' said Henry, tracing a pattern on the floor with the sharp, glinting ferrule of his umbrella. 'We're just going for a drive. I thought it might be fun' – he paused delicately – 'if we got away from school for a while, maybe had some dinner Without Bunny, that is the subtext here, I thought. Where was he? The tip of Henry's umbrella glittered. I glanced up and noticed that Francis was looking at me with lifted eyebrows.

'What is it?' I said irritably, swaying slightly in the doorway.

He exhaled with a sharp, amused sound. 'Are you drunk?' he said.

They were all looking at me in kind of a funny way. 'Yes,' I said. It wasn't the truth, but I didn't feel much like explaining.

The chill sky, misty with fine rain near the treetops, made even the familiar landscape around Hampden seem indifferent and remote. The valleys were white with fog and the top of Mount Cataract was entirely obscured, invisible in the cold haze. Not being able to see it, that omniscient mountain which grounded Hampden and its environs in my senses, I found it difficult to get my bearings, and it seemed as if we were heading into strange and unmarked territory, though I had been down this road a hundred times in all weathers. Henry drove, rather fast as he always did, the tires whining on the wet black road and water spraying high on either side.

'I looked at this place about a month ago,' he said, slowing as we approached a white farmhouse on a hill, forlorn bales of hay dotting the snowy pasture. 'It's still for sale, but I think they want too much.'

'How many acres?' said Camilla.

'A hundred and fifty.'

'What on earth would you do with that much land?' She raised her hand to clear the hair from her eyes and again I caught the gleam of her bracelet: blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown… 'You wouldn't want to farm it, would you?'

'To my way of thinking,' Henry said, 'the more land the better.

I'd love to have so much land that from where I lived I couldn't see a highway or a telephone pole or anything I didn't want to see. I suppose that's impossible, this day and age, and that place is practically on the road. There was another farm I saw, over the line in New York State…'

A truck shot past in a whine of spray.

Everyone seemed unusually calm and at ease and I thought I knew why. It was because. Bunny wasn't with us. They were avoiding the topic with a deliberate unconcern; he must be somewhere now, I thought, doing something, what I didn't want to ask. I leaned back and looked at the silvery, staggering paths the raindrops made as they blew across my window.

'If I bought a house anywhere I'd buy one here,' said Camilla.

'I've always liked the mountains better than the seashore.'

'So have I,' said Henry. 'I suppose in that regard my tastes are rather Hellenistic. Landlocked places interest me, remote prospects, wild country. I've never had the slightest bit of interest in the sea. Rather like what Homer says about the Arcadians, you remember? With ships they had nothing to do…'

'It's because you grew up in the Midwest,' Charles said.

'But if one follows that line of reasoning, then it follows that I would love flat lands, and plains. Which I don't. The descriptions of Troy in the Iliad are horrible to me – all flat land and burning sun. No. I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions Pan himself was born in the mountains, you know. And Zeus. In Parrhasia it was that Rheia bore thee,' he said dreamily, lapsing into Greek, 'where was a hill sheltered with the thickest brush It was dark now. Around us, the countryside lay veiled and mysterious, silent in the night and fog. This was remote, untraveled land, rocky and thickly wooded, with none of the quaint appeal of Hampden and its rolling hills, its ski chalets and antique shops, but high and perilous and primitive, everything black and desolate even of billboards.