Donna Tartt: The Secret History

I might have said yes, but I had the feeling he would be glad to catch me in a mistake, and that he would be able to do it easily. 'I like Homer,' I said weakly.

He regarded me with chill distaste. 'I love Homer,' he said.

'Of course we're studying things rather more modern, Plato and the tragedians and so forth.'

I was trying to think of some response when he looked away in disinterest.

'We should go,' he said.

Charles shuffled his papers together, stood up again; Camilla stood beside him and this time she offered me her hand, too.

Side by side, they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gesture which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid. Their eyes were the same color of gray, intelligent and calm. She, I thought, was very beautiful, in an unsettling, almost medieval way which would not be apparent to the casual observer.

Bunny pushed his chair back and slapped me between the shoulder blades. 'Well, sir,' he said, 'we must get together sometime and talk about Greek, yes?'

'Goodbye,' Henry said, with a nod.

'Goodbye,' I said. They strolled off and I stood where I was and watched them go, walking out of the library in a wide phalanx, side by side.

When I went by Dr Roland's office a few minutes later to drop off the Xeroxes, I asked him if he could give me an advance on my work-study check.

He leaned back in his chair and trained his watery, red-rimmed eyes on me. 'Well, you know,' he said, 'for the past ten years, I've made it my practice not to do that. Let me tell you why that is.'

'I know, sir,' I said hastily. Dr Roland's discourses on his 'practices' could sometimes take half an hour or more. 'I understand.

Only it's kind of an emergency.'

He leaned forward again and cleared his throat. 'And what,' he said, 'might that be?'

His hands, folded on the desk before him, were gnarled with veins and had a bluish, pearly sheen around the knuckles. I stared at them. I needed ten or twenty dollars, needed it badly, but I had come in without first deciding what to say. 'I don't know,' I said. 'Something has come up.'

He furrowed his eyebrows impressively. Dr Roland's senile manner was said to be a facade; to me it seemed quite genuine but sometimes, when you were off your guard, he would display an unexpected flash of lucidity, which – though it frequently did not relate to the topic at hand – was evidence that rational processes rumbled somewhere in the muddied depths of his consciousness.

'It's my car,' I said, suddenly inspired. I didn't have a car. 'I need to get it fixed.'

I had not expected him to inquire further but instead he perked up noticeably. 'What's the trouble?'

'Something with the transmission.'

'Is it dual-pathed? Air-cooled?'

'Air-cooled,' I said, shifting to the other foot. I did not care for this conversational turn. I don't know a thing about cars and am hard-pressed to change a tire.

'What've you got, one of those little V-6 numbers?'

'Yes.'

'I'm not surprised. All the kids seem to crave them.'

I had no idea how to respond to this.

He pulled out his desk drawer and began to pick things up and bring them close to his eyes and put them back in again.

'Once a transmission goes,' he said, 'in my experience the car is gone. Especially on a V-6. You might as well take that vehicle to the junk heap. Now, myself, I've got a '98 Regency Brougham, ten years old. With me, it's regular checkups, new filter every fifteen hundred miles, and new oil every three thousand. Runs a dream. Watch out for these garages in town,' he said sharply.

'Pardon?'

He'd found his checkbook at last. 'Well, you ought to go to the Bursar but I guess this'll be all right,' he said, opening it and beginning to write laboriously. 'Some of these places in Hampden, they find out you're from the college, they'll charge you double. Redeemed Repair is generally the best – they're a bunch of born-agains down there but they'll still shake you down pretty good if you don't keep an eye on them.'

He tore out the check and handed it to me. I glanced at it and my heart skipped a beat. Two hundred dollars. He'd signed it and everything.

'Don't you let them charge you a penny more,' he said.

'No sir,' I said, barely able to conceal my joy. What would I do with all this money? Maybe he would even forget he had given it to me.

He pulled down his glasses and looked at me over the tops of them. 'That's Redeemed Repair,' he said. They're out on Highway 6. The sign is shaped like a cross.'

'Thank you,' I said.

I walked down the hall with spirits soaring, and two hundred dollars in my pocket, and the first thing I did was to go downstairs to the pay phone and call a cab to take me into Hampden town.

If there's one thing I'm good at, it's lying on my feet. It's sort of a gift I have.

And what did I do in Hampden town? Frankly, I was too staggered by my good fortune to do much of anything. It was a glorious day; I was sick of being poor, so, before I thought better of it, I went into an expensive men's shop on the square and bought a couple of shirts. Then I went down to the Salvation Army and poked around in bins for a while and found a Harris tweed overcoat and a pair of brown wingtips that fit me, also some cufflinks and a funny old tie that had pictures of men hunting Jeer on it. When I came out of the store I was happy to find that I still had nearly a hundred dollars. Should I go to the bookstore?

To the movies? Buy a bottle of Scotch? In the end, I was so swarmed by the flock of possibilities that drifted up murmuring and smiling to crowd about me on the bright autumn sidewalk that – like a farm boy flustered by a bevy of prostitutes -1 brushed right through them, to the pay phone on the corner, to call a cab to take me to school.

Once in my room, I spread the clothes on my bed. The cufflinks were beaten up and had someone else's initials on them, but they looked like real gold, glinting in the drowsy autumn sun which poured through the window and soaked in yellow pools on the oak floor – voluptuous, rich, intoxicating.

I had a feeling of deja vu when, the next afternoon, Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding, something that he was careful not everyone should see. It was a feeling I would come to know well in the next months. Even now, years later and far away, sometimes in dreams I find myself standing before that white door, waiting for him to appear like the gatekeeper in a fairy story: ageless, watchful, sly as a child.

When he saw it was me, he opened the door slightly wider than he had the first time. 'Mr Pepin again, isn't it?' he said.

I didn't bother to correct him. 'I'm afraid so.'

He looked at me for a moment. 'You have a wonderful name, you know,' he said. 'There were kings of France named Pepin.'

'Are you busy now?'

'I am never too busy for an heir to the French throne if that is in fact what you are,' he said pleasantly.

'I'm afraid not.'

He laughed and quoted a little Greek epigram about honesty being a dangerous virtue, and, to my surprise, opened the door and ushered me in.

It was a beautiful room, not an office at all, and much bigger than it looked from outside – airy and white, with a high ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the starched curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant; their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky scent of camphor. Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated. Everywhere I looked was something beautiful – Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels a dazzle of fractured color that struck me as if I had stepped into one of those little Byzantine churches that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt and tesserae.