Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'Anyway. The crowd parted when I came in and the Dean of Studies handed me the telephone. Mr Corcoran calmed down when he realized who I was. Got all confidential and asked me if this wasn't some type of frat stunt.'

'Oh, God,' said Francis.

Charles looked at him out of the corner of his eye. 'He asked about you. "Where's the old Carrot-Top," he said.'

'What else did he say?'

'He was very nice. Asked about you all, really. Said to tell everybody that he said hi.'

There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

Henry bit his lower lip and went to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a drink. 'Did anything,' he said, 'come up about that bank business?'

'Yes. Marion gave them the girl's name. By the way' – when he looked up, his eyes were distracted, blank – 'I forgot to tell you earlier, but Marion gave your name to the police. Yours too, Francis.'

'Why?' said Francis, alarmed. 'What for?'

'Who were his friends? They wanted to know.'

'But why me?'

'Calm down, Francis.'

The light in the room was gone. The skies were lilac-colored and the snowy streets had a surreal, lunar glow. Henry turned on the lamp. 'Do you think they'll start looking tonight?'

They'll look for him, certainly. Whether they'll look in the right place is something else.'

No one said anything for a moment. Charles, thoughtfully, rattled the ice in his glass. 'You know,' he said, 'we've done a terrible thing.'

'We had to, Charles, as we have all discussed.'

'I know, but I can't stop thinking about Mr Corcoran. The holidays we've spent at his house. And he was so sweet on the telephone.'

'We're all a lot better off.'

'Some of us are, you mean.'

Henry smiled acidly. 'Oh, I don't know,' he said. Tle XXuiou port; jif'Yfrc hv ',\ff›r^'

This was something to the effect that, in the Underworld, a great ox costs only a penny, but I knew what he meant and in spite of myself I laughed. There was a tradition among the ancients that things were very cheap in Hell.

When Henry left, he offered to drive me back to school. It was late, and when we pulled up behind the dormitory I asked him if he wanted to come to Commons and have some dinner.

We stopped in the post office so Henry could check his mail.

He went to his mailbox only about every three weeks so there was quite a stack waiting for him; he stood by the trash can, going through it indifferently, throwing half the envelopes away unopened. Then he stopped.

'What is it?'

He laughed. 'Look in your mailbox. It's a faculty questionnaire.

Julian's up for review.'

They were closing the dining hall by the time we arrived, and the janitors had already started to mop the floor. The kitchen was closed, too, so I went to ask for some peanut butter and bread while Henry made himself a cup of tea. The main dining room was deserted. We sat at a table in the corner, our reflections mirrored in the black of the plate-glass windows. Henry took out a pen and began to fill out Julian's evaluation.

I looked at my own copy while I ate my sandwich. The questions were ranked from one – poor to five – excellent: Is this faculty member prompt? Well-prepared? Ready to offer help outside the classroom? Henry, without the slightest pause, had gone down the list and circled all fives. Now I saw him writing the number 19 in a blank.

'What's that for?'

'The number of classes I've taken with Julian,' he said, without looking up.

'You've taken nineteen classes with Julian?'

'Well, that's tutorials and everything,' he said, irritated.

For a moment there was no sound except the scratching of Henry's pen and the distant crash of dish racks in the kitchen.

'Does everybody get these, or just us?' I said.

'Just us,' 'I wonder why they even bother.'

'For their records, I suppose.' He had turned to the last page, which was mostly blank. Please elaborate here on any additional compliments or criticisms you may have of this teacher. Extra sheets of paper may be attached if necessary.

His pen hovered over the paper. Then he folded the sheet and pushed it aside.

'What,' I said, 'aren't you going to write anything?'

Henry took a sip of his tea. 'How,' he said, 'can I possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?'

After dinner, I went back to my room. I dreaded the thought of the night ahead, but not for the reasons one might expect – that I was worried about the police, or that my conscience bothered me, or anything of the sort. Quite the contrary. By that time, by some purely subconscious means, I had developed a successful mental block about the murder and everything pertaining to it. I talked about it in select company but seldom thought of it when alone.

What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten. Every cruel or fatuous thing I'd ever said came back to me with an amplified clarity, no matter how I talked to myself or jerked my head to shake the thoughts away: old insults and guilts and embarrassments stretching clear back to childhood – the crippled boy I'd made fun of, the Easter chick I'd squeezed to death – paraded before me one by one, in vivid and mordant splendor.

I tried to work on Greek but it wasn't much good. I would look up a word in the lexicon only to forget it when I turned to write it down; my noun cases, my verb forms, had left me utterly.

Around midnight I went downstairs and called the twins. Camilla answered the phone. She was sleepy, a little drunk and getting ready for bed.

'Tell me a funny story,' I said.

'I can't think of any funny stories.'

'Any story.'

'Cinderella? The Three Bears?'

'Tell me something that happened to you when you were little.'

So she told me about the only time she remembered seeing her father, before he and her mother were killed. It was snowing, she said, and Charles was asleep, and she was standing in her crib looking out the window. Her father was out in the yard in an old gray sweater, throwing snowballs against the side of the fence.

'It must have been about the middle of the afternoon. I don't know what he was doing there. All I know is that I saw him, and I wanted to go out so bad, and I was trying to climb out of my crib and go to him. Then my grandmother came in and put the bars up so I couldn't get out, and I started to cry. My uncle Hilary – he was my grandmother's brother, he lived with us when we were little – came in the room and saw me crying. "Poor little girl," he said. He rummaged around in his pockets, and finally he found a tape measure and gave it to me to play with.'

'A tape measure?'

'Yes. You know, the ones that snap in when you push a button.

Charles and I used to fight over it all the time. It's still at home somewhere.'

Late the next morning I woke with an unpleasant start to a knock at my door.

I opened it to find Camilla, who looked as if she'd dressed in a hurry. She came in and locked the door behind her while 1 stood blinking sleepily in my bathrobe. 'Have you been outside today?' she said.

A spider of anxiety crawled up the back of my neck. I sat down on the side of my bed. 'No,' I said. 'Why?'

'I don't know what's going on. The police are talking to Charles and Henry, and I don't even know where Francis is.'

'What?'

'A policeman came by and asked for Charles around seven this morning. He didn't say what he wanted. Charles got dressed and they went off together and then, at eight, I got a call from Henry. He asked if I'd mind if he was a little late this morning?

And I asked what he was talking about, because we hadn't planned to meet. "Oh, thanks," he said, "I knew you'd understand, the police are here about Bunny, you see, and they want to ask some questions."'