Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Laforgue turned. 'Oh,' he said coldly when he saw who it was.

Henry inclined his head slightly. 'Bonjour, Monsieur Laforgue,' he said. 'Quel plaisir de vous revoir.'

Laforgue, with a flourish, took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose for what seemed about five minutes; then, refolding the handkerchief into fussy little squares, he turned his back on Henry and resumed his story. It happened, in this case, that the student had simply gone off to New York City on the bus without telling anybody.

'And this boy – Birdie, is it?'

'Bunny.'

'Yes. This boy has been away for far less long. He will appear again, of his own accord, and everyone will feel very foolish,' He lowered his voice. 'I believe that the school is afraid of a lawsuit, and that perhaps is why they lost their sense of proportion, no?

Please do not repeat me.'

'Of course not.'

'My position is delicate with the Dean, you understand.'

'I'm a bit tired,' Henry said later, in the car, 'but there's nothing to worry about.'

' What'd they want to know?'

'Nothing much. How long had I known him, was he acting strangely, did I know any reason why he might have decided to leave school. Of course, he has been acting strangely the last few months, and I said so. But I also said I hadn't seen very much of him lately, which is true.' He shook his head. 'Honestly. Two hours. I don't know if I could've made myself go through with this if I'd known what nonsense we were letting ourselves in for.'

We stopped by the twins' apartment and found Charles asleep on the couch, sprawled on his stomach in his shoes and overcoat, one arm dangling over the edge so that three or four inches of wrist and an equal amount of cuff were exposed.

He woke with a start. His face was puffy and the ridged pattern from the sofa cushions was printed deeply on his cheek.

'How did it go?' said Henry.

Charles sat up a bit and rubbed his eyes. 'All right, I guess,' he said. 'They wanted me to sign some thing that said what happened yesterday.'

'They visited me as well.'

'Really? What'd they want?'

'The same questions.'

'Were they nice to you?'

'Not particularly.'

'God, they were so nice to me down at the police station. They even gave me breakfast. Coffee and jelly doughnuts.'

This was a Friday, which meant no classes, and that Julian was not in Hampden but at home. His house was not far from where we were – halfway to Albany, where we'd driven to have pancakes at a truck stop – and after lunch Henry suggested, quite out of the blue, that we drive by and see if he was there.

I had never been in Julian's house, had never even seen it, though I assumed the rest of them had been there a hundred limes. Actually – Henry being of course the notable exception – Julian did not allow many visitors. This was not so surprising as it sounds; he kept a gentle but firm distance between himself and his students; and though he was much more fond of us than teachers generally are of their pupils, it was not, even with Henry, a relationship of equals, and our classes with him ran more along the lines of benevolent dictatorship than democracy. 'I am your teacher,' he once said, 'because I know more than you do.'

Though on a psychological level his manner was almost painfully intimate, superficially it was businesslike and cold. He refused to see anything about any of us except our most engaging qualities, which he cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all our tedious and less desirable ones. While I felt a delicious pleasure in adjusting myself to fit this attractive if inaccurate image – and, eventually, in finding that I had more or less become the character which for a long time I had so skillfully played – there was never any doubt that he did not wish to see us in our entirety, or see us, in fact, in anything other than the magnificent roles he had invented for us: genis grains, corpore glabelliis, arte multiscius, et fortuna opulentus – smooth-cheeked, soft-skinned, welleducated, and rich. It was his odd blindness, I think, to all problems of a personal nature which made him able at the end to transmute even Bunny's highly substantive troubles into spiritual ones.

I knew then, and know now, virtually nothing about Julian's life outside of the classroom, which is perhaps what lent such a tantalizing breath of mystery to everything he said or did. No doubt his personal life was as flawed as anyone's, but the only side of himself he ever allowed us to see was polished to such a high gloss of perfection that it seemed when he was away from us he must lead an existence too rarefied for me to even imagine.

So, naturally, I was curious to see where he lived. It was a large stone house, set on a hill, miles off the main road and nothing but trees and snow as far as one could see – imposing enough, but not half so Gothic and monstrous as Francis's. I had heard marvelous tales of his garden, also of the inside of the house – Attic vases, Meissen porcelain, paintings by Alma-Tadema and Frith. But the garden was covered with snow, and Julian, apparently, was not at home; at least he didn't answer the door.

Henry looked back down the hill to where we waited in the car. He reached into his pocket for a piece of paper and scribbled a note that he folded and wedged in the crack of the door.

'Are there students out with the search parties?' Henry asked on the way back to Hampden. 'I don't want to go down there if we'll be making ourselves conspicuous. But on the other hand, it does seem rather callous, don't you think, to just go home?'

He was quiet a moment, thinking. 'Maybe we should have a look,' he said. 'Charles, you've done quite enough for one day.

Maybe you should just go home.'

After we dropped the twins off, the three of us went on to campus. I had expected that by now the search party would have grown tired and gone home but I was surprised to find the enterprise busier than ever. There were policemen, college administrators, Boy Scouts, maintenance workers and security guards, about thirty Hampden students (some in an official, student-councily-looking group, the rest just along for the ride), and mobs of townspeople. It was a large assembly, but as the three of us looked down at it from the top of the rise, it seemed oddly muffled and small in the great expanse of snow.

We went down the hill – Francis, sulky because he hadn't wanted to come, followed two or three paces behind – and wandered through the crowd. No one paid us the least bit of attention.

Behind me I heard the indistinct, aborted garble of a walkie-talkie; and, startled, I walked backwards into the Chief of Security.

'Watch it,' he shouted. He was a squat, bulldoggish man with liver spots on his nose and jowls.

'Sorry,' I said hastily. 'Can you tell me what '

'College kids,' he muttered, turning his head away as if to spit.

'Stumbling around, getting in the way, don't know what the hell you're supposed to do.'

'Well, that's what we're trying to find out,' snapped Henry.

The guard turned quickly, and somehow his gaze landed not on Henry but on Francis, who was standing staring into space.

'So it's you, is it?' he said with venom. 'Mr Off-Campus who thinks he can park in the faculty parking lot.'

Francis started, a wild look in his eye.

'Yes, you. You know how many unpaid violations you're carrying? Nine. I turned your registration in to the Dean just last week. They can put you on probation, hold your transcripts, what have you. Suspend your library privileges. If it was up to me they'd put you in jail.'

Francis gaped at him. Henry caught him by the sleeve and pulled him away.

A long, straggly line of townspeople was crunching through the snow, some of them swiping listlessly at the ground with sticks. We walked to the end of the queue, then fell into step with them.