The Secret History - Donna Tartt [10]
I mumbled something and was about to turn away when Bunny—who was staring in the opposite direction—shot out an arm and grabbed me by the wrist. “Wait,” he said.
Startled, I looked up. Henry had just come in the door—dark suit, umbrella, and all.
When he got to the table he pretended not to see me. “Hello,” he said to them. “Are you finished?”
Bunny tossed his head at me. “Look here, Henry, we’ve got someone to meet you,” he said.
Henry glanced up. His expression did not change. He shut his eyes and then reopened them, as if he found it extraordinary that someone such as myself should stand in his path of vision.
“Yes, yes,” said Bunny. “This man’s name is Richard—Richard what?”
“Papen.”
“Yes, yes. Richard Papen. Studies Greek.”
Henry brought his head up to look at me. “Not here, surely,” he said.
“No,” I said, meeting his gaze, but his stare was so rude I was forced to cut my eyes away.
“Oh, Henry, look at this, would you,” said Charles hastily, rustling through the papers again. “We were going to use a dative or an accusative here but he suggested locative?”
Henry leaned over his shoulder and inspected the page. “Hmm, archaic locative,” he said. “Very Homeric. Of course, it would be grammatically correct but perhaps a bit off contextually.” He brought his head back up to scrutinize me. The light was at an angle that glinted off his tiny spectacles, and I couldn’t see his eyes behind them. “Very interesting. You’re a Homeric scholar?”
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