The Secret History - Donna Tartt [102]
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 back 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.
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 deliciously 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