The Secret History - Donna Tartt [103]
We walked to Commons through slush and cold rain, and when we got there Charles, Francis, and Henry were waiting for us. The configuration struck me as significant, in some way that was not entirely clear, everyone except for Bunny—“What’s going on?” I said, blinking at them.
“Nothing,” said Henry, tracing a pattern on the floor with the sharp, glinting ferrule of his umbrella. “We’re just going for a drive. I thought it might be fun—” he paused delicately—“if we got away from school for a while, maybe had some dinner …”
Without Bunny, that is the subtext here, I thought. Where was he? The tip of Henry’s umbrella glittered. I glanced up and noticed that Francis was looking at me with lifted eyebrows.
“What is it?” I said irritably, swaying slightly in the doorway.
He exhaled with a sharp, amused sound. “Are you drunk?” he said.
They were all looking at me in kind of a funny way. “Yes,” I said. It wasn’t the truth, but I didn’t feel much like explaining.
The chill sky, misty with fine rain near the treetops, made even the familiar landscape around Hampden seem indifferent and remote. The valleys were white with fog and the top of Mount Cataract was entirely obscured, invisible in the cold haze. Not being able to see it, that omniscient mountain which grounded Hampden and its environs in my senses, I found it difficult to get my bearings, and it seemed as if we were heading into strange and unmarked territory, though I had been down this road a hundred times in all weathers. Henry drove, rather fast as he always did, the tires whining on the wet black road and water spraying high on either side.
“I looked at this place about a month ago,” he said, slowing as we approached a white farmhouse on a hill, forlorn bales of hay dotting the snowy pasture. “It’s still for sale, but I think they want too much.”
“How many acres?” said Camilla.
“A hundred and fifty.”
“What on earth would you do with that much land?” She raised her hand to clear the hair from her eyes and again I caught the gleam of her bracelet: blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown.… “You wouldn’t want to farm it, would you?”
“To my way of thinking,” Henry said, “the more land the better. I’d love to have so much land that from where I lived I couldn’t see a highway or a telephone pole or anything I didn’t want to see. I suppose that’s impossible, this day and age, and that place is practically on the road. There was another farm I saw, over the line in New York State …”
A truck shot past in a whine of spray.
Everyone seemed unusually calm and at ease and I thought I knew why. It was because Bunny wasn’t with us. They were avoiding that topic with a deliberate unconcern; he must be somewhere now, I thought, doing something, what I didn’t want to ask. I leaned back and looked at the silvery, staggering paths the raindrops made as they blew across my window.
“If I bought a house anywhere I’d buy one here,” said Camilla. “I’ve always liked the mountains better than the seashore.”
“So have I,” said Henry. “I suppose in that regard my tastes are rather Hellenistic. Landlocked places interest me, remote prospects, wild country. I’ve never had the slightest bit of interest in the sea. Rather like what Homer says about the Arcadians, you remember? With ships they had nothing to do.…”
“It’s because you grew up in the Midwest,” Charles said.
“But if one follows that line of reasoning, then it follows that I would love flat lands, and plains. Which I don’t. The descriptions of Troy in the Iliad are horrible—all flat land and burning sun. No. I’ve always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions—Pan himself was born in the mountains, you know. And Zeus. In Parrhasia it was that Rheia bore thee,” he said dreamily, lapsing into Greek, “where was a hill sheltered with the thickest brush.…”
It was dark now. Around us, the countryside