The Secret History - Donna Tartt [106]
In some respects, it was as if nothing had happened at all. We went to our classes, did our Greek, and generally managed to pretend among one another and everybody else that things were all right. At the time it heartened me that Bunny, in spite of his obviously disturbed state of mind, nonetheless continued to follow the old routine so easily. Now, of course, I see that the routine was all that held him together. It was his one remaining point of reference and he clung to it with a fierce Pavlovian tenacity, partly through habit and partly because he had nothing with which to replace it. I suppose the others sensed that the continuation of the old rituals was in some respects a charade for Bunny’s benefit, kept up in order to soothe him, but I did not, nor did I have any idea how disturbed he really was until the following event took place.
We were spending the weekend at Francis’s house. Aside from the barely perceptible strain which manifested itself in all dealings with Bunny at that time, things seemed to be going smoothly and he’d been in a good mood at dinner that night. When I went to bed he was still downstairs, drinking wine left from dinner and playing backgammon with Charles, to all appearances his usual self; but some time in the middle of the night I was awakened by a loud, incoherent bellowing, from down the corridor in Henry’s room.
I sat up in bed and switched on the light.
“You don’t care about a goddamn thing, do you?” I heard Bunny scream; this was followed by a crash, as if of books being swept from desk to floor. “Not a thing but your own fucking self, you and all the rest of them—I’d like to know just what Julian would think, you bastard, if I told him a couple of—Don’t touch me,” he shrieked, “get away—!”
More crashing, as of furniture overturned, and Henry’s voice, quick and angry. Bunny’s rose above it. “Go ahead!” he shouted, so loudly I’m sure he woke the house. “Try and stop me. I’m not scared of you. You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew—”
Yet another crash, this time of splintering wood. A door slammed. There were rapid footsteps down the hall. Then the muffled noise of sobs—gasping, terrible sobs which went on for a long while.
About three o’clock, when everything was quiet and I was just about to go back to sleep, I heard soft footsteps in the hall and, after a pause, a knock at my door. It was Henry.
“Goodness,” he said distractedly, looking around my room, at the unmade four-poster bed and my clothes scattered on the rug beside it. “I’m glad you’re awake. I saw your light.”
“Jesus, what was all that about?”
He ran a hand through his rumpled hair. “What do you suppose?” he said, looking up at me blankly. “I don’t know, really. I must have done something to set him off, though for the life of me I don’t know what. I was reading in my room, and he came in and wanted a dictionary. In fact, he asked me to look something up, and—You wouldn’t happen to have an aspirin, would you?”
I sat on the side of my bed and rustled through the drawer of the night table, through the tissues and reading glasses and Christian Science leaflets belonging to one of Francis’s aged female relatives. “I don’t see any,” I said. “What happened?”
He sighed and sat down heavily in an armchair. “There’s aspirin in my room,” he said. “In a tin in my overcoat pocket. Also a blue enamel pillbox. And my cigarettes. Will you go get them for me?”
He was so pale and shaken I wondered if he was ill. “What’s the matter?” I said.
“I don’t want to go in there.”
“Why not?”
“Because Bunny’s asleep on my bed.”
I looked at him. “Well, Jesus,” I said. “I’m not going to—”
He waved away my words with a tired hand. “It’s all right. Really. I’m just too upset to go myself. He’s fast asleep.”
I went quietly out of my room and down the hall. Henry’s door was at the end. Pausing outside with one hand on the knob, I heard distinctly from within the peculiar huffing noise of Bunny’s snores.
In spite of what I’d heard earlier, I was unprepared