The Secret History - Donna Tartt [112]
To compound this—all these unpleasant recollections to the contrary—so much remained of the old Bunny, the one I knew and loved. Sometimes when I saw him at a distance—fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk—I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. It seemed impossible then that one could ever be angry at him, no matter what he did. Unfortunately, these were often the moments when he chose to attack. He would be amiable, charming, chatting in his old distracted manner when, in the same manner and without missing a beat, he would lean back in his chair and come out with something so horrendous, so backhanded, so unanswerable, that I would vow not to forget it, and never to forgive him again. I broke that promise many times. I was about to say that it was a promise I finally had to keep, but that’s not really true. Even today I cannot muster anything resembling anger for Bunny. In fact, I can’t think of much I’d like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: “Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?”
One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Camilla he tormented simply because she was a girl. In some ways she was his most vulnerable target—through no fault of her own, but simply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures, better seen than heard. This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.
Bunny, through no impulse towards Hellenic purity but simply out of mean-spiritedness, championed this view. He didn’t like women, didn’t enjoy their company, and even Marion, his self-proclaimed raison d’être, was tolerated as grudgingly as a concubine. With Camilla he was forced to assume a slightly more paternalistic stance, beaming down at her with the condescension of an old papa towards a dimwit child. To the rest of us he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship. We all found this pretty funny. To be honest, none of us, not even the brightest of us, were destined for academic achievement in subsequent years, Francis being too lazy, Charles too diffuse, and Henry too erratic and generally strange, a sort of Mycroft Holmes of classical philology. Camilla was no different, secretly preferring, as I did, the easy delights of English literature to the coolie labor of Greek. What was laughable was that poor Bunny should display concern about anyone else’s intellectual capacities.
Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose