The Secret History - Donna Tartt [120]
“You ought to go,” I said.
“Are you kidding? It’s in Palm Springs or someplace like that and besides I think they lock you up and make you do aerobics. She watches too much television, my mother,” he said, glancing at the letter again.
The telephone began to ring.
“Goddammit,” he said in a tired voice.
“Don’t answer it.”
“If I don’t she’ll call the police,” he said, and picked up the receiver.
I let myself out (Francis pacing back and forth: “Funny? What do you mean, I sound funny?”) and walked to the post office, where in my box I found, to my surprise, an elegant little note from Julian asking me to lunch the next day.
Julian, on special occasions, sometimes had lunches for the class; he was an excellent cook and, when he was a young man living off his trust fund in Europe, had the reputation of being an excellent host as well. This was, in fact, the basis of his acquaintance with most of the famous people in his life. Osbert Sitwell, in his diary, mentions Julian Morrow’s “sublime little fêtes,” and there are similar references in the letters of people ranging from Charles Laughton to the Duchess of Windsor to Gertrude Stein; Cyril Connolly, who was notorious for being a hard guest to please, told Harold Acton that Julian was the most gracious American that he had ever met—a double-edged compliment, admittedly—and Sara Murphy, no mean hostess herself, once wrote him pleading for his recipe for sole véronique. But though I knew that Julian frequently invited Henry for lunches à deux, I had never before received an invitation to dine alone with him, and I was both flattered and vaguely worried. At that time, anything even slightly out of the ordinary seemed ominous to me, and, pleased as I was, I could not but feel that he might have an objective other than the pleasure of my company. I took the invitation home and studied it. The airy, oblique style in which it was written did little to dispel my feeling that there was more in it than met the eye. I phoned the switchboard and left a message for him to expect me at one the next day.
“Julian doesn’t know anything about what happened, does he?” I asked Henry when next I saw him alone.
“What? Oh, yes,” said Henry, glancing up from his book. “Of course.”
“He knows you killed that guy?”
“Really, you needn’t be so loud,” said Henry sharply, turning in his chair. Then, in a quieter voice: “He knew what we were trying to do. And approved. The day after it happened, we drove out to his house in the country. Told him what happened. He was delighted.”
“You told him everything?”
“Well, I saw no point in worrying him, if that’s what you mean,” said Henry, adjusting his glasses and going back to his book.
Julian, of course, had made the lunch himself, and we ate at the big round table in his office. After weeks of bad nerves, bad conversation, and bad food in the dining hall, the prospect of a meal with him was immensely cheering; he was a charming companion and his dinners, though deceptively simple, had a sort of Augustan wholesomeness and luxuriance which never failed to soothe.
There was roasted lamb, new potatoes, peas with leeks and fennel; a rich and almost maddeningly delicious bottle of Château Latour. I was eating with better appetite than I had had in ages when I noticed that a fourth course had appeared, with unobtrusive magic, at my elbow: mushrooms. They were pale and slender-stemmed,