The Secret History - Donna Tartt [126]
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“I think I’m going to go out and run a few errands,” he said. “I want you to go home and go to sleep.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“No. But there’s something I want to look into. I’d drive you back to school, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be seen together just now.” He began to fish in the pocket of his bathrobe, pulling out matches, pen nibs, his blue enamel pillbox. Finally he found a couple of quarters and lay them on the table. “Here,” he said. “Stop at the newsstand and buy a paper on your way home.”
“Why?”
“In case anyone should wonder why you’re wandering around at this hour. I may have to talk to you tonight. If I don’t find you in, I’ll leave a message that a Doctor Springfield called. Don’t try to get in touch with me before then, unless of course you have to.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll see you later, then,” he said, starting out of the kitchen. Then he turned in the door and looked at me. “I’ll never forget this, you know,” he said matter-of-factly.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s everything and you know it.”
“You’ve done me a favor or two yourself,” I said, but he had already started out and didn’t hear me. At any rate, he didn’t answer.
I bought a newspaper at the little store down the street and walked back to school through the dank, verdant woods, off the main path, stepping over the boulders and rotting logs that occasionally blocked my way.
It was still early when I got to campus. I went in the back door of Monmouth and, pausing at the top of the stairs, I was startled to see the house chairperson and a flock of girls in housecoats, huddled around the broom closet and conversing in varying tones of shrill outrage. When I tried to brush past them. Judy Poovey, clad in a black kimono, grabbed my arm. “Hey,” she said. “Somebody puked in this broom closet.”
“It was one of those goddamned freshmen,” said a girl at my elbow. “They get stinking drunk and come to the upperclass suites to barf.”
“Well, I don’t know who did it,” the house chairperson said, “but whoever it was, they had spaghetti for dinner.”
“Hmnn.”
“That means they’re not on the meal ticket, then.”
I pushed through them to my room, locking the door behind me, and went, almost immediately, to sleep.
I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man’s float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream. Day ran into night, and still I slept, until finally the rush and rumble of a flushing toilet rolled me on my back and up from sleep.
The Saturday night party had already started, in Putnam house next door. That meant dinner was over, the snack bar was closed, and I’d slept at least fourteen hours. My house was deserted. I got up and shaved and took a hot bath. Then I put on my robe and, eating an apple I’d found in the house kitchen, walked downstairs in my bare feet to see if any messages had been left for me by the phone.
There were three. Bunny Corcoran, at a quarter to six. My mother, from California, at eight-forty-five. And a Dr. H. Springfield, D.D.S., who suggested I visit at my earliest convenience.
I was famished. When I got to Henry’s, I was glad to see that Charles and Francis were still picking at a cold chicken and some salad.
Henry looked as if he hadn’t slept since I’d seen him last. He was wearing an old tweed jacket with sprung elbows, and there were grass stains on the knees of his trousers; khaki gaiters were laced over his mud-caked shoes. “The plates are in the sideboard, if you’re hungry,” he said, pulling out his chair and sitting down heavily, like some old farmer just home from the field.
“Where have you been?”
“We’ll talk about it after dinner.”
“Where’s Camilla?”
Charles began to laugh.
Francis put down his chicken leg. “She’s got a date,” he said. “You’re kidding. With who?”
“Cloke Rayburn.”
“They’re at the party,” Charles said. “He took her out for drinks before and everything.”
“Marion