The Secret History - Donna Tartt [143]
Francis, sitting in his chair by the window with an ankle balanced upon the opposite kneecap and his teacup balanced on his bare ankle, was looking at Charles rather narrowly.
Charles turned, reeling slightly. “What are you looking at?” he said.
“Do you have a bottle in your pocket?”
“No.”
“Nonsense, Charles, I can hear it sloshing.”
“What difference does it make?”
“I want a drink.”
“Oh, all right,” said Charles, irritated. He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket and brought out a flat pint bottle. “Here,” he said. “Don’t be a pig.”
Francis drank the rest of his tea and reached for the bottle. “Thanks,” he said, pouring the remaining inch or so into his teacup. I looked at him—dark suit, sitting very straight with his legs now crossed at the knee. He was the picture of respectability except that his feet were bare. All of a sudden I found myself able to see him as the world saw him, as I myself had seen him when I first met him—cool, well-mannered, rich, absolutely beyond reproach. It was such a convincing illusion that even I, who knew the essential falseness of it, felt oddly comforted.
He drank the whiskey down in a swallow. “We need to sober you up, Charles,” he said. “We’ve got class in a couple of hours.”
Charles sighed and sat on the foot of my bed. He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness. “I know,” he said. “I hoped the walk might do the trick.”
“You need some coffee.”
He wiped his damp forehead with the heel of his hand. “I need more than coffee,” he said.
I smoothed out the papers and went over to my desk and began to copy out my Greek.
Francis sat down on the bed next to Charles. “Where’s Camilla?”
“Asleep.”
“What’d you two do tonight? Get drunk?”
“No,” said Charles tersely. “Cleaned house.”
“No. Really.”
“I’m not kidding.”
I was still so dopey that I couldn’t make any sense of the passage I was copying, only a sentence here and there. Being weary from the march, the soldiers stopped to offer sacrifices at the temple. I came back from that country and said that I had seen the Gorgon, but it did not make me a stone.
“Our house is full of tulips, if you want any,” said Charles inexplicably.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, before the snow got too deep, we went outside and brought them in. Everything’s full of them. The water glasses, even.”
Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.
My vision swam. I closed my eyes. I sat there for a long time, half-dozing, until I became aware that Charles was saying my name.
I turned in my chair. They were leaving. Francis was sitting on the side of my bed, lacing his shoes.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“Home to dress. It’s getting late.”
I didn’t want to be alone—quite the contrary—but I felt, unaccountably, a strong desire to be rid of them both. The sun was up. Francis reached over and turned off the lamp. The morning light was sober and pale and made my room seem horribly quiet.
“We’ll see you in a little while,” he said, and then I heard their footsteps dying on the stair. Everything was faded and silent in the dawn—dirty teacups, unmade bed, snowflakes floating past the window with an airy, dangerous calm. My ears rang. When I turned back to my work, with trembling, ink-stained hands, the scratch of my pen on the paper rasped loud in the stillness. I thought of Bunny’s dark room and of the ravine, miles away; of all those layers of silence on silence.
“And where is Edmund this morning?” said Julian as we opened our grammars.
“At home, I suppose,” said Henry. He’d come in late and we hadn’t had a chance to talk. He seemed calm, well