The Secret History - Donna Tartt [207]
It was four o’clock before we finally got away. Now, for some reason, it was Charles and Camilla who weren’t speaking. They’d fought about something—I’d seen them arguing in the yard—and all the way home, in the back seat, they sat side by side and stared straight ahead, their arms folded across their chests in what I am sure they did not realize was a comically identical fashion.
It felt as if I’d been away longer than I had. My room seemed abandoned and small, like it had stood empty for weeks. I opened the window and lay on my unmade bed. The sheets smelled musty. It was twilight.
Finally it was over but I felt strangely let down. I had classes on Monday: Greek and French. I hadn’t been to French in nearly three weeks and the thought of it gave me a twinge of anxiety. Final papers. I rolled over on my stomach. Exams. And summer vacation in a month and a half, and where on earth was I going to spend it? Working for Dr. Roland? Pumping gas in Plano?
I got up and took another Dalmane and lay down again. Outside it was nearly dark. Through the walls I could hear my neighbor’s stereo: David Bowie. “This is Ground Control to Major Tom …”
I stared at the shadows on the ceiling.
In some strange country between dream and waking, I found myself in a cemetery, not the one Bunny was buried in but a different one, much older, and very famous—thick with hedges and evergreens, its cracked marble pavilions choked with vines. I was walking along a narrow flagstone path. As I turned a corner, the white blossoms of an unexpected hydrangea–luminous clouds, floating pale in the shadows—brushed against my cheek.
I was looking for the tomb of a famous writer—Marcel Proust, I think, or maybe George Sand. Whoever it was, I knew they were buried in that place, but it was so overgrown I could hardly see the names on the stones, and it was getting dark besides.
I found myself at the top of a hill in a dark grove of pines. A smudged, smoky valley lay far beneath. I turned and looked back the way I’d come: a prickle of marble spires, dim mausoleums, pale in the growing darkness. Far below, a tiny light—a lantern, maybe, or a flashlight—bobbed towards me through the crowd of gravestones. I leaned forward to see more clearly, and then was startled by a crash in the shrubbery behind me.
It was the baby the Corcorans called Champ. It had tumbled the length of its body and was trying to stagger to its feet; after a moment it gave up and lay still, barefoot, shivering, its belly heaving in and out. It was wearing nothing but a plastic diaper and there were long ugly scratches on its arms and legs. I stared at it, aghast. The Corcorans were thoughtless but this was unconscionable; those monsters, I thought, those imbeciles, they just went off and left it here all by itself.
The baby was whimpering, its legs mottled blue with cold. Clutched in one fat starfish of a hand was the plastic airplane which had come with its Happy Meal. I bent down to see if it was okay but as I did I heard, very near, the wry, ostentatious clearing of a throat.
What happened next took place in a flash. Looking over my shoulder I had only the most fleeting impression of the figure looming behind me, but the glimpse I got struck me stumbling backwards, screaming, falling down and down and down until at last I hit my own bed, which rushed up from the dark to meet me. The jolt knocked me awake. Trembling, I lay flat on my back for a moment, then scrambled for the light.
Desk, door, chair. I lay back, still trembling. Though his features had been clotted and ruined, with a thick, scabbed quality that I did not like to remember even with the light on—still, I had known very well who it was, and in the dream he knew I knew.
After what we’d been through in the previous weeks, it was no wonder we were all a little sick of one another. For the first few days we stayed pretty