The Secret History - Donna Tartt [210]
The twins weren’t like Henry; if they were home, they would generally answer the phone. But no one did answer. I dialed again and glanced at my watch. Eleven-twenty. I couldn’t think where Camilla would be, that time of night, unless she was on her way over to get him.
I hung up the phone. The quarter tinkled into the slot. I pocketed it and headed back to Charles at the bar. For a moment I thought he had just moved somewhere into the crowd, but after standing there a moment or two I realized I wasn’t seeing him because he wasn’t there. He had drunk the rest of his beer and left.
Hampden, suddenly, was green as Heaven again. Most of the flowers had been killed by the snow except the late bloomers, honeysuckle and lilac and so forth, but the trees had come back bushier than ever, it seemed, deep and dark, foliage so dense that the way that ran through the woods to North Hampden was suddenly very narrow, green pushing in on both sides and shutting out the sunlight on the dank, buggy path.
On Monday I arrived at the Lyceum a little early and, in Julian’s office, found the windows open and Henry arranging peonies in a white vase. He looked as if he’d lost ten or fifteen pounds, which was nothing to someone Henry’s size but still I saw the thinness in his face and even in his wrists and hands; it wasn’t that, though, but something else, indefinable, that somehow had changed since I had seen him last.
Julian and he were talking—in jocular, mocking, pedantic Latin—like a couple of priests tidying the vestry before a mass. A dark smell of brewing tea hung strong in the air.
Henry glanced up. “Salve, amice,” he said, and a subtle animation flickered in his rigid features, usually so locked up, and distant: “valesne? Quid est rei?”
“You look well,” I said to him, and he did.
He inclined his head slightly. His eyes, which had been murky and dilated while he was ill, were now the clearest of blues.
“Benigne dicis,” he said. “I feel much better.”
Julian was clearing away the last of the rolls and jam—he and Henry had had breakfast together, quite a large one from the looks of it—and he laughed and said something I didn’t quite catch, some Horatian-sounding tag about meat being good for sorrow. I was glad to see that he seemed quite his bright, serene old self. He’d been almost inexplicably fond of Bunny, but strong emotion was distasteful to him, and a display of feeling normal by modern standards would to him have seemed exhibitionist and slightly shocking: I was fairly sure this death had affected him more than he let show. Then again, I suspect that Julian’s cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death kept him from feeling too sad about anything for very long.
Francis arrived, and then Camilla; no Charles, he was probably in bed with a hangover. We all sat down at the big round table.
“And now,” said Julian, when everything was quiet, “I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?”
Those days, I took an enormous relish in my new-found freedom. Now it appeared that we were safe a huge darkness had lifted from my mind. The world was a fresh and wonderful place to me, green and bracing and entirely new, and I looked at it now with fresh new eyes.
I went on a lot of long walks by myself, through North Hampden, down to the Battenkill river. I liked especially going to the little country grocery in North Hampden (whose ancient proprietors, mother and son, were said to have been the inspiration for a famous and frequently anthologized horror story from the 1950s) to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons—a waste of time. I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was