The Secret History - Donna Tartt [211]
On one of those afternoons I wandered by Henry’s house and found him in his back yard digging a flower bed. He had on his gardening clothes—old trousers, shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow—and in the wheelbarrow were tomato plants and cucumber, flats of strawberry and sunflower and scarlet geranium. Three or four rosebushes with their roots tied in burlap were propped against the fence.
I let myself in through the side gate. I was quite drunk. “Hello,” I said, “hello, hello, hello.”
He stopped and leaned on his shovel. A pale flush of sunburn glowed on the bridge of his nose.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Putting out some lettuces.”
There was a long silence, in which I noticed the ferns he’d dug up the afternoon we killed Bunny. Spleenwort, I remembered him calling them; Camilla had remarked on the witchiness of the name. He had planted them on the shady side of the house, near the cellar, where they grew dark and foamy in the cool.
I lurched back a bit, caught myself on the gatepost. “Are you going to stay here this summer?” I said.
He looked at me closely, dusted his hands on his trousers. “I think so,” he said. “What about you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, but only the day before I had put in an application at the Student Services office for an apartment-sitting job, in Brooklyn, for a history professor who was studying in England over the summer. It sounded ideal—a rent-free place to stay in, nice part of Brooklyn, and no duties except watering the plants and taking care of a pair of Boston terriers, who couldn’t go to England because of the quarantine. My experience with Leo and the mandolins had made me wary, but the clerk had assured me that no, this was different, and she’d shown me a file of letters from happy students who had previously held the job. I had never been to Brooklyn and didn’t know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city—any city, especially a strange one—liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
Henry was still looking at me. He pushed his glassses up on his nose. “You know,” he said, “it’s pretty early in the afternoon.” I laughed. I knew what he was thinking: first Charles, now me.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Are you?”
“Of course.”
He went back to his work, sticking the shovel into the ground, stepping down hard on one side of the blade with a khaki-gaitered foot. His suspenders made a black X across his back. “Then you can give me a hand with these lettuces,” he said. “There’s another spade in the toolshed.”
Late that night—two a.m.—my house chairperson pounded on my door and yelled that I had a phone call. Dazed with sleep, I put on my bathrobe and stumbled downstairs.
It was Francis. “What do you want?” I said.
“Richard, I’m having a heart attack.”
I looked with one eye at my house chairperson—Veronica, Valerie, I forget her name—who was standing by the phone with her arms folded over her chest, head to one side in an attitude of concern. I turned my back. “You’re all right,” I said into the receiver. “Go back to sleep.”
“Listen to me.” His voice was panicky. “I’m having a heart attack. I think I’m going to die.”
“No you’re not.”
“I have all the symptoms. Pain in the left arm. Tightness in chest. Difficulty breathing.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to come over here and drive me to the hospital.”
“Why don’t you call the ambulance?” I was so sleepy my eyes kept closing.
“Because I’m scared of the ambulance,” said Francis, but I couldn’t hear the rest because Veronica, whose ears had pricked up at the word ambulance, broke in excitedly.
“If you need a paramedic,