The Secret History - Donna Tartt [222]
I was astounded. She didn’t flinch, didn’t move. When he came up for breath she pulled her chair in close to the table and reached for the sugar bowl as if nothing had happened. Spoon tinkled against china. The smell of Charles—damp, alcoholic, sweet with the linden-water he used for shaving—hung heavy in the air. She brought the cup up and took a sip and it was only then I remembered: Camilla didn’t like sugar in her coffee. She drank it unsweetened, with milk.
I was astounded. I felt I should say something—anything—but I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
It was Charles who finally broke the silence. “I’m starving to death,” he said, retying the knot of his bathrobe and pottering over to the refrigerator. The white door opened with a bark. He stooped to look in, his face radiant in the glacial light.
“I think I’m going to make some scrambled eggs,” he said. “Anyone else want some?”
Late that afternoon, after I’d gone home and had a shower and a nap, I went to visit Francis.
“Come in, come in,” he said, waving me in frenetically. His Greek books were spread out on the desk; a cigarette burned in a full ashtray. “What happened last night? Was Charles arrested? Henry wouldn’t tell me a thing. I got part of the story from Camilla but she didn’t know the details.… Sit down. Do you want a drink? What can I get for you?”
It was always fun to tell Francis a story. He leaned forward and hung on every word, reacting at appropriate intervals with astonishment, sympathy, dismay. When I was finished he bombarded me with questions. Normally, enjoying his rapt attention, I would have strung it out much longer, but after the first decent pause I said, “Now I want to ask you something.”
He was lighting a fresh cigarette. He clicked shut the lighter and brought his eyebrows down. “What is it?”
Though I had thought of various ways to phrase this question, it seemed, in the interests of clarity, most expedient to come to the point. “Do you think Charles and Camilla ever sleep together?” I said.
He had just drawn in a big lungful of smoke. At my question it spurted out his nose the wrong way.
“Do you?”
But he was coughing. “What makes you ask something like that?” he finally said.
I told him what I’d seen that morning. He listened, his eyes red and streaming from the smoke.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “He was probably still drunk.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
He lay the burning cigarette in the ashtray. “All right,” he said, blinking. “If you want my opinion. Yes. I think sometimes they do.”
There was a long silence. Francis closed his eyes, rubbed them with thumb and forefinger.
“I don’t think it’s anything that happens too frequently,” he said. “But you never know. Bunny always claimed he walked in on them once.”
I stared at him.
“He told Henry, not me. I’m afraid I don’t know the details. Apparently he had the key and you remember how he used to barge in without knocking—Come now,” he said. “You must have had some idea.”
“No,” I said, though actually I had, from the time I’d first met them. I’d attributed this to my own mental perversity, some degenerate vagary of thought, a projection of my own desire—because he was her brother, and they did look an awful lot alike, and the thought of them together brought, along with the predictable twinges of envy, scruple, surprise, another very much sharper one of excitement.
Francis was looking at me keenly. Suddenly I felt he knew exactly what I was thinking.
“They’re very jealous of each other,” he said. “He much more so than she. I always thought it was a childish, charming thing, you know, all verbal rough-and-tumble, even Julian used to tease them about it—I mean, I’m an only child, so is Henry, what do we know about such things? We used to talk about what fun it would be to have a sister.” He chuckled. “More fun than either of us imagined, it seems,” he said. “Not that I think it’s so terrible, either—from a moral standpoint, that is—but it’s not at all the casual, good-natured