The Secret History - Donna Tartt [223]
He trailed away, sat smoking for some moments, an expression of frustration and vague irritation on his face.
“Well?” I said. “What happened?”
“Specifically?” He shrugged. “I can’t tell you. I remember hardly anything that happened that night, which isn’t to say the tenor of it isn’t clear enough.…” He paused; started to speak but thought better of it; shook his head. “I mean, after that night it was obvious to everyone,” he said. “Not that it wasn’t before. It’s just that Charles was so much worse than anyone had expected. I …”
He sat staring into space for a moment. Then he shook his head and reached for another cigarette.
“It’s impossible to explain,” he said. “But one can also look at it on an extremely simple level. They were always keen on each other, those two. And I’m no prude, but this jealousy I find astounding. One thing I’ll say for Camilla, she’s more reasonable about that sort of thing. Perhaps she has to be.”
“What sort of thing?”
“About Charles going to bed with people.”
“Who’s he been to bed with?”
He brought up his glass and took a big drink. “Me for one,” he said. “That shouldn’t surprise you. If you drank as much as he does, I daresay I would have been to bed with you, too.”
Despite the archness of his tone—which normally would have irritated me—there was a melancholy undernote in his voice. He drained off the rest of the whiskey and set the glass down on the end table with a bang. He said, after a pause: “It hasn’t happened often. Three or four times. The first time when I was a sophomore and he was a freshman. We were up late, drinking in my room, one thing led to another. Loads of fun on a rainy night, but you should have seen us at breakfast the next morning.” He laughed bleakly. “Remember the night Bunny died?” he said. “When I was in your room? And Charles interrupted us at that rather unfortunate moment?”
I knew what he was going to tell me. “You left my room with him,” I said.
“Yes. He was awfully drunk. Actually a little too drunk. Which was quite convenient for him as he pretended not to remember it the next day. Charles is very prone to these attacks of amnesia after he spends the night at my house.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “He denies it all quite convincingly and the thing is, he expects me to play along with him, you know, pretend it never happened,” he said. “I don’t even think he does it out of guilt. As a matter of fact he does it in this particularly light-hearted way which infuriates me.”
I said: “You like him a lot, don’t you?”
I don’t know what made me say this. Francis didn’t blink. “I don’t know,” he said coldly, reaching for a cigarette with his long, nicotine-stained fingers. “I like him well enough, I suppose. We’re old friends. Certainly I don’t fool myself that it’s more than that. But I’ve had a lot of fun with him, which is a great deal more than you can say about Camilla.”
That was what Bunny would have called a shot across the bow. I was too surprised to even answer.
Francis—though his satisfaction was evident—did not acknowledge his point. He leaned back in his chair by the window; the edges of his hair glowed metallic red in the sun. He said: “It’s unfortunate, but there it is. Neither one cares about anybody but himself—or herself, as the case may be. They like to present a unified front but I don’t even know how much they care about each other. Certainly they take a perverse pleasure in leading one on—yes, she does lead you on,” he said when I tried to interrupt, “I’ve seen her do it. And the same with Henry. He used to be crazy about her, I’m sure you know that; for all I know he still is. As for Charles—well, basically, he likes girls. If he’s drunk, I’ll do. But—just when I’ve managed to harden my heart, he’ll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don’t know why.” He was quiet for a moment. “We don’t run much to looks in my family, you know, all knuckles and cheekbones and beaky noses,” he