The Secret History - Donna Tartt [236]
By way of distraction, I presented Charles with the orchid.
“Really? You bought that for me, Richard?” He seemed touched. I was going to explain that it was from all of us—without coming out and mentioning Henry, exactly—but Francis shot me a warning look and I kept my mouth shut.
We unloaded the sack of presents. I’d half expected him to pounce on the Cutty Sark and tear it open in front of us, but he only thanked us and put the bottle in the compartment underneath his upright gray-plastic bed tray.
“Have you talked to my sister?” he said to Francis. He said it in a very cold way, as if he were saying Have you talked to my lawyer?
“Yes,” Francis said.
“She’s all right?”
“Seems to be.”
“What does she have to say for herself?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I hope you told her I said go to hell.”
Francis didn’t answer. Charles picked up one of the books I had brought him and began to leaf through it sporadically. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I’m kind of tired now.”
“He looks awful,” said Francis in the car.
“There’s got to be some way they can patch this up,” I said. “Surely we can get Henry to call him and apologize.”
“What good do you think that’s going to do? As long as Camilla’s at the Albemarle?”
“Well, she doesn’t know he’s in the hospital, does she? This is kind of an emergency.”
“I don’t know.”
The windshield wipers ticked back and forth. A cop in a rain slicker was directing traffic at the intersection. It was the cop with the red moustache. Recognizing Henry’s car, he smiled at us and beckoned for us to go through. We smiled and waved back, happy day, two guys on a ride—then drove for a block or two in grim, superstitious silence.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” I said at last.
“I think we had better stay out of it.”
“You can’t tell me that if she knew how sick he was, she wouldn’t be over at the hospital in five minutes.”
“I’m not kidding,” said Francis. “I think we both had better just stay out of it.”
“Why?”
But he only lit another cigarette and wouldn’t say anything else, no matter how I grilled him.
When I got back to my room I found Camilla sitting at my desk, reading a book. “Hi,” she said, glancing up. “Your door was open. I hope you don’t mind.”
Seeing her was like an electric shock. Unexpectedly I felt a surge of anger. Rain was blowing through the screen and I walked across the room to shut the window.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“How’s my brother?”
“Why don’t you go see him yourself?”
She put down the book—ah, lovely, I thought helplessly, I loved her, I loved the very sight of her: she was wearing a cashmere sweater, soft gray-green, and her gray eyes had a luminous celadon tint. “You think you have to take sides,” she said. “But you don’t.”
“I’m not taking sides. I just think whatever you’re doing, you picked a bad time to do it.”
“And what would be a good time?” she said. “I want you to see something. Look.”
She held up a piece of the light hair near her temples. Underneath was a scabbed spot about the size of a quarter where someone had, apparently, pulled a handful of hair out by the roots. I was too startled to say anything.
“And this.” She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. The wrist was swollen and a bit discolored, but what horrified me was a tiny, evil burn on the underside of the forearm: a cigarette burn, gouged deep and ugly in the flesh.
It was a moment before I found my voice. “Good God, Camilla! Charles did this?”
She pulled the sleeve down. “See what I mean?” she said. Her voice was unemotional; her expression watchful, almost wry.
“How long has this been going on?”
She ignored my question. “I know Charles,” she said. “Better than you do. Staying away, just now, is much wiser.”
“Whose idea was it that you stay at the Albemarle?”
“Henry’s.”
“How does he fit into this?”
She didn’t answer.
A horrible thought flashed across my mind. “He didn’t do this to you, did he?” I