The Secret History - Donna Tartt [243]
“What kind of letter?” said Francis, leaning closer. “Who’s it from?”
“Bunny,” Julian said.
A bright knife of terror plunged through my heart. We stared at him, dumbstruck. Julian smiled at us, allowing a dramatic pause for our astonishment to blossom to the full.
“Well, of course, it’s not really from Edmund,” he said. “It’s a forgery, and not a very clever one. The thing is typewritten, and there’s no signature or date. That doesn’t seem quite legitimate, does it?”
Francis had found his voice. “Typewritten?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Bunny didn’t own a typewriter.”
“Well, he was my student for nearly four years, and he never handed in anything typewritten to me. As far as I’m aware, he didn’t know how to type-write at all. Or did he?” he said, looking up shrewdly.
“No,” said Francis, after an earnest, thoughtful pause, “no, I think you’re right”; and I echoed this, though I knew—and Francis knew, too—that as a matter of fact Bunny had known how to type. He didn’t have a typewriter of his own—this was perfectly true; but he frequently borrowed Francis’s, or used one of the sticky old manuals in the library. The fact was—though neither of us was about to point it out—that none of us, ever, gave typed things to Julian. There was a simple reason for this. It was impossible to write in Greek alphabet on an English typewriter; and though Henry actually had somewhere a little Greek-alphabet portable, which he had purchased on holiday in Mykonos, he never used it because, as he explained to me, the keyboard was different from the English and it took him five minutes to type his own name.
“It’s terribly sad that someone would want to play a trick like this,” Julian said. “I can’t imagine who would do such a thing.”
“How long had it been in the mailbox?” Francis said. “Do you know?”
“Well, that’s another thing,” Julian said. “It might have been put in at any time. The secretary said that Mr. Morse’s son hadn’t been to check his father’s box since March. Which means, of course, that it might have been slipped in yesterday.” He indicated the envelope, on the table. “You see. There’s only my name, typewritten, on the front, no return address, no date, of course no postmark. Obviously it’s the work of a crank. The thing is, though, I can’t imagine why anyone would play such a cruel joke. I’d almost like to tell the Dean, though goodness knows I don’t want to stir things up again after all that fuss.”
Now that the first, horrible shock was over, I was starting to breathe a bit easier. “What sort of a letter is it?” I asked him.
Julian shrugged. “You can have a look at it, if you like.”
I picked it up. Francis looked at it over my shoulder. It was single-spaced, on five or six small sheets of paper, some of which looked not unlike some writing paper which Bunny used to have. But though the sheets were roughly the same size, they didn’t all match. I could tell, by the way the ribbon had struck a letter sometimes half-red and half-black, that it had been written on the typewriter in the all-night study room.
The letter itself was disjointed, incoherent, and—to my astonished eyes—unquestionably genuine. I skimmed it only briefly, and remember so little about it that I am unable to reproduce it here, but I do remember thinking that if Bunny wrote it, he was a lot closer to a breakdown than any of us had thought. It was filled with profanities of various sorts which it was difficult, even in the most desperate of circumstances, to imagine Bunny using in a letter to Julian. It was unsigned, but there were several clear references which made it plain that Bunny Corcoran, or someone purporting to be him, was the author. It was badly spelled, with a great many of Bunny