The Secret History - Donna Tartt [249]
Julian put on his glasses and sat down. He looked through the whole thing, very carefully, front and back. I heard kids laughing, faintly, somewhere outside. At last he folded the letter and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Well,” he said at last. “Well, well, well.”
As is true of most incipient bad things in life, I had not really prepared myself for this possibility. And what I felt, standing there, was not fear or remorse but only terrible, crushing humiliation, a dreadful, red-faced shame I hadn’t felt since childhood. And what was even worse was to see Henry, and to realize that he was feeling the same thing, and if anything, more acutely than myself. I hated him—was so angry I wanted to kill him—but somehow I was not prepared to see him like that.
Nobody said anything. Dust motes floated in a sunbeam. I thought of Camilla at the Albemarle, Charles in the hospital, Francis waiting trustfully in the car.
“Julian,” said Henry, “I can explain this.”
“Please do,” said Julian.
His voice chilled me to the bone. Though he and Henry had in common a distinct coldness of manner—sometimes, around them, the very temperature seemed to drop—I had always thought Henry’s coldness essential, to the marrow, and Julian’s only a veneer for what was, at bottom, a warm and kind-hearted nature. But the twinkle in Julian’s eye, as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.
Henry started to talk. It was so painful to hear him—Henry!—stumble over his words that I am afraid I blocked out much of what he said. He began, in typical fashion, by attempting to justify himself but that soon faltered in the white glare of Julian’s silence. Then—I still shudder to remember it—a desperate, pleading note crept into his voice. “I disliked having to lie, of course”—disliked! as if he were talking about an ugly necktie, a dull dinner party!—“we never wanted to lie to you, but it was necessary. That is, I felt it was necessary. The first matter was an accident; there was no use in worrying you about it, was there? And then, with Bunny … He wasn’t a happy person in those last months. I’m sure you know that. He was having a lot of personal problems, problems with his family.…”
He went on and on. Julian’s silence was vast, arctic. A black buzzing noise echoed in my head. I can’t stand this, I thought, I’ve got to leave, but still Henry talked, and still I stood there, and the sicker and blacker I felt to hear Henry’s voice and to see the look on Julian’s face.
Unable to stand it, I finally turned to go. Julian saw me do it.
Abruptly, he cut Henry off. “That’s enough,” he said.
There was an awful pause. I stared at him. This is it, I thought, with a kind of fascinated horror. He won’t listen anymore. He doesn’t want to be left alone with him.
Julian reached into his pocket. The expression on his face was impossible to read. He took the letter out and handed it to Henry. “I think you’d better keep this,” he said.
He didn’t get up from the table. The two of us left his office without a word. Funny, when I think about it now. That was the last time I ever saw him.
Henry and I didn’t speak in the hallway. Slowly, we drifted out, eyes averted, like strangers. As I went down the stairs he was standing by the windowsill on the landing, looking out, blind and unseeing.
Francis was panic-stricken when he saw the look on my face. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, my God. What’s happened?”
It was a long time before I could say anything. “Julian saw it,” I said.
“What?”
“He saw the letterhead. Henry’s got it now.”
“How’d he get it?”
“Julian gave it to him.”
Francis was jubilant. “He gave it to him? He gave Henry the letter?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s not going to tell anyone?”