The Secret History - Donna Tartt [254]
Finally, my plea finished, and my handwriting a passionate scrawl, I fell down on my bed and went to sleep. At eleven o’clock I woke, made some changes, and headed for the all-night study room to type it up. On the way I stopped at the post office, where, to my immense gratification, a note in my box informed me that I had got the job apartment-sitting in Brooklyn, and that the professor wanted to meet with me sometime in the coming week to discuss my schedule.
Well, that’s the summer taken care of, I thought.
It was a beautiful night, full moon, the meadow like silver and the housefronts throwing square black shadows sharp as cutouts on the grass. Most of the windows were dark: everyone sleeping, early to bed. I hurried across the lawn to the library, where the lights of the All-Night Study Room—“The House of Eternal Learning,” Bunny had called it in happier days—burned clear and bright on the top floor, shining yellow through the treetops. I went up the outside stairs—iron stairs, like a fire escape, like the steps in my nightmare—my shoes clattering on the metal in a way that might have given me the heebie-jeebies in a less distracted mood.
Then, through the window, I saw a dark figure in a black suit, alone. It was Henry. Books were piled in front of him but he wasn’t working. For some reason, I thought of that February night I had seen him standing in the shadows beneath the windows of Dr. Roland’s office, dark and solitary, hands in the pockets of his overcoat and the snow whirling high in the empty arc of the streetlights.
I closed the door. “Henry,” I said. “Henry. It’s me.”
He didn’t turn his head. “I just got back from Julian’s house,” he said, in a monotone.
I sat down. “And?”
“The place is shut up. He’s gone.”
There was a long silence.
“I find it very hard to believe he’s done this, you know.” The light glinted off his spectacles; beneath the dark, glossy hair his face was deadly pale. “It’s just such a cowardly thing to have done. That’s why he left, you know. Because he was afraid.”
The screens were open. A damp wind rustled in the trees. Beyond them clouds sailed over the moon, fast and wild.
Henry took off his glasses. I never could get used to seeing him without them, that naked, vulnerable look he always had.
“He’s a coward,” he said. “In our circumstance, he would have done exactly what we did. He’s just too much of a hypocrite to admit it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He doesn’t even care that Bunny is dead. I could forgive him if that was why he felt this way, but it isn’t. He wouldn’t care if we’d killed half a dozen people. All that matters to him is keeping his own name out of it. Which is essentially what he said when I talked to him last night.”
“You went to see him?”
“Yes. One would hope that this matter would’ve seemed something more to him than just a question of his own comfort. Even to have turned us in would have shown some strength of character, not that I wanted to be turned in. But it’s nothing but cowardice. Running away like this.”
Even after all that had happened, the bitterness and disappointment in his voice cut me to the heart.
“Henry,” I said. I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood are frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers. But I found myself unable to say anything at all.
He turned his blind, unseeing eyes upon me.
“I loved him more than my own father,” he said. “I loved him more than anyone in the world.”
The wind was up. A gentle pitter of rain swept across the roof. We sat there like that, not talking, for a very long time.
The next afternoon at three, I went to meet the new teacher.
When I stepped inside Julian’s office I was shocked. It was completely empty. The books, the rugs, the big round table were gone. All that was left were the curtains on