The Secret History - Donna Tartt [268]
“Not at all?”
“Not really, no.” She took another drink of her whiskey. “It’s broken my Nana’s heart,” she said.
In the rainy twilight, we walked back to Francis’s through the Public Gardens. The lamps were lit.
Very suddenly, Francis said: “You know, I keep expecting Henry to show up.”
I was a bit unnerved by this. Though I hadn’t mentioned it, I’d been thinking the same thing. What was more, ever since arriving in Boston I’d kept catching glimpses of people I thought were him: dark figures dashing by in taxicabs, disappearing into office buildings.
“You know, I thought I saw him when I was lying in the bathtub,” said Francis. “Faucet dripping, blood all over the goddamned place. I thought I saw him standing there in his bathrobe—-you know, that one with all the pockets that he kept his cigarettes and stuff in—over by the window, with his back half-turned, and he said to me, in this really disgusted voice: ‘Well, Francis, I hope you’re happy now.’ ”
We kept walking. Nobody said anything.
“It’s funny,” said Francis. “I have a hard time believing he’s really dead. I mean—I know there’s no way he could have faked dying—but, you know, if anybody could figure out how to come back, it’s him. It’s kind of like Sherlock Holmes. Going over the Reichenbach Falls. I keep expecting to find that it was all a trick, that he’ll turn up any day now with some kind of elaborate explanation.”
We were crossing a bridge. Yellow streamers of lamplight shimmered bright in the inky water.
“Maybe it really was him that you saw,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought I saw him too,” I said, after a long, thoughtful pause. “In my room. While I was in the hospital.”
“Well, you know what Julian would say,” said Francis. “There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
“Do you mind if we change the subject?” Camilla said, quite suddenly. “Please?”
Camilla had to leave on Friday morning. Her grandmother wasn’t well, she said, she had to get back. I didn’t have to be back in California until the following week.
As I stood with her on the platform—she impatient, tapping her foot, leaning forward to look down the tracks—it seemed more than I could bear to see her go. Francis was around the corner, buying her a book to read on the train.
“I don’t want you to leave,” I said.
“I don’t want to, either.”
“Then don’t.”
“I have to.”
We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.
“Camilla, I love you,” I said. “Let’s get married.”
She didn’t answer for the longest time. Finally she said: “Richard, you know I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t. I can’t just pick up and go to California. My grandmother is old. She can’t get around by herself anymore. She needs someone to look after her.”
“So forget California. I’ll move back East.”
“Richard, you can’t. What about your dissertation? School?”
“I don’t care about school.”
We looked at each other for a long time. Finally, she looked away.
“You should see the way I live now, Richard,” she said. “My Nana’s in bad shape. It’s all I can do to take care of her, and that big house, too. I don’t have a single friend my own age. I can’t even remember the last time I read a book.”
“I could help you.”
“I don’t want you to help me.” She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.
“I’ll get down on my knees if you want me to,” I said. “Really, I will.”
She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses, than tore at my very heart.
“I can’t marry you,” she said.
“Why not?”
I thought she was going to say, Because I don’t love you, which probably would have been more or less the truth, but instead, to my surprise,