The Secret History - Donna Tartt [39]
We went to the other side of the lake and returned, half-blinded by the light on the water, to find Bunny and Charles on the front porch, eating ham sandwiches and playing cards.
“Have some champagne, quick,” Bunny said. “It’s going flat.”
“Where is it?”
“In the teapot.”
“Mr. Hatch would be beside himself if he saw a bottle on the porch,” said Charles.
They were playing Go Fish: it was the only card game that Bunny knew.
On Sunday I woke early to a quiet house. Francis had given my clothes to Mrs. Hatch to be laundered; putting on a bathrobe he’d lent me, I went downstairs to sit on the porch for a few minutes before the others woke up.
Outside, it was cool and still, the sky that hazy shade of white peculiar to autumn mornings, and the wicker chairs were drenched with dew. The hedges and the acres and acres of lawn were covered in a network of spider web that caught the dew in beads so that it glistened white as frost. Preparing for their journey south, the martins flapped and fretted in the eaves, and, from the blanket of mist hovering over the lake, I heard the harsh, lonely cry of the mallards.
“Good morning,” a cool voice behind me said.
Startled, I turned to see Henry sitting at the other end of the porch. He was without a jacket but otherwise immaculate for such an ungodly hour: trousers knife-pressed, his white shirt crisp with starch. On the table in front of him were books and papers, a steaming espresso pot and a tiny cup, and—I was surprised to see—an unfiltered cigarette burning in an ashtray.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“I always rise early. The morning is the best time for me to work.”
I glanced at the books. “What are you doing, Greek?”
Henry set the cup back into its saucer. “A translation of Paradise Lost.”
“Into what language?”
“Latin,” he said solemnly.
“Hmm,” I said. “Why?”
“I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English—of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I’m referring to is the later work. In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose.” He lay his cigarette back in the ashtray. I stared at it burning. “Will you have some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
“I hope you slept well.”
“Yes, thanks.”
“I sleep better out here than I usually do,” said Henry, adjusting his glasses and bending back over the lexicon. There was a subtle evidence of fatigue, and strain, in the slope of his shoulder which I, a veteran of many sleepless nights, recognized immediately. Suddenly I realized that this unprofitable task of his was probably nothing more than a method of whiling away the early morning hours, much as other insomniacs do crossword puzzles.
“Are you always up this early?” I asked him.
“Almost always,” he said without looking up. “It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, and I did. About the only time of day I had been able to stand in Plano was the very early morning, almost dawn, when the streets were empty and the light was golden and kind on the dry grass, the chain-link fences, the solitary scrub-oaks.
Henry looked up from his books at me, almost curiously. “You’re not very happy where you come from, are you?” he said.
I was startled at this Holmes-like deduction. He smiled at my evident discomfiture.
“Don’t worry. You hide it very cleverly,” he said, going back to his book. Then he looked up again. “The others really don’t understand that sort of thing, you know.”
He said this without malice, without empathy, without even much in the way of interest. I was not even sure what he meant, but, for the first time, I had a glimmer of something I had not previously understood: why the others were all so fond of him. Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer