The Secret History - Donna Tartt [49]
I took a sip of my drink and looked out at the faraway figures on the lawn. Bunny, hair falling into his eyes, was preparing to make a shot, flexing the mallet and shifting back and forth on his feet like a professional golfer.
“Does Julian have any family?” I said.
“No,” said Charles, his mouth full of ice. “He has some nephews but he hates them. Look at this, would you,” he said suddenly, half rising from his chair.
I looked. Across the lawn, Bunny had finally made his shot; the ball went wide of the sixth and seventh arches but, incredibly, hit the turning stake.
“Watch,” I said. “I bet he’ll try for another shot.”
“He won’t get it, though,” said Charles, sitting down again, his eyes still on the lawn. “Look at Henry. He’s putting his foot down.”
Henry was pointing at the neglected arches and, even at that distance, I could tell he was quoting from the rule book; faintly, we could hear Bunny’s startled cries of protest.
“My hangover’s about gone,” Charles said presently.
“Mine, too,” I said. The light on the lawn was golden, casting long velvety shadows, and the cloudy, radiant sky was straight out of Constable; though I didn’t want to admit it, I was about half-drunk.
We were quiet for a while, watching. From the lawn I could hear the faint pock of mallet against croquet ball; from the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: “ ‘We are little black sheep who have gone astray … Baa baa baa …’ ”
“And if Francis buys the house?” I said finally. “Think he’d let us live here?”
“Sure. He’d be bored stiff if it was just him and Henry. I guess Bunny might have to work in the bank but he could always come up on weekends, if he leaves Marion and the kids at home.”
I laughed. Bunny had been talking the night before about how he wanted eight children, four boys and four girls; which had prompted a long, humorless speech from Henry about how the fulfillment of the reproductive cycle was, in nature, an invariable harbinger of swift decline and death.
“It’s terrible,” said Charles. “Really, I can just see him. Standing out in a yard wearing some kind of stupid apron.”
“Cooking hamburgers on the grill.”
“And about twenty kids running around him and screaming.”
“Kiwanis picnics.”
“La-Z-Boy recliners.”
“Jesus.”
A sudden wind rustled through the birches; a gust of yellow leaves came storming down. I took a sip of my drink. If I had grown up in that house I couldn’t have loved it more, couldn’t have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible—just barely—in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.
It was getting dark; soon it would be time for dinner. I finished my drink in a swallow. The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining