The Secret History - Donna Tartt [76]
When Bunny started in again (“And then there’s the one about the Old West—this is when they still hung folks …”) Camilla edged over on the windowsill and smiled nervously at me.
I went over and sat between her and Charles. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “How are you?” she said. “Did you wonder where we were?”
“I can’t believe we haven’t seen you,” said Charles quietly, turning towards me and crossing his ankle over his knee. His foot was trembling violently, as if it had a life of its own, and he put a hand on it to still it. “We had a terrible mishap with the apartment.”
I didn’t know what I’d expected to hear from them, but this was not it. “What?” I said.
“We left the key back in Virginia.”
“Aunt Mary-Gray had to drive all the way to Roanoke to Federal Express it.”
“I thought you had someone subletting,” I said suspiciously.
“He left a week ago. Like idiots we told him to mail us the key. The landlady is in Florida. We’ve been in the country at Francis’s the whole time.”
“Trapped like rats.”
“Francis drove us out there and about two miles from the house something terrible happened to the car,” said Charles. “Black smoke and grinding noises.”
“The steering went out. We ran into a ditch.”
They were both talking very rapidly. For a moment, Bunny’s voice rose stridently above them. “… Now this judge had a particular system he liked to follow. He’d hang a cattle thief on a Monday, a card cheat on a Tuesday, murderers on Wednesday—”
“… so after that,” Charles was saying, “we had to walk to Francis’s and for days we called Henry to come get us. But he wasn’t answering the phone—you know what it’s like to try to get in touch with him—”
“There was no food at Francis’s house except some cans of black olives and a box of Bisquick.”
“Yes. We ate olives and Bisquick.”
Could this be true? I wondered suddenly. Briefly I was cheered—my God, how silly I had been—but then I remembered the way Henry’s apartment had looked, the suitcases by the door.
Bunny was working up to a big finish. “So the judge says, ‘Son, it’s a Friday, and I’d like to go on and hang you today, but I’m going to have to wait until next Tuesday because—”
“There wasn’t any milk, even,” said Camilla. “We had to mix the Bisquick with water.”
There was the slight sound of a throat being cleared and I looked up and saw Julian closing the door behind him.
“Goodness, you magpies,” he said into the abrupt silence that fell. “Where have you all been?”
Charles coughed, his eyes fixed on a point across the room, and began rather mechanically to tell the story of the apartment key and the car in the ditch and the olives and the Bisquick. The wintry sun, coming in at a slant through the window, gave everything a frozen, precisely detailed look; nothing seemed real, and I felt as though this were some complicated film I’d started watching in the middle and couldn’t quite get the drift of. Bunny’s jailhouse jokes had for some reason unsettled me, though I remembered him telling an awful lot of jokes like that, back in the fall. They had been met, then as now, with a strained silence, but then they were silly, bad jokes. I had always assumed the reason he told them was because he had some corny old Lawyer’s Joke Book up in his room or something, right up there on the shelf with Bob Hope’s autobiography, the Fu Manchu novels, and Men of Thought and Deed. (Which, as it eventually turned out, he did.)
“Why didn’t you call me?” said Julian, perplexed and perhaps a little slighted, when Charles finished his story.
The twins looked at him blankly.
“We never thought of it,” Camilla said.
Julian laughed and recited an aphorism from Xenophon, which was literally about tents and soldiers and the enemy nigh, but which carried the implication that in troubled times it was best to go to one’s own people for help.
I walked home from class alone, in a state of bewilderment and turmoil. By now my thoughts were so contradictory and disturbing that I could no longer even speculate, only wonder dumbly at what was taking place around me;