The Secret History - Donna Tartt [77]
I decided, finally, that the last of these would be a prerequisite for any other plan. I walked back to Monmouth house and up to Judy’s room, only to find a note in gold paint-marker on the door: “Beth—Come to Manchester for lunch with Tracy and me? I’m in the costume shop till eleven. J.”
I stood staring at Judy’s door, which was adorned with photographs of automobile crashes, lurid headlines cut from the Weekly World News, and a nude Barbie doll hanging from the doorknob by a noose. By now it was one o’clock. I walked back to my pristine white door at the end of the hall, the only one in the suite unobscured by taped-up religious propaganda and posters of the Fleshtones and suicidal epithets from Artaud, and wondered how all these people were able to put up all this crap on their doors so fast and why they did it in the first place.
I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling, trying to guess when Judy would return, trying to think of what to do in the meantime, when there was a knock at the door.
It was Henry. I opened the door a little wider and stared at him and said nothing.
He gazed back at me with a fixed and patient unconcern. He was level-eyed and calm and had a book tucked under his arm.
“Hello,” he said.
There was another pause, longer than the first. “Hi,” I said, after a while.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“That’s good.”
There was another long silence.
“Are you doing anything this afternoon?” he said politely.
“No,” I said, taken aback.
“Would you like to go on a drive with me?”
I got my coat.
Once well out of Hampden, we turned off the main highway and onto a stretch of gravel road that I had never seen. “Where are we going?” I said, rather uneasy.
“I thought we might go out and take a look at an estate sale on the Old Quarry Road,” said Henry, unperturbed.
I was as surprised as I’ve ever been at anything in my life when the road finally did bring us out, about an hour later, to a large house with a sign in front that said ESTATE SALE.
Though the house itself was magnificent, the sale turned out not to be much: a grand piano covered with a display of silver and cracked glassware; a grandfather clock; several boxes full of records, kitchen implements, and toys; and some upholstered furniture badly scratched by cats, all out in the garage.
I leafed through a stack of old sheet music, keeping Henry in the corner of my eye. He poked around unconcernedly in the silver; played a disinterested bar of “Träumerei” on the piano with one hand; opened the door of the grandfather clock and had a look at the works; had a long chat with the owner’s niece, who had just come down from the big house, about when was the best time to put out tulip bulbs. After I had gone through the sheet music twice, I moved to the glassware and then the records; Henry bought a garden hoe for twenty-five cents.
“I’m sorry to have dragged you all the way out here,” he said on the way home.
“That’s all right,” I said, slouched down in my seat very close to the door.
“I’m a bit hungry. Are you hungry at all? Would you like to have something to eat?”
We stopped at a diner on the outskirts of Hampden. It was virtually deserted this early in the evening. Henry ordered an enormous dinner—pea soup, roast beef, a salad, mashed potatoes with gravy, coffee, pie—and ate it silently and with a great deal of methodical relish. I picked erratically at my omelet and had a hard time keeping my eyes off him as we ate. I felt as though I were in the dining car of a train and had been seated by the steward with another solitary male traveler, some kindly stranger, someone who didn’t even speak my language, perhaps, but who was still content to eat his dinner with me, exuding