The Secret History - Donna Tartt [85]
CHAPTER
5
WHEN THE LIGHTS came on, and the circle of darkness leaped back into the mundane and familiar boundaries of the living room—cluttered desk; low, lumpy sofa; the dusty and modishly cut draperies that had fallen to Francis after one of his mother’s decorating purges—it was as if I’d switched on the lamp after a long bad dream; blinking, I was relieved to discover that the doors and windows were still where they were supposed to be and that the furniture hadn’t rearranged itself, by diabolical magic, in the dark.
The bolt turned. Francis stepped in from the dark hall. He was breathing hard, pulling with dispirited jerks at the fingertips of a glove.
“Jesus, Henry,” he said. “What a night.”
I was out of his line of vision. Henry glanced at me and cleared his throat discreetly. Francis wheeled around.
I thought I looked back at him casually enough, but evidently I didn’t. It must have been all over my face.
He stared at me for a long time, the glove half on, half off, dangling limply from his hand.
“Oh, no,” he said at last, without moving his eyes away from mine. “Henry. You didn’t.”
“I’m afraid I did,” Henry said.
Francis squeezed his eyes tight shut, then reopened them. He had got very white, his pallor dry and talcumy as a chalk drawing on rough paper. For a moment I wondered if he might faint.
“It’s all right,” said Henry.
Francis didn’t move.
“Really, Francis,” Henry said, a trifle peevishly, “it’s all right. Sit down.”
Breathing hard, he made his way across the room and fell heavily into an armchair, where he rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette.
“He knew,” said Henry. “I told you so.”
Francis looked up at me, the unlit cigarette trembling in his fingertips. “Did you?”
I didn’t answer. For a moment I found myself wondering if this was all some monstrous practical joke. Francis dragged a hand down the side of his face.
“I suppose everybody knows now,” he said. “I don’t even know why I feel bad about it.”
Henry had stepped into the kitchen for a glass. Now he poured some Scotch in it and handed it to Francis. “Deprendi miserum est,” he said.
To my surprise Francis laughed, a humorless little snort.
“Good Lord,” he said, and took a long drink. “What a nightmare. I can’t imagine what you must think of us, Richard.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I said this without thinking, but as soon as I had, I realized, with something of a jolt, that it was true; it really didn’t matter that much, at least not in the preconceived way that one would expect.
“Well, I guess you could say we’re in quite a fix,” said Francis, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with Bunny. I wanted to slap him when we were standing in line for that damned movie.”
“You took him to Manchester?” Henry said.
“Yes. But people are so nosy and you never do really know who might be sitting behind you, do you? It wasn’t even a good movie.”
“What was it?”
“Some nonsense about a bachelor party. I just want to take a sleeping pill and go to bed.” He drank off the rest of his Scotch and poured himself another inch. “Jesus,” he said to me. “You’re being so nice about this. I feel awfully embarrassed by this whole thing.”
There was a long silence.
Finally I said: “What are you going to do?”
Francis sighed. “We didn’t mean to do anything,” he said. “I know it sounds kind of bad, but what can we do about it now?”
The resigned note in his voice simultaneously angered and distressed me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why for God’s sake didn’t you go to the police?”
“Surely you’re joking,” said Henry dryly.
“Tell them you don’t know what happened? That you found him lying out in the woods? Or, God, I don’t know, that you hit him with the car, that he ran out in front of you or something?”
“That would have been a very foolish thing to do,” Henry said. “It was an unfortunate incident and I am sorry that it happened, but frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers’ interests or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in a Vermont jail.”
“But