The Secret History (11 page)

I leaned out the window and called to them. They stopped and turned, hands shading brows, eyes screwed up against the evening glare. “Hello,” they called, and their voices, faint and ragged, were almost one voice floating up to me. “Come down.”

So now we were walking in the grove behind the college, down by the scrubby little pine forest at the base of the mountains, with one of them on either side of me.

They looked particularly angelic, their blond hair wind-blown, both in white tennis sweaters and tennis shoes. I wasn’t sure why they’d asked me down. Though polite enough, they seemed wary and slightly puzzled, as if I were from some country with unfamiliar, eccentric customs, which made it necessary for them to take great caution in order not to startle or offend.

“How’d you hear about it?” I said. “The lunch?”

“Bun called this morning. And Henry told us about it last night.”

“I think he was pretty mad.”

Charles shrugged. “Mad at Bunny, maybe. Not at you.”

“They don’t care for each other, do they?”

They seemed astonished to hear this.

“They’re old friends,” said Camilla.

“Best friends, I would say,” said Charles. “At one time you never saw them apart.”

“They seem to argue quite a bit.”

“Well, of course,” said Camilla, “but that doesn’t mean they’re not fond of each other all the same. Henry’s so serious and Bun’s so sort of—well,
not
serious—that they really get along quite well.”

“Yes,” said Charles. “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. A well-matched pair. I think Bunny’s about the only person in the world who can make Henry laugh.” He stopped suddenly and pointed into the distance. “Have you ever been down there?” he said. “There’s a graveyard on that hill.”

I could see it, just barely, through the pines—a flat, straggled line of tombstones, rickety and carious, skewed at such angles
that they gave a hectic, uncanny effect of motion, as if some hysterical force, a poltergeist perhaps, had scattered them only moments before.

“It’s old,” said Camilla. “From the 1700s. There was a town there too, a church and a mill. Nothing left but foundations, but you can still see the gardens they planted. Pippin apples and wintersweet, moss roses growing where the houses were. God knows what happened up there. An epidemic, maybe. Or a fire.”

“Or the Mohawks,” said Charles. “You’ll have to go see it sometime. The cemetery especially.”

“It’s pretty. Especially in the snow.”

The sun was low, burning gold through the trees, casting our shadows before us on the ground, long and distorted. We walked for a long time without saying anything. The air was musty with far-off bonfires, sharp with the edge of a twilight chill. There was no noise but the crunch of our shoes on the gravel path, the whistle of wind in the pines; I was sleepy and my head hurt and there was something not quite real about any of it, something like a dream. I felt that at any second I might start, my head on a pile of books at my desk, and find myself in a darkening room, alone.

Suddenly Camilla stopped and put a finger to her lips. In a dead tree, split in two by lightning, were perched three huge, black birds, too big for crows. I had never seen anything like them before.

“Ravens,” said Charles.

We stood stock-still, watching them. One of them hopped clumsily to the end of a branch, which squeaked and bobbed under its weight and sent it squawking into the air. The other two followed, with a battery of flaps. They sailed over the meadow in a triangle formation, three dark shadows on the grass.

Charles laughed. “Three of them for three of us. That’s an augury, I bet.”

“An omen.”

“Of what?” I said.

“Don’t know,” said Charles. “Henry’s the ornithomantist. The bird-diviner.”

“He’s such an old Roman. He’d know.”

We had turned towards home and, at the top of a rise, I saw the gables of Monmouth House, bleak in the distance. The sky was cold and empty. A sliver of moon, like the white crescent of a thumbnail, floated in the dim. I was unused to those dreary
autumn twilights, to chill and early dark; the nights fell too quickly and the hush that settled on the meadow in the evening filled me with a strange, tremulous sadness. Gloomily, I thought of Monmouth House: empty corridors, old gas-jets, the key turning in the lock of my room.

“Well, see you later,” Charles said, at the front door of Monmouth, his face pale in the glow of the porch lamp.

Off in the distance, I saw the lights in the dining hall, across Commons; could see dark silhouettes moving past the windows.

“It was fun,” I said, digging my hands in my pockets. “Want to come have dinner with me?”

“Afraid not. We ought to be getting home.”

“Oh, well,” I said, disappointed but relieved. “Some other time.”

“Well, you know …?” said Camilla, turning to Charles.

He furrowed his eyebrows. “Hmnn,” he said. “You’re right.”

“Come have dinner at our house,” said Camilla, turning impulsively back to me.

“Oh, no,” I said quickly.

“Please.”

“No, but thanks. It’s all right, really.”

“Oh, come on,” said Charles graciously. “We’re not having anything very good but we’d like you to come.”

I felt a rush of gratitude towards him. I did want to go, rather a lot. “If you’re sure it’s no trouble,” I said.

“No trouble at all,” said Camilla. “Let’s go.”

Charles and Camilla rented a furnished apartment on the third floor of a house in North Hampden. Stepping inside, one found oneself in a small living room with slanted walls and dormer windows. The armchairs and the lumpy sofa were upholstered in dusty brocades, threadbare at the arms: rose patterns on tan, acorns and oak leaves on mossy green. Everywhere were tattered doilies, dark with age. On the mantel of the fireplace (which I later discovered was inoperable) glittered a pair of lead-glass candelabra and a few pieces of tarnished silver plate.

Though not untidy, exactly, it verged on being so. Books were stacked on every available surface; the tables were cluttered with papers, ashtrays, bottles of whiskey, boxes of chocolates; umbrellas and galoshes made passage difficult in the narrow hall. In Charles’s room clothes were scattered on the rug and a rich confusion of ties hung from the door of the wardrobe; Camilla’s
night table was littered with empty teacups, leaky pens, dead marigolds in a water glass, and on the foot of her bed was laid a half-played game of solitaire. The layout of the place was peculiar, with unexpected windows and halls that led nowhere and low doors I had to duck to get through, and everywhere I looked was some fresh oddity: an old stereopticon (the palmy avenues of a ghostly Nice, receding in the sepia distance); arrowheads in a dusty case; a staghorn fern; a bird’s skeleton.

Charles went into the kitchen and began to open and shut cabinets. Camilla made me a drink from a bottle of Irish whiskey which stood on top of a pile of
National Geographics
.

“Have you been to the La Brea tar pits?” she said, matter of fact.

“No.” Helplessly perplexed, I gazed at my drink.

“Imagine that. Charles,” she said, into the kitchen, “he lives in California and he’s never been to the La Brea tar pits.”

Charles emerged in the doorway, wiping his hands on a dish-towel. “
Really?
” he said, with childlike astonishment. “Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“But they’re so interesting. Really, just think of it.”

“Do you know many people here from California?” said Camilla.

“No.”

“You know Judy Poovey.”

I was startled: how did she know that? “She’s not my friend,” I said.

“Nor mine,” she said. “Last year she threw a drink in my face.”

“I heard about that,” I said, laughing, but she didn’t smile. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said, and took another sip of her drink. “Do you know who Cloke Rayburn is?”

I knew of him. There was a tight, fashionable clique of Californians at Hampden, mostly from San Francisco and L.A.; Cloke Rayburn was at its center, all bored smiles and sleepy eyes and cigarettes. The girls from Los Angeles, Judy Poovey included, were fanatically devoted to him. He was the sort you saw in the men’s room at parties, doing coke on the edge of the sink.

“He’s a friend of Bunny’s.”

“How’s that?” I said, surprised.

“They were at prep school together. At Saint Jerome’s in Pennsylvania.”

“You know Hampden,” said Charles, taking a large gulp of his drink. “These progressive schools, they love the problem student, the underdog. Cloke came in from some college in Colorado after his first year. He went skiing every day and failed every class. Hampden’s the last place on earth—”

“For the worst people in the world,” said Camilla, laughing.

“Oh, come now,” I said.

“Well, in a way, I think it’s true,” said Charles. “Half the people here are here because nowhere else would let them in. Not that Hampden’s not a wonderful school. Maybe that’s why it’s wonderful. Take Henry, for instance. If Hampden hadn’t let him in, he probably wouldn’t have been able to go to college at all.”

“I can’t believe that,” I said.

“Well, it does sound absurd, but he never went past tenth grade in high school and, I mean, how many decent colleges are likely to take a tenth-grade dropout? Then there’s the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs—he’d probably score off the charts if he did, but he’s got some kind of aesthetic objection to them. You can imagine how that looks to an admissions board.” He took another sip of his drink. “So, how did you end up here?”

The expression in his eyes was hard to read. “I liked the catalogue,” I said.

“And to the admissions board I’m sure that seemed a perfectly sensible reason for letting you in.”

I wished I had a glass of water. The room was hot and my throat was dry and the whiskey had left a terrible taste in my mouth, not that it was bad whiskey; it was actually quite good, but I had a hangover and I hadn’t eaten all day, and I felt, all at once, very nauseous.

There was a knock at the door and then a flurry of knocks. Without a word, Charles drained his drink and ducked back into the kitchen while Camilla went to answer it.

Before it was even open all the way I could see the glint of little round glasses. There was a chorus of hellos, and there they were: Henry; Bunny, with a brown paper bag from the supermarket; Francis, majestic in his long black coat, clutching, with a black-gloved hand, the neck of a bottle of champagne. The last inside, he leaned to kiss Camilla—not on the cheek, but on the mouth, with a loud and satisfied smack. “Hello, dear,” he said. “What a happy mistake we have made. I’ve got champagne, and
Bunny brought stout, so we can make black and tans. What have we got to eat tonight?”

I stood up.

For a fraction of a second they were struck silent. Then Bunny shoved his paper bag at Henry and stepped forward to shake my hand. “Well, well. If it isn’t my partner in crime,” he said. “Haven’t had enough of going out to dinner, eh?”

He slapped me on the back and started to babble. I felt hot, and rather sick. My eyes wandered around the room. Francis was talking to Camilla. Henry, by the door, gave me a small nod and a smile, nearly imperceptible.

“Excuse me,” I said to Bunny. “I’ll be back in just a minute.”

I found my way to the kitchen. It was like a kitchen in an old person’s house, with shabby red linoleum and—in keeping with this odd apartment—a door that led onto the roof. I filled a glass from the tap and bolted it, a case of too much, too quickly. Charles had the oven open and was poking at some lamb chops with a fork.

I—due largely to a rather harrowing tour my sixth-grade class took through a meat-packing plant—have never been much of a meat eater; the smell of lamb I would not have found appealing in the best of circumstances, but it was particularly repulsive in my current state. The door to the roof was propped open with a kitchen chair, a draft blowing through the rusty screen. I filled my glass again and went to stand by the door:
deep breaths
, I thought,
fresh air, that’s the ticket
 … Charles burned his finger, cursed, and slammed the oven shut. When he turned around he seemed surprised to find me.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “What is it? Can I get you another drink?”

“No, thanks.”

He peered at my glass. “What’ve you got? Is that gin? Where did you dig that up?”

Henry appeared in the door. “Do you have an aspirin?” he said to Charles.

“Over there. Have a drink, why don’t you.”

Henry shook a few aspirin into his hand, along with a couple of mystery pills from his pocket, and washed them down with the glass of whiskey Charles gave him.

He had left the aspirin bottle on the counter and surreptitiously I went over and got a couple for myself, but Henry saw me do it. “Are you ill?” he said, not unkindly.

“No, just a headache,” I said.

“You don’t have them often, I hope?”

“What?” said Charles. “Is everybody sick?”

“Why is everybody in here?” Bunny’s pained voice came booming from the hallway. “When do we eat?”

“Hold on, Bun, it’ll only be a minute.”