The Secret History (23 page)

I went to bed early that night, around eleven; at twelve I was awakened by a loud persistent banging at the front door. I lay in bed and listened for a minute, then got up to see who it was.

In the dark hallway I met Henry, in his bathrobe, fumbling with his glasses; he was holding one of his kerosene lanterns and it cast long, weird shadows on the narrow walls. When he saw me, he put a finger to his lips. We stood in the hall, listening. The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.

We stood there for a long time, it seemed, long after the banging stopped and we heard footsteps crunching away. Henry looked over at me, and we were quiet for a bit longer. “It’s all right now,” he said at last, and he turned away abruptly, the lamplight bobbing crazily about him as he went back to his room. I waited a moment or two longer in the dark, and then went back to my own room and to bed.

The next day, around three in the afternoon, I was ironing a shirt in the kitchen when there was another knock at the door. I went into the hall and found Henry standing there.

“Does that sound like Bunny to you?” he said quietly.

“No,” I said. This knock was fairly light; Bunny always beat on the door as if to bash it in.

“Go around to the side window and see if you can see who it is.”

I went to the front room and advanced cautiously to the side; there were no curtains and it was hard to get to the far windows without exposing oneself to view. They were at an odd angle and all I could see was the shoulder of a black coat, with a silk scarf blown out in the wind behind it. I crept back through the kitchen to Henry. “I can’t really see, but it might be Francis,” I said.

“Oh, you can let him in, I suppose,” said Henry, and he turned and went back towards his part of the house.

I went to the front room and opened the door. Francis was looking back over his shoulder, wondering, I suppose, if he should leave. “Hi,” I said.

He turned around and saw me. “Hello!” he said. His face seemed to have got much thinner and sharper since I’d seen him last. “I thought nobody was home. How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“You look pretty bad to me.”

“You don’t look so good yourself,” I said, laughing.

“I drank too much last night and gave myself a stomach ache. I want to see this tremendous
head
wound of yours. Are you going to have a scar?”

I led him into the kitchen and shoved aside the ironing board so he could sit down. “Where’s Henry?” he said, pulling off his gloves.

“In the back.”

He began to unwind his scarf. “I’ll just run say hello to him and I’ll be right back,” he said briskly, and slid away.

He was gone a long time. I had got bored and had almost finished ironing my shirt when suddenly I heard Francis’s voice rise, with a hysterical edge. I got up and went into the bedroom so I could hear better what he was saying.

“—thinking about? My God, but he’s in a state. You can’t tell me you know what he might—”

There was a low murmur now, Henry’s voice, then Francis’s voice came back to me again.

“I don’t care,” he said hotly. “Jesus, but you’ve done it now. I’ve been in town two hours and already—I don’t
care,
” he said in reply to another murmur from Henry. “Besides, it’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”

Silence. Then Henry began to talk, too indistinctly for me to hear.

“
You
don’t like it?
You?
” said Francis. “What about me?”

His voice dropped suddenly and then resumed, too quietly for me to hear.

I walked quietly back to the kitchen and put on water for tea. I was still thinking about what I’d heard when, several minutes later, there were footsteps and Francis emerged in the kitchen, edging his way around the ironing board to gather his gloves and scarf.

“Sorry to run,” he said. “I’ve got to unpack the car and start cleaning my apartment. That cousin of mine tore it all to pieces. I don’t believe he took out the garbage once the whole time he was there. Let me see your head wound.”

I pulled back the hair on my forehead and showed him the place. I’d had the stitches out long ago and it was nearly gone.

He leaned forward to peer at it though his pince-nez. “Goodness, I must be blind, I can’t see a thing. When do classes start? Wednesday?”

“Thursday, I think.”

“See you then,” he said, and he was gone.

I put my shirt on a hanger and then went into the bedroom and started to pack my things. Monmouth House opened that afternoon; maybe Henry would drive me to school with my suitcases later on.

I was just about finished when Henry called me from the back of the apartment. “Richard?”

“Yes?”

“Would you come here for a moment, please?”

I went back to his room. He was sitting on the side of the fold-out bed, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a game of solitaire spread out on the blanket at the foot. His hair had fallen to the wrong side and I could see the long scar at his hairline, all dented and puckered, with ridges of white flesh cutting across it to the browbone.

He looked up at me. “Will you do a favor for me?” he said.

“Sure.”

He took a deep breath through the nostrils and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Will you call Bunny and ask him if he’d like to come over for a few minutes?” he said.

I was so surprised that I didn’t say anything for half a second. Then I said: “Sure. Fine. I’ll be glad to.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temple with his fingertips. Then he blinked at me. “Thank you,” he said.

“No, really.”

“If you want to take some of your things back to school this afternoon, you’re more than welcome to borrow the car,” he said evenly.

I got his drift. “Sure,” I said, and it was only after I’d loaded my suitcases in the car and driven them to Monmouth and got Security to unlock my room that I called Bunny from the pay phone downstairs, a safe half hour later.

4

S
OMEHOW
I thought that when the twins returned, when we were settled in again, when we were back at our Liddell and Scotts and had suffered through two or three Greek Prose Composition assignments together, we would all fall back into the comfortable routine of the previous term and everything would be the same as it had been before. But about this I was wrong.

Charles and Camilla had written to say they would arrive in Hampden on the late train, around midnight on Sunday, and on Monday afternoon, as students began to straggle back to Monmouth House with their skis and their stereos and their cardboard boxes, I had some idea that they might come to see me, but they didn’t. On Tuesday I didn’t hear from them either, or from Henry or anybody but Julian, who had left a cordial little note in my post-office box welcoming me back to school and asking me to translate an ode of Pindar’s for our first class.

On Wednesday I went to Julian’s office to ask him to sign my registration cards. He seemed happy to see me. “You look well,” he said, “but not as well as you ought. Henry’s been keeping me up to date on your recovery.”

“Oh?”

“It was a good thing, I suppose, that he came back early,” said Julian, glancing through my cards, “but I was surprised to see him, too. He showed up at my house straight from the airport, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of the night.”

This was interesting. “Did he stay with you?” I said.

“Yes, but only a few days. He’d been ill himself, you know. In Italy.”

“What was the matter?”

“Henry’s not as strong as he looks. His eyes bother him, he has terrible headaches, sometimes he has a difficult time.… I didn’t think he was in a proper condition to travel, but it was
lucky he didn’t stay on or he wouldn’t have found
you
. Tell me. How did you end up in such a dreadful place? Wouldn’t your parents give you money, or didn’t you want to ask?”

“I didn’t want to ask.”

“Then you are more of a stoic than I am,” he said, laughing. “But your parents do not seem very fond of you, am I correct?”

“They’re not that crazy about me, no.”

“Why is that, do you suppose? Or is it rude of me to ask? I should think that they would be quite proud, yet you seem more an orphan than our real orphans do. Tell me,” he said, looking up, “why is it that the twins haven’t been in to see me?”

“I haven’t seen them, either.”

“Where can they be? I haven’t even seen Henry. Only you and Edmund. Francis telephoned but I only spoke to him for a moment. He was in a hurry, he said he would stop by later, but he hasn’t.… I don’t think Edmund’s learned a word of Italian, do you?”

“I don’t speak Italian.”

“Nor do I, not anymore. I used to speak it rather well. I lived in Florence for a while but that was nearly thirty years ago. Will you be seeing any of the others this afternoon?”

“Maybe.”

“Of course, it’s a matter of small importance, but the registration slips should be at the Dean’s office this afternoon and he will be irritated that I haven’t sent them. Not that I care, but he is certainly in a position to make things unpleasant for any of you, if he chooses.”

I was somewhat annoyed. The twins had been in Hampden three days and hadn’t called once. So when I left Julian’s I stopped by their apartment, but they weren’t home.

They weren’t at dinner that night, either. Nobody was. Though I had expected at least to see Bunny, I stopped by his room on the way to the dining hall and found Marion locking his door. She told me, rather officiously, that the two of them had plans and would not be in until late.

I ate alone and walked back to my room in the snowy twilight, with a sour, humorless feeling as if I were the victim of a practical joke. At seven I called Francis, but there was no answer. There was no answer at Henry’s, either.

I read Greek till midnight. After I’d brushed my teeth and
washed my face and was almost ready for bed, I went downstairs and called again. Still no answer anywhere. I got my quarter back after the third call and tossed it up in the air. Then, on a whim, I called Francis’s number in the country.

There was no answer there, either, but something made me hold the line longer than I should have and finally, after about thirty rings, there was a click and Francis said gruffly into the receiver, “Hullo?” He was making his voice deep in an attempt to disguise it but he didn’t fool me; he couldn’t bear to leave a phone unanswered, and I had heard him use that silly voice more than once before.

“Hul
lo?
” he said again, and the forced deepness of his voice broke into a quaver at the end. I pressed the receiver hook and heard the line go dead.