The Secret History (92 page)

Camilla was looking at him thoughtfully.

“Charles loves to go to the country,” she said.

“I know,” said Francis, pleased. “What could be simpler? And we won’t have to keep him there long. Richard and I can stay with him. I’ll buy a case of champagne. We’ll make it look like a party.”

It was not easy to get Charles to come to the door. We knocked for what seemed like half an hour. Camilla had given us a key, which we didn’t want to use unless we had to, but just as we were contemplating it the bolt snapped and Charles squinted at us through the crack.

He looked disordered, terrible. “What do you want?” he said.

“Nothing,” said Francis, quite easily, despite a slight, stunned pause of maybe a second. “Can we come in?”

Charles looked back and forth at the two of us. “Is anybody with you?”

“No,” Francis said.

He opened the door and let us in. The shades were pulled and the place had the sour smell of garbage. As my eyes adjusted to the dim I saw dirty dishes, apple cores and soup cans littering almost every conceivable surface. Beside the refrigerator, arranged with perverse neatness, stood a row of empty Scotch bottles.

A lithe shadow darted across the kitchen counter, twisting through the dirty pans and empty milk cartons:
Jesus
, I thought,
is that a rat?
But then it jumped to the floor, tail switching, and I saw it was a cat. Its eyes glowed at us in the dark.

“Found her in an empty lot,” said Charles. His breath, I noticed, did not have an alcoholic odor but a suspiciously minty one. “She’s not too tame.” He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe and showed us a discolored, contaminated-looking crisscross of scratches on his forearm.

“Charles,” said Francis, jingling his car keys nervously, “we stopped by because we’re driving out to the country. Thought it might be nice to get away for a while. Do you want to come?”

Charles’s eyes narrowed. He pushed down his sleeve. “Did Henry send you?” he said,

“God, no,” said Francis, surprised.

“Are you sure?”

“I haven’t seen him in days.”

Charles still didn’t look convinced.

“We’re not even speaking to him,” I said.

Charles turned to look at me. His gaze was watery and a little unfocused. “Richard,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always liked you a lot.”

“I like you, too.”

“You wouldn’t go behind my back, would you?”

“Of course not.”

“Because,” he said, nodding at Francis, “because I know he would.”

Francis opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked as if he’d been slapped.

“You underestimate Francis,” I said to Charles, in a calm, quiet voice. It was a mistake the others often made with him, to try to reason with him in a methodical, aggressive way, when all he wanted was to be reassured like a child. “Francis likes you very much. He’s your friend. So am I.”

“Are you?” he said.

“Of course.”

He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down, heavily. The cat slunk over and began to twine round his ankles. “I’m afraid,” he said hoarsely. “I’m afraid Henry’s going to kill me.”

Francis and I looked at each other.

“Why?” said Francis. “Why would he want to do that?”

“Because I’m in the way.” He looked up at us. “He’d do it, too, you know,” he said. “For two cents.” He nodded at a small,
unlabeled medicine bottle on the counter. “You see that?” he said. “Henry gave it to me. Couple of days ago.”

I picked it up. With a chill I recognized the Nembutals I’d stolen for Henry at the Corcorans.

“I don’t know what they are,” said Charles, pushing the dirty hair from his eyes. “He told me they’d help me sleep. God knows I need something, but I’m afraid to take them.”

I handed the bottle to Francis. He looked at it, then up at me, horrified.

“Capsules, too,” said Charles. “No telling what he filled them with.”

But he wouldn’t even have to, that was the evil thing. I remembered, with a sick feeling, having tried to impress upon Henry how dangerous these were when mixed with liquor.

Charles passed a hand over his eyes. “I’ve seen him sneaking around here at night,” he said. “Out back. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“
Henry?
”

“Yes. And if he tries anything with me,” he said, “it’ll be the worst mistake he ever made in his life.”

We had less trouble enticing him to the car than I’d expected. He was in a rambling, paranoid humor and was somewhat comforted by our solicitude. He asked repeatedly if Henry knew where we were going. “You haven’t talked to him, have you?”

“No,” we assured him, “no, of course not.”

He insisted on taking the cat with him. We had a terrible time catching it—Francis and I dodging round the dark kitchen, knocking dishes to the floor, trying to corner it behind the water heater while Charles stood anxiously by saying things like “Come on” and “Good kitty.” Finally, in desperation, I seized it by a scrawny black hindquarter—it thrashed around and sank its teeth into my arm—and, together, we managed to wrap it up in a dish towel so that only its head stuck out, eyes bulging and ears flattened back against the skull. We gave the mummified, hissing bundle to Charles. “Now, hold her tight,” Francis kept saying in the car, glancing anxiously back in the rear-view mirror, “watch out, don’t let it get away—”

But, of course, it did get away, catapulting into the front seat and nearly running Francis off the road. Then, after scrabbling around under the brake and gas pedal—Francis aghast, attempting simultaneously to avoid touching it and to kick it away from
him—it settled on the floorboard by my feet, succumbing to an attack of diarrhea before falling into a glaring, prickle-haired trance.

I had not been out to Francis’s since the week before Bunny died. The trees in the drive were in full leaf and the yard was overgrown and dark. Bees droned in the lilacs. Mr. Hatch, mowing the lawn some thirty yards away, nodded and raised a hand at us.

The house was shadowy and cool. There were sheets on some of the furniture and dust balls on the hardwood floor. We locked the cat in an upstairs bathroom and Charles went down to the kitchen, to make himself something to eat, he said. He came back up with a jar of peanuts and a double martini in a water glass, which he carried into his room, and shut the door.

We didn’t see an awful lot of Charles for the next thirty-six hours or so. He stayed in his room eating peanuts, and drinking, and looking out the window like the old pirate in
Treasure Island
. Once he came down to the library while Francis and I were playing cards, but he refused our invitation to join in and poked listlessly through the shelves, finally meandering upstairs without choosing a book. He came down for coffee in the mornings, in an old bathrobe of Francis’s, and sat in the kitchen windowsill looking moodily over the lawn as if he were waiting for someone.

“When do you think is the last time he had a bath?” Francis whispered to me.

He lost all interest in the cat. Francis sent Mr. Hatch out for some cat food and each morning and evening Francis let himself in the bathroom to feed it (“Get away,” I heard him muttering, “get away from me, you devil.”) and came out again with a fouled crumple of newspaper, which he held from his body at arm’s length.

About six o’clock in the afternoon of our third day there, Francis was up in the attic digging around for a jar of old coins his aunt had said he could have if he could find it, and I was lying on the couch downstairs drinking iced tea and trying to memorize the irregular subjunctive verbs in French (for my final exam was in less than a week) when I heard the phone ringing in the kitchen. I went to answer it.

It was Henry. “So there you are,” he said.

“Yes.”

There was a long, crackly silence. At last he said: “May I speak to Francis?”

“He can’t come to the phone,” I said. “What is it?”

“I suppose you’ve got Charles out there with you.”

“Look here, Henry,” I said. “What’s the big idea giving Charles those sleeping pills?”

His voice came back at me brisk and cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do. I saw them.”

“Those pills you gave me, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if he has them he must have taken them from my medicine cabinet.”

“He says you gave them to him,” I said. “He thinks you’re trying to poison him.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Is it?”

“He
is
there, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, “we brought him out the day before yesterday …” and then I stopped, because it seemed to me that somewhere towards the beginning of this sentence I had heard a stealthy but distinct click, as of an extension being picked up.

“Well, listen,” Henry said. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep him out there a day or two longer. Everyone seems to think this should be some big secret but believe me, I’m happy to have him out of the way for a while. If he doesn’t come to court he’ll be guilty by default, but I don’t think there’s an awful lot they can do to him.”

It seemed I could hear breathing on the other end.

“What is it?” said Henry, suddenly wary.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Charles?” I said. “Charles, is that you?”

Upstairs, the telephone slammed down.

I went up and knocked on Charles’s door. No answer. When I tried the knob, it was locked.

“Charles,” I said. “Let me in.”

No answer.

“Charles, it wasn’t anything,” I said. “He called out of the blue. All I did was answer the phone.”

Still no answer. I stood in the hall for a few minutes, the afternoon sun shining golden on the polished oak floor.

“Really, Charles, I think you’re being a bit silly. Henry can’t hurt you. You’re perfectly safe out here.”

“Bullshit,” came the muffled reply from within.

There was nothing more to say. I went downstairs again, and back to the subjunctive verbs.