The Secret History (41 page)

“I’ll say Chris has problems. He’s twenty-six years old and married to my mother, isn’t he? ‘Now I even hate to bring this up,’ ” he read, “ ‘and I wouldn’t have suggested it had not Chris insisted but you know, dear, how he loves you and he says he has seen this type of thing so often before in show business you know. So I phoned the Betty Ford Center and precious, what do you think? They have a nice little room waiting just for you, dear’—no, let me finish,” he said, when I started to laugh, “ ‘Now I know you’ll hate the idea but really you needn’t be ashamed, it’s a Disease, baby, that’s what they told me when I went and it made me feel so much better you cannot imagine. Of course I don’t know what it is you’re taking but really, darling, let’s be practical, whatever it is it must be frightfully expensive mustn’t it and I have to be quite honest with you and tell you that we simply cannot afford it, not with your grandpa the way he is and the taxes on the house and everything …’ ”

“You ought to go,” I said.

“Are you kidding? It’s in Palm Springs or someplace like that and besides I think they lock you up and make you do aerobics. She watches too much television, my mother,” he said, glancing at the letter again.

The telephone began to ring.

“Goddammit,” he said in a tired voice.

“Don’t answer it.”

“If I don’t she’ll call the police,” he said, and picked up the receiver.

I let myself out (Francis pacing back and forth: “
Funny?
What do you mean, I
sound funny?”)
and walked to the post office, where in my box I found, to my surprise, an elegant little note from Julian asking me to lunch the next day.

Julian, on special occasions, sometimes had lunches for the class; he was an excellent cook and, when he was a young man living off his trust fund in Europe, had the reputation of being
an excellent host as well. This was, in fact, the basis of his acquaintance with most of the famous people in his life. Osbert Sitwell, in his diary, mentions Julian Morrow’s “sublime little
fêtes
,” and there are similar references in the letters of people ranging from Charles Laughton to the Duchess of Windsor to Gertrude Stein; Cyril Connolly, who was notorious for being a hard guest to please, told Harold Acton that Julian was the most gracious American that he had ever met—a double-edged compliment, admittedly—and Sara Murphy, no mean hostess herself, once wrote him pleading for his recipe for
sole véronique
. But though I knew that Julian frequently invited Henry for lunches
à deux
, I had never before received an invitation to dine alone with him, and I was both flattered and vaguely worried. At that time, anything even slightly out of the ordinary seemed ominous to me, and, pleased as I was, I could not but feel that he might have an objective other than the pleasure of my company. I took the invitation home and studied it. The airy, oblique style in which it was written did little to dispel my feeling that there was more in it than met the eye. I phoned the switchboard and left a message for him to expect me at one the next day.

“Julian doesn’t know anything about what happened, does he?” I asked Henry when next I saw him alone.

“What? Oh, yes,” said Henry, glancing up from his book. “Of course.”

“
He knows you killed that guy?
”

“Really, you needn’t be so loud,” said Henry sharply, turning in his chair. Then, in a quieter voice: “He knew what we were trying to do. And approved. The day after it happened, we drove out to his house in the country. Told him what happened. He was delighted.”

“You told him everything?”

“Well, I saw no point in worrying him, if that’s what you mean,” said Henry, adjusting his glasses and going back to his book.

Julian, of course, had made the lunch himself, and we ate at the big round table in his office. After weeks of bad nerves, bad conversation, and bad food in the dining hall, the prospect of a meal with him was immensely cheering; he was a charming companion and his dinners, though deceptively simple, had a sort of
Augustan wholesomeness and luxuriance which never failed to soothe.

There was roasted lamb, new potatoes, peas with leeks and fennel; a rich and almost maddeningly delicious bottle of Château Latour. I was eating with better appetite than I had had in ages when I noticed that a fourth course had appeared, with unobtrusive magic, at my elbow: mushrooms. They were pale and slender-stemmed, of a type I had seen before, steaming in a red wine sauce that smelled of coriander and rue.

“Where did you get these?” I said.

“Ah. You’re quite observant,” he said, pleased. “Aren’t they marvelous? Quite rare. Henry brought them to me.”

I took a quick swallow of my wine to hide my consternation.

“He tells me—may I?” he said nodding at the bowl.

I passed it to him, and he spooned some of them onto his plate. “Thank you,” he said. “What was I saying? Oh, yes. Henry tells me that this particular sort of mushroom was a great favorite of the emperor Claudius. Interesting, because you remember how Claudius died.”

I did remember. Agrippina had slipped a poisoned one into his dish one night.

“They’re quite good,” said Julian, taking a bite. “Have you gone with Henry on any of his collecting expeditions?”

“Not yet. He hasn’t asked me to.”

“I must say, I never thought I cared very much for mushrooms, but everything he’s brought me has been heavenly.”

Suddenly I understood. This was a clever piece of groundwork on Henry’s part. “He’s brought them to you before?” I said.

“Yes. Of course I wouldn’t trust just anyone with this sort of thing, but Henry seems to know an amazing lot about it.”

“I believe he probably does,” I said, thinking of the boxer dogs.

“It’s remarkable how good he is at anything he tries. He can grow flowers, repair clocks like a jeweler, add tremendous sums in his head. Even if it’s something as simple as bandaging a cut finger he manages to do a better job of it.” He poured himself another glass of wine. “I gather that his parents are disappointed that he’s decided to concentrate so exclusively on the classics. I disagree, of course, but in a certain sense it is rather a pity. He would have made a great doctor, or soldier, or scientist.”

I laughed. “Or a great spy,” I said.

Julian laughed too. “All you boys would be excellent spies,” he said. “Slipping about in casinos, eavesdropping on heads of state. Really, won’t you try some of these mushrooms? They’re glorious.”

I drank the rest of my wine. “Why not,” I said, and reached for the bowl.

After lunch, when the dishes had been cleared away and we were talking about nothing in particular, Julian asked, out of the blue, if I’d noticed anything peculiar about Bunny recently.

“Well, no, not really,” I said, and took a careful sip of tea.

He raised an eyebrow. “No? I think he’s behaving
very
strangely. Henry and I were talking only yesterday about how brusque and contrary he’s become.”

“I think he’s been in kind of a bad mood.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Edmund is such a simple soul. I never thought I’d be surprised at anything he did or said, but he and I had a very odd conversation the other day.”

“Odd?” I said cautiously.

“Perhaps he’d only read something that disturbed him. I don’t know. I am worried about him.”

“Why?”

“Frankly, I’m afraid he might be on the verge of some disastrous religious conversion.”

I was jarred. “Really?” I said.

“I’ve seen it happen before. And I can think of no other reason for this sudden interest in
ethics
. Not that Edmund is profligate, but really, he’s one of the least
morally
concerned boys I’ve ever known. I was very startled when he began to question me—in all earnestness—about such hazy concerns as Sin and Forgiveness. He’s thinking of going into the Church, I just know it. Perhaps that girl has something to do with it, do you suppose?”

He meant Marion. He had a habit of attributing all of Bunny’s faults indirectly to her—his laziness, his bad humors, his lapses of taste. “Maybe,” I said.

“Is she a Catholic?”

“I think she’s Presbyterian,” I said. Julian had a polite but implacable contempt for Judeo-Christian tradition in virtually all its forms. He would deny this if confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious
filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.

“A Presbyterian? Really?” he said, dismayed.

“I believe so.”

“Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.”

In the first week of April the weather turned suddenly, unseasonably, insistently lovely. The sky was blue, the air warm and windless, and the sun beamed on the muddy ground with all the sweet impatience of June. Toward the fringe of the wood, the young trees were yellow with the first tinge of new leaves; woodpeckers laughed and drummed in the copses and, lying in bed with my window open, I could hear the rush and gurgle of the melted snow running in the gutters all night long.

In the second week of April everyone waited anxiously to see if the weather would hold. It did, with serene assurance. Hyacinth and daffodil bloomed in the flower beds, violet and periwinkle in the meadows; damp, bedraggled white butterflies fluttered drunkenly in the hedgerows. I put away my winter coat and overshoes and walked around, nearly light-headed with joy, in my shirtsleeves.

“This won’t last,” said Henry.