The Secret History (41 page)

“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.

In the third week of April, when the lawns were green as Heaven and the apple blossoms had recklessly blown, I was reading in my room on a Friday night, with the windows open and a cool, damp wind stirring the papers on my desk. There was a party across the lawn, and laughter and music floated through the night air. It was long after midnight. I was nodding, half-asleep over my book, when someone bellowed my name outside my window.

I shook myself and sat up, just in time to see one of Bunny’s shoes flying through my open window. It hit the floor with a thud. I jumped up and leaned over the sill. Far below, I saw his staggering, shaggy-headed figure, attempting to steady itself by clutching at the trunk of a small tree.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?”

He didn’t reply, only raised his free hand in a gesture half wave, half salute, and reeled out of the light. The back door
slammed, and a few moments later he was banging on the door of my room.

When I opened it he came limping in, one shoe off and one shoe on, leaving a muddy trail of macabre, unmatched footprints behind him. His spectacles were askew and he stank of whiskey. “Dickie boy,” he mumbled.

The outburst beneath my window seemed to have exhausted him and left him strangely uncommunicative. He tugged off his muddy sock and tossed it clumsily away from him. It landed on my bed.

By degrees, I managed to extricate from him the evening’s events. The twins had taken him to dinner, afterwards to a bar in town for more drinks; he’d then gone alone to the party across the lawn, where a Dutchman had tried to make him smoke pot and a freshman girl had given him tequila from a thermos. (“Pretty little gal. Sort of a Deadhead, though. She was wearing clogs, you know those things? And a tie-dyed T-shirt. I can’t stand them. ‘Honey,’ I said, ‘you’re such a cutie, how come you want to get yourself up in that nasty stuff?’ ”) Then, abruptly, he broke off this narrative and lurched away—leaving the door of my room open behind him—and I heard the sound of noisy, athletic vomiting.

He was gone a long time. When he returned he smelled sour, and his face was damp and very pale; but he seemed composed. “Whew,” he said, collapsing in my chair and mopping his forehead with a red bandanna. “Musta been something I ate.”

“Did you make it to the bathroom?” I asked uncertainly. The vomiting had sounded ominously near my own door.

“Naw,” he said, breathing heavily. “Ran in the broom closet. Get me a glass of water, wouldja.”

In the hall, the door to the service closet hung partly open, providing a coy glimpse of the reeking horror within. I hurried past it to the kitchen.