The Secret History (79 page)

She dropped us off at Charles’s place. It was ten o’clock. Camilla wasn’t home.

“God,” said Charles, shouldering off his jacket. It fell, in a heap, on the floor.

“How do you feel?”

“Drunk.”

“Want some coffee?”

“There’s some in the kitchen,” Charles said, yawning and running a hand through his hair. “Mind if I have a bath?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ll be out in a minute. That cell was filthy. I think I might have fleas.”

He was more than a minute. I could hear him sneezing, running the hot and cold taps, humming to himself. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice and put some raisin bread in the toaster.

While looking through the cabinet for coffee, I found a half-f jar of Horlick’s malted milk. The label stared at me like a reproach. Bunny was the only one of us who ever drank malted milk. I pushed it to the rear of the cabinet, behind a jug of maple syrup.

The coffee was ready and I was on my second batch of toast when I heard a key in the lock, the front door opening. Camilla stuck her head into the kitchen.

“Hi, you,” she said. Her hair was untidy and her face pale and watchful; she looked like a little boy.

“Hi yourself. Want some breakfast?”

She sat down at the table beside me. “How did it go?” she said.

I told her. She listened attentively, reached out and took a triangle of buttered toast from my plate and ate it as she listened.

“Is he all right?” she said.

I didn’t know exactly how she meant it, “all right.” “Sure,” I said.

There was a long silence. Very faintly, on a downstairs radio, a sprightly female voice sang a song about yogurt, backed by a chorus of mooing cows.

She finished her toast and got up to pour herself some coffee. The refrigerator hummed. I watched her rummage in the cabinet for a cup.

“You know,” I said, “you ought to throw away that jar of malted milk you have in there.”

It was a moment before she answered. “I know,” she said.
“In the closet there’s a scarf he left the last time he was here. I keep running across it. It still smells like him.”

“Why don’t you get rid of it?”

“I keep hoping I won’t have to. I hope one day I’ll open the closet door and it’ll be gone.”

“I thought I heard you,” said Charles, who had been standing in the kitchen door for I didn’t know how long. His hair was wet and all he had on was a bathrobe and in his voice was still a trace of that liquory thickness I knew so well. “I thought you were in class.”

“Small class. Julian let us out early. How do you feel?”

“Fabulous,” said Charles, padding into the kitchen, his moist feet tracking prints that evaporated instantly on the shiny, tomato-red linoleum. He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. “How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?” he said.

She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth—not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His bathrobe fell slightly open as his left hand sank from her chin to neck, collarbone, base of throat, his fingertips just inside the edge of her thin polka-dot shirt and trembling over the warm skin there.

I was astounded. She didn’t flinch, didn’t move. When he came up for breath she pulled her chair in close to the table and reached for the sugar bowl as if nothing had happened. Spoon tinkled against china. The smell of Charles—damp, alcoholic, sweet with the linden-water he used for shaving—hung heavy in the air. She brought the cup up and took a sip and it was only then I remembered: Camilla didn’t like sugar in her coffee. She drank it unsweetened, with milk.

I was astounded. I felt I should say something—anything—but I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

It was Charles who finally broke the silence. “I’m starving to death,” he said, retying the knot of his bathrobe and pottering over to the refrigerator. The white door opened with a bark. He stooped to look in, his face radiant in the glacial light.

“I think I’m going to make some scrambled eggs,” he said. “Anyone else want some?”

Late that afternoon, after I’d gone home and had a shower and a nap, I went to visit Francis.

“Come in, come in,” he said, waving me in frenetically. His Greek books were spread out on the desk; a cigarette burned in a full ashtray. “What happened last night? Was Charles
arrested?
Henry wouldn’t tell me a thing. I got part of the story from Camilla but she didn’t know the details.… Sit down. Do you want a drink? What can I get for you?”

It was always fun to tell Francis a story. He leaned forward and hung on every word, reacting at appropriate intervals with astonishment, sympathy, dismay. When I was finished he bombarded me with questions. Normally, enjoying his rapt attention, I would have strung it out much longer, but after the first decent pause I said, “Now I want to ask you something.”

He was lighting a fresh cigarette. He clicked shut the lighter and brought his eyebrows down. “What is it?”

Though I had thought of various ways to phrase this question, it seemed, in the interests of clarity, most expedient to come to the point. “Do you think Charles and Camilla ever sleep together?” I said.

He had just drawn in a big lungful of smoke. At my question it spurted out his nose the wrong way.

“Do you?”

But he was coughing. “What makes you ask something like that?” he finally said.

I told him what I’d seen that morning. He listened, his eyes red and streaming from the smoke.

“That’s nothing,” he said. “He was probably still drunk.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

He lay the burning cigarette in the ashtray. “All right,” he said, blinking. “If you want my opinion. Yes. I think sometimes they do.”

There was a long silence. Francis closed his eyes, rubbed them with thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t think it’s anything that happens too frequently,” he said. “But you never know. Bunny always claimed he walked in on them once.”

I stared at him.

“He told Henry, not me. I’m afraid I don’t know the details. Apparently he had the key and you remember how he used to barge in without knocking—Come now,” he said. “You must have had some idea.”

“No,” I said, though actually I had, from the time I’d first met them. I’d attributed this to my own mental perversity, some degenerate vagary of thought, a projection of my own desire—because he was her brother, and they did look an awful lot alike, and the thought of them together brought, along with the predictable twinges of envy, scruple, surprise, another very much sharper one of excitement.

Francis was looking at me keenly. Suddenly I felt he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“They’re very jealous of each other,” he said. “He much more so than she. I always thought it was a childish, charming thing, you know, all verbal rough-and-tumble, even Julian used to tease them about it—I mean, I’m an only child, so is Henry, what do we know about such things? We used to talk about what fun it would be to have a sister.” He chuckled. “More fun than either of us imagined, it seems,” he said. “Not that I think it’s so terrible, either—from a moral standpoint, that is—but it’s not at all the casual, good-natured sort of thing that one might hope. It runs a lot more deep and nasty. Last fall, around the time when that farmer fellow …”

He trailed away, sat smoking for some moments, an expression of frustration and vague irritation on his face.

“Well?” I said. “What happened?”

“Specifically?” He shrugged. “I can’t tell you. I remember hardly anything that happened that night, which isn’t to say the tenor of it isn’t clear enough.…” He paused; started to speak but thought better of it; shook his head. “I mean, after that night it was obvious to everyone,” he said. “Not that it wasn’t before. It’s just that Charles was so much worse than anyone had expected. I …”

He sat staring into space for a moment. Then he shook his head and reached for another cigarette.

“It’s impossible to explain,” he said. “But one can also look at it on an extremely simple level. They were always keen on each other, those two. And I’m no prude, but this jealousy I find astounding. One thing I’ll say for Camilla, she’s more reasonable about that sort of thing. Perhaps she has to be.”

“What sort of thing?”

“About Charles going to bed with people.”

“Who’s he been to bed with?”

He brought up his glass and took a big drink. “Me for one,”
he said. “That shouldn’t surprise you. If you drank as much as he does, I daresay I would have been to bed with you, too.”

Despite the archness of his tone—which normally would have irritated me—there was a melancholy undernote in his voice. He drained off the rest of the whiskey and set the glass down on the end table with a bang. He said, after a pause: “It hasn’t happened often. Three or four times. The first time when I was a sophomore and he was a freshman. We were up late, drinking in my room, one thing led to another. Loads of fun on a rainy night, but you should have seen us at breakfast the next morning.” He laughed bleakly. “Remember the night Bunny died?” he said. “When I was in your room? And Charles interrupted us at that rather unfortunate moment?”

I knew what he was going to tell me. “You left my room with him,” I said.

“Yes. He was awfully drunk. Actually a little
too
drunk. Which was quite convenient for him as he pretended not to remember it the next day. Charles is very prone to these attacks of amnesia after he spends the night at my house.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “He denies it all quite convincingly and the thing is, he expects me to play along with him, you know, pretend it never happened,” he said. “I don’t even think he does it out of guilt. As a matter of fact he does it in this particularly light-hearted way which infuriates me.”

I said: “You like him a lot, don’t you?”

I don’t know what made me say this. Francis didn’t blink. “I don’t know,” he said coldly, reaching for a cigarette with his long, nicotine-stained fingers. “I like him well enough, I suppose. We’re old friends. Certainly I don’t fool myself that it’s more than that. But I’ve had a lot of fun with him, which is a great deal more than you can say about Camilla.”

That was what Bunny would have called a shot across the bow. I was too surprised to even answer.

Francis—though his satisfaction was evident—did not acknowledge his point. He leaned back in his chair by the window; the edges of his hair glowed metallic red in the sun. He said: “It’s unfortunate, but there it is. Neither one cares about anybody but himself—or herself, as the case may be. They like to present a unified front but I don’t even know how much they care about each other. Certainly they take a perverse pleasure in leading one on—yes, she does lead you on,” he said when I tried to
interrupt, “I’ve seen her do it. And the same with Henry. He used to be crazy about her, I’m sure you know that; for all I know he still is. As for Charles—well, basically, he likes girls. If he’s drunk, I’ll do. But—just when I’ve managed to harden my heart, he’ll turn around and be so
sweet
. I always fall for it. I don’t know why.” He was quiet for a moment. “We don’t run much to looks in my family, you know, all knuckles and cheekbones and beaky noses,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they’ve been duped by the same pair of eyes.” He leaned over and energetically stubbed out his cigarette. “She’d behave a lot more like Charles if she were allowed to; he’s so possessive, though, he keeps her reeled in pretty tight. Can you imagine a worse situation? He watches her like a hawk. And he’s also rather poor—not that it matters much,” he said hastily, realizing to whom he was speaking, “but he’s quite self-conscious about it. Very proud of his family, you know, very well aware that he himself is a sot. There’s something kind of Roman about it, all this regard he puts in his sister’s honor. Bunny wouldn’t go near Camilla, you know, he would hardly even
look
at her. He used to say that she wasn’t his type but I think the old Dutchman in him just knew she was bad medicine. My God … I remember once, a long time ago, we had dinner at a ridiculous Chinese restaurant in Bennington. The Lobster Pagoda. It’s closed now. Red bead curtains and a shrine to the Buddha with an artificial waterfall. We drank a lot of drinks with umbrellas in them and Charles was
horribly
drunk—not that it was his fault, really; we were all drunk, the cocktails are always too strong in a place like that and besides, you never know quite what they put in them, do you? Outside, they had a footbridge to the parking lot that went over a moat with tame ducks and goldfish. Somehow Camilla and I got separated from everyone else, and we were waiting there. Comparing fortunes. Hers said something like ‘Expect a kiss from the man of your dreams,’ which was too good to pass up, so I—well, we were both drunk, and we got a little carried away—and then Charles barreled out of nowhere and grabbed me by the back of the neck and I thought he was going to throw me over the rail. Bunny was there, too, he pulled him off, and Charles had the sense to say he’d been joking but he
wasn’t, he
hurt
me, twisted my arm behind my back and damn near pulled it out of the socket. I don’t know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T’ang Dynasty.”