The Secret History

It was Camilla. Her iron-colored eyes were all I saw at first luminous, bemused, bright in the dim light from the bar. 'Hi,' she said.

I stared at her. 'Helio,' I said, trying to be nonchalant but delighted and beaming down at her all the same. 'How are you?

What are you doing here? Can I get you a drink?'

'Are you busy?' she said.

It was hard to think. The little gold hairs were curled in a very engaging way at her temples. 'No, no, I'm not busy at all,' I said, looking not at her eyes but at this fascinating area around her forehead.

'If you are, just say so,' she said in an undertone, looking over my shoulder. 'I don't want to drag you away from anything.'

Of course: Miss Gaul tier. I turned around, half-expecting some snide comment, but she'd lost interest and was talking pointedly to someone else. 'No,' I said. 'I'm not doing a thing.'

'Do you want to go to the country this weekend?'

'What?'

'We're leaving now. Francis and me. He has a house about an hour from here.'

I was really drunk; otherwise I wouldn't have just nodded and followed her without a single question. To get to the door, we had to make our way through the dance floor: sweat and heat, blinking Christmas lights, a dreadful crush of bodies. When finally we stepped outside, it was like falling into a pool of cool, still water. Shrieks and depraved music throbbed, muffled, through the closed windows.

'My God,' said Camilla. 'Those things are hellish. People being sick all over the place.'

The pebbled drive was silver in the moonlight. Francis was standing in the shadows under some trees. When he saw us coming he stepped suddenly onto the lighted path. 'Boo,' he said.

We both jumped back. Francis smiled thinly, light glinting off his fraudulent pince-nez. Cigarette smoke curled from his nostrils.

'Hello,' he said to me, then glanced at Camilla. 'I thought you'd run off,' he said.

'You should have come in with me.'

'I'm glad I didn't,' said Francis, 'because I saw some interesting things out here,' 'Like what?'

'Like some security guards handing out a girl on a stretcher and a black dog attacking some hippies.' He laughed, then tossed his car keys in the air and caught them with a jingle. 'Are you ready?'

He had a convertible, an old Mustang, and we drove all the way to the country with the top down and the three of us in the front seat. Amazingly, I had never been in a convertible before, and it is even more amazing that I managed to fall asleep when both momentum and nerves should've kept me awake but I did, fell asleep with my cheek resting on the padded leather of the door, my sleepless week and the six vodka tonics hitting me as hard as an injection.

I remember little of the ride. Francis drove at a reasonable clip – he was a careful driver, unlike Henry, who drove fast and often recklessly and whose eyes were none too good besides. The night wind in my hair, their indistinct talk, the songs on the radio all mingled and blurred in my dreams. It seemed we'd been driving for only a few minutes when suddenly I was conscious of silence, and of Camilla's hand on my shoulder. 'Wake up,' she said.

'We're here.'

Dazed, half dreaming, not quite sure where I was, I shook my head and inched up in my seat. There was drool on my cheek and I wiped it off with the flat of my hand.

'Arc you awake?'

'Yes,' I said, though I wasn't. It was dark and I couldn't see a thing. My fingers finally closed on the door handle and only then, as I was climbing out of the car, the moon came out from behind a cloud and I saw the house. It was tremendous. I saw, in sharp, ink-black silhouette against the sky, turrets and pikes, a widow's walk.

'Geez,' I said.

Francis was standing beside me, but I was scarcely aware of it till he spoke, and I was startled by the closeness of his voice. 'You can't get a very good idea of it at night,' he said.

'This belongs to you?' I said.

He laughed. 'No. It's my aunt's. Way too big for her, but she won't sell it. She and my cousins come in the summer, and only a caretaker the rest of the year.'

The entrance hall had a sweet, musty smell and was so dim it seemed almost gaslit; the walls were spidery with the shadows of potted palms and on the ceilings, so high they made my head reel, loomed distorted traces of our own shadows. Someone in the back of the house was playing the piano. Photographs and gloomy, gilt-framed portraits lined the hall in long perspectives.

'It smells terrible in here,' said Francis. 'Tomorrow, if it's warm, we'll air it out, Bu

That's my great-grandmother,' he said, pointing at a photograph which he saw had caught my attention. 'And that's her brother next to her – he went down on the Titanic, poor thing. They found his te

'Come see the library,' said Camilla.

Francis close behind us, we went down the hall and through several rooms – a lemon-yellow sitting room with gilt mirrors and chandeliers, a dining room dark with mahogany, rooms I wanted to linger in but got only a glimpse of. The piano music got closer; it was Chopin, one of the preludes, maybe.

Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass-fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier – dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading – sparkled in the dim.

There was a piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another.

A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair.

'Golly,' I said.

The playing stopped abruptly and Charles looked up. 'Well there you are,' he said. 'You're awfully late. Bu

'Where's Henry?' said Francis.

'Working. He might come down before bed.'

Camilla went to the piano and took a sip from Charles's glass.

'You should have a look at these books,' she said to me. 'There's a first edition oflvanhoe here.'

'Actually, I think they sold that one,' said Francis, sitting in a leather armchair and lighting a cigarette. 'There are one or two interesting things but mostly it's Marie Corelli and old Rover Boys.'

I walked over to the shelves. Something called London by somebody called Pe

'Here, go make your own drink if you want one,' Charles was saying to Camilla.

'I don't want my own. I want some of yours.'

He gave her the glass with one hand and, with the other, wobbled up a difficult backwards-and-forwards scale.

'Play something,' I said.

He rolled his eyes.

'Oh, come on,' said Camilla.

'No.'

'Of course, he can't really play anything,' Francis said in a sympathetic undertone.

Charles took a swallow of his drink and ran up another octave, trilling nonsensically on the keys with his right hand. Then he handed the glass to Camilla and, left hand free, reached down and turned the fibrillation into the opening notes of a Scott Joplin rag.

He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase. Camilla, on the seat beside him, smiled at me. I smiled back, a little dazed.

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.