The Secret History

We were spending the weekend at Francis's house. Aside from the barely perceptible strain which manifested itself in all dealings with Bu

I sat up in bed and switched on the light.

'You don't care about a goddamn thing, do you?' I heard Bu

More crashing, as of furniture overturned, and Henry's voice, quick and angry. Bu

Yet another crash, this time of splintering wood. A door slammed. There were rapid footsteps down the hall. Then the muffled noise of sobs – gasping, terrible sobs which went on for a long while.

About three o'clock, when everything was quiet and I was just about to go back to sleep, I heard soft footsteps in the hall and, after a pause, a knock at my door. It was Henry.

'Goodness,' he said distractedly, looking around my room, at the unmade four-poster hed and my clothes scattered on the rug beside it. Tm glad you're awake. I saw your light.'

'Jesus, what was all that about?'

He ran a hand through his rumpled hair. 'What do you suppose?' he said, looking up at me blankly. 'I don't know, really.

I must have done something to set him off, though for the life of me I don't know what. I was reading in my room, and he came in and wanted a dictionary. In fact, he asked me to look something up, and – You wouldn't happen to have an aspirin, would you?'

I sat on the side of my bed and rustled through the drawer of the night table, through the tissues and reading glasses and Christian Science leaflets belonging to one of Francis's aged female relatives. 'I don't see any,' I said. 'What happened?'

He sighed and sat down heavily in an armchair. There's aspirin in my room,' he said. 'In a tin in my overcoat pocket.

Also a blue enamel pillbox. And my cigarettes. Will you go get them for me?'

He was so pale and shaken I wondered if he was ill. 'What's the matter?' I said.

'I don't want to go in there.'

'Why not?'

'Because Bu

I looked at him. 'Well, Jesus,' I said. 'I'm not going to '

He waved away my words with a tired hand. 'It's all right.

Really. I'm just too upset to go myself. He's fast asleep.'

I went quietly out of my room and down the hall. Henry's door was at the end. Pausing outside with one hand on the knob, I heard distinctly from within the peculiar huffing noise of Bu

In spite of what I'd heard earlier, I was unprepared for what I saw: books were scattered in a frenzy across the floor; the night table was knocked over; against the wall lay the splay-legged remains of a black Malacca chair. The shade of the pole lamp was askew and cast a crazy irregular light over the room. In the middle of it was Bu

As troubling as they were, these eruptions of hysteria were infrequent. But they made it plain how upset Bu

It seemed, for the most part, that he sublimated his anger towards Henry into his dealings with the rest of the world. He was insulting, rude, quick to start a quarrel with virtually everyone he came in contact with. Reports of his behavior drifted back to us through various cha

Marion, we knew, recognized the difference in Bu

'God, please God, let her give him the old heave-ho,' said Francis, turning his eyes to heaven, when he heard this bit of intelligence. Nothing more was said of it, but we watched them carefully and prayed that it would be so. If he had his wits about him Bu