The Secret History

To compound this – all these unpleasant recollections to the contrary – so much remained of the old Bu

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Camilla he tormented simply because she was a girl. In some ways she was his most vulnerable target – through no fault of her own, but simply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures, better seen than heard. This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.

Bu

With Camilla he was forced to assume a slightly more paternalistic stance, beaming down at her with the condescension of an old papa toward a dimwit child. To the rest of us he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship. We all found this pretty fu

Being the only female in what was basically a boys' club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn't compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof. Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees.

Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

If I found the twins so fascinating, I think it was because there was something a tiny bit inexplicable about them, something I was often on the verge of grasping but never quite did. Charles, kind and slightly ethereal soul that he was, was something of an enigma but Camilla was the real mystery, the safe I could never crack. I was never sure what she thought about anything, and I knew that Bu

Only once did I ever see him get to her. It was over at the twins' apartment, very late. Charles, fortunately, was out with Henry getting ice; he'd had a lot to drink and if he'd been around things would almost certainly have gotten out of hand.

Bu

She shrugged, in that odd, one-shouldered way the twins had.

'Huh?'

'It's convenient,' said Camilla. 'Cheap.'

'Well, I think it's pretty damned peculiar.'

'I've lived with Charles all my life.'

'Not much privacy, is there? Little place like this? On top of each other all the time?'

'It's a two-bedroom apartment.'

'And when you get lonesome in the middle of the night?'

There was a brief silence.

'I don't know what you're trying to say,' she said icily.

'Sure you do,' said Bu

I was stu

To my utter, utter surprise, Camilla said tartly: 'You mustn't think I'm sleeping with my brother just because I won't sleep with you.'

Bu

She looked at him with absolutely no expression in her pale eyes. Then she got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Francis and me to one of the more torturous silences I have ever experienced.

Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants – too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive. To ascribe it to such a motive would be easy enough. There was one, certainly. But the instinct for self-preservation is not so compelling an instinct as one might think. The danger which he presented was, after all, not immediate but slow and simmering, a sort which can, at least in the abstract, be postponed or diverted in any number of ways. I can easily imagine us there, at the appointed time and place, anxious suddenly to reconsider, perhaps even to grant a disastrous last minute reprieve. Fear for our own lives might have induced us to lead him to the gallows and slip the noose around his neck, but a more urgent impetus was necessary to make us actually go ahead and kick out the chair.