In the morning I woke up sore and disoriented. The rain was falling harder than ever against the windows of the kitchen as we, guests, sat around the table.
The Corcorans were upstairs, dressing. Francis was still in his bathrobe. He had gotten up late and was in a state of outrage because all the hot water in the tank was gone.
He and Charles were across the table from each other and avoided looking in one another's direction. Marion - red-eyed, her hair in hot curlers - was sullen and silent. She was dressed in a navy suit, but with fuzzy pink slippers.
Lilith, out of all of us, was the most ready. She wore a long, tight black dress, her makeup was done, and her hair was slightly wavy. Even like this, her exhaustion and paleness were more than just visible. She seemed extremely doped up and was looking through the window for at least half an hour already, not moving, only sometimes raising her coffee cup to her lips.
Henry, among us, was the only pallbearer. I wondered if the coffin was heavy and how Henry would manage. Though he (like Lilith) emitted a faint odor of Scotch, he did not look at all drunk. The pills had sunk them both into a glassy, fathomless calm. It was a state which might have seemed a suspiciously narcotic one except that it barely differed from his regular manner.
--------------------
When we arrived at the church cars lined the road on both sides. We parked near the country club and hiked the quarter-mile silently.
The church was packed. I looked for Henry, but didn't see him; saw someone I thought was Julian but when he turned around I realised it wasn't.
There were metal folding chairs along the back wall, but then someone spotted a half-empty pew and we headed for that: Francis and Lilith, the twins, and me.
--------------------
It was a long service. The minister, who took his slightly impersonal remarks from Saint Paul's sermon on Love, talked for about half an hour. Next was Hugh Corcoran ('He was the best little brother a guy could have'); then Bunny's old football coach, telling a rousing anecdote about how Bunny had once saved the day against a particularly rough team.
No one paid much attention to the final speaker, Henry himself, who went to the podium and read, inaudibly and without comment, a short poem by A. E. Housman.
Quite often I had heard Bunny say this Housman aloud, so that the lines for me were set and hardened in the cadence of his voice. Perhaps that's why hearing it then, in Henry's academic monotone (he was a terrible reader and the only person in the whole world who actually liked listening to him read aloud was Lilith) enkindled in me such a brief and excruciating pain.
--------------------
The cemetery was on a highway. We pulled over and got out of the Mustang and stood blinking on the littered shoulder. Car whooshed past on the asphalt, not ten feet away.
It was a big cemetery, windy and flat. The uniformed driver of the funeral home Lincoln walked around to open the door for Mrs Corcoran.
The back doors of the hearse were opened and the coffin slid out. Silently, the party drifted after it as it was borne aloft into the open field. The sky was hostile and enormous.
A green striped canopy was set up over the grave. We stopped, stood, in awkward little groups. Somehow I had thought there would be more than this. Bits of litter lay scattered on the grass; there were cigarette butts, a Twix wrapper and bunch of other already unrecognizable stuff.
The grave was unspeakably horrible. It was a barbarous thing, a blind clayey hole with folding chairs for the family on one side and raw dirt on the other. My god, I thought. Why bother with the coffin if they were just going to dump him and go home? Bun, I thought, oh, Bun, I'm sorry.
The pallbearers stood in a dark row behind the coffin. Henry was the youngest one. He stood there quietly, his hands folded before him. The minister finished talking.
The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the grave with long, creaking straps. Henry's muscles quivered with the effort; his jaw was clenched tight; he almost looked like he was going to fall. Lilith, standing next to Julian, looked like she was going to jump to the front and catch Henry, but he didn't fall and she stood unmoving.
The straps were pulled up. Dirt and dark. The first spadeful of earth. The thud of it on the hollow lid gave me an empty feeling. Mrs Corcoran stepped forward. She tossed the little bouquet of roses into the grave.
Slowly, slowly, with a drugged calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged the hand across his chest.
I stared at him. So did Julian, and Francis, and the twins, and Lilith, who looked like she was going to faint and Francis grabbed her on her waist; with a kind of shocked horror. He seemed not to realise he had done anything out of the ordinary. He stood there perfectly still, the wind ruffling his hair and the dull light glinting from the rims of his glasses.
I have so many great (kinda) ideas for the ending of this book, but I don't really know what to do now, so if you have any suggestions tell them x
Not proofread
YOU ARE READING
The Madness Of Love | The Secret History
Fanfiction"The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings" - Plato Henry Winter x fem. oc !not my original characters except my oc! obviously the story is based on Donna Tartt's book.
