The Last Enchantments (3 page)

I perceived at some point in those first few hours of our acquaintance—later in the year, when I was better attuned to British mores, it wouldn’t have taken me as long—that he belonged to the upper classes. His accent should have alerted me immediately, with its long vowels and back-of-the-throat intonation, but really it was his reference to Ascot (“Daisy and I got hammered at Ascot last year, it was lovely, we snogged in one of the private boxes all afternoon and shook hands with Prince Philip, the old racist”) that signaled it first.

Tom grew up in South Kensington. His father was a banker who belonged to a landless cadet branch of a ducal family, and his mother was first cousin to a Sussex title. She did administrative work for this cousin’s land-mine charity two days a week. They were both formal people, Tories, with clear ideas of their responsibilities. They sent Tom to Westminster when he was eight; his older sister, Katie, to Roedean. Their small assertions of class—his father’s membership in a Northumberland hunt, his mother’s activities at the National Portrait Gallery, their Vizslas—were conscious, I think, rather than reflexive. To nearly everyone they seemed an exalted family; to those whose opinion genuinely mattered to them, however, merely a decent one.

Tom, too, was a terrible snob. As a carbuncular he had been to the Ritz and the Savoy for coming-out balls, served as a page at one or two demi-royal functions, and rowed for his school. There is nobody as hopelessly vulgar as a British aristocrat, and he bore their customary equipment, the signet ring, the diamond tie pin, the colorful handkerchiefs, the Toryism, the rah. He openly looked down on me for being American—“News from the colonies?” he asked when I got mail—but that was nothing to his scorn for the people of his own country whom he believed to be fraudulently claiming a connection to his class. These were the rugby-obsessed MPSIAers—
Minor public school, I’m afraid
—and Brookes frauds, pretending they were entitled to
their
signet rings, the Sloane Rangers, the affected Barbour “northerners” who implied a great deal of land somewhere the other side of Yorkshire. Like all authentic snobbery—backed by public affirmation, by heritage—it was disagreeable and also cunningly pleasant, an occasional remoteness that made his friendship seem more valuable. It also made it all the stranger when he picked the person he did to fall in love with.

This account of his life—his account, Westminster, LSE, Thailand, Oxford, the City—makes it sound perfectly ordered. Indeed until five years earlier it had been that way. Then it had changed.

The house he grew up in was at the center of a long row of identical alabaster town houses, divided by hedges. There were two family dogs, Charger and Sandy, and one day he arrived home from school to find them out on the sidewalk, sniffing at a hedge.

He called them, and they ran to heel—well-trained animals—and went up the steps to his house, number seventeen, with him. It was then that he noticed the door was open and began to feel a sense of panic. He called out to see if anybody was home—his father’s car wasn’t in its spot, but that was usual enough—and his sister came to the door, flanked by two police officers. There were tears on her face. “What happened?” he asked. (They had always been close—one of the first things he told me as we played pool was that they talked every day still, though she was in Syria, working for the government, and I remembered that she was the one who had dropped him here at Fleet.) One of the officers put a hand on his shoulder and told him then that his parents had been in a crash with a food delivery truck on the M4. His father had died immediately. His mother had lasted fifty minutes.

For all the time we spent living side by side—and soon we were good friends, even best friends—I wouldn’t know any of this if it weren’t for two conversations. The second happened later in the year, when he was drunk and told me the story from start to finish. The first was that first day, when he told me the following.

After the funeral he and Katie had written thank-you notes to all the relatives who had been there. They had a great-uncle in an assisted-living home in Devon, who was unable to come to London, but who had written them an e-mail. It said, “Your father was a fine chap, so sorry he’s died, LOL, Uncle Arthur.” They responded without acknowledging the strange sign-off, and after that begin to get a series of similar terse, lunatic messages, laughing at the horrors of the world: “Doris in the next room died, LOL, Uncle Arthur.” “Kidney bad again, may need surgery, LOL, Uncle Arthur.” “Still missing your father, LOL, Uncle Arthur.”

Tom was smiling as he told me this—and in retrospect it’s amazing that he told me it at all, so soon after we met, unless he was trying to get it out of the way that he was, as he jokingly said, an orphan, like Oliver Twist—but I didn’t understand.

“What the hell did he mean?”

“Some idiot at the home, the person who taught him how to use the computer, told him it meant ‘lots of love.’”

“Oh Jesus.”

“I know.”

*   *   *

Tom wanted to go out, but I was too tired—tomorrow, I said. We walked back through Fleet together, but as I turned out of college toward our house he pulled his phone from his pocket and looked up, restless, and said good-bye, that he thought he’d walk around a bit. I went up to my room and started to make my bed.

When that was done, I called Alison. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Hey.”

I could picture her in underwear and a tank top, cross-legged at the center of our bed, biting her bottom lip, her eyes bright and brown and expressive. Then I realized that no, of course she would be at work. The time difference.

It’s hard to describe someone you know as well as I know her. She grew up in New Canaan, new money, and had a tendency to be cliquish, bossy, and unreflective, traits that four years in politics had only sharpened but that vanished when you knew her well enough. I thought primarily of her consideration, her love, and that we felt matched.

“I made it,” I said.

“Your mom called me, yeah.”

She sounded mad. “I tried you before, right when I got here.”

That was a lie. “Are you sure?” she asked. “I don’t have a missed call from you.”

“Maybe check again?”

“No, it doesn’t matter. How is it?”

“Okay. I’m really tired. I met a guy in my dorm and we got some beers, but I think it was a mistake to drink.”

“Can you get
The New York Times
?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“You get moody if you don’t read it in the mornings.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. It sucks.”

Then—it’s a fault of mine, an eagerness to conciliate, to please—I said, “Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe I should just come back.”

To my surprise, she was the one who said, this time, “It’s only a year.”

“You’re right. One year.”

“By the way, did you see the Gallup they just released?”

“You know I can’t get the
Times
here.”

She laughed. “Asshole. No, it was like forty minutes ago.”

“What are the numbers?”

“They’re good. Look them up. My dad is saying he could get us both on McCormack, if you came back. Back to Ohio.”

I ignored that. “You’re ready to leave the congressman already?”

“You know me. I like the trail best. Anyway, a moron could write up these press releases on school outreach.”

“But you get to deal with the reporters. You like that.”

“That’s true.”

After John Kerry lost the election—and we both lost our jobs—she had decided to stay in politics. She was tougher than I was about it. She wanted to keep on fighting, the next campaign, the next candidate, fuck the world. In any campaign they say that you need your volunteers to drink the Kool-Aid, so they’ll still knock on doors when it’s ten below or lend their spare bedroom to a junior pollster who can’t find a hotel room—but that’s the volunteers. I was on the senior staff and I was still drinking the Kool-Aid, which was a mistake. Alison believed in the
cause,
in the big picture, and she hated George Bush. It’s different to fight against something than to fight for something, though. I believed in our guy, Kerry. Worse than that, I really, sincerely believed he was going to win. I was certain. Right until the last people in Ohio voted.

We talked for an hour. She had been crying almost every day before I left, but now she seemed okay. When we hung up I thought of the evening before, the sky that heartbreaking lavender of late twilight in the summer in New York, when even as I had waved good-bye to her for the last time, stepping into my taxi, my other hand had been reaching into my pocket to check that my passport was still there.

Then, though, I thought I was safe, for some reason I couldn’t discern the conversation took on a sullen edge. When I asked what was wrong she said nothing was wrong. I pressed her.

Finally she answered. “I just don’t understand why you left.”

“Jesus, this again.”

“Yep, this again.”

“What’s changed since the start of this conversation, Al?”

I knew the answer—she could be lulled into forgetting that anything was amiss, but when she remembered she was angrier than before. “It would be one thing if you had invited me to come with you.”

“What would you have done over here?”

“Whatever I wanted if I had time to plan for it.”

“So you would have given up your job?”

“Of course! Are you insane?”

“You’re lucky you have that job, Alison, my dad isn’t even—”

“Oh, here we go. Boo-hoo. The world revolves around Will.”

“Don’t be a jerk.”

She laughed. “Me? Is that right? Because the way I seem to remember it is that
you
left without giving me any warning, and
you
totally fucked up my life and barely said sorry and now you’re acting, acting aggrieved, because I’m upset about it, as if I did something wrong by not liking that you—”

“It’s time to get over it.” After that there was a long pause, tense with fury, and I knew I had made a mistake—but I didn’t care.

She started to shout, and slowly it became all of the arguments we’d already fought out, the old injustices brought forth like a peddler’s goods, the trip I’d once cancelled at the last minute, the high school boyfriend with whom she exchanged birthday phone calls. Finally she hung up on me, but I called her back over and over until she answered, with a hiss, “My secretary can see you’re calling, we’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Do you think I give a shit about your secretary?”

She hung up again. I called her, angry, again and again. Soon both of her lines went straight to voice mail.

I sat still for a minute, phone in hand. Then I dragged myself upright to unpack my clothes and find a T-shirt to sleep in. I wrote an e-mail to a list of friends, telling them I had arrived. When all that was done I went over to the window and sat down again, feeling unrepentant. Because I had heard that staying up late was the key to getting over jet lag, I forced myself to stay awake. It’s a kind of madness. Soon enough loneliness crept in; I began to picture our apartment, warm and well lit, but who cares, I didn’t care, I was here. In the end I fell asleep in one of the armchairs, the windows cracked open, the night air still warm even as it drizzled, and the small boats clicking against each other in the river: one of those times when the uneven, discarded sounds of the world outside remind you that the world doesn’t care, and the comfort of that feeling.

*   *   *

When I woke up late the next morning, I felt better for sleeping, and remorseful. It was too early in the States now to call, but I sent Alison an e-mail apologizing—not just for the argument but for leaving.

After that I went through the nonsense necessities of entering any institution: enrolled officially, claimed my student ID, confirmed my arrival with the English Department. Then I had to register my passport at the office of the provost and promise not to blow up anything in England, and between that and the immigration desk at Heathrow I was half convinced myself that I had designed complex plans to level the British Museum and only failed to carry them out through sheer forgetfulness.

Still, the charm of being somewhere new lived on. It had been too long since I experienced the self-distancing happiness of a new city. For lunch I found a pub, which I never visited once afterward but seemed to me then perfect. While I ate I read through the newspapers I’d bought that morning—
The Sun, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times
—and tried to puzzle out who David Blunkett was, or why people hated the Chelsea Football Club. After I had eaten I left and took a wandering walk through the city.

It was what I had hoped it would be. Savvier Americans than me have a costume-drama dream of England, and now here I was, turning each corner to find myself in an alley barely wider than my body, and it would be called Logic Lane or Magpie Lane and look as if it hadn’t changed since Disraeli was prime minister and we still had Burma. Nearly every building was made of the same golden-white stone as Fleet, reaching high into the air above the low, shingled roofs of the shops. There was Tom Tower as I walked down Cornmarket Street, and the deer park near Magdalen Bridge. I stood in the tranquil, muting stone courtyard of the Bodleian, with its carved walls flying up high around me. Americans go to Oxford and Cambridge—but especially Oxford, I think—with an idea of it. I did, anyway. It didn’t fail my expectations.

As the sun was falling I returned to my room, happy. I went to my computer to check whether Alison had written back. She hadn’t. I wrote again, more plaintively, faintly angry.

When I had been back for a few minutes I heard Tom’s voice on the stairs. I looked out of my room and saw him with what looked like an Indian teenager, short, smooth-faced, covered in gold rings and chains. He wore rimless glasses.

Tom introduced us. “Hey, Will, this is Anil Gupta. Anil, this is Will Baker, our housemate, the one I was telling you about.”

“Good to meet you,” I said.

“What’s up,” said Anil, giving me a wide smile and a multistep handshake in which I attempted to participate. “How goes, how goes,” he said when it was done.