The Last Enchantments (6 page)

When we were on the chairs I was silent for a minute or two. She had been throwing bread to a family of black birds with red bills, and she started again, smiling weakly when they took it. Finally I asked, “So are you in Fleet? Are you in the Cottages?”

“Yeah, I just got here. Number five. What about you?”

She had a lovely, lilting accent, posh but with sweetness at its edges and a faint heaviness in its vowels that I learned later was from Yorkshire. Even in her vulnerable state there was something imperious to her.

“I’m in three.”

“You must think I’m nuts.”

“No. Everyone gets this way sometimes.”

“But not me.” She studied me for a second. “I’m breaking up with my boyfriend today.”

I smiled and said, mildly, “On a boat?”

“He was supposed to pick me up.” She sighed with her whole body. “But he’s always fucking late, or he ditches me, even for things like this. God, I hate him.”

“Then congratulations. Right?”

“Listen to me.” She gave her head a quick, sharp shake, took a deep breath, and smiled a smile set with the determination not to be foolish. “So what do you study? What’s your name? I’m Sophie.”

We shook hands. “I’m Will. I do English. What about you?”

“French.”

“A master’s, too?”

She shook her head ruefully. “Probably for the long haul, actually, the DPhil. Are you American?”

“Yeah, I’m from New York.”

Unlike most people, she didn’t rush to prove that she knew the city. “Oh, lovely,” she said and looked down the river again.

“Have you met anyone yet?”

She looked back at me. “Not a soul. I only just got here on Tuesday.”

“I think a bunch of fun people are going out tonight, if you want to drown your sorrows.” I was referring to myself, Tom, and Anil, so “a bunch of fun people” might have been misleading, but who cared. “To the Royal Oak.”

“I wish I could, but my department has these introductory seminars every evening this week. Refreshers, they’re supposed to be, vousvoyering. It’s an insult, but they’re mandatory.”

“What about next week? There’s the opening Formal Hall in First Week.” There were three terms at Oxford, Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity, each with nine numbered weeks. Just then we were in Noughth Week, as it was called, when the students arrived and settled in. First Week would be the formal commencement of the fall term, Michaelmas.

“Oh, I’d love to go to that,” she said and looked genuinely pleased.

In a formal tone, I said, “If you come you may tutoyer me.”

She laughed. “Seems hasty.”

“I feel as if I’d known you for decades. I’ve known you in a relationship and single, and I have to say I prefer—”

She laughed and was about to speak when from not far off a voice barked out her name. “Soph.”

It was her boyfriend, I guessed; he was sitting in the stern of a scull for two, handsome and very tan, shaggy-haired, an instinctive smirk in his expression. After he had called for her he set about the work of turning the boat, so we had a moment before she went to him.

She stuck out her hand again. “It was nice to meet you,” she said. Then, in a lower voice, she added, “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck.”

She went. “Who was that?” I heard her boyfriend ask her.

I didn’t watch them go, turning back toward Fleet and finding Tom after a short while. He said good-bye to Gobbs and apologized for running off, and we started to walk back to the college, again tossing the ball back and forth. It was an hour full of meetings; I told him about Sophie, and on the way back to the bar we met a girl who would be one of our closest friends at Fleet, Anneliese.

*   *   *

Then again, in those young hours of the school year there were always chances to meet new people. There were movie nights, cocktails with the Master on the lawns, unskilled games of croquet that devolved into a kind of loose, horseless polo. All of these activities originated with the MCR, or Middle Common Room, which was the graduate students’ chief social center. It was located in three rooms on the ground floor of First Quad, with a view of the gates and porters’ lodge, and had couches, a kitchen, and a television. At a cheese-tasting there in Noughth Week Anil became friends with Tim, or Timmo, as we all eventually called him, a short, silent, very strong personage—not overburdened with charisma—who Anil assured us belonged to the very elites of Liverpool.

Timmo’s chief ambition in life was to participate in any reality TV show, ideally
Big Brother,
which was culturally definitive in England as it never was in America. (Aside from the normal half-hour show every night, one channel on British TV had a twenty-four-hour feed of the
Big Brother
house, in obeisance to the insane demand of the public, apparently.) It was never totally clear, though,
why
he wanted to be on the show.

“Do you want to be famous?” I asked him one day.

“No way,” he said with a snort, as if I knew nothing at all about the nature of television.

“Or rich?”

“He is rich,” said Anil quickly.

“Why do you want to do it, then?”

“It looks like a laugh.” (Loff, as the Brits pronounce it.) “And there’s some lovely girls on there.”

Whenever he got drunk he would practice his confession-booth monologues, which he had planned out in arresting detail. Example: “I
know
I shouldn’t have had sex with Keeley, but Ricky can fuck off. She had her choice.” We would nod appreciatively at his slurred and heartfelt speech, our faith in humanity, and Oxford, too, shaken. Keeley’s identity is one of the world’s ageless mysteries.

These early MCR events were in the next weeks; for that afternoon, we found Anneliese. She was kneeling by a tree, holding a seventies-era Nikon—she came from a family of amateur photographers, we learned—and staring down at something on the ground with great concentration. She was an earnestly pretty person, round-faced with gray eyes and curly brown hair.

We went over to see what she was looking at. It was a flat grave marker with weeds growing over it. “Can you read this?” she asked, pointing to the old, faint cursive.

I couldn’t, but Tom could. “Francis Cholmondley-Chapman. Looks like he died in the Crimean War, ‘that freedom might not perish from the earth.’ It also says ‘and who fought that fighting might end.’ Sorry, chaps, missed that one.”

“Ah,” she said, with a radiant smile on her face. “That makes me happy for the first time in days. A true English experience.”

“Have you not been happy?” asked Tom.

Her face turned serious. “No, not at all,” she said in her German accent. “I’m homesick, you see. It’s very bad. I haven’t made any friends yet, either.”

This was so like her. She was incapable of dishonesty. It meant that to know her for a few minutes was almost to begin to love her.

“You have two now,” Tom said with embarrassed gallantry, and she beamed at him.

“Oh, good.”

We invited her to the bar terrace, where we had beers and watched the sun finally vanish. She had done an undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Göttingen, she said, but her parents had pushed her into that, both being scientists themselves, and she had decided upon graduation that she wanted to try history instead. That was why she had come to Oxford. She was from Berlin originally.

Everything about the Crusades, her subject, was deeply shocking to her, as if it were still happening somewhere not far away. “They roasted the Saracens alive over brushfires and ate them, the cannibals,” she told us. “I think it was awful of them. And they had scurvy and bled out of their eyeballs, too.”

*   *   *

Here is a story to tell you about Anneliese.

At Fleet there was a new graduate student named Steffen, from France, who became famous immediately throughout the college for his rudeness. If you spoke to him he mumbled and walked away, and he actually cursed at one of the most complacent porters, Laurence, to the delight of the undergrads who witnessed it.

One day later in the year, that winter, I saw him on the steps of the Sackler Library, all the way across town, speaking with tremendous and unwonted animation. I could hear what it was about—the food in Fleet’s dining hall, whose quality he seemed to interpret as a personal insult to him as a Frenchman—but I hadn’t even known he could speak in full sentences, and it was only after twenty or thirty seconds of eavesdropping that I realized the person with him was Anneliese. She told me later that they had lunch every week. Thinking of her, I might put it this way: Most people think they’re the same with everybody, when in fact it’s one of the rarest qualities I know. She was.

In any event, Anneliese filled out our small, sectile, but durable group. There were Tom, Anneliese, Anil, Timmo, and me, with Sophie and a few others drifting in and out of our daily lives. What ratified our friendship was the first Formal Hall of Michaelmas term, and everything good and bad that followed it.

*   *   *

On the first day of First Week I got a note in my pigeonhole from an old professor at Fleet, St. John Jarvis. My mother had told me to expect to hear from him. In the sixties he had taught at Columbia on an exchange and become friends with my great-uncle, who was in the philosophy department there. The note offered me a cup of coffee the following afternoon. There was a sketchy map drawn on the envelope. It said to cross the river beyond the lawns by a footbridge, then take a dirt path a half mile to his house.

“Have you heard of someone named St. John Jarvis?” I asked Tom.

“Sinjun, not Saint John.”

“Excuse me?”

He stopped reading his e-mail and looked at me. “When it’s a proper name in England it’s pronounced Sinjun.”

“Well, have you hard of Sinjun Jarvis?”

“No, why?”

“He’s a don. He pidged me an invitation to coffee.”

“Don’t fuck up his name.”

“I’m not going to say, ‘Hey, Sinjun!’ Tom.”

I arrived the next day, two minutes late. I could still hear the last of the city’s tower bells ringing four o’clock, but otherwise his huddled brown Middle Earth house seemed like the only one for miles. It was at the edge of a growth of apple trees, with green fields beyond them.

Sinjun himself answered the door. He was an enormous, barrel-chested man, who, though he was seventy-seven, looked as if he were in the prime of late middle age. I had expected must and stink, a polite half hour, but there was none of that. His hair was still dark, and his great florid face grinned at me.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “You’re three minutes late, but we’ll spare you the firing squad. You look just like your uncle George, you know. Same nose.”

“Thanks.”

“I don’t know that it’s such a wonderful compliment. Sit right there on that couch. Larissa, the coffee! I hope you don’t like tea? Never touch the stuff myself, I think it tastes of ashes. I spent four years with your uncle, the Amiables, we called the Americans. I never met a man who liked women more than George—that is, I’ve met many men who liked women more than they liked George, but none that liked women more than George liked women.”

He laughed, and a black woman came in with a chased silver pot of coffee and nodded at me. There were two cups on a square marble table, and a plate of cakes and sandwiches between them. The room was high-beamed, with a wall of windows looking out over his gardens and a sleek, modern, vacant feel. On the wall there was a Hodgkin print, and on the mantel a Henry Moore nude, a room reduced to simplicity by money.

“I’m glad you came—look, have a cake. I was fond of your uncle, very fond. I was chuffed when his wife wrote to tell me you were coming to Fleet. He died when, was it—”

“In 1999.”

“Just so. It’s a terrible pity he never lived to see the millennium. They say, you know, that nobody dies in the last month of the year. Everyone wants to get to New Year’s. Wait and see what happens. Then they drop like flies in January, poor buggers.”

“It could just be the cold.”

“Maybe. Now, drink some of this delicious coffee—I take it strong, I have to warn you—and eat a finger sandwich. There’s a ham set and a cucumber set. I can’t recommend the ham, sadly. She’s never gotten the knack of it.” I thanked him, and he settled back in his chair, leonine. “Can I assume that since you’ve come here to study English, the last thing you want to do is become an English professor?”

I smiled. “Why do you say that?”

“It’s harder to get jobs in America with a degree from Oxford, for one thing, because a DPhil only takes four years to earn here, as opposed to seven there. Seems less serious to them. My friend Wimsatt got terribly annoyed with their condescension over the length of the doctoral programs when he visited America. For another, you Ivy League Yanks like to treat Oxbridge as a finishing school. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. I don’t resent it, mind you. It’s what I would’ve done in your shoes, oh, in a heartbeat, but I doubt that you want to have a career like, say, Professor Norbrook’s, or my friend Greenblatt’s.”

“No, not really.”

“If you saw Greenblatt’s wife you wouldn’t mind. Makes the MLA worth enduring. Leave that aside, though, what
do
you want? You were in politics? I bet you liked that—a chance to prove you’re clever.”

“All the good professions are that way, aren’t they?”

“Yes, though for some reason politics especially. You get the provers in there.”

I considered this. “I guess that was me. I did like the power.” I smiled. “It’s probably healthier to be here, less chaotic.”

Even as I said that I realized it was only partly true. The energy of the campaign, the long hours, the cold pizza, the conference calls, the competitive banter, the jokes, the urgency—I missed all of it.

“So, if you don’t go back to politics?”

“I think probably I will. My girlfriend still does it, in New York.”

“Ah, long distance. She’s still in?”

“She wants both of us to do it, like a team.” I paused then. Something about his tone invited confidence, made secrecy seem slack. “Her father is the head of the congressional fundraising committee in New York. He may run for office himself soon enough.”