“Tour?” he asked in a voice full of hope.
“These lads want to see the college,” said one of the porters.
“This way, this way, this way,” said Jerry, walking through the door to Fleet’s high front gate. “Tour begins now. Only two of you? Good, excellent, I like a smaller group.”
These were the only complete thoughts that Jerry spoke. The rest of the tour he conducted in a single chattering run-on sentence, unpunctuated and unceasing, stylistically similar to Finnegans Wake but without that book’s charm of comprehensibility.
Still, it was very beautiful—that half hour of a late Oxford afternoon when the harsh white light of midday and the melancholy pink of evening merge and everything turns gold, soft and dim, generous, coloring the city’s high towers at a slant.
Fleet is a modestly venerable place. The first Oxford colleges came into existence when the university did, just before 1300, and Fleet was four hundred years younger than they were, respectably old but not ancient. (This is within the hierarchy of the colleges, among whom to have been established after the United States achieved independence from Great Britain is considered gravely humiliating.) Like most colleges it was divided into irregular quads, circumscribed by high buildings. First Quad, or “Firsts,” as Jerry denominated it, was directly through the high archway that led into college from the street, a rectangle of shaved grass looped with a slender stone path. Opposite was a bell tower. Like all of the other buildings in college it was made of the same honey-colored stone as Parliament, with the same intricate filigreed stonework, and like Parliament, indeed like all the buildings of the college, the bell tower seemed to bear in its beauty and mass a strange immunity to life, to time.
“… oldest gargoyles and grotesques in Oxford, dating to the foundation of Fleet and the construction of the tower, now if you’ll follow me here you’ll see on either side of the First Quadrangle two three-story dormitories, same quarrystone as the chapel and the dining hall, keep up, keep up, Fleet’s first master was a gentleman named Merryweather, known abuser of opium—thought he saw unicorns flying over the Radcliffe Camera—quite inappropriate—wholly inappropriate—entirely impossible, of course—a brilliant linguist, however—portrait in the hall—”
Continuing to speak the whole while, Jerry trotted us briskly through Firsts, into the dorms and the bell tower, up to the top, and back down again. (“Bells, bells, wonderful bells,” was his full gloss when we reached the pinnacle of the tower. Though he did tell us as we descended that several people had jumped from the tower and died over the years. “Fantastic,” said Tom.) Then he took us through a narrow corridor at the back of Firsts, paneled with the names of the war dead and lit with old black hanging lanterns, into the Second Quad—Anna’s.
It was a hexagonal stone courtyard, not very large, without any grass. Ringed around the hexagon was a row of medieval houses, overgrown with rose bushes, that Fleet had bought with its first endowment and turned into the library. Over their roofs we could see all the dreaming spires of Oxford, ranged together for a quarter mile. There was a dusky hush in that small courtyard, a silence through which even Jerry’s voice couldn’t break, really. It seemed deeply romantic to me. What fools Americans can be for England.
“… named for Queen Anne, as no doubt you know, this way to Third Quad, mustn’t linger, Queen Anne founded the college in 1702, portrait of her you’ll see in dining hall, now Fleet has graduated four Nobel laureates, try not to let the side down, lads, ha, ha, four Nobel laureates, two in physics, one in medicine, one in literature, this way, through the gate, should have had at least one in peace if you ask me, several of the young gentlemen I’ve seen have done quite a lot more than their bit for peace, but you have to ask the fellows in Stockholm about it—now—this way—through the gate, as I said—come along.”
“What do you think we should do tonight?” Tom whispered. Jerry had put ten feet between us with his short-striding canter. “We could try to scare up one or two other people from the Cottages”—the other arriving graduate students—“and then drag them over to the Turtle.”
“What’s that?”
He looked at me wide-eyed. “Shocking cultural ignorance.”
“What is it?”
“The big nightclub down in the city. Horribly dodgy. I bet Anil Gupta knows all about it.”
“… Third Quad, our newest addition here at Fleet, contains the preponderance of our dormitories—sleeping halls—halls of residence—”
Third was unspectacular, but it had one great virtue: the Fleet Tavern. Because the drinking age in England is eighteen, not twenty-one, every college at Oxford had its own bar. The consequences of having regular access to a bar in my dorm at Yale would have been catastrophic, but then drinking is different for American students, who are always on a desperate hunt for extralegal means of getting drunk and when they find alcohol drink it as quickly as possible, so it can’t be taken away from them.
“Will the bar be open?” I asked Tom in a low voice, seeing the sign.
“I shouldn’t think so. The undergrads don’t come till next week. They’re meant to be the best bops in Oxford, Fleet’s. After St. John’s maybe.”
“Bops” were what Oxford called dance parties. “Is the bar just for the undergrads?”
“No, no, but it’s mostly undergrads that go there. A lot of graduate students here never come out of their rooms.”
As it happened, though, the bar was open. Jerry showed us inside. Through the wide doors that covered one wall of the room I glimpsed the lawns behind the college. It was these for which Fleet was most famous; most colleges had just such long, manicured stretches of grass, but Fleet’s, lying against the river, were the largest and best-situated. We didn’t go out, that evening, and I wouldn’t see the lawns, or Sophie, for another two days.
“… and that, I think you’ll agree, gentlemen, was a thorough tour of Fleet College. Welcome. I’ll leave you here for your pint of beer.”
* * *
Other than the bartender, who was smoking a cigarette by the jukebox, flipping through it with a look of moralizing distaste on his face, the bar was empty. He was a big guy with black hair down to his shoulders, glasses, and a soft, affable countenance. His name was Jem, we would find out later. We bought two pints of Carlsberg from him and took them to the other end of the room to play a strange version of pool with wooden dowels sticking out of the table, which Tom told me was called bar billiards.
I found it easy to talk to him, perhaps especially after the shared comic formality of the tour, and as night fell outside we had a long unforced conversation. At first it was about neutral subjects, sports and travel especially. (He had spent the year since his graduation from LSE traveling through Asia. “Mostly sex tourism,” he said and laughed at his own joke.) He had an ambling way of walking around the pool table, a boyishness left intact by going away to school—I recognized it. Gradually we began to ask each other more personal questions. I told him about Alison. He’d had a girlfriend until recently, too, Daisy.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She dumped me. She wanted me to stay in London.”
“That sucks.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s for the best.”
“We’re only an hour from London by train.”
He laughed. “She isn’t very bright.”
His course at Oxford—that was the term for any degree program—was the Bachelor of Civil Law. He had studied law as an undergraduate and had a job waiting for him at Freshfields at the end of the year, one of the Magic Circle firms, which made his course ornamental, a distinguished but inessential garland. Really it was a tactic to delay the start of his career for another year.
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 b
ack-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 goin
g 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.”
The Last Enchantments Page 2
