The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  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.”

  He whistled. “Money?”

  “Yeah. He was in real estate when he was younger.” Then, with a feeling of guilt, I added, “He bought his way into politics, actually. No talent of his own for it, but money, and strong convictions.”

  “You should get married. It’ll be good for you. Then you should cheat.” He took a gulp of coffee. “I had a girl at Columbia—Kitty, a student, which means I shouldn’t tell you, but there it is. If I had ever married it would have been her.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  “I hope not. Just nephews that I know of, three,” he said. “Big boys. They play cricket, like I did.”

  “How did you decide what to do?” I asked. “To go into academia.”

  “How did I decide? Well, I was passionate about it.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t imagine anything else.”

  “I don’t think I feel that way. About Orwell.”

  He nodded and then gave me an odd look, half fond, half shrewd. There was a sheaf of papers on the table between us, and he picked it up. “I’m glad. If you seemed right I was going to suggest—I’m the chair of the committee for a fellowship Balliol disburses.”

  I realized I had been tricked. Or that was too ungenerous a word—appraised. I think I blushed. “What fellowship?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Take the papers, if you like, there’s a chance you’ll want to stay here for another four years, but don’t, don’t do it for a fellowship or out of lassitude. Stay here for a year, see Europe, get an honorable second. God, but I envy you.”

  I took the papers. It was funny; I envied him. I had looked at his CV online, nine books, two of which were still widely taught, and he wrote now for The Observer and The Times Literary Supplement. He had been a visiting professor in New York, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Cape Town. He had obviously fucked about ten thousand women. His achievements were behind him. When you’re young, people keep telling you how lucky you are to have all of your choices in front of you. I don’t doubt I’ll feel that way one day, too, but it’s an old person’s dream.

  In truth, I arrived at Oxford feeling half like a failure. It was 2005 already. I had been out of college for more than three years, and time seemed to be running out the way it only can when you’re twenty-five, and armed to the teeth with it. I woke up in the middle of the night with a hollow feeling in my chest, panicked about what I would become. I had a friend making three million dollars a year at a hedge fund and another friend who had just been elected to the Rhode Island Senate. All I had was the Kerry campaign—and Alison, I would tell myself in the middle of the night, at least I had Alison.

  There were times when I wished I could be done with all of what I was good at, books, reading, writing, speaking, thinking. Too much analysis, too quick a brain. Too many words. It was a kind of fever. Sometimes I thought I had the temperament of a scientist, just not the intelligence. I wanted to be a scientist in the age when good birth, a knack for organization, and a pleasure in careful labeling were enough—when you could simply record the time of the sunset and the sunrise, measure how long it took different types of flowers to bud, dig up bones, and make wildly inadequate conjectures about their origin: the whole time of civilization when the imponderables of life were broader and softer, before polymers, before relativity. It’s the wish of a stupid mind.

  Jarvis and I talked about all of this. I stayed for three hours, two hours longer than I should have, two and a half longer than I intended. I kept thinking about the fellowship.

  “We’ll have to do this again,” he said when at last I was going. “I mean it.”

  “Thank you for inviting me. It’s easy enough to feel lost here.”

  He shook his head. “No, within a week you’ll be at home. When does Fleet have its first bop?”

  “Third Week, I think.”

  “I went to one, you know. Anything but clothes was the theme, meaning you had to dress up in anything but clothes. There was a young woman in a tinfoil bikini, and there were a great deal of poorly fastened socks. About ten years ago, this would have been.”

  I laughed. “Did you have fun?”

  He thought for a moment. “At my age the beauty of these young people, the women, is a personal affront. They’re so very lovely, and too stupid to know it.” He smiled and opened the door. “Have fun. Come see me again in a month or two.”

  * * *

  As I walked back across the fields toward college, I called Alison.

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Will! Hey! I’m running out of the door, though, I can’t talk.”

  “To where?”

  “To work.”

  “Oh, of course.” I could hear the click of her high heels on the hardwood floors of our apartment.

  “What’s up?”

  “What do you think I should do after this year?”

  “I don’t know. Get a job?”

  “Thanks, problem solved.”

  She laughed. “It’s tough here right now. Kerry people are having a shitty time.”

  “What about your dad?”

  I heard her turn the sink on. “He could probably help you, but more with a staff position like I got, or maybe with the DNC or the DCCC. None of the House campaigns are hiring, but who knows how it will be in a year.”

  “That guy I told you about last night, Jarvis, is in charge of this thing called the Swift Prize.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not that I would ever apply, it’s just crazy. It comes with five years of room and board, and the annual stipend is twenty thousand pounds. There’s no teaching, no … but only four people get it a year.”

  “So?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Do you want to keep doing English? We talked about that. You can always come back and do your doctorate at Columbia.”

  “This professor—”

  The sink turned off. “Will, you have to tell me you’re not staying in fucking Oxford for five years.”

  “No! I’m telling you about this guy.”

  “I would love to see you do English, but I don’t care about some prize that keeps you over there for a hundred years. As long as we’re
together, right?”

  This was a talismanic phrase of ours. “As long as we’re together.”

  “Shit, there’s the doorman calling, my car is here. I’ve got to go, really I do. Bye, sweetheart. Call me later. Don’t do this, please, don’t make me worry. I love you.”

  I walked home, unconsoled, through a misting and irresolute rain.

  * * *

  That Saturday’s Formal Hall was my first. It had been a busy week—classes had started, a few hours a day with a bright group, all of whom were consumed by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, one or the other, nearly without exception. I was settling into the city. I could find all the main streets by now. I had forgotten about Jess, the whirl of life making that night seem very distant. When you start to feel as if you belong to Oxford, its walls rise around you. She was outside of them.

  Tom, Anil, and I walked into Formal Hall together. We ate most of our meals in the same room, but it had been transformed, pushed backward in time. You can picture it, I’m sure, the sparkling candlelight cast upon half-full glasses of red wine, the byzantine ceremonies, the head porter in his tails, the young men and women in robes, the witty chatter building to a white noise. Along the walls were portraits of the Tudors; the food was inedible, the wine excellent; there was a series of ancient rituals to observe at each mealtime. All for the sake of twenty-year-olds on their way to dance to Usher songs at a place called Filth.

  The first tradition we learned about, from the older students at the table around us, was grace. Before each meal the master said grace in Latin, and there was a bitter, centuries-old dispute between Fleet and Merton as to whose grace was longer. In recent years things had escalated. Fleet added a word to their grace to make it twenty-six words, Merton added two to make theirs twenty-seven, Fleet bumped over top of them again with twenty-eight. Then Merton made theirs twenty-eight, too, as a conciliatory gesture, but all the dons at Fleet put their heads together and added a word anyway. The term before I arrived, Merton, in the equivalent for Oxford graces of a nuclear attack, rewrote theirs to make it thirty-five words long. Fellows at Fleet felt the shame of this keenly. For months while I was there the dean walked around in a state of unconstrained grief.