The Last Enchantments (10 page)

For me remembrance is mostly taken up with acknowledgment of death. When my life fulfills its only precondition—its own ending—my memory will vanish. Nothing is being recorded, nobody is keeping score. Your childhood bedroom, your first kiss. They go with you. Better to think of memory as like food, or sex, or books: a reason to believe in the perishable days. A way to manage being alive.

*   *   *

In the fourth week of term Tom’s sister, Katie, came up from London to take us to lunch. She was back from the Middle East for ten days on vacation.

I heard her before I saw her. As I was bouncing up the stairs of our house after a morning at the Bodleian, I could hear a woman’s voice singing “On the Street Where You Live” on our floor. I reached the top step and saw Katie, standing in our bathroom with the door open, putting makeup on. She had a quiet, pretty, unstrained voice.

It was surprising after hearing her voice to see that she was ugly, with horsey teeth and intelligent green eyes couched in big, red, laughing cheeks, no makeup. A silver cross on a necklace was the only flair she had of individual style. She looked sunburned a dozen times over.

“You caught me singing,” she said when I came back out of my room. “You must be Anil, right?”

“No—I—”

She smiled. “I’m only joking. You’re Will.”

I laughed. “I’m Will.”

“My brother is in his room. I’m Katie.” We shook hands, and she called out to Tom, then turned back to me. “Will you come out and eat with us? My treat.”

“I’d love to.”

“I’m afraid it’s only going to be Pizza Hut. It’s been Tom’s favorite since he was four.”

“It was my favorite, too.”

“Our parents never took us, either. Not that they were especially against it, just it wouldn’t have occurred to them, I don’t think, and when Tom asked they didn’t seem to really believe he wanted to go there. Except we went there for one of his birthdays. Lord, he was happy. Anyway, that’s what big sisters are for, Pizza Hut.”

Tom’s door opened behind us and he came out. “Katie, shut up!”

Katie laughed. “Such a curmudgeon, such a grown-up.”

Half an hour later we had a large pizza, half pepperoni and half mushrooms and onions, and three sodas. There are few things as distressing to anyone who pretends to the title of world traveler than to be seated in an American chain restaurant abroad, but I was happy; in fact, the primary softening of the attitude of my English friends toward my homeland came when we were discussing Kentucky Fried Chicken or Jerry Springer or the show
Alias.
Another proof of soft power in the decade hard power failed.

Tom was less acerbic than I had seen him before, and it was easy to picture him and his sister as childhood companions: explorations together, pillow forts, arguments and tears on small red faces. What was strange was that Katie had none of his aggressive class fealty, and around her, Tom didn’t either. I wondered if it had calcified at the death of their parents, since he was still at school, while she, because she was a few years older, had been less in need of armature.

“Will,” she said, “I have to compliment you for being much more congenial than the last friend of Tom’s I took out. Do you remember, Tom? Daisy?”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Daisy was Tom’s girlfriend at LSE. She was a very beautiful girl, too—the idea of her in a Pizza Hut is impossible—and Tom called beforehand and begged me to take us to, where was it? Brown’s? No, it was the Wolseley? Somewhere with all sorts of Sloanies and Americans—excuse the example, because I love Americans—snap pictures of each other with the waiters. Maybe I should have said Germans. Tourists, at any rate. I had just been posted to Syria—”

“No,” said Tom, “you were leaving for Syria in a week. It was close.”

“That’s right, that’s right. Anyway, I was telling Daisy about the Druze, this minority religion in Syria—fascinating, really, they’re Muslim but subscribe to some really ancient Gnostic beliefs. And as I spoke she nodded, politely, and then at some point, still nodding, she pulled out a clothes catalog and started to flip through it.”

I burst out laughing. Tom was shaking his head sheepishly. “It was a copy of
Vogue.
”

“
Vogue!
That’s right!” Katie grinned. It made me miss my family. “He feels the need to date these mean, posh girls, but I’ve always told him that what he needs is someone
nice.
That’s the girl I hope he marries, the first nice one he meets, and for my part I hope she’s a milkmaid, or works at a makeup counter, or … or I don’t know what.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Let’s move on.”

“I do want to hear about Syria,” I said. “Tom told me you worked there.”

“I’m a liaison between the British Embassy in Damascus and all the other embassies there, so the American Embassy, we deal with them a lot, and then of course the embassies of the other Middle Eastern states.”

“How’d you start doing that?”

“When we were little our parents took us to Egypt, and ever since then it’s what I’ve been interested in. I studied Arabic at university and took the diplomatic test, and now…” She shrugged.

“You must hate Bush.”

“No, she takes after our parents,” said Tom. “They liked him. Will worked for John Kerry, Kates.”

“I don’t like him, Tom! I think he’s terrible. But then I think Blair’s terrible, too.”

“You’re a Tory?” I asked.

“You’ve gone pale,” she said.

“He’s just surprised that you’re nice,” said Tom.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said.

“No, don’t mention it. I don’t think we should be waging a holy war against Islam, or anything like that. In fact, I love it there, the Middle East. I was desperate to get posted there. Your first assignment’s always in the sand, they say, and for most people it’s a curse, but I was so pleased. Certainly I’m to the left of your president. I wouldn’t mind seeing Cameron go in, but that’s as far as I’ll push it.”

“Not his president,” said Tom and grinned.

“Do you hate Bush, then?” she asked.

“I do.”

She laughed and looked at her watch. “Our train’s at two thirty, Tom.” They had their bags; she was taking him down to London and they were going to stay at their childhood home over the weekend. It was Katie who had decided to keep it. “After lunch with Daisy, Will, I asked Tom how it was going with her. I was scrupulously fair to her—didn’t bring up
Vogue
—and I remember Tom saying, ‘You’d better brace Mum and Dad, because that’s the girl I’m going to marry.’”

“Katie!”

“I’m sorry! I think it’s sweet—you were so sweet. You still are.”

“I’m not sweet, I’m a scourge,” he said.

She took his hand. “You
are
sweet. Will, take good care of my brother while he’s up here, okay?”

*   *   *

It was the next day that Alison called me with news.

“Hey, babe, it’s me, guess what,” she said.

I was walking through Trinity College’s front quad, to meet my adviser. It was a wet afternoon, and I knew he would have a fire and tea, so I wanted to get inside, but I stopped. “What’s up?”

“My dad might have heard about a job for you.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s nothing concrete yet, but he’s on the case.”

“Starting in the summer?”

“No, it would have to be right away.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. “I don’t think I could take that kind of job.”

“You haven’t even heard what it is.”

“But I just got here—it’s not as if I can leave after a month and a half.”

“Okay.” Then she paused for a while. “I thought you missed me so much.”

“I miss you like crazy, but what would going out on a campaign do about that?”

“At least you’d be in America.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t I find out whether the job is available,” she said.

“No, really, don’t worry about it.” I looked up at the clock tower—I was a minute late already. “I don’t know—what is it?”

“No, don’t worry about it,” she said. “You were right. You have to go through with it, now that you’ve started.” There was another pause, then she added, “You’re not applying for the Swift, are you?”

“Alison. Come on.”

“No, I know, we’ve talked about it.”

She didn’t point out—this time—that I hadn’t told her I was applying to Oxford. “Should I e-mail your dad?”

“Yeah, maybe, just to say thanks.”

“I do miss you. It was so nice having you here.”

“I know, baby. I miss you, too. I love you.”

“Talk at the usual time?”

“Of course.”

*   *   *

The MCR officers were constantly organizing: day trips to London, soccer brunches, pub walks to track the Inklings. One Monday night, in Fifth Week, they sent out an e-mail offering a limited number of spots at Merton evensong. Merton was the oldest and among the most beautiful of the colleges, on the last full cobblestone street in Oxford. Its library was the oldest in continuous use in Europe. Its chapel, whose acoustics were famous, was used to record choral music. They would be recording the evensong.

I asked Tom to go with me.

“It’ll be all Americans and Japs,” he said.

“I’m not sure ‘Japs’ is the preferred term.”

“It sounds like tourist bullshit.”

“If you don’t go with me, I’ll tell Anil your nickname.”

He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “What did my sister tell you?”

“Tommy Bear?”

So he came along, and as we entered the hush of the chapel we saw, at the same time, someone we knew: the hot Asian girl from the bar at Fleet. We still hadn’t met her. She was standing in the antechapel.

“Now aren’t you glad you came?” I asked in a low voice.

She had a new streak in her hair, besides the pink and black. It was silvery. She was wearing a demure, unshredded oxford, unusual for her, but you could just see a sliver of flat stomach between it and her skirt.

“Hey!” said Tom.

She turned. “Oh. Hey.”

“Is anyone else coming from Fleet?” I asked.

She looked at her phone. “My friend Virginia was supposed to, but she canceled.”

“I know we’ve met, but I’m Tom. Law.”

“And I’m Will,” I said. “English.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m Ella. Ravenclaw.”

We laughed, but her face remained impassive. When people began to filter into the pews, she waited to see where we led and took the other side.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

“No idea. I find us irresistible.”

Merton was beautiful. Of course, like most of the old chapels it was what you would design if you wanted people to believe in God, light slanting in paler and weakened from the very high windows, the voices, the stone, a serious house on a serious earth. I don’t especially pay attention to the words in church anymore. Instead I let my thoughts sift into each other at random, a meditation: like falling asleep. Sometimes I fall asleep, too.

The evensong began, and in fact the music was as beautiful as I had hoped. I tracked what was happening in the program. Did I have some vague Easter recollection of the Magnificat? Or was it from a CD cover? My grandfather was a deacon at St. James’s, too, on Seventy-first and Madison. It’s a shame, perhaps. Orwell always said that in a different age he would happily have been a country vicar.

In the eyeline from our pew was the doorway of the church, swung out open—it was still warm—and as the Nunc Dimittis began something terrible happened: An older man, wearing a Merton tie, was walking along when his foot caught the lip of a flagstone. He looked as if he had been hurrying to make it into the chapel.

I immediately started to stand up, but then I saw that two young men were just behind him, his children, probably, along with an older woman, all of them having previously been obscured by the door, and I sat down. “Look,” I said to Tom.

“Should we help?”

“They’re okay, I think.”

As the service went on we watched and whispered as he was treated and then, finally, borne away in a wheelchair.

It was painful to watch it, an interesting small moment, but I mention it only because of what happened at the end of the service. Ella, who sat at a diagonal from us, oblivious to the old man’s fall, practically burst out of her seat and toward us, furious. “Have some respect, dickheads,” she hissed.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“You can’t tell each other jokes during fucking
church.
”

Tom, genuinely surprised, said, “We weren’t.”

“Right, you’re both big Christians.”

“I am, actually.”

I hadn’t known Tom was. I shook my head, with what I hoped was a gentle smile. “Not practicing. But I’m sorry about the whispering. We weren’t making jokes.”

I explained to her then in detail what had happened, and her face changed as I did, from anger to appraisal. After a beat, she said, “Oh. Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

What’s funny is that Ella, though she had been raised by stridently Christian parents, wasn’t herself religious any longer—in fact, she was there solely for the music. Mollified, she walked out with us and then, to our surprise, agreed to have a drink at the Merton bar. It was thus, improbably, that we became friends.

She was from a small town an hour outside of Seattle and had gone to Stanford on a scholarship. Her parents were immigrants and now owned three nail salons—but were not rich, because both were terrible spenders, always in and out of debt, never finding more than seventy cents in a dollar. She had come to Oxford because her adviser was the best biochemist on earth, she thought. Here, too, she was on a scholarship. “I can barely afford this pint,” she said, that first night, and laughed. We had already talked about our initial encounter in the bar at Fleet, several weeks before, and she said, “You were just what I thought Oxford would be. Arrogant rich kids.”

“Us?” asked Tom.

She shook her head. “Everything here is expensive. Everyone always wants to go out to dinner, or to get drinks, or wants to go into London. My stipend, besides my tuition, covers books and food. That’s it.”

“Could you get a job?”

“I could, but I just want to get my degree as fast as I can, get the fuck out of here, and start making some money.”