The Last Enchantments (19 page)

“It’s Thursday tomorrow. We could go to Filth.” This was the sketchiest of all the Oxford clubs, every bathroom stall and booth occupied by couples hooking up.

“Sounds good to me.” He looked at his watch. “Do you feel like getting food?”

“Sure,” I said and started to stand up.

“Wait, though, let’s just stay here for a bit first,” he said, and it was the closest he ever came to asking me for anything after his sister died.

“Of course.”

“What’s that you and Jem say? Fleet time, or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Fleet time,” he said, and leaned his head back on the chair, and closed his eyes.

*   *   *

In the long, cold winter, its mornings and evenings dim, its middays obstinately chilled against the sun, we were lucky to have the MCR. Once or twice at loose ends I spent an entire day there instead of going to the library, watching TV, doing homework, drinking coffee, playing an unhealthy amount of table football. Certainly I stopped in during all the lost pockets of the day—between classes, after I was done at the Bod, before Hall, at midmorning.

There were two rooms and a kitchen in our MCR, and somehow they had managed to fit half a dozen couches along various walls, so there were places to spread out. There was a big TV and a library of DVDs. A couple of soccer balls lingered in the corner, ready for an indoor kick-around. Before Hall the wine committee put out wine, and afterward port. If you wanted to have a party, they would give you cash for drinks and food. Along with the bar and the Bod, it was the indispensable comfort of Oxford for me.

Unfortunately, it was presided over by an oligarchy of morons.

The president of the MCR, an honorific upon which he insisted during meetings, was a small, fierce Italian named Giorgio, with black hair and a pair of eyebrows threatening to merge. His greatest ambition in life was to acquire a new MCR coffeemaker (we had a serviceable drip machine, but his heart was set on an Italian one he had discovered online, which could grind beans, steam milk, and make espresso). His deputy was a Frenchman named Richard,
Ree-shard,
who was dashing to look at but immovably stupid. He adored Giorgio with the peculiar political mania of a cherished lieutenant, and together the two of them knew all the bylaws of the Fleet Middle Common Room Constitution—they always referred to it by this completest denomination—and deployed them without discrimination or mercy against those who opposed their plans.

Their chief opponent was a friend of mine named Peter, a sweet-natured redhead who had been at Fleet as an undergraduate and was now doing a DPhil in classical archaeology. He acted as secretary of the MCR committee and consistently offered his superiors sage and understated advice, which they ignored. We hadn’t known him during Michaelmas, but one day near Christmas he and I had found ourselves in the MCR and decided to play chess. After that we played regularly. He was quiet, with a sly, deadpan sense of humor; he didn’t like to go out much, but he was good daytime company. Despite his British reserve, his language when the subject of Giorgio and Richard came up would become (for him) violent.

“It does seem ridiculous for us to hold all of the special meetings we have about the coffee machine,” he said to me once.

I looked at him wonderingly. “I don’t know where your rage is. I would murder them.”

“It is a bit much, isn’t it?”

“The Espresso Wizard. Please.”

He chuckled in a sidelong way intended to show that he agreed but disapproved and said, “Well, yes. Oh, and—is it—any chance that’s mate?” He pointed to his queen-side knight.

I looked at the board. “Fuck. Again. Triple or nothing?”

Anneliese went to the weekly MCR meetings out of a sense of duty, and Anil, too, because he adored Giorgio and Richard, but the rest of us had learned long before to skip them, though it meant enduring their snide comments about our lack of Fleet patriotism. Tom in particular hated them. In meetings he never made it longer than fifteen minutes before he either got up and left or offered a strong opposition to Giorgio and Richard’s stance on some issue he cared nothing about—whether to buy a copy of the dictionary for the MCR, say, or if the MCR computer should have solitaire and pinball installed on its hard drive even though it might distract people from work and potentially make the computer’s wait time longer. Giorgio’s positions on these two issues were, respectively, no and of course not. Tom won both times simply by virtue of his doggedness and Giorgio’s unpopularity, and once Peter drafted him into a meeting he really cared about for the same reason—Peter thought, and Giorgio and Richard did not, that the MCR should continue to provide small sums of money for graduate students’ books. Giorgio said the fund was only erratically in use and that the money we spent could upgrade a potential coffee machine to include a fresh cinnamon production feature. (I’m really not making that up. It sounds like I am, but I’m not; those were his words, “fresh cinnamon production feature.”) Tom and Peter won. Anil wouldn’t speak to either of them for a week. He told Ella that he had a particular fondness for cinnamon.

Aside from these politics providing a carnival sideshow for us, I mention them because on the day I returned to Oxford, Tom and I decided to wander over to the MCR in the early evening and accidentally walked straight into a general meeting. I was surprised that he wanted to go, because there was a chance that people might speak to him about Katie—but perhaps it was shrewd to see as many people as possible at one fell swoop, and thereby forestall any attempted expressions of pity. In the event it was a night that showed something of Tom’s state of mind and also changed our group of friends for good.

*   *   *

What happened was this.

One of Giorgio and Richard’s favorite tricks was to pretend to take two sides of a debate and then gradually talk each other into agreement. It was agonizingly transparent, but it worked simply because they were willing to grind the meeting and its arcana of constitutional law out for long enough to manufacture a weary consent.

This was what they were doing when Tom and I came in. We waved to Anneliese and Peter, sitting side by side, she patient and he martyred; she raised her eyebrows with surprised happiness to see Tom and stood to give him a hug.

The issue that day was the MCR clock, which in fairness did need to be replaced. It was from the 1970s, and its hands hadn’t moved since I came to Fleet. Still, everyone had either a watch or a phone.

Giorgio and Richard wanted the MCR to acquire an object called the Eternal Clock. Its merits, if you listened to Richard, were endless: It kept Greenwich Mean Time to within a quarter of a second; it only needed a new battery once every nine years; it was a classic work of design. (He was one of those people who have the Eames chair, the Barcelona couch, the Noguchi table, and the Nelson cabinet gathered in one room, taste pushed in so uniform a direction as to declare its absence.)

“How much does it cost?” Peter asked.

“What is the cost of perfection?” answered Giorgio grandly.

“Generally pretty high,” said Tom.

“Mr. Raleigh, would you like to be registered as an attendant of this meeting?” asked Richard.

“No, definitely not.”

“How expensive is the clock?” asked Anneliese.

“My mum has one,” said an anonymous third-year graduate student, who never came to Hall or the bar. His name was Bert. “It cost six hundred quid.”

That caused a sensation.

“Six hundred fucking quid!” Tom said.

“Far too much, far too much,” said Peter, moved beyond caution.

Anneliese, ever polite, said, “Mine cost five pounds at Dixon’s. It works beautifully.”

“Is it really six hundred pounds?” I asked.

Richard, with the exhausted sigh of a visionary constrained by the small-mindedness of his subordinates, said, “The fall Eternal costs just about seven hundred pounds.”

Everyone started to speak at once. Peter, in what for him amounted to a breakout of Tourette’s, said, “Surely this is coming it a bit high, surely, isn’t it?”

“Let’s buy Liese’s clock for a tenner,” said Tom, “and she’ll make a profit. It sounds like it works beautifully!”

“It works beautifully,” Anneliese confirmed, nodding, “and I would be happy to give it to the MCR for free. I love the MCR.”

Richard took umbrage at that, in his heavy French accent. “Let us be clear here that we all love the MCR.”

Bert said, “It’s just so much money!”

“Ask your mum for hers,” said Hans.

“We need that money if we plan to continue subsidizing curry nights,” said Peter. “Some of the scholarship students wouldn’t go out otherwise, because of the cost.” Then he added, rather bravely, “I wouldn’t, for instance.”

Giorgio shifted his eyes away from us and said, “Well, that motion has expired, so,” and then, when Peter tried to speak, pushed on, “but the clock, the clock! Really I must demand that you all consult section four in your constitutions just now—”

So our protests came to nothing. Invoking an obscure clause that permitted the president to arrogate 5 percent of the MCR’s annual budget for whatever use he chose, Richard said, the MCR would receive this bounty whether there was a vote in its favor or not.

“Generally that’s been used if there are unexpected expenses for an event at the last minute,” Peter interjected. “Small sums, forty quid, ninety quid. Giorgio, you must remember when the blue midfield line of the table football broke and Jaime appropriated twenty-two pounds to fix it?”

“The president exercises his own discretion in matters pertaining to these funds,” said Richard.

“You won’t take a vote?”

Giorgio and Richard shook their heads, and among the twenty-odd people crammed along the walls, drinking drip coffee, there was a long silence.

“Then this is fucking ridiculous,” said Tom at last.

“Tom?” said Richard. “Civility is one of the principles—”

“You, you are a fucking muppet. As for you, Giorgio, if you really mean to spend our college fees on a fucking seven-hundred-quid clock, you’ve lost your fucking mind. Peter, is there anything in the constitution about the president acting like Mao? A contingency plan? An assassination provision or something?”

“Is that a threat of personal assault?” Giorgio asked gravely.

Peter said, voice pained, “Um, I don’t think—really I don’t think so.”

Tom threw his hands up in the air, and suddenly it was his volatility, not the clock, that had the room’s attention. I thought,
Oh no.
“We just have to let these fucking prats steal our money? It’s total fucking bullshit. Do you understand that?”

There was a long silence in the MCR.

One of the Chinese students, confused, broke it. “Who acts like Mao?”

“Nobody,” said Richard.

“It’s not the end of the world,” said Anneliese, standing up and coming over to stand next to Tom.

He must have realized then that the room’s silence had shifted its focus from Giorgio and Richard to him.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ve just had a couple of beers.”

Then he walked out. I watched him jog away through the window to the front gate of First Quad, back toward the Cottages.

“We need a clock,” Giorgio said.

“I don’t think anybody is acting like Mao,” said the Chinese student, lips pursed with concern.

I stayed at the meeting to lend my support to Peter. It lasted another thirty or forty minutes. Afterward I went back to the Cottages expecting to find Tom, but he wasn’t there, and as far as I could tell he hadn’t been home.

This worried me. The MCR was a short walk from the Cottages, not quite three minutes, and so to attend the meeting he had only worn a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. There was a freezing rain on my window now, and I knew if he were out in that for more than a couple of minutes he would get dangerously cold.

I called him, but his phone was off. So, uneasy but unsure of what to do, I left my door ajar and spent an hour watching some random college football game online.

Then I started to get really worried. I called again, and his phone was still off. It was darker by now; I showered and talked to Ella and Anneliese, but neither of them had seen him. I thought about going out to find him, but where would I have started?

After a while Ella, who hadn’t been at the meeting, came over to my room. She was dressed up as a Catholic schoolgirl, with her pink, silver, black hair in pigtails, a white button-down shirt, knee-high socks, and a green checked skirt.

“Why do you look like that?” I asked.

“Hi to you, too. How was the meeting?”

“Bad.”

“I’m supposed to go to a fancy dress birthday party for a girl in my lab. He’s still not back?”

“No. You didn’t have to come over, though, thanks.”

“How long has it been?”

I looked at my watch. “Two hours. Hopefully he just went to the pub, because if he’s outside—”

“Maybe I’ll go tell the porters he’s gone, see what they think.”

Just then, though, the door downstairs opened and there were footsteps on the stairs. We both went to my door and saw Tom; his lips were blue, and the hems of his jeans were sodden.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked.

“I went on a walk. Should have brought a coat.”

“Do you think so, Doctor?”

“I’ll be fine. Hey, Ella.”

She looked upset. “You must have pneumonia.”

He laughed. “Don’t be so serious, Ella, or either of you. Hey, by the way. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“Yeah, welcome back.”

There was a pregnant moment then. He looked unusually boyish; that lingers if you went to boarding school, I’ve always thought, a faint lineament of having been abandoned. Suddenly Ella went over and put her arms around his waist and gave him a kiss. When that was done she led him into his room, never looking at me.

Soon enough they were having sex, pretty plainly. I turned up the volume on my computer and immediately texted Anneliese, liveblogging their progress for her. Half an hour later I heard footsteps, and then the shower we shared at the end of the hallway turned on. When Tom was dried and dressed they knocked on my door together, unsheepish, both glowing, and said they were going over to Ella’s, she had some wine.