The Last Enchantments (2 page)

He stamped my passport. “Well, you’re not so clever yet.”

Not much later I was on the train to Oxford. It was a bright day, and from the window I gazed at the distant concavities of the landscape, the green swales that dipped away from the tracks and then rose in steep hills to meet the afternoon light. Intermittently I dozed, with the heavy wakefulness of the overnight traveler. Finally in the last half hour of the trip I got some real rest, and woke only when an old woman pushing a cart came through the train. I bought a cup of coffee from her.

When we arrived I took a cab to my new college, Fleet; at Oxford every student belongs both to the university and to one of its forty constituent colleges, each its own dominion upon a few acres, with its own library, its own bar, its own chapel. From the cobblestone lane outside the college I looked up and saw its high white spires, and through the tall, black-iron gates a stretch of green grass. I would wait to look around, I thought.

Instead I fetched my room key from the porters, a group of men in bowler hats and gray wool suits. The porters’ lodge lay just inside the gates. (“Cheek,” said one of them lazily when he had to leave his tea to help me.) From there I turned right down a lane just near the gates and found myself at the Cottages, a row of twelve brick houses, haphazardly rife with ivy, where Fleet’s graduate students lived. It was also the corridor that connected the college to the center of the city.

My house was the third to last, with a flagstone courtyard before it and a long, slender garden full of fading trees behind. At the door I staggered to a standstill under my bags, panting slightly, then with a last great crash went inside and let everything drop off my shoulders in the entryway. Above me, halfway up the stairs, was another student.

“You look as if you’ve been on a death march,” he said.

“I overpacked.”

He smiled, and we met on the second step to shake hands. “I’m Tom Raleigh. If you’re William Baker you’re room four, next to me. Anyway I don’t imagine you’re Anil Gupta, in room two, or Margo Peabody, room one. Let me take some of those bags.”

Tom was English, tall, thin, and pale, with freckles and bright red lips. Looking at him for the first time I saw a trace of privately educated cruelty in his heavy-eyed expression, of wishes met, small worlds conquered. He picked up three of my bags, and I hauled the rest up the stairs behind him. On the second floor were two doors, and through his I could see half-unpacked boxes and a squat refrigerator. “My sister dropped me off this morning,” he said. We stopped in front of the heavy oak door just next to his, which was mine. My name was printed on it in gold leaf.

He put down my things. “Get settled, then knock on my door for a beer if you like. My sister also filled my fridge before she left.”

“Thanks, I will.”

He hesitated and then grinned. “Americans everywhere,” he said. “That’s Oxford now, I suppose.”

I closed the door behind me and called my mother. “Hey, it’s me. I made it.”

“Oh, my God!”

“I’m in my room, just got here.”

“I can’t believe you live in another country! What is it like? What can you see?”

“It’s not bad.” I looked around. “There’s a fireplace, but it has a radiator in it. I have a couple of windows, so I can see the yard. Wait, if I lean out—I’m leaning out, and I can see the back lawns of Fleet. Just like that picture I showed you online, only they look bigger.”

“I can’t believe you’re there! Is it beautiful?”

“I haven’t seen much.”

“Can you get the
Times
?”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“It’s England, not North Korea.”

“Do you want me to send it to you?”

“Please don’t be ridiculous.”

“I can’t believe you’re in England! What did Alison say?”

“I’m about to call her.”

After we hung up I lumped down into one of the armchairs by the window—I couldn’t face unpacking—and looked out.

I had a strange, displaced feeling, heightened by fatigue. It was a mystery to me how I had come to be here. Not practically—after my last job ended I had sent in an application, a late one, but I was so settled in New York that it had never seemed likely to come to anything. A number of events in the year that preceded my arrival in Oxford had pushed me toward a change, but I might as easily have gone to Shanghai or Bermuda.

It was true that I had never felt more at home anywhere than college, and that I missed it. Oxford, specifically, was linked in my mind with a peculiar blended sense of peace and grandeur. I had a weakness for that. This was my first time in England, but it was a country, dangerously, that I had loved for much of my life, especially during the unhappy and turbulent days of my childhood, when I devised a kind of imaginative home there without ever having been, based on the books to which I exiled myself: Sherlock Holmes, Kenneth Grahame, C. S. Lewis. Why had they once made me so happy, I wondered? The calm, the civility, the safety, I suppose—lengthening shadows on the cricket pitch, tea at five—all of it foolish. There’s no lasting safety to life. The only thing that will become of anyone is death. Yet: I felt an exhaling happiness to gaze out at the English sunlight, the English trees. Soon enough I fell asleep again.

*   *   *

There was a knock on the door thirty or forty minutes later. It was Tom. He took the other armchair, and for a while we talked, feet up on the windowsill. He asked if I had looked through college yet.

“No, have you?”

He shook his head. “Not in years. My sister was at Fleet. My father was at Magdalen, and I remember that better.”

“Where did you go?”

“LSE. I haven’t been in Oxford for ages. Shall we go see it, do you think? It’s fucking hideous, I bet, but I’m sure the porters will show us around.”

Three porters were sitting in the lodge. They looked at us so dourly, as if we, the students, were the only blemish on their otherwise perfect happiness—which may well have been true—that I suspected the sign posted by the window that read
ASK US FOR A TOUR!
to be insincere.

“We were thinking about a tour of the college.”

“JERRY!” they roared in unison.

“Bloody hell,” said Tom.

The head porter pointed to a door at the far end of the lodge. “Jerry’ll show you about. He likes ’em, the tours. I can’t be asked personally.”

Expectantly we looked at the door, and after a moment an immensely dignified figure, not above five foot three, stepped through it. He had dark gray hair, a paunch under his college-crested blue sweater and college-crested blue button-down, and glasses that made him look like an owl.

“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.