The Last Enchantments (31 page)

He was a dark brown color now, exceedingly handsome. “I can’t be with a girl that holds me down,” he said.

“You’re drunk and showing off.” This accusation seemed to make her notice that she was amid people, and she said, “We can talk about this over there.”

So they went behind one of the pubs, down an uninhabited alleyway. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, though her voice rose now and then.

I waited, obviously.

After twenty minutes she came back to me. She was crying. It had grown windy, and her hair was flying around her face.

“Are you okay?”

“Just take me to a bar,” she said, “and not one of these crowded ones. And for God’s sake don’t try to kiss me if I get drunk, for once.”

“Of course not. Of course not.”

I texted Tom that we were leaving. She and I walked away from the river and found a calm pub, the Boat Race coverage on muted TVs here and there. I ordered us red wine, her preferred drink, and we sat at a table far from everyone else.

“I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been,” she said.

“You haven’t been stupid at all.”

“Of course I have.”

“What happened?”

“He’s broken up with me.” She said this in a normal voice, but tears were rolling from her eyes. I thought I had never seen anyone so hurt. “Why on earth would he do that?”

I loved her to the degree now that I would have put them back together if I could, to lessen her unhappiness. Yet it was strange: Much of me went to Jack, then, and less to Sophie. For one thing I wondered if his grand and brutal diffidence, his almost cruelty, came from being Over There, as I thought of it—fighting. He was in a war, really a war. Not the television war, the thing itself.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I tried so hard. I wrote him every day and sent him e-mails and pictures. And he never really wrote back much more than a line or two. Not that I needed much to get by. I spoke to his mother on the telephone once a week, and visited his brother at Eton and sent him tuck, which Jack used to do. I tried very hard.”

“You were great to him.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was racked with guilt every day. I missed you,” she said. She paused. “I wanted to come see you every night when I went to sleep.”

“Me, too.”

“No, but it’s not like that, I wanted to go see him every night, too, I wanted to hold him, too. Don’t make it seem that way. I wanted him to move to Oxford and I’d be in school and we could have one of those houses by St. Giles and—” She broke off, having shared, I saw, too much of a private vision that had become more real to her through unspokenness than it should have. “But I felt so content with you, that weekend. You were so nice to me.”

“Jack wasn’t?”

“No, but that’s okay. That’s the kind of thing I can forgive. But not to care—that’s different. Imagine him not calling me! Can you believe—” She burst into fresh tears, and two reddened white-haired men at the bar looked at me reprovingly. As if she had remembered how far she was forgetting herself, Sophie turned away and cleared her throat, trying to achieve some restoration of her usual guardedness. Then she gave me a formal look. “I’m glad you’re here, Will, but nothing’s going to happen.”

“I know,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

“Maybe we should have a cigarette. Not even a secret one.”

She laughed and hiccupped and cried at once. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Eventually we roused ourselves to go back to the race, but it was over. I called Tom, and he said they were all going to the Cheshire Cheese, a pub on Fleet Street. (“Double Fleet time!”) However, Sophie said she wanted to go
do
something, not just sit around, and so we went and drifted through the cold of the British Museum, never really looking at anything much. Aztec bowls, Egyptian funeral boats, Turkish tiles: all these civilizations at such a desperate disadvantage to us because we, happy or unhappy, were alive. At some point she started to hold my hand.

We missed the bus back and then had a forlorn pizza near St. Paul’s. Still she kept talking about Jack, still her shield was down. When at last it was time for the second bus we walked silently across the dim city, back to pick it up at Marble Arch. On the way there were endless repetitive shops full of clothes and books and jewelry and electronics, the uncaring intricate rented world, and soon the only thing that seemed real to me was her. I thought to myself at one point that perhaps all the gold wreathed around her, the stars and moon and streetlight, her lips slightly parted, her face worn out from crying—thought to myself it might have been no more than my love, which surrounded her wherever she went.

Oxford won, by the way, even though Cambridge was the heavy favorite. Floreat Oxonia. Or Greyfriars, or what you will.

*   *   *

I suppose in the next days I expected Sophie to be around more, but she wasn’t. For the last two weeks of April, after the Boat Race, she went to her parents’ beach cottage in Dorset to finish her long essay, trundling all the way home first to pick up Chessie, her ancient spaniel, for company. She did text me occasionally—random jokes and complaints—and once we spoke on the phone. I asked about Jack.

“I still get his daily e-mail,” she said. “Otherwise nothing. I expect he’s with Minka now, the slut. I’m sure she does all sorts of things with him I wouldn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, three-ways and coming on your face and playing with your bottom and all the stuff boys want to do.”

I felt a sense of relief that she hadn’t allowed Jackal those violations. “Are you coming back soon?”

“Soon,” she promised.

“What about the Swift?”

“I don’t have to tell them for a month. I’ll see how the essay goes. Speaking of which, I should get back to work.”

“Say hi to Chessie for me.”

“I will.”

“And make sure you’re stocked up on Hobnobs.”

She laughed. “See you soon.”

“Good-bye.”

*   *   *

The next week, as April ended, Tom knocked on my door. It was late at night, past midnight, and I was downloading music illegally and chatting with Ella on AIM about a summer trip we might make to Amsterdam. I told her to wait.

“What’s up?”

“Hey.” He was holding his phone and biting his lip, his face thick with concentration. “I just got a text. Daisy is in town.”

“Are you going to see her?”

“Do you think I should? Will you come?”

“Won’t that be awkward?”

“Just come.”

At a table at the King’s Arms sat a girl with feline eyes and dark, lustrous, Trianon-milkmaid hair. She had big sunglasses propped on her head (it was past midnight, let me repeat) and a handbag large enough to hold an infant. On her face was that constantly recalibrated baseline sullenness of the pretty English upper-class girl. Her shirt was of some fashion I was too ignorant to appreciate, with a dorsal pleat that ought to have looked absurd but made her shoulders seem especially soft and beautiful.

She ignored Tom. “I’m Daisy.” She put out her hand, her bag hanging from her forearm so that I had to reach. “Pleasure to meet you.”

I knew who she was, of course. I also knew that she and Tom had spoken only once, for five minutes, after his sister died. “How do you do,” I said. “What brings you to town?”

“My firm is consulting here. I’m at the Old Bank.” She gestured lazily behind her. “Poky city.”

Tom was staring at her. We hadn’t sat down yet, and just as I was about to, he burst out, “Will’s on his way to meet our friend Ella, actually.” He turned to me. “Thanks for walking me, mate.”

“Sure,” I said.

Daisy wasn’t fooled.

On the short walk back to the Cottages, I got a text from Tom.
I owe you one.

No worries,
I wrote back.

I was just about to go to sleep, an hour later, when I heard the door. Anil and his friend Shateel were visiting Hadrian’s Wall overnight, with Anneliese—both Anil and Anneliese had a checklist of places to see while they lived in England—so I knew it was Tom. Accompanying his footsteps was the peal of a girl’s laughter. It wasn’t Jess.

I ran to open my door and steadied it to make it look like I’d left it that way casually, then sat with a book in the armchair that faced the hall.

“Hi, Will,” said Daisy. “How was Ella?”

“She’s good.”

“I look forward to meeting her.”

“Daze, grab yourself a beer from the fridge,” Tom said and ushered her into his room. “Will, this is that Web site I was telling you about.”

“What Web site?” Daisy called from Tom’s room.

“Just about football.”

“Oh,” she said without satisfaction.

He opened Google and typed “THIS IS A FUCKING DISASTER JESUS CHRIST” into the search bar. A Web site called
Jesus Fucking Christ
popped up.

“Yeah, look around it, there’s some pretty cool stuff about Arsenal on there,” he said to me. “All right. Daisy and I are off for a walk. We just stopped back here for beers.”

They were gone an hour, and when Tom returned he was alone. He came into my room and without saying anything spilled himself into one of the armchairs by my open windows.

“My life is fucking over,” he said. “She’s here for five weeks.”

“You don’t have to see her.”

“I’m the only person she knows in the entire city.”

“That’s not your fault.”

He sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “It’s not so simple.”

“Why?”

“You know better than anyone that I never wanted to break up with her.”

“But that was a long time ago.”

“She’s single,” he said, not quite irrelevantly. Then, more relevantly, “Fuck.”

“Stick with Jess,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Yep.”

“She looked great.”

“Daisy?”

“Daisy, yeah.” Then, ruminatively and summarizingly, he said, “Fuck.”

*   *   *

That April and May run together in my mind. I spent more time with Anneliese and Ella than with anyone else. Anil suddenly had to study very hard for exams, and Tom, though I knew he had seen Daisy now and then, was still with Jess every night. At some stage Sophie returned, but we only saw her once or twice a week. As I should have realized after she got the Swift, she had all along been working much harder than any of us realized, and like Anil she spent most of her time in the library. After she was back from Dorset I would visit her there most evenings, bringing a cup of coffee, a candy bar, and she would squeeze my hand and thank me and after ten or fifteen sentences of conversation turn back to her work. Slowly and gently I began to let go of my hopes of her. No, that’s not accurate: I never let go of my hopes, but I saw that they were slipping away whether I wanted them to or not, and the excuse of her work, of Jack’s desertion, softened the pain.

In the second week of May, on a very hot day, the lawns scattered with undergraduates burning themselves imperial red, I received an unexpected phone call. There was a booming American voice on the other end of the line.

“Is that Will Baker?” it asked.

“It is.”

“You’re a hard man to get ahold of. Dougie Bryson,” said the voice. “Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

“It rings a bell,” I said, which was a lie.

“I thought it might. I was on Kerry, too, but in Colorado. I ran the field office out there. It was rough. Hopefully we set ’em up for the next election, at least. We definitely cut some good turf.”

“Doug Bryson, sure, of course.”

“So listen, any interest in getting back into politics?”

“You know I’m in England, right?”

“I just called you, smart guy.”

“Very true. What’s going on?” I asked.

“If you want it I have a job for you, actually.”

“Wow.”

“Well, we’re short on time. What it is, I’m running a congressional candidate out of the Ohio Seventeenth, a Democrat named Viskovitz, David Viskovitz. You’d love him. He’s a veteran, Panama, and he’s owned a contracting business out here for about ten years. The business is clean, which it’s reassuring to know. Really weirdly handsome, blond wife, the kids. Actually one of the kids is Down’s, too, which—it’s not a disadvantage, quality of life aside and all that, not trying to be insensitive. Sweet kid. Anyway, Viskovitz, he’s local chamber of commerce, hangs out at the hardware store, concerned parent at school meetings. The whole thing. Sounds like a Republican, doesn’t he? That’s why we’re excited to have him.”

“And you’re running him.”

“We need a comm director. I know you worked senior staff, but the people I was in touch with from Ohio told me you were a decent writer, and if I’m not mistaken you freelanced in the comm shop?”

“Yeah, all the time. It was us who got Polsky.”

“Nice. Well, it doesn’t pay much, sixteen hundred a month, but there’s a car and an apartment, and you get fifty bucks per diem on weekdays, so that’s another thousand a month.” He paused. “I won’t lie, the numbers are trending against us, and right now it’s me and a phone bank, and some people from the community who are, look, they’re nice folks, but they’re not exactly seasoned operatives. The presumptive nominee had to drop out, some shady financing stuff. It’s last minute. But even still, it’s close, man. We gotta fight, right?”

“Of course. I’m honored. It would just be a big change.”

“Two years of votes against Bush. If we can get this guy in office, I don’t give a shit if he gets voted out in oh-eight, I don’t give a shit if he fucks the prom queen in the ass on Main Street or does meth with Marion Barry, it’s two years of votes against Bush. Just a big ‘Nay’ next to his name on C-SPAN every day. Because fuck those guys.” His pitch was done, and he waited for my response. “Will? Did I lose you?”

“No, just thinking.” The thing was, now I did remember Doug Bryson’s name. He and a small band of field operatives in Colorado had stopped taking the orders of the national campaign in August, not long before the election, a briefly famous
trahison des clercs
that immediately bumped Kerry six points in local polling. In the end it had gotten him promoted, and he had been on TV a few dozen times. He was an interesting contact.

“Well?”