The Last Enchantments (36 page)

“What about your PhD?” Ella asked.

“I know,” she answered, looking guilty. “I just talked with my adviser about quitting this afternoon. He was upset with me, very upset.”

“But what’s the job?” I asked.

“I get to take pictures.”

“For who?” Ella asked.

“For
Die Zeit
.”

“Anneliese!” I said. “That’s incredible!”

“What—how did you get that job?” asked Ella.

“I got tired of the Crusades. I submitted a portfolio to a couple of German and English newspapers.” She laughed. “Probably not as tired as the Crusaders, I suppose.”

“But Anneliese, I’ll be all alone next year!” said Ella.

“Cheers,” said Peter, and everyone laughed.

Anneliese, sitting down, said, “No, but guess where I’ll be?”

“Where?”

“London! I’ll be based here, taking pictures all over England.”

“Oh!” said Ella. “That’s much better than Berlin! For me, I mean.”

Anneliese laughed. “I know. Will, you and I can take the train up together on weekends to visit.”

I grinned at her. “Here, take a beer. We need to toast you.”

“Fine, but let’s wait until we can have wine,” Anneliese said, sitting down. “Beer is okay once in a while, but I’m sick of it.”

“You’re German,” said Anil.

“Well, I can’t go around apologizing for that all my life,” she said crossly. “I want some nice white wine.”

For a while we talked about the new job. She was to begin right away. She talked about buying a medium-format camera possibly, certainly another lens.

“But who
will
be here next year?” I asked Ella eventually.

She thought about it for a second. “Anil. He has a two-year course. Richard and Giorgio.”

“Oh dear,” said Anil.

She laughed. “Peter, thank God. Tom and Anneliese will be in London. Sophie will be here.”

Just then Jem appeared at the door of the bar and started walking back out to us with a big glass pitcher.

“Christ,” he said when he came up to us. “These old women will be the death of me. Fleet hired out the conference rooms to the interior decoration society of Oxfordshire and they’re all in the bar now, acting as if they’re twenty and not sixty. Here, I brought you a jug of G&Ts.”

“Thanks,” we all said.

He laughed wickedly. “Charged them to the credit card these muppets left. Bake, the other half get out in twenty minutes and they’re all coming down.”

“You want me to work?”

“Thanks.” He sighed. “Once more unto the breach, dear fuckers.”

“Jem, what are you doing next year?” Anneliese asked.

Ella interrupted his answer. “Anneliese just got a job at
Die Zeit,
taking pictures.”

“The Hamburg paper? Shit, well done,” he said. Jem was surprisingly informed. “I’m playing in a band. I’ll bartend somewhere.”

“
A
band?” I asked. “Not
the
band?”

He shook his head. “We broke up yesterday.”

“Shit.”

“It was bound to happen. Anyway, Eli and I are talking about a duo kind of thing, maybe more folky, open tunings, like ‘Buckets of Rain’ only electric.”

“I love that song,” said Anneliese.

“Yeah, Eli’s dad is a session musician, and he can get our tape out to some execs. He said he could definitely find us gigs as well, bars. He plays at this jazz club every weekend. There’s even a chance he could find us some cheap studio time, because he knows everyone.”

“Remember us when you’re famous,” Ella said. “You, too, Anneliese.”

He shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Bake, come help me as soon as you finish your drink.”

*   *   *

That day and nearly every other in August someone went punting; we had taken it up again. There was an unwritten rule that anybody could tag along, even if they weren’t your closest friends or you weren’t theirs. Once I went with Giorgio and Richard—widely held to have mellowed since their deposition from power, though I didn’t see it—and their two Chinese acolytes, the statistics students.

On the afternoon I’m thinking of Ella and I went punting alone, going very slowly because neither of us could be bothered to put in much effort. It was nice to spend time together—I had seen relatively little of her, an evening here and there, perhaps lunch. While her lab was on its summer break she had taken a miserable job at an Indian restaurant called Kolkata, where she was the only non-Indian server. On the first night she had dropped an entire tray of food on a customer, who stormed out of the restaurant, which by tradition meant the waitstaff—as a method of pooling risk—had to chip in to pay his bill. Since then none of them talked to her, and they huddled in a corner when business was slow, staring at her and muttering in Hindi. Anil had gone in to vouch for her, but it turned out he was from the wrong part of India.

When we pulled the punt up along a clearing and got out to sit on the bank, our feet dangling over the water, she lit a joint—a new habit, born that spring of the stress of her days in the lab and the prospect of two more years of them—and said, “Peter has been talking about marriage.”

“Already?”

“I know, it’s quick. Though it’s not as if he proposed.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know if I could live in England more than another couple of years, and I can’t see him leaving. Maybe he would.”

“I don’t find myself missing America much.”

“I do. Just
Pulp Fiction
stuff, like the kinds of cereal you can get at home. How original, right?”

“Are you over Tom?”

She smiled. “That’s direct.”

“I’m sorry.”

She was playing with her hair, braiding pink and black strands of it together, but looked up now. “I don’t think about him.”

“That seems impossible.”

“I’m not like you. It doesn’t all have to be something.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “I remember this one day, after he and I started hooking up, when we were out at a pub and he almost had a nervous breakdown. He was just freaking out.”

“How?”

“He kept saying, ‘I can’t be around these people, I can’t be around these people, take me home.’ And this was like three months after Katie died, not to sound unkind, but … anyway, I remember thinking to myself, first off, Ella, this is not a person you can count on, and second of all, even knowing that, that I didn’t care. Because I can count on myself. I know who I am. As long as I’m alive I’ll work hard, and I’ll be in charge of my shit, and I’ll make money, and I’ll make sure my kids do their homework. That’s me. And I have enough margin that I could have had someone in my life who isn’t that way, like who eats up a little bit of my stability. But the thing is,” and she laughed, “Peter is like that, too. Like he might as well be Korean. President of the stupid MCR, right?”

“Do you love him as much as Tom, then?”

She puzzled over this and then answered. “More and less at the same time.”

There was a pause. “Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Okay.”

“When you’re a mom are you going to wear all this stuff? The safety pins, and coloring your hair?”

She smiled. “No, probably not.”

“Just curious.”

“You know why I do it? Because fuck them. I like it.”

I laughed and put my arm around her shoulder, squeezing. “I love you,” I said.

“You, too.”

We talked for another few minutes, not so directly now, and then shoved off in the punt, soft light striking against the tree-sheltered river. When we were nearly all the way back to Fleet my phone buzzed. It was Sophie.

I need you to come back.

On my way. What is it?

You’re still punting?

Ten minutes away.

I took the pole then and started to push us more quickly downriver. When we came into view of the lawns I saw that she was standing there, arms crossed, face dense with unhappiness, the wind troubling her hair. I feared that something terrible had happened.

“Are you okay?” I called out. I let Ella lock the punt to the shore and jumped out.

“It’s Chessie,” she said. “She’s gotten sicker. They want to put her down, straight away.”

“Oh, no.”

“No, I convinced them to wait. Will you come with me?”

“Of course.”

We left half an hour later in her car. I drove, even though I still wasn’t accustomed to the left side of the road. It took nearly three hours to get there—we ran into traffic near Birmingham—with Sophie silent most of the way. It was dusk when we arrived in her small village.

“Which way?” I asked.

“Left,” she said and then changed her mind. “No, let’s go straight to the vet’s. Turn right. My parents left her there, the bastards.”

The stainless steel and fluoresced white tile of the vet’s office looked, somehow even more than in a hospital for humans, like a well-organized mind’s idea of death. A receptionist led us back into the holding room, and through a large window we saw the dog, a beautiful white-and-brown animal with an intelligent face, before she saw us. She was lying on her side, breathing very raggedly. Her shanks looked thin. You could tell she was ill. She didn’t pay any attention to the vet’s assistant who was in the room with her.

When Sophie came into the room, though, some dim sensation of smell or sight must have told the dog that its friend was here. Her tail thumped once and then twice against the gurney and she lifted her head, her tongue lolling out, and snorted with happiness, then struggled—a losing battle—to rise up to her haunches.

It is absurd to care too much about a dog’s death and inhuman not to care—that is the world. The anguish in Sophie’s face was terrible and real. She went and cradled Chessie’s head in her arms, soothing her down and down until she was resting still again. Occasionally the dog’s tail would beat in happiness, and when it did I felt a lump in my throat. As for Sophie, she was so silent and impassive that I knew her to be inconsolable, beyond the range of any speech to help her. I thought about Hitler poisoning his dog to make sure his cyanide caplets worked and hated him for it, the trust of the dog taking the pill with a bit of steak. The torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind against a tree. This was followed by a hiss of revulsion at myself for the emotion: Who cares about Hitler’s dog; what an absurdity.

The vet came in and introduced herself, a hardy Yorkshire woman of fifty or thereabouts with a monkey face. “You’re her owner?” she asked. Her voice was sympathetic but professional.

“I am,” said Sophie.

“There’s only so much we can do for the pain at this stage.”

“How much longer if we—if we kept her like this?”

“She’s a very old dog. Maybe two weeks or so. But they would be painful weeks.”

Sophie wiped the tears away from her face with the heel of her hand. “I don’t care,” she said. “Let’s keep her alive. Let’s do it.”

I stayed silent, but the vet said, “It would only be unkind.”

Chessie’s tail thumped, and Sophie covered the dog’s face in kisses. She was quiet for a few minutes, long minutes. “Okay,” she said at last.

“You can give her a last treat, if you like, take your time,” said the vet. I honored her for her patience; the rest of the practice was shut up for the night.

“Will, go get some peanut butter, would you? There’s a shop two doors down to the left.”

I went and returned; Sophie scooped some of the peanut butter out with her fingers, and Chessie licked at it once or twice, but it seemed to me it was more to please Sophie than out of any real desire to eat. Finally the vet interceded.

“I’m going to give her the shot now.”

“What will you do with her body?” asked Sophie.

“We can give you the ashes, if you like. It takes a day or two.”

“Yes, I want them.”

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

To my surprise, she nodded. “Yes, please.”

As I left I watched Sophie envelop the dog in her arms more carefully and wholly, as if she could lift her clear away from death. I went into the lobby and waited twenty minutes. After that Sophie emerged, her face dull. She didn’t want to see her parents, so despite the lateness of the hour we began the drive back to Oxford.

*   *   *

When we were twenty or thirty miles from home it began to rain, the red lights in front of us and the white lights coming toward us stained together, the trees along the side of the road no longer individual, a cliff of green-black. Sophie hadn’t spoken much during the trip, and when I asked about Chessie she had shaken her head. Then she said something that took me aback entirely.

“I’ve been e-mailing with Jack.”

That saying “My blood ran cold”—it’s true, it feels as if your blood loses its heat in your veins for a second. “What?”

“I didn’t get his daily e-mail for three days. I worried. I called his mother.”

“And, so?”

“He’s fine.”

“Oh, great,” I said, without regretting the sarcasm.

“They lost power at his base. Then he had a satellite phone but he couldn’t get through on it, to home, I mean, and so he had to wait until the power came back. He started up with the daily e-mail again.”

“What have you been e-mailing him?”

She started to cry. “Only asking how he is.”

“Why did you even ask me to come up to the vet’s with you?” I asked. My voice was more detached than I felt. “Why didn’t you ask Jack?”

“He’s not here.”

“That’s the only reason.”

“No, of course not.”

“Will you stop e-mailing with him?” I asked.

She was silent.

“Sophie?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

My skin started to prickle. There was a gas station on the side of the road, with a bright hopeful sign lofted above it in the black of the sky. I pulled in.

“Are you breaking up with me?”

“No,” she said, “of course not.”

I turned the car off, and with the engine sound gone it seemed too quiet. Now that I started to think of it we had seen less of each other in the past few days. She had a job doing research for her adviser, tedious hours combing through records, and she had been too tired, she said, to do much at the end of the day, though we had still been sleeping in her room, still smiling when we saw each other. Had something been different?