The Last Enchantments (25 page)

“Tom,” I said, reproachfully but not enough so as to cause confrontation.

“It’s okay,” she said. She was blushing. “It’s okay. Should we get ready to go?”

She put her overcoat on over her dress, her hem and bare legs protruding from it when she sat next to me.

“Let’s have another look at the dress, Ell,” said Tom.

“Let’s have a shag, Ell,” said Percy. “Will, please excuse the four of us.”

“No, she’s not Lizbeth,” said Alex, and the other two went into further fits of laughter.

“Who is that?” asked Ella, an edge to her voice.

“Everyone called her Jizzbreath,” said Alex over their laughter. “She was one of the tutor’s daughters, a bit older than us, loose as change.”

“I’m glad you don’t think I’m like her,” said Ella, but they were immune to sarcasm.

“Should we go?” I asked.

“Soon enough,” said Percy. “I’m feeling wonky.”

“Will it be any trouble getting in?” Ella asked Alex.

He was a decent guy, and as best he could he sat up, shaking his head, and said, “No, no, it’ll be fine. My friend is working the door. I put down your names. Not Percy’s, but we’ll slide him in.”

“Well, it’s no fucking rush,” Percy mumbled. “Wait a minute or two.”

Tom was grinning through all this but silent. His eyes were closed. I wondered what drugs they had taken. Ella and I shrugged and drank, and for five or ten minutes Alex and Percy made jokes, Tom silent all the while, his eyes still closed. Then he seemed to startle awake and sat up.

“Wills, you know who I quite fucking fancy?” he asked, his voice raspy.

“Ella,” I said.

“No, no.” He waved a hand. “Your bird, Jess. Jess the townie. Remember her in the silvery black dress at the Turtle, start of the year?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Tits?” Percy asked the room, eyes fixed upward at some invisible infinity.

“
Some
tits, not enormous,” Tom said slurringly. “And those working-class girls are loose, loose as change.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

Ella waved a hand. “Will, it’s not—leave it.”

Tom sat up further and seemed entirely awake for the first time since he had come out of the bathroom, though he was slurring his words. “I’m an asshole?” he said to me.

“Forget it.”

“I’m an asshole?” he said again. Then he leaned back. “Yeah, okay. Sometimes I am. But at least I didn’t fuck a girl while her fucking boyfriend was in Iraq.”

There was a long stop in conversation. “Jesus,” said Percy at last. “Heavy.”

“He’s not even overseas, he’s like two hours away at training,” I told Percy.

“He’ll be going over soon enough to get shot up,” said Tom. “Then we’ll see how you feel.”

“Let’s take a breath here, ladies,” said Alex. He opened a window and cold air rushed into the room. “Tom, that was some heavy shit.”

I felt a wave of nausea. I had drunk too much over the course of the day.

“I’m fine,” said Tom. “I’m fine, fine, fine. Let’s just go to this party.” He stood up and stumbled and then looked around at the rest of us, still sitting. “Will, come on. I’m sorry, mate. Are we cool?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Ella?”

“Of course, Tom,” she said, as if we would always forgive him. Anything.

We all stood and put on our coats while Ella waited at the door. By eleven thirty we had walked the short distance to the bar.

*   *   *

King’s did have an extraordinary view of London. I tend to judge cities by their rivers, and by that standard Paris beats New York and London alike, but the Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city, its bridges strangely unpersuasive, toylike. We found our way into the party without any trouble, and on the big primary dance floor there were already strobe-lit multitudes, moving in syncopated time.

Tom, Percy, and Alex went straight to the dance floor. Now that I think it over they must have been on heroin: the modulating energy, the irritability, the mix of focus and dreaminess. Who knows what else Tom had taken. Soon they had integrated themselves into a group of dancing girls, as Ella and I stood at the bar, drinking. Her eyes were fastened to Tom. He was out of it, gliding slowly but surely away from Alex and Percy and their group of girls, not dancing even, really, swaying back and forth. His eyes were closed again.

“Should we get him?” Ella asked.

“He’ll pep up. Let’s get another drink.”

She looked unsure. “Okay.”

Her concern was correct. At some point between ordering our next round of drinks and paying for them, Tom disappeared.

For a while we couldn’t even be sure that he had gone. We walked around the dance floor looking for him. Alex and Percy had lost track of him, but neither seemed to think he had gone far. Ella called him; we checked the bathroom. At last we asked the guy at the door, Alex’s friend, if he had seen Tom leaving, and he had.

The elevator had just gone, so we ran down the stairs. Ella was frantic, out of control herself. We looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of him.

“You go right,” I said. “I’ll go left, and we’ll meet on the other side of the block if one of us doesn’t find him first.”

She nodded and clattered off, wearing just her high heels and her yellow dress. I started to walk around the corner, but after only an instant I heard her shout my name, and I ran back.

Tom was slumped against the trashcan by the traffic light, with vomit all over his shirt. Ella was leaning over him.

“What should we do?” she asked again. He murmured something. “He’s talking at least. He’s awake.”

“Let’s get him home.”

She didn’t move. She was shivering, so I put my jacket around her shoulders. Still she crouched by him, watching silently, and I saw that there were tears standing in her eyes, about to slip away one by one. The full force of her love for him, its hopelessness, its delusions, its infiniteness, was apparent, and for a split second I was more worried for her than for him.

I noticed she was clutching something. “What’s that?” I asked.

She looked down at her hand before she remembered. “His wallet.”

“Why do you have it?”

She showed me her other hand, which was full of plastic shards. “He snapped every card he had. His Oxford ID, his Fleet ID, his credit cards, his driver’s license. His fucking NHS card. He tore up the cash.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“I wish I knew what he took.”

She looked at me. Her mascara was running with her tears. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

We had been almost ignoring Tom, though all our attention was supposed to be on him, but then he started to convulse and bile burst in a bubble from his mouth. Almost simultaneously I saw that there was a ragged line of blood on the side of his neck. I turned his head; there was an open wound there. When he had fallen he had broken open his scalp.

“Fuck,” I said. “I’m calling 999.”

She knelt down on the ground next to him and took him in her arms, even though it meant blood and spit and vomit on her bare chest, on the top of her dress. She was sobbing. The ambulance was there three minutes later, and eight minutes after that he was in the emergency room.

*   *   *

It was Ella who sat with Tom at the hospital while I went back to King’s, found Alex, and retrieved our light bags, it was Ella who watched as they pumped his stomach, and it was Ella who decided to rent a car the next morning and drive back to Oxford to save Tom from the train or the bus. It was Ella who sat in Tom’s room, running out occasionally to the kitchen or Sainsbury’s, for the drag of the next three days, until he was better.

On the fourth day, he broke things off with her.

For three days he had been passive, until finally his agitation erupted. It happened in his room, and when their voices rose I could hear what they said. (I wish I could pretend that I didn’t eavesdrop. It reminds me of a story my grandfather used to tell. He was a journalist for
Life
in the sixties, interviewing Truman Capote at a roadside diner in Kansas. At some point Truman went silent, and my grandfather started to repeat his question. Truman shot him a look, scrawled something on his notepad, and pushed it across the table,
Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to eavesdrop
. The scrap of paper is in a frame in the front hall of my uncle’s house.)

“Just leave me alone!” Tom shouted. “I’m an adult!”

“You need someone to take care of you,” Ella said.

“I didn’t slash my fucking wrists!”

“You might as well have.”

“Oh, Jesus, the melodrama.”

“Me? What about you?”

“What does that mean?” he asked, his voice softer.

“You know what it means.”

“No, what does it mean, Ella? If you’re talking about my sister—”

“I’m talking about
you,
and how you wallow.”

“Please just go, leave me alone.”

There was a silence. “I love you.”

“Ella.”

Now there was a long silence, a minute or two. At last, she said, “Are you drinking your fluids?”

“There’s not much else to do with them.”

“Tom.”

I heard that symphony-chord sound of his Mac powering on. After that there was another passage of silence, and then Ella left. As she was going I opened my door, but she brushed past me without looking and went down the stairs.

I went into Tom’s room. “What is wrong with you?” I asked.

He still had a bandage on his head. “Jesus, not you, too.”

Nevertheless, that evening he went over to Ella’s house to talk to her again, more gently this time. When I saw her the next afternoon she was puffy-eyed and impassive.

“Well, it’s over,” she said.

We were standing in the MCR together making coffee. It was a cold day. “What happened?”

“I never know what to believe with these things.” She tucked a strand of pink and black hair behind her ear. “He told me … he said that he could have loved me, but for him I’ll always remind him of … of this time.”

“Anyway, you helped him after Katie died.”

She shrugged. “If that’s true, I would do it all again. It’s not much of a sacrifice.”

I could see in her eyes that this was untrue. “Maybe you two will—”

Before I could finish speaking she cut me off, however. “No. Never.”

Amid all of this drama, the worst thing of all happened:
Big Brother
turned down Timmo. He was distraught and started speculating about whether they took Brits on
Survivor.

“It puts my own ordeal into perspective,” said Tom. “Thank God he’s strong.”

*   *   *

Not much later, I had a call from Sophie. It was a Tuesday night in the third week of March, and I was walking home, through Radcliffe Square, from a seminar at Balliol about neutrality in fiction. Its subject was the novelists of the 1930s and 1940s—Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett—who had chosen to write almost exclusively in dialogue. Was it a reaction to the war—a silence? A reaction to the discursive self-regard of the previous generation, Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf? There was something of Pontius Pilate in the inert disinterest of these writers, refusing to speak in their own voices, but something great, too. Their ambiguities invited the reader’s participation, the reader’s choices, in a sense even the reader’s coauthorship. Still, I thought that Orwell’s way took more courage. He took the burden of judgment upon himself. Perhaps as a result he didn’t write with such terrible coldness.

It was an hour of conversation that won me another few paragraphs for my thesis. It was times like that when I was gladdest I had come to Oxford.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out and answered. “Sophie?”

“Hey,” she said. “Can I come over there?”

“I’m on my way home now. I won’t be back for ten minutes or so.”

“Pick up beer, would you?”

“We have some.”

“What kind?”

“1664.”

“If you pass a shop, get some Guinness.” There was a beat after this command, and then, as if she were answering to some deeper reflex of politeness, something I understood so well, like the older magic in Narnia, she added, “If you don’t mind, of course.”

“No problem. See you in twenty?”

“Thanks.”

When I arrived at the Cottages, she was on our steps. There was still some last white light lofted high over the still city, the air colder than ten minutes before.

“Hey,” I said.

She stood up and smiled. “Hey.”

In my room—which Strick had tidied just that morning, thank God—she went over to my computer and put on
Room on Fire.
Then she took one of the beers and drank half of it without speaking.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do when I have to leave Oxford. Who knows where Jack will be. It all seems like a mess. Everyone has someplace to be, except me. I wish they wanted me here.”

“You could stay.”

She laughed. “I wish.”

“Why don’t you? Did you apply for the Swift?”

“I told you, they wouldn’t give it to someone studying French language. Not academic enough. Maybe if I did literature.” She finished the beer and looked at me. “Anyway, I didn’t come over to talk. Let’s sleep together.”

“What?”

She came to the bed, pushed my things onto the floor, and lay down. “You do the work,” she said.

So I did: I unbuttoned her jeans, ran my fingers over her hipbones and her thighs, kissed her from her neck to her breasts, brushed her hair away from her face and put my mouth on hers, felt the slight pressure she returned, and then the involuntary rise of her hips against my hand, and after only a little while she had turned me on my back and started to do the work herself.

When it was over she held me tightly. “This was the last time,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Sorry.”

We lay there in silence for a very long time, perhaps half an hour, until, not wholly to my surprise, she started to cry. “What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Okay. You don’t want to talk about it?”

“No.” There was a pause. “Are you ready to go again?”