The Last Enchantments (28 page)

“Do you want to go get a drink at the bar?”

“I guess.”

“What do you guys want?” he asked them. It turned out they both wanted Guava Screwdrivers.

Anil, who had greeted me without surprise, said, “Extra guava!” twice, to be sure, which made me think he didn’t know anything awkward was happening.

As soon as we were out of earshot, Tom said, “I’m sorry, mate. I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?”

He shook his head. “It’s hard to say. I was just trawling around Facebook one day and I came across her profile … I don’t know, I’d quite fancied her. I messaged to see if she wanted to get a drink. We’ve been out a few times.”

“Those nights you went on your walks?”

“It was wrong of me.” There was a pause. “We haven’t slept together or anything.” Another pause. “And the two of you haven’t seen each other in ages.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

With a hint of desperation, he said, “Come on, Will. You must be furious.”

“I’m not. I’m really not.”

“It just happened.”

“To be honest, I’m most surprised that Anil is your wingman.”

He smiled. We were at the bar by now. “I know.”

“It’s funny. She doesn’t seem like your type.”

“I don’t know if she would have been.” The drinks came. “Here,” he said, “I’m getting these. Come sit at—”

“No, I should go.”

“You’re mad?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m not mad. I guess it might bother me a little. I don’t know.” Suddenly I felt cruel. “One thing, though, I hope you know she has chlamydia.”

He turned white as snow and said, “What?”

“Just kidding,” I said, but I felt vindicated: It proved they had slept together. “Have fun.”

As I walked home, the wine wearing off, the night late and the streets abandoned, some self-pitying corner of my mind, or some self-rejecting one, thought that perhaps Jess had been what I needed all along. I thought how tied up she was for me in the beginning of the year, in that first night, and then thought about the way I could make her laugh, the effortless chatter. The hooking up. Even when you don’t mean to, if you spend enough time in somebody’s bed you know them. How unkind I had been to her! Was I different than Jack at all, in the end? I thought about days in the teashop, her big, athletic brother—I would never meet him now, after having heard so much about him—her basic gentleness. I thought about how at ease I had been with her. Still, there was something hard and unyielding at the back of all this, a barrier beyond which I knew that sort of sentimentality would never take me. It was Sophie.

Guava, I ask you.

*   *   *

For a week Tom was abjectly apologetic. The next day he wrote me a long letter, which I barely read, and for days he kept checking with me, “Are you sure you’re not mad? Come on, just tell me.” He made sure I observed him going to bed in our house. He liked her, though, and I didn’t especially care. For a while they stayed away from Fleet. Then they didn’t. Tom was happy.

Sophie, on the other hand, seemed unhappy. When I saw her around college she looked harried and tense, her arms always crossed over her chest. I didn’t dare call her or text her. I thought often of her impassive, unreadable mood when we last slept together, and the timing of it, and I thought often, too, of Jack. I wondered whether I had known her at all. Slowly my obsession began to return, and though I did my best to suppress it I would find myself checking to see if her car was outside when I woke up, lingering as I passed her house in case she came out. I wanted so badly to see her, that feeling of illness back again. She was constantly in my thoughts.

Anneliese was Sophie’s closest friend at Fleet, and she would listen to me describe this without judgment. We spent long afternoons walking out into the university parks, where she photographed trees that she liked, and we sometimes stopped to watch the varsity cricket matches. I found her monologues about the trees comforting.

“This is a very interesting one,” she said to me one day in a serious voice. She adjusted her lens and snapped a photograph. “You can chew its sap, like gum, though it doesn’t taste very nice. You can make furniture out of its wood. And look how the leaves grow reddish there along the fringe, where it overhangs the lake! I wonder if they get more light because of the reflection of the sun, and die sooner.”

“Let me see the picture,” I said.

She showed me. “When the light is very clear like this the branches look beautiful. My f-stop—”

“You should take pictures professionally,” I said.

“Oh, no, it’s only a hobby.” She brought her camera away from her face and looked at me then. “Will?” she said. “Do you want to talk more about Sophie?”

“No, no.”

She touched my forearm. “It’s all right.”

I paused, then said, “Well, how is she?”

“She’s worried. She worries about Jack.”

“Has she mentioned me?”

“Not recently.”

“What is Jack doing?”

“He is at something called a PRT, a Provincial Reconstruction Base. It is in a place called Ghazni. Sophie and I looked it up on the map in the Senior Common Room. His job is to help the local government, but they must also run after the terrorists, he says.”

In her clipped German voice, less prone to contraction, it sounded like a news report. “And he’s an officer?”

“Yes. But there is no officer’s mess, really, and there are only thirty people around him, and he is the youngest lieutenant there, and he hates it. He thinks he is too inexperienced to be there. And he is afraid, also, Sophie says. And an American laughed at him. I think it must be difficult because the Americans don’t care about his background, his credentials. I didn’t tell Sophie that.”

“They talk? Jack and Sophie?”

“He sends an e-mail out once a day to a list of people, telling them he is still alive. Otherwise it’s difficult to reach home. So they do not talk, I don’t think, or not much, and she can’t reach him, and every day at around five in the evening she gets very fretful because perhaps he will not write.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

“You know she’ll never sleep with you again, as long as he’s there.”

“She told you about that?”

Anneliese looked up at the wind in the trees. “For a long time she seemed to cry about it every time I saw her. I told her she should be more gentle with herself.”

“Oh.”

“I wouldn’t tell you this, normally, but I want you to know.” She glanced at me. “Can you understand?”

We were walking down an avenue of lime trees, and I was silent for a while. We stopped when we reached the end, and sat on a bench. “Was it so wrong?” I asked.

She looked away from me, then took my hand and smiled sorrowfully at me. “Yes, I think. I think it was wrong of both of you.”

*   *   *

In 1722, when an aristocratic reprobate named Nicholas Swift was a student at Corpus Christi, his servitor caught him rutting with a woman well over the age of sixty, who worked the kitchens. To forestall their heir’s rustication his family established the Swift Prize. It had grown so rich, three centuries later, that it awarded room, board, and tens of thousands of pounds to twenty students at a time, four new ones every year, without demanding of them any definite responsibilities.

Nearly everyone I knew applied for it—not Tom or Anil, those with direct professional paths ahead of them, but everyone in the humanities—and nobody expected to get it, except, perhaps, me. I had Sinjun on my side.

The person who got it was, in the end, also the person who spoke least often about her work. It was Sophie.

I was at the MCR bar one day when Ella came in and told me the news, irritatingly pleased for our friend.

“They’ve posted all four names?” I asked.

“Oh, shit,” she said with sudden concern. “Did you apply?”

“I did. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t even want to stay.”

“No, and Sophie does.”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “She does.”

I e-mailed her my congratulations and got a reply a few days later.
Thnx, miracles do happen! Not even sure if I’ll take it.

I wondered about St. John. Had I told him her name? I had, I knew I had, and her story too.

When I contemplated four years more of Oxford, the only appeal they had was in other people. For Sophie it would be different; to stay would mean something. She had been pushed out into the world on a little raft when she was eight, alone mostly. Even Jack barely wanted her, the fool. The more I thought about the Swift the more I thought about that word she had used, “miracles,” and what it offers us.

My vague plans of selling out took on practical contours now. I prepared my résumé and took it to a depressing building near Summertown, where I met with a pale career counselor who frowned at its untidiness.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“Something that makes a lot of money.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere in London or Oxford. Preferably Oxford.”

*   *   *

During some of the winter months I had occasionally had sex with an undergraduate girl, Melissa. She wasn’t especially interested. British girls seemed more experienced than American ones, and less generous, too, and her grumbling criticisms and exhortations (“
There,
not there!” and “You’re pinching my skin! You’re pinching my skin!”) seemed to me to prevent her from achieving whatever state of bliss she expected.

Still, because I was one of the few people known to have been hooking up, in the MCR I was widely suspected to be the Sex Bandit—the nickname everyone was calling the person who had sex on the dining room table. I protested that it was all over long ago—since I’d slept with Sophie, in fact, though I didn’t say as much—but people still eyed me charily. Personally I suspected Peter and Ella.

As it fell out, though, we were all wrong. Before a meeting in the third week of April, word spread that someone was going to step forward. Because of this it was unusually crowded. I’m not sure what we were all expecting, but we got it right away. The moment new business was called for Peter’s hand shot into the air.

“Yes?” said Richard reluctantly.

“I just wanted to suggest the cancellation of the skeet-shooting vote,” he said. “Nobody supported it in the last meeting, and I don’t think that you should use your override, Richard.”

Giorgio looked furious. “How is this new business?”

“It’s not. I just wanted to make that suggestion. Do you agree to it?”

“Of course not,” said Richard. “Even the suggestion is ludicrous.”

Peter sighed and looked deeply conflicted. “It will eat up such a lot of money.”

“The issue is off the table,” Giorgio said.

“Unlike the Sex Bandit,” said Anil.

“In that case, I do have new business. I know who the Sex Ban—who has been having sex on the dining room table.”

There was an intake of breath in the room, and then a long silence.

“Well?” said Tom, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Who was it?”

“I came in at 4:00
A.M.
last night after working in the library. About fifteen minutes later, two people came in. I had dozed off, or I would have said something before they started. As it was, I left before they noticed me, but I saw their faces.”

Peter paused. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense!” said Tom. “Who!?”

“It was Giorgio,” said Peter.

Giorgio was bright red, and above the din he said. “This man is a liar.”

“I saw it, too,” Ella said quietly.

Peter waited until the room was quiet.

“The other person was Richard,” he said.

This revelation caused the most profound pandemonium I had ever seen in the MCR. Several people shouted out, others looked on with unspeaking but deep gratification, nearly everyone broke into a conversation at once, and one sensitive soul, Bert, the chemistry DPhil, was so moved by the news that his glass of water slipped from his hand.

When the din finally settled, there was a protracted discussion in which first Giorgio denied Peter’s account, then Richard stood up and proudly admitted it, and said, pounding his chest Gallically, “To use the MCR, is it not an appanage of office, ladies and gentlemen! Why should I be ashamed?”

To which Tom said, “You should be ashamed because you wanted to go skeet shooting and spend all of our money and made Peter come in every morning to wash the MCR table, you prat!”

Peter, a more peaceable soul, said, “A standard punishment for public indecency, according to the—erm, the amendment that you wrote, Giorgio, to the MCR Constitution, would be a three-month suspension of MCR membership. With an accompanying abdication of any office held within the MCR government.”

Giorgio stood up. “I’m leaving.”

“You’ll recall I argued it was too harsh at the time,” said Peter.

Richard said, “This is homophobia!”

“Please,” said Tom.

“Gay or straight,” Peter said, “it is inappropriate to have sex in the MCR, or indeed in any college building.”

“Yeah,” said Ella.

“Yeah,” said Tom. Then he looked at me with a grin, because he knew I knew he and Ella had once had sex in the Fleet library. Fortunately Ella’s eyes were on Peter.

After a day of hushed consideration Giorgio and Richard agreed to leave office if they did not have to suspend their membership in the MCR. They also came out as a couple, which right away increased their popularity—their mutual loyalty made so much more sense that way. Shortly thereafter Peter, following a very low-key campaign, was elected president. He was suited to the position and filled it admirably, soliciting with special care the opinion of the former president; but every so often I would see Giorgio and Richard huddled in some corner of the dining hall, speaking quietly, occasionally with Xi or some other acolyte, and feel certain that they were planning a coup.

*   *   *

I think perhaps it sounds as if I were unhappy in Oxford, especially during this March and April, but I wasn’t. The failure is in my telling, because those days were wonderful, altering, rich in their inattention, profuse with chance.

Already I’ve forgotten to explain how the Bodleian looked under snow, how total the silence of that inner courtyard became, above all how companionable it was for all of us working anonymously together in the bright reading rooms, warm. How we all glanced through the window from time to time at the chill fall of light, how honored and safe it seemed to belong to that loose net of humans inside the Bod, in the days after it snowed, for a moment present in the infinite continuum of Oxford.