The Last Enchantments (29 page)

Or when spring came I found this pub of my own, the Wheatsheaf. I never took anyone there. The windows were propped open with old books, letting the breeze in, and on the walls were sepia cricket pictures and menus from the nineteenth century. There was a cigarette-smoke-dirtied portrait of Gladstone hanging over the taps. I went there every morning to have coffee and croissants. It was usually mostly empty, so I could have all to myself one of the high-backed booths, upholstered in rich green, that ran along one wall. Copies of the daily papers would be scattered around the room at random, and I would take one and read. The same group of three old men sat at the bar every morning between nine and noon, nursing pints of bitter, and on the first day when they all said hello upon my entrance I felt triumphant: a regular.

Then, and I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it was, there were the kebab vans. Anybody from Oxford will know what I mean. Arabic men ran all of them, and they all had their proponents, but Tom, Ella, and I liked one called Hassan’s, on Broad Street, to which most of Fleet was devoted. (St. John’s liked Houssain’s; Christ Church liked Sid’s Kitchen.) Anyway, they served everything, open until dawn. The two most popular things they had were kebab pitas, stuffed with dubious-looking meat, lettuce, mayonnaise, and hot sauce, and chips and cheese, which was what I got. I can taste it now. Because Hassan’s was so busy the chips were always fresh and damp, newly salted, and it makes my mouth water to think about every random night after the Turtle when I would get a medium-sized foam box full of them, smothered in some generic kind of cheese with ketchup and mayonnaise. All of it melted together into a mess. I can’t think of any late-night snack that compares to it—not New Haven pizza, not a hot dog on the street in New York.

A million words started to mean something:
Green Wing,
Arsenal, Parky, Paxman, Jonathan Ross, Cesc Fàbregas, Jodie Marsh, Prime Minister’s Questions, Michael Hague, Jordan and Peter, Jemima Kahn,
Akenfield,
the Stig, “put paid to,” “bottle,” “nous.” Or my favorite, “tired and emotional”—a phrase that, applied to politicians, meant drunk.

It was a great mental unburdening to live there. Even when I worried about the future, New York was still a million miles away; the life I had left behind there, Alison, all of the human beings succeeding and failing, the people pushing through medical school and law school or trying to get above the fold at the
Times,
all the people working in politics—it seemed mute and evanescent in the daily e-mails I received from friends back home. What a relief, after so many years of striving! From high school to college, from college to New York, from a job to a better job. Like having a headache so long you forget what it’s like to feel well, and then one day, the pain rising, and vanishing, and the world all right again. That was Oxford for me.

That and all of it: the old quads, the mellifluous summer whisper of tree and water, Mob Quad, the fat lazy walk down Broad Street, the chintzy tuck shops and sandwich stands near the bus station, the lawns behind Trinity, the dust of the Ashmolean, the cracked eggs and glitter and white flour scattered outside the Exams School after people were trashed, trips down into the dodge of Cowley, used bookshop, the covered markets, the Bear, all of the city’s spires lined up toward the Bodleian …

It’s hard without some pain to think of the past, how perishable both it and its certainties are: how once upon a time we belonged to something, to a school, a person, a group of friends; and how we no longer do. In many ways Oxford was a terrible place. Like anyone else who went there I acknowledged the legitimacy of what C. S. Lewis had said, “The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing, humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They’ll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it somehow when the time comes, don’t you worry.”

Still, I loved it. C. S. Lewis, whatever his grumbling, never left, and I wonder if perhaps he, too, preferred Matthew Arnold’s description, of the city venerable and serene, how its gardens spread themselves under the moonlight, home to forsaken beliefs and impossible loyalties, the city itself a mystery and a charm: whispering, from her towers, the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER
NINE

On the first day of April I saw Sophie outside of Fleet Hall.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi, Will.” Her tone was neutral.

“Are you coming into Hall?”

“No, picking up a snack.” She held out an apple. “My long essay’s due soon. I should run.”

“Okay. Maybe later.”

“Bye.”

I had been thinking about Jack all the time, wondering how his life compared to mine. Was he eating those meals that came in plastic slipcovers, MREs, or was that just the American army? What food did he miss? Did he have access to the Internet? What was the toilet paper like? Was he sunburned? What if he needed ChapStick, did you have to get it requisitioned or was there a shop? If he was craving peanuts, could he get ahold of peanuts? Was it a desert he was in or were there trees and scrub? How many hours of his waking day was there not a gun in his hands? Why was he there? Why did he have to apply to Sandhurst out of public school instead of university? Bad grades? Family tradition? Had he seen anyone die? Did they let them have iPods? If so, what was he listening to? Music that Ella had given him? Was there a picture of Soph tacked up on his bunk? In his bag? What picture was it? Could she possibly have given him a naked picture of herself, if he cajoled her into it? Was that in her? And how could I feel jealous even now, when it was only an invented question in my mind, what was wrong with me? Did he jack off into a sock thinking about her body every night? About Minka’s body? Was there the privacy for that? Did he get the news from England? What did he say to his mother in letters home? Did he read books there? Could he get a copy of
The Times
? Did he think about me?

I could wonder about these things and at the same time I knew that if she had asked I would have walked back to the Cottages and slept with her as many times as she wanted, however she wanted to betray him, whatever she wanted to do with me. It was hopeless love.

Ella was across the quad when I said good-bye to Sophie, and she came right over. “What was that?”

“Nothing much.”

She snorted, not unkindly. “It sucks, huh?”

“Are you getting food?”

“Yeah, let’s have lunch.”

“Has it gotten better for you yet?” I asked as we went up the steps to Hall. “With Tom?”

“Not especially. A little.”

“But Peter—”

“Not especially. A little.”

*   *   *

Bank after bank returned my application with thanks and a rejection letter. Soon I started to fear seriously that I would leave Oxford without any plan. Should I begin a doctorate? I could afford to pay my own way. I could try to find a job in journalism. Could I write a book, perhaps about working in politics? There would be an election in 2008, and for six months or so political books would be bestsellers again. No, I didn’t think I could. So many people I had known mistook themselves for writers because they thought they must be something special; they always had been so far. (Or else such people were photographers, so many of them.) What occurred to me was that maybe I was nothing special at all.

The truth was that I didn’t know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, not knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom—just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children—so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of nondecisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike.

One day I explained my anxiety to my mother. She cut me off. “Oh, go see your cousin’s husband in London, Franklin. He’ll give you a job.”

“He will? What are you talking about?”

“He does investments. He’ll like you. He married your cousin Maggie, Lucy’s sister.”

“There’s no way he’d hire me. I’m doing an English degree, and I’m American.”

“He married an American. Listen, if I set it up will you meet with him?”

Two weeks later I took the train to London and after a tube ride found myself standing in the lobby of the Gherkin. I felt like an impostor in my suit, the way a teenager dressed up for the first time thinks everyone on the street is staring at him.

I was encouraged when I got to the thirty-seventh floor and discovered that my cousin’s husband didn’t work at an investment firm—he ran one. The thirty-seventh, thirty-eighth, and fortieth floors housed the offices of Franklin Cross. (I don’t know what happened on the thirty-ninth floor—ritual killing and satanic orgies probably, or a gym.)

Our meeting began exactly on time. “How do you do?” he said, leading me into his office himself, a red-cheeked old rugby type. He had a view of the city that ran from the Tower of London to the Houses of Parliament, westward down the Thames. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Thanks so much for seeing me.”

“Our Maggie has a good eye. You study English, she mentioned? I like that. The best chap I’ve got has a DPhil in philosophy. A Jew. But he doesn’t bother about it, he would sell Spinoza’s bones if there was a buyer. He makes a million pounds a year, or thereabouts anyway.”

“Should we start our bargaining there, then?”

He smiled. “Good lad. All right, you’re meeting with a couple of my senior men. They’ll give me their opinion of you, administer a test, look at your records—Maggie said you’re some kind of thing in politics, which is good, people skills—and if everything’s positive you’ve got a job. It’s a hundred twenty a year, and benefits. The usual sort, gym membership, private health insurance, life insurance, retirement. Raise every six months, ten to twelve percent. Six to eight if the economy tanks. We’ll work you to the ground. You’d start in September.”

He stood up, and we shook hands. “Thank you. Thanks so much.”

“Give those fuckers at Christ Church hell for me, would you? I was in Oriel myself.”

That was all I saw of Franklin—a minute, ninety seconds—and then I spent the rest of the day with two men. One was fat and one was thin, and to my astonishment they were called Mr. Black and Mr. White. (“We aren’t like those chaps in
Reservoir Dogs,
don’t worry,” said White in a practiced tone.) They asked me about two hundred questions, most of which were incomprehensible. (“What did the LIBOR open at this morning?” “How many basis points has the Nikkei risen year-to-date?” “What is a safe BRIC exposure for an aggressive fund?”)

“How many people could you fit in this room?” White asked.

“Twenty.”

“The right answer is, with or without the furniture,” said Black, shaking his head.

“With or without the furniture?”

“With.”

“Twenty.”

Neither of them laughed. “How many golf balls could you fit in this room?” asked White.

“With or without the furniture?” I asked.

I left London certain that I hadn’t gotten the job, and so of course two days later I got it. For the fiftieth time I did the math in my head—$190,000 a year, and for what, for qualifications that I didn’t have. I couldn’t quite believe it. I had some money from a trust that my father’s death had dissolved, but my family is wary about capital and I was loath to touch it. Here was real money, to spend. Every night as I fell asleep I repeated the figure in my head, surprised, and imagined the crisply decorated one-bedroom apartment I could get, looking over the Thames, furnished as if I were an adult. I pictured Sophie visiting me there and dropping one of her soft brown leather bags on the kind of modernist chair on which it deserved to be dropped. I did my best to forget how I had gotten the job, through the same well-worn avenues of nepotism that, I harangued people every day by e-mail or at the bar, had ruined the American government, had manufactured the gross inequality of my home country—had given me my whole life, in truth, if I thought about it.

Before too long I knew what the LIBOR was and where the Nikkei was trading. I studied the markets every morning when I woke up and read books about the essentials of the stock market. I canceled my print subscription to
The New York Times,
figuring I could read it for the political stuff online when I had time (no paywall in those days), and replaced it with one to
The Wall Street Journal.

*   *   *

A few afternoons after I got the job, I ran into Jess in Blackwell’s.

Blackwell’s is Oxford’s primary bookstore. It sits flush against Trinity College and looks as if it belongs to Diagon Alley, two smallish crooked houses of irregular rooms. The stock is an eccentric mixture of popular and academic books, and there’s a café with a fireplace and armchairs. I used to go there often simply to read, but when I bumped into Jess I was in search of a copy of
A Clergyman’s Daughter,
Orwell’s worst novel. (
Coming Up for Air
is pretty good,
Burmese Days
interesting as a document,
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
outright underrated, and of course
1984
and
Animal Farm
have their immortal moments, but otherwise it’s best to stick to his essays and memoirs.) Jess was facing a bank of oversized art books, looking through a collection of paintings by Pieter de Hooch. She looked pale, I thought. Her blond hair just touched the pages of the book as she looked down at it.

“Jess, hey,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder.

She turned. “Oh, hullo, Will.” Her smile was so familiar. “This is a bit awkward.”

“No, no. I’m happy for you. I think you’re great for him.”