The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

  —Norman Rush

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I was a self-serious child of ten or eleven I believed that novels were largely about the weather. In a fit of ambition I would start The Rainbow or Lord Jim, books I carried around school in the hopes that someone might ask me what I was reading, and which perhaps I thought would inaugurate my career as, what, a grown-up? A thinker? I’m not sure. Every one of them opened with the same thwarting descent of description: It was an unusually hot March evening in upper Cornwall; the rain in Burma had been going for days; the clouds lowered over the moor. The first eighty pages of A Passage to India are a description of some caves. I’m pulling that number from memory, so it may be inexact, if anything too low, but the point stands.

  I suspected that in the end humans would walk into this weather—I remember feeling a spark of excitement when a “cart” threatened to provide me with some in Return of the Native—but I attached no special primacy to them. I rarely made it further than six or seven paragraphs into any of those books, which left my illusions about their nature intact. Finally when I was twelve some intelligent adult—likely my mother—got it over with and gave me The Catcher in the Rye, and I found the same banal and vibrant sanities everyone does in that book.

  Really, those novels were right, however: There are times in life when the weather and the landscape seem suddenly as if they’re for you alone, and for a moment there’s a novelistic pressure, an interiority, to gazing out through a window at the snow, or the sun.

  I’m thinking of the late August afternoon when I was supposed to leave New York for England. It was uncommonly cold for the month, and there was a heavy rain, the kind of day that reminds you, oh, of course, the other seasons are coming soon.

  “Are you hungry?” Alison asked.

  I shook my head. “Not especially.”

  “Come on, we’re forgetting something. You had pizza last night, we got soup from Veselka. What else are you going to miss?”

  “Well, you.” My tone had it both ways, mocking this kind of straightforward tenderness and taking credit for it, too.

  She rolled her eyes. “My hero.”

  We were in the living room of our apartment on Horatio Street. Its estranging collocation of familiar objects—its picture frames, its hanging garden of pots, its chromatically organized bookshelves—seemed so much like a vision of life to me, now that I was leaving.

  “I should go soon anyway. I have to check all these bags.”

  “Okay.” She stood up, her long brown hair falling down her shoulders. There was a tangle of silver necklaces spilling in and out of the top of her shirt, and her sweet, intelligent face—prone to worry—was drawn inward with concentration. “Last check, then. You have the bag of medicines I packed for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have a sweater handy in case it’s cold when you get in.”

  I pointed toward the largest suitcase. “Yep.”

  “And do you have a book?”

  “The Captive Mind, it’s sitting right in the outer pocket of the blue bag. With my headphones. And the sweater.”

  “And that bag of pretzels I got you for a snack?”

  “And that bag of pretzels you got me for a snack.”

  “And your passport.”

  I felt my eyes widen. “Oh, no.”

  She smiled to acknowledge the joke, and then when my face didn’t change her expression grew uncertain. “Wait, are you kidding?”

  I stood up, my ears hot, my face tingling. “I didn’t even think about it.”

  “Where did you leave it after you got your visa?”

  “Seriously, I don’t know.”

  We spent the next fifteen minutes rifling through our uncluttered apartment like thieves. I inspected every pile of paper I could find, old bills, Christmas cards, making no effort to reassemble them before I moved on. How long did it take to get a passport? Or could Alison’s dad get me a temporary one, good for a week or two until she could find mine and overnight it to England?

  I was in the bedroom, sifting through our drawers of clothes, mine empty now, when I heard her call out. “I found it.”

  “Oh God, thank fuck.” I ran to the living room, where she held the passport up in triumph. “Is that definitely it?”

  “Yeah, it was next to mine. From Montreal in July.”

  I took it and flipped to my picture to make sure. “Jesus. Thank you.”

  I looked around. “The apartment is a disaster. I should clean.”

  She looked at her watch. “No, no, you don’t have time. I’ll tidy it up when you’re gone.”

  “Thanks, babe.” I put the passport in my pocket, a stiff, awkward panel of hide. “Should we go downstairs?”

  “Just come lie with me for a minute first, would you?”

  “In bed?”

  “Yeah.”

  We went into the bedroom. She kicked off her shoes and slipped herself into the sheets, and as I followed her in she pulled me close, her encircling arms a loose, too loose, fortification, the walls of a city anybody could get into or out of. “A whole year,” she murmured after a minute.

  “It’s not even that long.”

  I loved her more than I had in months, months. Our breath began to even out, the silence of the battering rain. I looked at the bedroom, gray in the unlit afternoon, at the cheerful battalion of photographs of us along her dresser, and next to them at her perfume bottles, clustered in their leather tray. The quiet disloyalty of objects. How serious it is to be young!

  It seemed impossible that the next morning I wouldn’t blunder sleepily out of that bed, that it would be elsewhere, in different time.

  Alison and I had first lain together this way four years before, during college. We had been on a few dates already, but there was still a formal element to our conversations, even our kisses. One Saturday my friends Geoff, Ben, and I spent a few hours throwing a football to each other on Old Campus. We stopped as it began to get dark, and even though I was hot and dusty I decided to drop by her room; I hadn’t been there yet. She lived in Connecticut Hall, a building made of that salmon-white brick common to all of the remaining colonial houses in New England, on the third floor.

  She answered the door in a hoodie and navy shorts, with YALE written in white along the hem on her left thigh. “Hey,” she said and looked past me up and down the hallway, as if I might be part of a group. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to say hi.”

  She looked puzzled for another instant, but then her face opened with comprehension. “Oh, good, sure. Come in. I was watching TV.”

  We sat on her bed to watch together. I fell asleep right away. I remember briefly waking, feeling cold and shifting my weight into her body. Her hand was stroking my head, and her neck, where my face was buried, was
warm and fragrant and sleepy, like a hayfield at the end of summer.

  Now, essentially for the first time since then, our two bodies would be apart, we would be apart. She looked at me. “Are you sure I can’t come to the airport?” she said.

  “No, no, go to the fund-raiser.”

  “Okay.” She looked at her watch. “You should leave, you’ll never be able to get a cab in this weather.”

  In fact I got a cab immediately, my day’s travel misfortune already allotted to the passport scare, and we loaded my bags into the trunk and the backseat.

  “Look out for some treats,” she said. “They might be squashed, I guess.”

  I smiled. Whenever I went on trips alone I would find things that she had tucked into my luggage, magazines, Snickers bars. “Thanks.”

  She gave me a kiss. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “In a month. It’s practically tomorrow.”

  “Ha.”

  I got into the cab. She was standing with her arms folded, watching me, from the dry of the awning. I got out and gave her a last kiss on the cheek, and she smiled and squeezed my hand. Then I left.

  Right then I wanted what we all want: both things; to leave and to stay at the same time. I looked through the window at the wet-blurred taillights of the cabs around me, their brightness an increasing proportion of everything visible out in the world. I remembered that day in college, how after we woke up Alison and I had spent half an hour making a poster to welcome Bill Clinton to a meeting. We both belonged to the lower reaches of the upper reaches of the byzantine bureaucracy that ran the Yale Democrats. That was how we’d met.

  “What should I put?” she asked, sitting cross-legged, marker in hand, hair back in a ponytail.

  “I would avoid mentioning blow jobs.”

  “What about kneepads? Or impeachment? Or Ken Starr? Or Whitewater?”

  “Maybe impeachment if you have a good joke.”

  “No, come on, what should I put?”

  “Hm. Maybe something about Bulldogs? Go Bulldogs? Bulldogs for Bill?”

  “I think I’m going to draw some bunting and write just ‘Welcome Home,’ in big letters,” she said. “I think he’ll appreciate that.”

  “It’ll definitely come in handy the next time you go to a rally in Arkansas.”

  “He went to school here. That’s like a home.”

  As the cab moved north toward the Midtown Tunnel, I opened the outer pocket of my suitcase to fetch my book and came across a bag of Twizzlers, which had been on Alison’s list of the foods they didn’t have in England. I opened it and ate one and thought of that phrase, That’s like a home. I had reached the age by then, twenty-five, when I had finally stopped believing, in some illogical and hopeful chamber of my heart, that one day we might all gather up our things, reassemble, my friends and I, Alison, and go back to school again together. Yet here I was, returning in a way. Without them, fine; but without her, that seemed unkind.

  * * *

  My first exchange with an English person was at Immigration.

  “Coming from?”

  “New York.”

  “Didn’t bring anything dangerous or alive, did you now?”

  I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  He gave me a sharp look. “What’s that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He looked down at my immigration card. “Says here you’re going up to uni, then? English literature?”

  He said these last two words as if they were individually irreproachable but hilariously stupid side by side. “Yes, sir.”

  He stamped my passport. “Well, you’re not so clever yet.”

  Not much later I was on the train to Oxford. It was a bright day, and from the window I gazed at the distant concavities of the landscape, the green swales that dipped away from the tracks and then rose in steep hills to meet the afternoon light. Intermittently I dozed, with the heavy wakefulness of the overnight traveler. Finally in the last half hour of the trip I got some real rest, and woke only when an old woman pushing a cart came through the train. I bought a cup of coffee from her.

  When we arrived I took a cab to my new college, Fleet; at Oxford every student belongs both to the university and to one of its forty constituent colleges, each its own dominion upon a few acres, with its own library, its own bar, its own chapel. From the cobblestone lane outside the college I looked up and saw its high white spires, and through the tall, black-iron gates a stretch of green grass. I would wait to look around, I thought.

  Instead I fetched my room key from the porters, a group of men in bowler hats and gray wool suits. The porters’ lodge lay just inside the gates. (“Cheek,” said one of them lazily when he had to leave his tea to help me.) From there I turned right down a lane just near the gates and found myself at the Cottages, a row of twelve brick houses, haphazardly rife with ivy, where Fleet’s graduate students lived. It was also the corridor that connected the college to the center of the city.

  My house was the third to last, with a flagstone courtyard before it and a long, slender garden full of fading trees behind. At the door I staggered to a standstill under my bags, panting slightly, then with a last great crash went inside and let everything drop off my shoulders in the entryway. Above me, halfway up the stairs, was another student.

  “You look as if you’ve been on a death march,” he said.

  “I overpacked.”

  He smiled, and we met on the second step to shake hands. “I’m Tom Raleigh. If you’re William Baker you’re room four, next to me. Anyway I don’t imagine you’re Anil Gupta, in room two, or Margo Peabody, room one. Let me take some of those bags.”

  Tom was English, tall, thin, and pale, with freckles and bright red lips. Looking at him for the first time I saw a trace of privately educated cruelty in his heavy-eyed expression, of wishes met, small worlds conquered. He picked up three of my bags, and I hauled the rest up the stairs behind him. On the second floor were two doors, and through his I could see half-unpacked boxes and a squat refrigerator. “My sister dropped me off this morning,” he said. We stopped in front of the heavy oak door just next to his, which was mine. My name was printed on it in gold leaf.

  He put down my things. “Get settled, then knock on my door for a beer if you like. My sister also filled my fridge before she left.”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  He hesitated and then grinned. “Americans everywhere,” he said. “That’s Oxford now, I suppose.”

  I closed the door behind me and called my mother. “Hey, it’s me. I made it.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “I’m in my room, just got here.”

  “I can’t believe you live in another country! What is it like? What can you see?”

  “It’s not bad.” I looked around. “There’s a fireplace, but it has a radiator in it. I have a couple of windows, so I can see the yard. Wait, if I lean out—I’m leaning out, and I can see the back lawns of Fleet. Just like that picture I showed you online, only they look bigger.”

  “I can’t believe you’re there! Is it beautiful?”

  “I haven’t seen much.”

  “Can you get the Times?”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “It’s England, not North Korea.”

  “Do you want me to send it to you?”

  “Please don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I can’t believe you’re in England! What did Alison say?”

  “I’m about to call her.”

  After we hung up I lumped down into one of the armchairs by the window—I couldn’t face unpacking—and looked out.

  I had a strange, displaced feeling, heightened by fatigue. It was a mystery to me how I had come to be here. Not practically—after my last job ended I had sent in an application, a late one, but I was so settled in New York that it had never seemed likely to come to anything. A number of events in the year that preceded my arrival in Oxford had pushed me toward a change, but I might as easily have gone to Shangha
i or Bermuda.

  It was true that I had never felt more at home anywhere than college, and that I missed it. Oxford, specifically, was linked in my mind with a peculiar blended sense of peace and grandeur. I had a weakness for that. This was my first time in England, but it was a country, dangerously, that I had loved for much of my life, especially during the unhappy and turbulent days of my childhood, when I devised a kind of imaginative home there without ever having been, based on the books to which I exiled myself: Sherlock Holmes, Kenneth Grahame, C. S. Lewis. Why had they once made me so happy, I wondered? The calm, the civility, the safety, I suppose—lengthening shadows on the cricket pitch, tea at five—all of it foolish. There’s no lasting safety to life. The only thing that will become of anyone is death. Yet: I felt an exhaling happiness to gaze out at the English sunlight, the English trees. Soon enough I fell asleep again.

  * * *

  There was a knock on the door thirty or forty minutes later. It was Tom. He took the other armchair, and for a while we talked, feet up on the windowsill. He asked if I had looked through college yet.

  “No, have you?”

  He shook his head. “Not in years. My sister was at Fleet. My father was at Magdalen, and I remember that better.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “LSE. I haven’t been in Oxford for ages. Shall we go see it, do you think? It’s fucking hideous, I bet, but I’m sure the porters will show us around.”

  Three porters were sitting in the lodge. They looked at us so dourly, as if we, the students, were the only blemish on their otherwise perfect happiness—which may well have been true—that I suspected the sign posted by the window that read ASK US FOR A TOUR! to be insincere.

  “We were thinking about a tour of the college.”

  “JERRY!” they roared in unison.

  “Bloody hell,” said Tom.

  The head porter pointed to a door at the far end of the lodge. “Jerry’ll show you about. He likes ’em, the tours. I can’t be asked personally.”

  Expectantly we looked at the door, and after a moment an immensely dignified figure, not above five foot three, stepped through it. He had dark gray hair, a paunch under his college-crested blue sweater and college-crested blue button-down, and glasses that made him look like an owl.