The second tradition was pennying. If you could bounce a penny off of the table and into anyone else’s glass while they weren’t touching the glass, that person had, was absolutely required, to drink it down to the bottom. This was theoretically to save the queen, because the queen’s picture is on the penny. (“These little bastards, ruining the best of Fleet’s cellar by tossing copper into the wine,” I once overheard the same dean say when he thought nobody was listening except the master.)
We arrived at Hall in high spirits. Tom and I, ready early at the Cottages, had spent half an hour watching Anil put on a fashion show. After several changes he emerged from his room in a black velvet jacket with gold epaulets, wearing a tie of scorching neon yellow.
“That tie is a little bright,” I said.
“Haters gonna hate,” said Anil, and he had a point.
At Hall we sat with Timmo and Anneliese, and then vigilantly watched the entrance of the undergraduate girls. They had arrived a few days before with trains of duffel bags and weepy mothers.
“At LSE the grad students got the pick of the undergrads,” Tom whispered to me.
“At Yale the grad students were like lepers.”
“Americans do everything backward. Even your toilets go backward.”
“That’s Australia.”
We sat, poured out a glass of wine each, and were immediately pennied. As for Anil, he was pennied dozens of times but refused, imperiously, to drink, which alienated him from the undergrads around us. It also made him a celebrity. At the end of the night there were thirty or forty pennies in his untouched glass of wine, and the captain of the undergraduate rugby team had come over from high table to see the apostasy for himself, a look of deep consternation on his face. “Aren’t you going to drink it?”
Anil, arms crossed, said, “Absolutely not.”
“Blimey,” said the captain.
That was later. Before they had served any food, Tom grabbed my arm. “Look,” he said in an urgent whisper.
It was the Asian girl from the bar, with the pink and black hair and the tattoos. She was wearing a not-much-of-a dress. “Maybe she’ll sit with us.”
As if she had heard—though she couldn’t have—she turned in our direction and caught us staring dead at her. She rolled her eyes and sat down in the first open seat she could find. In a way it made me glad Sophie hadn’t come.
Except that then, ten minutes after our twenty-nine word grace, as we were eating soup, she appeared at the door, in a long gold and white dress, hair up, a glittering black clutch held in her two hands, almost as if she were nervous. She was alone. I wondered if she knew her housemates yet, and waved at her tentatively, as she scanned the room. When she saw me she smiled and came toward us. My heart fluttered. I made Anil move down.
I introduced them to her. She and Tom had friends in common, and places, too, which they discovered quickly enough. Then she spent some time querying Anil about his course and his origins. When the soup was gone and there was a moment when Anil and Tom were talking to each other, she turned to me, and we talked.
“I can’t believe you saw me cry. You’re in select company.”
I laughed. “How did the breakup go?”
“It had to be done.”
I nodded and raised my glass. “Congratulations.”
“And you, do you have a girlfriend?”
“I do.”
“What’s she called?”
“Alison.”
“She’s here?”
“No, in New York.”
In an idle tone, she said, “I wonder if it’ll last.”
For the rest of the meal she and I talked exclusively to each other, without any break. It was unusually easy, and as they brought dessert, a gelatinous cylinder of something, mousse, panna cotta, who knew, I realized that it was making me miss Alison, the presence of a woman near me—and that it was making me miss having sex, too. Sophie looked more ethereal than Alison did, as if she held more back, and also as if she lacked Alison’s sturdy intelligence, but she traded it in for something more evasive, more alluring. She had very high cheekbones; light hazel eyes; slight, reddish lips; and a body that was slender but curved, long-limbed. She smiled more to herself than to me. I found her enthralling.
Though she was never very autobiographical, that night and in the next weeks I did discover a little bit about her. Neither of her parents worked. She grew up in a stone parsonage in Yorkshire, though they spent a month each spring in London and a month each fall in the French countryside, where she had learned to speak the language. Her father kept horses and pigs, and her best memories of childhood were of their matutinal visitations to the barn, each with a mug of tea. At the age of eight her parents had sent her—“I was sent,” she said, using the passive voice, which seemed indistinctly sad, as if nobody were quite responsible—to boarding school. There she was unhappy, though she never elaborated on how, or indeed even said outright that it was the case. I could simply tell.
She did tell me one story about it. As a child she had asked for a dog every birthday, and on her sixth birthday she had woken up to find a springer spaniel puppy outside her door. Before an hour was out they were inseparable, and within a year I think she was closer to Chessie—as she called the dog—than to any human. She had no brothers or sisters. When the dog had thrush at a year old, Sophie didn’t sleep for forty hours.
Two years later, with the car loaded to take her to boarding school for the first time, Sophie had gotten into the backseat of her parents’ Land Rover—rather bravely, from the sound of it—with her dog.
“Why d’you have Chessie in the car?” her father had asked.
“She’s coming with me, of course.”
Her father laughed, a laugh that no doubt seemed innocent of meaning to him but to her, as a child, felt like a Roman emperor’s whimsical malice—parents forget how long a single word can bore into a child, forever—and said, “No, no, she has to stay here. None of the girls will have a dog. Imagine!”
That was the worst moment of her life—and you could judge her for that, for of course many people have many worse moments every day, but only if you don’t remember what it’s like to be little, and how it seems as if nobody could ever understand you.
“Is she still alive?” I asked.
“Just about. But she’s old. Every time my mother calls I’m sure it’s to tell me she’s dead.”
During high school she had spent a year away in France. She went to university at Durham—which is a kind of mimic Oxbridge, a consolation for the unlucky—and studied French literature. She was somewhat scornful of England, but she was loyal to her class, in favor of the monarchy, supportive without much interest of England’s rugby and cricket teams, unable to imagine residing anywhere else permanently, even France. Still, she had imprinted on her character the restlessness, the half-hidden strangeness, of the traveler. I went to boarding school much later, at fourteen, but I think it helped me understand her.
She was telling me about Durham when Anil interrupted us.
“Sophie,” he said, “would you like to hear how we cook soup in Mumbai?”
“Of course,” she said politely, though it was evident that Anil had allowed for no other possibility in his mind.
As he rambled on I got pennied again. My hand had slipped from my cup as I stared at her in some indirect way; and I drank deeply again, and started to forget.
* * *
After Hall finished and the professors had processed away to wherever they drank port, we went to the lawns. There was a traditional handbell concert in Anna’s Court at ten, but none of us were in a rush to see it except Anneliese, who ran down every English tradition she could find, corgis, clotted cream, faded gravestones. She must have seen the Ceremony of the Keys six times.
I was drunk. Tom and I lay on our backs, our ties loosened, gazing up at the stars. I’ve never been able to tell the constellations, though I don’t mind. To know them would organize away what amazes me
about stars, their random density, their numerousness.
They were all curious about America. It was Timmo who said, “Is it true everyone in America’s fat, then?”
“Yes,” I said.
His potato face expanded with pleasure. “Really!”
“Not the movie stars. Or the president. Or me.”
“But mostly?” said Anneliese.
“No, no. I do remember thinking midwesterners were fat when I lived there.”
“Where?”
“The middle part of the country.”
“The Great Plains, they call it,” said Tom knowledgeably.
“Some of it,” I said.
“Where’d you go?” Anneliese asked.
“I was in Ohio. Iowa, actually, then Ohio.”
“How fat were they?” Timmo asked, eyes gleaming. I’ve always thought there was something humorless about people in peak fitness. “Very fat?”
“I’m not sure how to say…”
“Well, how many stone were they?”
“How much is a stone?”
“Fourteen pounds,” said Sophie.
I thought for a second. “Maybe the fat men are twenty stone, or something. Really it’s the fat kids, though. You would see a family of four, each eating like two hamburgers and a large fries, with a large Coke, and then maybe a McFlurry after that.”
All of them looked gratified, especially Anil, at this intelligence. “Oh, dear,” he said.
“I can’t say I haven’t done the same,” I admitted.
“Why were you in Ohio?” asked Sophie.
“I was working for John Kerry.”
“Mate, bad luck!” said Timmo, looking genuinely moved.
It was a sign that even someone as civically diffident as Timmo would commiserate with me, and there was a chorus of agreement. This was during the middle of the war in Iraq, two years after “Mission Accomplished,” and Bush’s reputation in England—which had never been high—was as a martial coward and an enemy of the poor.
“Was it fun at least?” asked Sophie. “The campaign?”
“It was amazing.” The bottle of wine came to me. “Everyone’s working really hard, and you’re all tired but you’re in it together, too, if you know what I mean, and there are constant little romances, and once every few days your candidate will come in and give a big rousing speech, and then you’re always putting out fires.”
“But losing must have been just awful,” Anneliese said.
“It was.”
It still felt fresh. I had been disappointed, for Kerry and for myself. I had been relieved to go home. I had been tired, definitely really tired.
Above all, I had been angry. I became interested in politics during high school, probably because it was considered a mark of intelligence, and when I reached college, and Clinton was president, the field had possessed a glamour for me—in its plain ambition, its competitive cleverness. I was a traditional liberal, for reasons that seemed self-evident, and which I probably acquired naively. Of course poor people ought to have better schools; of course the death penalty was wrong.
That glamour soured and my opinions intensified and clarified in the early 2000s. By the time I was in Oxford—partly because of the personal ignominy of losing the campaign—those feelings were too deep, ranting, almost embarrassing. I could see people retreat to politeness when I began to express myself, even like-minded people. I hated the president and his privileged, plausible, errant allies. What angered me almost to madness was that their rich and luxurious lives were, like mine, predicated on inherited privilege, and yet I felt—one always feels—that I was different. The inequality of circumstance for which I had felt guilty my entire life was to the president something to enshrine in the law. I would rather have shot myself than direct some minimum wage worker to pull himself up by the bootstraps. I looked at his face and could see a deformed version of my own—the British dream, inherited money and status, not the American dream, which seemed to me an outright falsehood by that stage. We went to the same high school and same college, Bush and I. I think I hated him even more than I hated the suicide bombers, young idiot kids, with who knew what mythology of early death and sorrow behind them, with who knew what loss traced into their rage.
I admit that even greater than my public anger was my own selfish anger. I had been born into a generation doomed politically by its stupid, credulous, narcissistic parents. These baby boomers! They were the reason Europeans grew wary now at my accent. They had squandered my good name, and the planet, too; they had squandered their own parents’ legacy of stoicism in their welter of sexual and narcotic self-indulgence; in a few years they would squander into their maws the whole economy of the world and become the only American generation better off than both the parents and their children; and for all that they believed they had the moral high ground! They talked about Selma, Birmingham, and Vietnam, while my friends and I, brighter I think, certainly more responsible, at ease with the endowments of sex and drugs, smart, ambitious—we got to walk in pointless, well-meaning marches against Iraq, global warming, whatever. I had to live guiltily in the half-shadow of those my age who died at war, while all I could do was run off to Oxford, from the real world into a dream world, a coward with his self-righteousness and his anger, doing nothing about it now that the campaign was over. A hider.
Anger and anger and anger—and behind it disappointment, in the world and myself. That was what I felt when I thought about the campaign now.
There was no point in saying it just then.
* * *
“Aren’t we supposed to go back to the lawns for the bell ringing?” asked Anneliese. “It’s starting soon, too!”
“Fleet time,” I said, yawning.
“I need to stretch my legs,” said Sophie. “I’ll be right back.”
It was colder and my head had cleared. I watched her go, her long, lean body falling into the shadows. After a decent interval, I said, “I’ll see what happened to Soph,” and Tom winked at me. I frowned at him.
She was on the phone when I found her, and I noticed, with some surprise, that she was smoking.
She hung up just as I was reaching her. “You’ve caught me,” she said repentantly. “But I’m glad it’s you.”
“Can I have one?”
“If you promise not to tell.”
“Promise.” I lit the cigarette she gave me, cupping my hand around the match to keep it out of the wind. “Aren’t you glad you came out to Hall tonight?”
“I am glad, I am. I spent too long worrying about Jack for my own good.”
“That’s your ex?”
“Mm.” After that answer she went silent, looking into my eyes for a period that grew less and less excusable. I found her so beautiful, painfully beautiful, her hazel eyes, her long and thick hair, with a thousand rich shades of copper, brown, auburn, and blond in it, falling around her bare throat, flying up around her face in the cold night, the faint scent of it creating some previously absent intimacy between us.
Why is it that a person can seem just right to you, once in a while? Perhaps it wasn’t Sophie herself but everything about my life just then, being in Oxford, the heightened sense of chance, the distancing away from myself. As we stared at each other I felt sharpened by this newness into love. The stars and trees and wind, all of it.
As I had known she would when she handed me the cigarette, she leaned in and kissed me.
“Sorry,” she said after a moment. I started to say something halting, and she laughed and turned her head away. “I’m sorry. Really, that was stupid. I drank too much.”
“I like you. I barely know you, but I—”
“I like you too.”
Oh fuck, I thought.
* * *
Here’s a story.
Alison and I went to work for John Kerry at the same time, during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses. We were in Des Moines, operating from the state headquarters. At that point it looked certain that Howard Dean was go
ing to win both the caucuses and the candidacy itself. Inside our campaign there was the disheartening sensation that we stood in opposition to a great popular tide of liberalism—but we believed that Kerry could beat Bush, and that Howard Dean, though many of us secretly preferred his politics, couldn’t.
Alison was in the press shop, where she wrote the campaign’s press releases for local news outlets, many of them to do with farming, the manufacture of farm equipment, and food processing, which were the three most significant industries in the state. She also occasionally appeared on camera, usually either for insignificant outlets (the Davenport, Iowa, CBS affiliate) or when they needed a young face (she was once on MTV). I was on the senior staff, meanwhile, consulting on the statewide vote strategy and, especially toward the thin end of the campaign, trying to organize endorsements. We had narrowly missed out on Al Gore, who had come out for Dean a week or two before, and we needed someone big. That night my job and Alison’s dovetailed, because we were both trying to get Mike Polsky on the phone.
Polsky was a writer at the Des Moines Star-Herald, where he ran the editorial page. He was a bratwurst-and-beer guy with a thick mustache and big glasses, very intelligent but in his outlook essentially provincial. For forty-five out of every forty-eight months he wrote about ethanol subsidies, highway bills, that kind of thing. When he wrote about national subjects during those forty-five months nobody but Iowans listened or cared.
For three months out of every four years, however, around the time of the caucuses, he became more important, to those who really know about these things, than any national media member. His endorsement meant everything in central Iowa. About a week before the caucuses we had turned down Tom Brokaw because our guy, Kerry, only had twenty minutes between campaign stops, and Polsky wanted to talk to him. That was how significant the Star-Herald endorsement could be. Even Polsky’s Christmas party, which for three years before the caucuses was probably more like a polka convention than anything you could find in D.C., turned into a K Street and Capitol Hill reunion.
The Last Enchantments Page 6