The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  “You caught me singing,” she said when I came back out of my room. “You must be Anil, right?”

  “No—I—”

  She smiled. “I’m only joking. You’re Will.”

  I laughed. “I’m Will.”

  “My brother is in his room. I’m Katie.” We shook hands, and she called out to Tom, then turned back to me. “Will you come out and eat with us? My treat.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “I’m afraid it’s only going to be Pizza Hut. It’s been Tom’s favorite since he was four.”

  “It was my favorite, too.”

  “Our parents never took us, either. Not that they were especially against it, just it wouldn’t have occurred to them, I don’t think, and when Tom asked they didn’t seem to really believe he wanted to go there. Except we went there for one of his birthdays. Lord, he was happy. Anyway, that’s what big sisters are for, Pizza Hut.”

  Tom’s door opened behind us and he came out. “Katie, shut up!”

  Katie laughed. “Such a curmudgeon, such a grown-up.”

  Half an hour later we had a large pizza, half pepperoni and half mushrooms and onions, and three sodas. There are few things as distressing to anyone who pretends to the title of world traveler than to be seated in an American chain restaurant abroad, but I was happy; in fact, the primary softening of the attitude of my English friends toward my homeland came when we were discussing Kentucky Fried Chicken or Jerry Springer or the show Alias. Another proof of soft power in the decade hard power failed.

  Tom was less acerbic than I had seen him before, and it was easy to picture him and his sister as childhood companions: explorations together, pillow forts, arguments and tears on small red faces. What was strange was that Katie had none of his aggressive class fealty, and around her, Tom didn’t either. I wondered if it had calcified at the death of their parents, since he was still at school, while she, because she was a few years older, had been less in need of armature.

  “Will,” she said, “I have to compliment you for being much more congenial than the last friend of Tom’s I took out. Do you remember, Tom? Daisy?”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “Daisy was Tom’s girlfriend at LSE. She was a very beautiful girl, too—the idea of her in a Pizza Hut is impossible—and Tom called beforehand and begged me to take us to, where was it? Brown’s? No, it was the Wolseley? Somewhere with all sorts of Sloanies and Americans—excuse the example, because I love Americans—snap pictures of each other with the waiters. Maybe I should have said Germans. Tourists, at any rate. I had just been posted to Syria—”

  “No,” said Tom, “you were leaving for Syria in a week. It was close.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. Anyway, I was telling Daisy about the Druze, this minority religion in Syria—fascinating, really, they’re Muslim but subscribe to some really ancient Gnostic beliefs. And as I spoke she nodded, politely, and then at some point, still nodding, she pulled out a clothes catalog and started to flip through it.”

  I burst out laughing. Tom was shaking his head sheepishly. “It was a copy of Vogue.”

  “Vogue! That’s right!” Katie grinned. It made me miss my family. “He feels the need to date these mean, posh girls, but I’ve always told him that what he needs is someone nice. That’s the girl I hope he marries, the first nice one he meets, and for my part I hope she’s a milkmaid, or works at a makeup counter, or … or I don’t know what.”

  Tom rolled his eyes. “Let’s move on.”

  “I do want to hear about Syria,” I said. “Tom told me you worked there.”

  “I’m a liaison between the British Embassy in Damascus and all the other embassies there, so the American Embassy, we deal with them a lot, and then of course the embassies of the other Middle Eastern states.”

  “How’d you start doing that?”

  “When we were little our parents took us to Egypt, and ever since then it’s what I’ve been interested in. I studied Arabic at university and took the diplomatic test, and now…” She shrugged.

  “You must hate Bush.”

  “No, she takes after our parents,” said Tom. “They liked him. Will worked for John Kerry, Kates.”

  “I don’t like him, Tom! I think he’s terrible. But then I think Blair’s terrible, too.”

  “You’re a Tory?” I asked.

  “You’ve gone pale,” she said.

  “He’s just surprised that you’re nice,” said Tom.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said.

  “No, don’t mention it. I don’t think we should be waging a holy war against Islam, or anything like that. In fact, I love it there, the Middle East. I was desperate to get posted there. Your first assignment’s always in the sand, they say, and for most people it’s a curse, but I was so pleased. Certainly I’m to the left of your president. I wouldn’t mind seeing Cameron go in, but that’s as far as I’ll push it.”

  “Not his president,” said Tom and grinned.

  “Do you hate Bush, then?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  She laughed and looked at her watch. “Our train’s at two thirty, Tom.” They had their bags; she was taking him down to London and they were going to stay at their childhood home over the weekend. It was Katie who had decided to keep it. “After lunch with Daisy, Will, I asked Tom how it was going with her. I was scrupulously fair to her—didn’t bring up Vogue—and I remember Tom saying, ‘You’d better brace Mum and Dad, because that’s the girl I’m going to marry.’”

  “Katie!”

  “I’m sorry! I think it’s sweet—you were so sweet. You still are.”

  “I’m not sweet, I’m a scourge,” he said.

  She took his hand. “You are sweet. Will, take good care of my brother while he’s up here, okay?”

  * * *

  It was the next day that Alison called me with news.

  “Hey, babe, it’s me, guess what,” she said.

  I was walking through Trinity College’s front quad, to meet my adviser. It was a wet afternoon, and I knew he would have a fire and tea, so I wanted to get inside, but I stopped. “What’s up?”

  “My dad might have heard about a job for you.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s nothing concrete yet, but he’s on the case.”

  “Starting in the summer?”

  “No, it would have to be right away.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. “I don’t think I could take that kind of job.”

  “You haven’t even heard what it is.”

  “But I just got here—it’s not as if I can leave after a month and a half.”

  “Okay.” Then she paused for a while. “I thought you missed me so much.”

  “I miss you like crazy, but what would going out on a campaign do about that?”

  “At least you’d be in America.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t I find out whether the job is available,” she said.

  “No, really, don’t worry about it.” I looked up at the clock tower—I was a minute late already. “I don’t know—what is it?”

  “No, don’t worry about it,” she said. “You were right. You have to go through with it, now that you’ve started.” There was another pause, then she added, “You’re not applying for the Swift, are you?”

  “Alison. Come on.”

  “No, I know, we’ve talked about it.”

  She didn’t point out—this time—that I hadn’t told her I was applying to Oxford. “Should I e-mail your dad?”

  “Yeah, maybe, just to say thanks.”

  “I do miss you. It was so nice having you here.”

  “I know, baby. I miss you, too. I love you.”

  “Talk at the usual time?”

  “Of course.”

  * * *

  The MCR officers were constantly organizing: day trips to London, soccer brunches, pub walks to track the Inklings. One Monday night, in Fifth Week, they sent out an e-mail offering a limi
ted number of spots at Merton evensong. Merton was the oldest and among the most beautiful of the colleges, on the last full cobblestone street in Oxford. Its library was the oldest in continuous use in Europe. Its chapel, whose acoustics were famous, was used to record choral music. They would be recording the evensong.

  I asked Tom to go with me.

  “It’ll be all Americans and Japs,” he said.

  “I’m not sure ‘Japs’ is the preferred term.”

  “It sounds like tourist bullshit.”

  “If you don’t go with me, I’ll tell Anil your nickname.”

  He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “What did my sister tell you?”

  “Tommy Bear?”

  So he came along, and as we entered the hush of the chapel we saw, at the same time, someone we knew: the hot Asian girl from the bar at Fleet. We still hadn’t met her. She was standing in the antechapel.

  “Now aren’t you glad you came?” I asked in a low voice.

  She had a new streak in her hair, besides the pink and black. It was silvery. She was wearing a demure, unshredded oxford, unusual for her, but you could just see a sliver of flat stomach between it and her skirt.

  “Hey!” said Tom.

  She turned. “Oh. Hey.”

  “Is anyone else coming from Fleet?” I asked.

  She looked at her phone. “My friend Virginia was supposed to, but she canceled.”

  “I know we’ve met, but I’m Tom. Law.”

  “And I’m Will,” I said. “English.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m Ella. Ravenclaw.”

  We laughed, but her face remained impassive. When people began to filter into the pews, she waited to see where we led and took the other side.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “No idea. I find us irresistible.”

  Merton was beautiful. Of course, like most of the old chapels it was what you would design if you wanted people to believe in God, light slanting in paler and weakened from the very high windows, the voices, the stone, a serious house on a serious earth. I don’t especially pay attention to the words in church anymore. Instead I let my thoughts sift into each other at random, a meditation: like falling asleep. Sometimes I fall asleep, too.

  The evensong began, and in fact the music was as beautiful as I had hoped. I tracked what was happening in the program. Did I have some vague Easter recollection of the Magnificat? Or was it from a CD cover? My grandfather was a deacon at St. James’s, too, on Seventy-first and Madison. It’s a shame, perhaps. Orwell always said that in a different age he would happily have been a country vicar.

  In the eyeline from our pew was the doorway of the church, swung out open—it was still warm—and as the Nunc Dimittis began something terrible happened: An older man, wearing a Merton tie, was walking along when his foot caught the lip of a flagstone. He looked as if he had been hurrying to make it into the chapel.

  I immediately started to stand up, but then I saw that two young men were just behind him, his children, probably, along with an older woman, all of them having previously been obscured by the door, and I sat down. “Look,” I said to Tom.

  “Should we help?”

  “They’re okay, I think.”

  As the service went on we watched and whispered as he was treated and then, finally, borne away in a wheelchair.

  It was painful to watch it, an interesting small moment, but I mention it only because of what happened at the end of the service. Ella, who sat at a diagonal from us, oblivious to the old man’s fall, practically burst out of her seat and toward us, furious. “Have some respect, dickheads,” she hissed.

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “You can’t tell each other jokes during fucking church.”

  Tom, genuinely surprised, said, “We weren’t.”

  “Right, you’re both big Christians.”

  “I am, actually.”

  I hadn’t known Tom was. I shook my head, with what I hoped was a gentle smile. “Not practicing. But I’m sorry about the whispering. We weren’t making jokes.”

  I explained to her then in detail what had happened, and her face changed as I did, from anger to appraisal. After a beat, she said, “Oh. Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

  What’s funny is that Ella, though she had been raised by stridently Christian parents, wasn’t herself religious any longer—in fact, she was there solely for the music. Mollified, she walked out with us and then, to our surprise, agreed to have a drink at the Merton bar. It was thus, improbably, that we became friends.

  She was from a small town an hour outside of Seattle and had gone to Stanford on a scholarship. Her parents were immigrants and now owned three nail salons—but were not rich, because both were terrible spenders, always in and out of debt, never finding more than seventy cents in a dollar. She had come to Oxford because her adviser was the best biochemist on earth, she thought. Here, too, she was on a scholarship. “I can barely afford this pint,” she said, that first night, and laughed. We had already talked about our initial encounter in the bar at Fleet, several weeks before, and she said, “You were just what I thought Oxford would be. Arrogant rich kids.”

  “Us?” asked Tom.

  She shook her head. “Everything here is expensive. Everyone always wants to go out to dinner, or to get drinks, or wants to go into London. My stipend, besides my tuition, covers books and food. That’s it.”

  “Could you get a job?”

  “I could, but I just want to get my degree as fast as I can, get the fuck out of here, and start making some money.”

  It seemed a funny ambition, because she was so different, her hair, her clothes, her tattoo. In the next few weeks, as we grew surprisingly close to her, we began to understand: Both parts of her, angry and ambitious, were characterized by drive, but like so many people of that nature she was, if you were in her heart, exceedingly gentle.

  Tom paid for the next round; it was obvious to me that halfway through it, unbeknownst to Ella herself, he was infatuated with her. I never heard him say the word “Japs” again, anyway.

  * * *

  On the Saturday of Sixth Week there was going to be a bop, the first big one of the year at Fleet’s bar. The theme was Moulin Rouge. Because it had been my hardest week of work so far I was looking forward to it especially; most of the last four nights I had stayed up finishing an essay on Enemies of Promise. My usual haunts at Fleet—the bar, the Hall, the Cottages—I had abandoned in that time for a solitary carrel and a thermos full of coffee.

  On the Saturday of the bop I got a text from Sophie.

  Are you going tonight? If so dressing up?

  Of course.

  What about now? Am at loose ends.

  With Tom, we’re bored. Punting?

  Perfect.

  It was my first time. We went into the boathouse and fetched the pillows that went in the middle of the punt and the long pole that you used to push yourself along.

  “I’ll go first, shall I?” asked Tom.

  “I don’t see why you should. I want to have a go,” said Sophie.

  “I’ll just start us off. I did it once with my sister.”

  So Sophie and I sat facing each other in the middle of the boat, or really came closer to lying down, our hips about even and our legs crossed and propped on opposite sides of the punt. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, the hood pulled up against the wind and stray wisps of auburn hair flying across her face.

  It was beautiful. The swift river was no wider than an alley in some parts, and there was a breeze, scattering red and yellow leaves onto the water. High above us the towering trees on either bank met and twined in the warm sky.

  We had two half-bottles of wine rolling around the bottom of the punt, outriders for the great troop to follow that evening, and we had ice, gin, a bottle of tonic, and three glasses stolen from Hall. It took one gin and tonic to get Sophie tipsy.

  We were a ways down the river when she said, hiccupping, “Let
’s play I Never.”

  “Is that the same as Never Have I Ever?” I asked

  Tom looked uncertain, but Sophie said, “It is, it is. Jack played when he visited the States.”

  “You go, Will,” said Tom.

  “Why me?”

  “You’re the American, you’re supposed to be an extrovert. Sophie and I’ve got British restraint.”

  Just as he said that Sophie hiccupped. “Extremely genteel,” I said.

  She laughed, and then someone, maybe even her, started the game. By the time we got to the pub, we had passed through several rounds:

  Tom: Never have I ever had sex in the Bod. Nobody drank. “We all have to do it at some point,” said Tom. “It’s an Oxford rite of passage.”

  Will: Never have I ever hooked up with a British person. Tom and Sophie drank.

  Sophie: Never have I ever hooked up with an American. Tom and I drank.

  Tom: Never have I ever worn a T-shirt that misidentified both my nationality and gender. I drank.

  Will: Never have I ever fallen into the Cherwell. Nobody drank, but I tried to push Tom in as retaliation.

  Sophie: Never have I ever had a threesome. Nobody drank. “Sophie’s raising the stakes,” I said.

  “STORY!” bellowed Tom, giving the punt a hard shove forward.

  “No!” she said. She was laughing. “I’ve never done it. I thought all boys wanted to. I think it’s disgusting.” She had the giggles, which made us laugh, in lessening waves, until there was a long moment of silence. She dragged her fingertips along the water, looking up at the warm autumn sun, and said, “I love this. I want to stay forever.”

  “In Oxford?”

  “It already feels like home,” she said. “Better than real home.” It was a strange thing to say: Of the people I knew at Oxford, the three in that boat were those most inclined to self-concealment, and she more than either Tom or me, I think. I don’t mean that she was a cipher—indeed sometimes her feelings were too plain, her coloring making it easy for her to flush, her sensitivity real and acute and deeper than most people’s. Nevertheless there was always a final expressionless retention of privacy to her, even at moments of great intimacy. I thought it was the same as for me: early pain, and then the impassive years, retreat, outward blankness, panic. Tom, whose parents had died so recently, was less cool, more erratic, more available.