We walked back to the Cottages and up the stairs to our rooms side by side; and though I didn’t say it to him, as I dozed off it occurred to me that because we lived in these castles, all of us felt like kings.
* * *
I woke to a panicked knocking at my door. “Yeah?” I called into my pillow.
Ella came in. “You guys are back from London?”
“What time is it?”
She opened my curtains. “Noon. Will, get up.”
“What is it?”
“Have you seen the news?”
“Not since yesterday.”
She went over to my clock radio and turned it on to the BBC. The report was about a stabbing in East London. “Is it that?”
“No, no, wait.”
I sat up and put on the T-shirt that was on the floor next to my bed. I turned the radio off. “Ella, tell me what the hell is going on.”
She sat down on my bed and turned the radio on again. “Just wait, it will come back on. It’s every other story right now.”
She was right, it was next. In a BBC voice, a woman said, Authorities have begun their investigation of the bombing that took place in Syria late last night at the British Embassy. According to Sir Denis Busby, the men who raided the compound are unconnected—
Suddenly I understood. “Not Katie.”
Ella turned down the radio. “Someone came in with explosives padlocked to his chest. They tried to clear the room, but at least eight people are dead. Six of them were Syrians, waitstaff, and there was a French couple. But they can’t find two people, and one of them is her. Her face is all over the TV.”
“Oh my God.”
“Do you think anyone’s called him?”
“He keeps his phone on silent when he sleeps,” I said. I went over to my computer and started to look at the news. “Holy shit.”
“What do we do?” she asked.
I turned in my desk chair and looked at her. “Do we tell him? Or wait? Do we let him sleep?”
“I don’t know.” We were silent for a moment. “I would want to know the second it happened.”
“Me, too.”
“Okay then.”
Birds took off from a tree outside my window, a gust of life, wobbly at first but then steadying themselves with air, only air. “Jesus,” I said and felt some hugely complex series of emotions, which I don’t think I can even begin to dissect; they were about Tom, they were about Katie, they were about politics. Since in any situation any person is capable of sociopathic selfishness they were about Sophie and Alison, too; they flashed through my head. They were about me.
We went into Tom’s room. He was sleeping with one arm off the bed, his face untroubled by his dreams. Ella put a hand on his shoulder, gently, and said, “Tom, Tom,” and we woke him up and ruined his life.
CHAPTER FIVE
The writer I primarily studied in my course at Oxford was George Orwell. I believed him to be not merely a great writer but one of the very greatest, in particular his nonfiction—Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, his long ruminations about England, Dickens, language, and writing. These seemed to me to have the authenticity and lucidity of the best essays and the humanity of the best fiction. He was a genius, of course, it’s impossible to write so simply without being one. Perhaps more importantly, I loved him as a person. “Decency,” that word seems to recur so often in his work, that humans should behave as decently as possibly toward one another, a Christian ethic to carry forward beyond the end of Christianity’s days. He lived in darker times than my own and never turned his face from what he saw. Certainly I’ve never known a more honest writer. Ironic, considering the doubtful accuracy of some of his work, but what I felt nevertheless. That was why I chose to study him.
As I read more into Orwell’s essays, his letters, and his journals, he became the Greek chorus of my days. One evening in the Fleet library I was glancing at The New York Times online and saw an editorial about waterboarding, then turned to a book review Orwell wrote as the year 1939 began and came across this sentiment, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Another time I saw an exhortatory speech given before a few hundred soldiers on an air force base by George Bush (who spent his war in Texas) and Dick Cheney (whose statement that he had other priorities during Vietnam was making the rounds), and thought of the passage in which Orwell wrote, “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
I think I only disagreed with him once. The day after Katie Raleigh went missing, I sat in the MCR with Ella and watched the BBC interview Tom’s uncle. I thought of the last line in Orwell’s diaries, “At 50, every man has the face he deserves.” This had seemed so true to me, how smiling or anxiety works its way into the face over time, how it shows character, but here was this virtual father to Tom and Katie—brother to their own father—who looked so haunted and lost, his face deformed by tragedy.
The tabloids found a picture that made Katie look what she was not: beautiful. There were journalists at Tom’s door in London, we saw on television. They reported that he had tried to go to Syria himself but been denied a visa. Eventually it emerged that the suicide bomber had been part of a group of Saudi Arabians with ties to a terrorist camp in Khartoum, Sudan. He had entered Syria illegally through northern Iraq. There had been other bombings down the years, of course, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, but this one was different—to England anyhow—because of Katie.
On the second day after the bombing there was a report that a young white woman had been seen traveling by car through Damascus, but that lead evaporated and no other emerged. The only certainties were that her remains were not at the embassy and that the terrorist had been driving a blue Mercedes truck. That was all. Slowly, without fresh news, it became the second story on the news, then the third, then the fourth. Was she dead? We decided that it was likely—in fact, hoped that it was likely, because by then we knew about the hostage videos on the Internet. I never had the stomach to watch them.
That morning we had woken Tom up, and without even looking at us, after he took in the information, he had turned on his phone, seen what was waiting for him on it, and bolted from the room, without a bag, for the taxi stand, his fastest way of making it into London. We hadn’t seen him since, nor had he replied to any of our anemic caring e-mails, and I kept recalling how he had seemed to cease to exist when he found out, how his face too had changed. What seemed so unfair was the absence of his parents. He had no margin for this loss.
Even as the national news turned away there was a great stir about Katie around Oxford, and specifically in college. She had been an undergraduate there only a few years before, and many of the staff and dons remembered her, and of course there was Tom. After a few days they remembered that he had friends and sent for us.
The dean of Fleet then was a man named Sir George Ballantine, and like Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, the beginning and end of him was vanity.
He was tall, with stiff white hair and a long pink face, a handsome man, and by all accounts an exceptional astronomer. The queen had knighted him “for services to the field of astronomical science” before he was fifty. Yet in his capacity as dean, no minor ignominy was beneath his wonderful brain. If Trinity beat us in rowing, he looked stern at Hall; if Worcester beat us, pale and harried. If we raised less money than Lincoln, he fretted euphemistically about it in unscheduled speeches during chapel. When Merton added those four words to their Latin grace, none of the returning students would bar the possibility of Ballantine jumping off the Magdalen Bridge.
It was Sir George who called for eight of us to come to his private office, two days after Tom had left: Anil, Ella, Jem, Anneliese, Timmo, an undergraduate girl named Allie whom Tom had hooked up with twice, Sophie, and me. I don’t know how he found out about Allie. Ella was displeased to see her there.
It was a hexagonal room, with books an
d portraits of past deans of Fleet lining the walls, big comfortable armchairs and couches around a fireplace at one end of the room, and an immaculate desk at the other. The window was ajar even in the cold, and what must have been a powerful amateur telescope stood on a tripod near it.
He welcomed us in by saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, please sit, please sit.” He offered coffee, which we all declined because it was nine thirty at night. Afterward Jem said he was famous for offering whatever he knew people wouldn’t want because he liked to use his entire personal catering budget on champagne, which he drank throughout the day. I don’t know if that was true. Hopefully.
“Ah,” he said and heaved a gargantuan sigh. “I knew her, Katherine Raleigh. I’m sorry to say I think her dead.”
Anneliese said, “Perhaps they can find her.”
“Indeed,” he said with what we were meant to see was a sage nod. “Well.” Another long pause, then, “This Tom. I never met him. Good chap?”
We assented.
“He’ll be all right, in time. The great healer.” After this ex cathedra proclamation he offered us another sigh. “You all are coping, too?” Nobody said a word. “Hm. Good. If you need anything I’m always here.”
Then he stood, and we were ushered out by the crimson martinet who served as junior dean. In an anteroom to the master’s office he asked if any of us had any questions for him. We all shook our heads except Allie, who asked, “When will Tom get back?” The junior dean didn’t know. So ended our brush with greatness.
“I’m not sure about you,” Jem said, as we walked out into Anna’s (where Ballantine’s office was), “but I feel loads better.” Everyone chuckled except Allie, who was brushing tears out of her eyes. Jem put his arm around her. “Come on, you lot. I’ll open the bar early. First round is mine.”
So it was in mingled disbelief and banality that the days after Katie Raleigh’s disappearance passed. I still thought about her constantly, catching myself staring into space for long stretches at my carrel in Bodley. Someone once told me that if you were careful, your understanding of the people you know who had died would deepen and evolve even after they were gone, like characters in a novel whose reasons for acting you piece together days and weeks past when you’ve finished reading it. The opposite is true, too: Think of someone who is gone too casually and you lose their capacity to surprise you. Then you find a letter they wrote, or a video, and see how effortlessly your brain has diminished them into a few characteristics. I tried to think about her.
I read in one interview, with a group of Katie’s friends from Fleet, that none of them had known her to have a boyfriend. It was a throwaway line, but it was what stuck with me, and combined with the memory of her ugliness this fact swelled in me every so often. I could still hear her as she had been singing when I came into the Cottages the day I met her, “On the Street Where You Live,” and that song, light-spirited, lovely and slight, persuaded of itself, seemed to represent in its contours what her life had been missing. She had been so decent (an Orwell word) herself, had seemed so eager for other people’s happiness; that made it worse, that apparently she felt no bitterness or envy, and was perhaps stoic in the face of her obscure inner disappointments, which, if she felt unloved, may have been greater than the average person’s. Her parents’ death, raising Tom, her possible loneliness—how cruel it seemed. I wondered what her world looked like from the inside. I found myself hoping that she had believed in the cross on her neck.
* * *
Then, just when it seemed that everything had gone quiet, we had news.
Turn on the TV—good about Katie? Timmo texted me.
With a surge of hope I ran to the common room. So she was alive. When I opened the door I heard the TV going and saw that Ella was watching it alone.
Her back was to me. “Ella!”
She turned, and her face was wet, her black eye makeup smudging down her cheeks. “Oh,” she said.
“What happened?’
“She’s dead.”
“But Timmo said—”
She looked at me curiously and then understood. “Oh. No video. No rape. Just dead. They found her.”
Just dead. “How?”
“Shot in the head.”
I almost never cry. I do whatever the opposite is, some involution. I sat down. “In Damascus.”
“Thirty miles outside of the city, close to the highway. A rainstorm uncovered the body. I guess they just scraped some dirt over her, not much.” She gestured toward the TV, as if it were responsible, not her. Then she came and slouched down heavily into the couch, leaning her head against my shoulder and quietly crying. We sat there for a while and watched the BBC. “Should we call him?” she asked eventually.
“You know he hasn’t been picking up.”
“We should go to the funeral at least. They said on the news that it would be at St. Luke’s in Chelsea. There are already bouquets outside and notes—handwritten notes, like posters.” She sobbed. “Poor Tom.”
“I’m not sure we should go. We should ask him if he wants us there.”
“Okay.”
I realized I had believed she was still alive. No matter how many people die I still, somehow, live in a deathless world; and then death comes back again and I remember, oh, right, that’s what happens; that’s where we’re going; that’s what it all means. At the same time I felt tremendous relief. When a woman is involved there is a restless, should-we-think-it-or-not taint of sexuality, an added fear. This worst fate precluded even worse ones.
We got no answer when we called Tom. We left a message, asking if we could come to the funeral, and started to plan our trip down, all of us—including Allie—but the next day we got back a text that said No thanks. Despite this we debated going, before concluding that it would be better to respect his refusal. There would have been something forced about going, I think, our friendship still new, forced into florescence by the hothouse of school. Instead we watched it on television. Like everything else. The clip the news shows had of Tom from the funeral showed him flashing a quick smile at someone he saw, one of those wordless messages of thanks you see go across the room at such events. In isolation it looked strange, though: like one taillight still glowing on a wrecked car.
I liked that they chose the regular old hymns, “All people that on earth do dwell,” “Ten thousand times ten thousand,” “Guide me, O thou great redeemer.” (That last one: I wondered if they chose it because of Syria, “Pilgrim in a barren land…”) There was an atavistic pleasure in seeing the family—the three of them who were left—leave the church for the burial ground with the casket between them. They had the body back.
A couple of days after the funeral Ella and I chanced another e-mail to Tom. We told him about watching the service and said we were sorry. Then we asked if he was coming back soon.
His only answer was Thanks. Probably not for a while. TR.
“How long do you think till he comes back?” Ella asked me.
We were hanging out in my room. “Maybe never, right?”
“Do you really think so?”
“He doesn’t need the degree.”
She looked disconcerted. “It never occurred to me he would stay away for good.”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t it feel wrong to go to a bop after your sister died?”
“You can’t not have fun for the rest of your life.”
I frowned. “Look around you, though, the parties, Oxford is—”
“Maybe yours is,” she said. “I’m here to work. Why don’t you work harder at your course?”
“That seems self-indulgent to me, too.” My face started to get warm. “Leaving Alison, no job, just for … what … to go punting and worry about Sophie?”
“You can’t think about things like that.”
“I don’t see why not.”
* * *
Life resumes, of course; that scarcely needs to be said. The week you die magazines and newspapers will go on appearing, all with the sa
me urgency as usual, only on behalf of the living now, and not even in infinitesimal part for you any longer. A new song will come out, something you would have loved and listened to on repeat. There will go on being news: earthquakes, the deposition of dictators, museum shows. They’ll keep giving out the Oscars and electing presidents, whose names you won’t know. There will be new geniuses. I think of it sometimes and feel sad to contemplate how it will be, this place I love so much, finished with me before I’m finished with it.
Nevertheless, for then, as it will be until I die, it was I who kept going on.
There were ten days until Christmas, and I threw myself into work. Despite what I’d told Ella, I liked being a student again. I looked forward to the evenings I spent in the Fleet library, reading and taking breaks to drink tea with friends. Taking a break between college and Oxford, predictably, had made me appreciate it all.
(I wonder about this: In the future, when we’ve grown more intelligent, will education change? I think it might, unless we’re living in bombed-out shelters, collecting rainwater and avoiding zombies. The long dwindle of learning from five to twenty-one seems pointless for most people. I bet in the future we’ll go to college for a year or two after high school, then do life things, marriage, kids, jobs, before returning at forty, like travelers circling home, for another year or two of education. That’s when you need it: before it’s too late, after you’ve realized it can get too late. A chance to rejigger. How grateful most forty-year-olds would be to spend two years reading The Spirit of the Laws and retraining themselves, I imagine. Then again I also have a theory, widely mocked by my friends, that in a hundred years our clothes will be superstrong exoskeletons, and that people in that time will look back and marvel at us and pity our weakness, our broken arms and skinned knees. Probably I’m wrong about all of it.)
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