One day in a class I was taking called “Memory and the Spanish Civil War,” a kid I didn’t know very well, named Sullivan, raised his hand and said, “Isn’t Homage to Catalonia more important now than anything that ever happened during the Spanish Civil War? Why do we even bother with these different militias and the history of it?”
The teacher, an amused, unhurried woman in her fifties, thin, lucid, effective, who had recently published a book called Bloomsbury’s War and always had a thermos of black coffee with her, responded, “Well, isn’t the logical extension of that question that Günter Grass’s books are more important than the Holocaust? What about Iraq?”
“The Holocaust is too provocative as an analogy,” I said. “And as for Iraq, we don’t know what kind of books will come out of it yet.”
“Why should the Holocaust be exempt from comparison?” asked the professor.
“It’s freighted with too much meaning.”
“Why is that our concern?”
“Once you take any historicity into your reading you have to take all of it,” I said.
“There I’m not sure we agree.”
Sullivan broke in. “But Grass isn’t Orwell,” he said. “Orwell’s better.”
“Victor Klemperer, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, whomever you please. If This Is a Man can stand against anything. Can we place the work they did above the event that motivated it?”
“No,” said Sullivan, “it’s—”
A girl from Bath named Helena, pretty but insufferable, interrupted. “And what about Iraq? You could argue that as a war it’s commensurate with the Spanish Civil War.” Her voice rose a pitch, and she said, “And all these sons and brothers that families lose are still important to them. That won’t change because somebody writes a book.”
Nobody in that class was in favor of the war, except perhaps an Old Etonian and (we suspected) Conservative named Larry, who treated the reading with a kind of hauteur that precluded him from most conversations. Still, the rest of us rolled our eyes at Helena: cheap points. She was right, but the dynamic of a class like that one always settles a certain way, and ours had settled against her.
Sullivan said, “What I’m saying is that to pretend we’re interested in all the little political details and the acronyms of the Spanish Civil War—I don’t know, we have this living, vibrant memoir. Why do we place the facts and Orwell’s interpretation on the same level, when one is so much higher?”
“But the book wouldn’t exist without them,” said an excellent student called Ben.
“Of course, of course,” said Sullivan impatiently. “That’s a given. I’m trying to express something broader.”
“There’s also the point that Franco was in charge up until not long ago,” said Helena.
“But I think I agree with you,” Ben told Sullivan. “If your argument is that the facts of the war are less interesting than the facts as Orwell saw them.”
“Yes,” he said, “but as Orwell saw them, not Arthur Koestler, not Martha Gellhorn.”
“They’re two different disciplines. It’s ridiculous to assess them qualitatively against each other,” said Helena.
Again she was correct, I thought. The professor stepped in. “One needs the other, clearly. Do any of you know Lyotard?”
I raised my hand tentatively, but she called on Ben, who had nodded vigorously. “I presume you’re referring to grand narratives and small narratives—that trying to assemble the limited perspectives of any event into a larger univocal perspective is dangerous.”
“Precisely,” she said. “Foucault had a similar idea when he talked about genealogy. That a series of fractured narratives makes up what we view in retrospect as unfractured history. Orwell’s subjective narrative is probably ‘righter’ than many historical texts, in the sense that it tells us about small privations in the trenches, bureaucratic stupidity, so on and so forth. But when we search a text for determinate meaning we immediately open it to indeterminacy. Was Orwell being honest? What were his politics? Can we corroborate any of his facts? And most importantly, are we even reading it correctly?
“That’s all the time we have. But thank you, Sullivan, I liked your question. That’s the way we should be thinking. You, too, Will, Helena. Larry, walk with me to my office?”
It hadn’t been that unusual a class, but on the street outside the English building Sullivan caught up with me and said, “Hey, you’re Orwell, right?”
(That wasn’t an uncommon brand of greeting. “Hey, aren’t you Coetzee?” “You’re Fulke Greville, someone said?”)
“Hey. I am, yeah.”
“Fucking amazing, Homage,” he said. “I didn’t think much of Animal Farm and 1984.”
“Try Such, Such Were the Joys, or any of his essays. In fact, even some of the other novels are more interesting than Animal Farm, to me. Coming Up for Air. What about you, Joyce?”
“Like everyone else.” He nodded. “Although I’m a Joyce Futurist.”
“What is that?”
“We try to piece together how Joyce will be read when Ireland is gone and English is a dead language. Essentially it’s an anthropological project. We’re also interested in how mechanization will alter academic readings of Joyce.”
“Can the subaltern speak if he’s a robot.”
He laughed. “Something like that. Say, what are you doing? Do you fancy a pint?”
It was just past five. “Sure.”
There was a cold, thin rain falling, and we walked under twinned black umbrellas.
“So what do you think of that crowd?” he asked.
“The class? I don’t know.”
We weren’t that close as a group, the eleven of us. In the fall we had all gone out for a drink or two, and there was one definite, inseparable friendship, between Helena and a poky girl in glasses called Sam, but that was it.
There were four graduate master’s programs in English: Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian, and Modern. I never once met anyone from the Medieval group, but the assumption was that they were abstruse, intelligent, geeky. Interested in Elvish and Aquinas. The Renaissance students were good-looking and romantic, the theater majors of the English Department, full of Sidney and “Whoso list to hunt” and “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, men were deceivers ever.” The Victorian group, by contrast, was composed almost entirely of nice girls, either plump or with glasses, all of whom had read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights a dozen times before they were fifteen. As for the modernists, as everyone called us, we fell into two groups: edgy, coffee-driven purists who studied Beckett or Joyce, and the rest of us. There was no gap in intelligence in these two groups, but there was a gap in seriousness. All of the coffee crowd would make it in academia. The rest of us: journalism, writing, advertising agencies, the whole depressing welter of selling words that come out of your brain.
There was some mingling between the disciplines in the fall, and a lot in the spring. By February we would form a group who hung out together and talked about books, with about seven people from across the three later eras (Renaissance, Victorian, Modern) who became friends. On that icy day, though, with Homage and a notebook in my hand, I had no true friends among the modernists, and after that day really Sull became the only one.
He was tall and very thin. His background was midlands, middle class, and state school—I think he had been the brightest person in every classroom he had ever sat in. His three subjects were Joyce, the Who, and Bob Dylan. (His favorites, respectively: Finnegan, “Baba O’Riley,” “Girl from the North Country.”) We started to get drinks together pretty regularly from that day forward, and in a vague way it was like being with a friend from home, because it meant not worrying, for a while, about Tom or Sophie.
* * *
“You could text me,” Sophie had said at Lula’s party. For a while I forgot, but then, nearing Christmas break, I wrote to her. I was shopping at Sainsbury’s. (We had a kitchen in our house, which was kept spotless.) What the hell is Yrkshre Tea? Tha
t or PG Tips?
Hopeless ignorance, she wrote back. Of course get Yorkshire Tea. Thank God I’m here. xxSoph.
When I returned home I made the tea and went to my desk, where I wrote her an e-mail that consisted of a long pull quote, which contained, I always thought, almost everything you could ever want to know about England:
Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
There was so much to love in this—“tenthly,” to begin with, and then “the milk-first school.” The author was Orwell.
What is this? she asked. Dying laughing, sent it to Lula.
I forward her the essay. Following this religiously, although I don’t agree that “one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect.” Last time I tried, Tom called it “swill” and Anil dumped half a bag of sugar in it “for taste,” convinced I can do better this time.
That day inaugurated our new correspondence, and soon enough I learned to love the tinny ping that signaled I had a text message. I learned to rush home and open my e-mail first thing in case she had written. She would write to complain about studying, or remind me about some part of English life I shouldn’t miss, or text things like Hmm. I need egg whites twice as heavy as sugar for something I’m baking. How can I do that without a kitchen weight? I would think that of course she could look it up as easily as I could, which must have meant that she wanted to be in touch—which must have meant—and so on.
At last, then, we saw each other again. It was a midweek day, the light falling, just past four o’clock. December had given up three weeks of its time, and there were Christmas decorations in the MCR; in another day or two people would clutch home for the holidays. I myself was leaving the next afternoon, the twenty-third of December.
She was doing her laundry in the MCR laundry room, which as far as I knew she hadn’t for a long time. (The thing that meant the most to me of anything she ever said was at Lula’s party. I said to her, “Wasn’t it great, when we were hanging out so much this fall? You never come to the MCR or Hall anymore.” She looked at me, a rare lack of evasion in her light brown eyes, and said, “Why do you think I was there so much?”)
There was a large window looking into the MCR from First Quad, and through it I could see her back to me, her hair over one shoulder, her head down as she looked at her phone. There were no lights on, and in the gray she looked a figure from Hammershøi, motionless, paused.
“Soph?” I said, coming through the door.
She turned. “Will!”
“What are you up to?”
“Laundry,” she said sorrowfully. “You wouldn’t believe the T-shirts I get through. It’s appalling. I was just thinking I would make some coffee.”
“I was coming to do the same. Should we have a pot?”
In the kitchen she put the ground beans into the filter and then poured cold water from the pitcher in the fridge into the percolator. It only took a second for the smell to fill the whole MCR—that amicable scent, when you had just come in from the cold.
As the coffee brewed I was saying something, about class I think, when she interrupted me to say, “Oh, wait!”
“What?”
“Never mind. Just pour the coffee. I’m going to dash to the Cottages. I have a surprise for you.”
“You’re coming back, right?”
“Of course. Just wait, okay?”
I poured out two mugs of coffee and put milk in both, then one sugar in hers. Just as I was carrying them over to the couches she came back in, red-cheeked from the cold. I could smell the familiar, understated scent that lingered in her long hair, a layer above the coffee, barely there.
“What’s the surprise?” I asked. “Here’s your coffee.”
She had her hands behind her back, and she brought out a roll of cookies with a flourish. “It’s Hobnobs.”
My eyes widened. “Holy shit.”
“I know.”
After I had texted her from the grocery store about the tea, I had texted again and asked what kind of cookies to get. She wrote back simply “HOBNOBS!” in all capital letters like that.
Uh … que? I texted her.
Hobnobs, Will! The most delicious cookies of all!
Just checked. They’re out.
After that, Hobnobs became a running joke in our text messages. If either of us got overexcited about something, the other would write back, HOBNOBS!
“What if I don’t like them?” I asked.
We were sitting on the couch now, our legs side by side, touching. She shook her head. “I’m not even remotely worried. You’re going to adore them. Just have one.”
In fact, they were terrific, these crunchy oatmeal cookies, and as we sat and talked, sipping our coffee, we ate the entire packet. When the coffee was gone too, she said, “We haven’t had a secret cigarette in a while, have we?”
“Can you brave the cold?”
“I think so,” she said.
We went and stood underneath an elm tree that grew alongside the MCR. “Do you think we’ll have snow soon?” she asked, looking up at the sky.
The question felt intimate. “I hope so. Maybe not. I’ll be gone.”
“You know, Jack is back at Sandhurst, training. I haven’t been seeing much of anyone these past two weeks. I’ve written to Tom, of course.”
“We should all hang out after Christmas,” I said. “With Anneliese and Anil and everyone.”
She smiled. “That would be nice. Is there anything coming up? There’s the James Bond bop, right?”
“Not for three weeks or so.”
“I have an essay to turn in the Friday before it, though, it’s in my calendar. It will give me something to look forward to. I’ve been longing for fancy dress. I won’t be out much till then anyhow.”
I wondered if that meant Jackal would be in Oxford. “It’s a date.”
She looked at me without any wariness. “It’s a date. We’ll match up our costumes and go together, you and I.” There was a beat. “In a group, of course, as friends.”
“Perfect.”
“But you and I will go over together.”
“I’ll bring you some Hobnobs instead of flowers.”
She laughed. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
My heart fluttered; they’re guiltless lies, the ones told when you’re in love. “Great.”
We went inside, and I kept her company as she folded her laundry. I didn’t try to kiss her when she left, but before she went she leaned into me and rested her head on my shoulder and left it there for a minute, longer, before pulling herself away.
* * *
I went home. It had been a long stretch in England, September, October, November, most of December now. I slept throughout the afternoon on Christmas. After that I sat with my mother by the fireplace and we played double solitaire, listening to the Drifters’ version of “White Christmas,” football on in the next room. It reminded me of going home from boarding school, which had always seemed to make a child of me again. I don’t think I picked up a book the whole week I was in Boston. I did manage to send Alison a silver bracelet I had bought her on a day trip to Hampton Court, and received, in her typically sloppy wrapping, a blue gingham shirt from Brooks Brothers and a bottle of Scotch, not to my taste. We spoke on the phone on Christmas morning.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said.
“Will, Merry Christmas.”
I wondered how much longer I could get away with it’s me. A few months? Forever? Could I always say it: deep calling to deep? “How’s the tree? Did you guys all get in the truck and go chop it down yet?”
“Yep, twenty-fourth time around for me. This one’s bullshit, though. It’s still sticky, and Jenny and I are the ones who have to reach in and decorate it.”
That was her sister. “Is your dad drunk yet?”
“It’s only eleven o’clock.”
“Just tipsy, then?”
“No, he’s drunk.”
I laughed. I used to love Christmas at her house; everything felt well ordered there, with the particular grace that money, whether we wish it did or not, will give a house, a person, a day. “Thanks for the shirt.”
“Oh, will you wear it? You’re impossible to shop for, you—”
“No, it’s amazing! Just my style.”
“Oh, good, when I saw it I thought—”
It felt strangely as if we were still together to me, and because of that I interrupted her and said, “Have you hooked up with anyone?”
“Will.”
“Have you?” There was a lingering caesura. “Hello?”
“I haven’t. It’s none of your business.”
“I miss you.”
She didn’t talk for a second. “Don’t fuck with my head.”
“You’re right.”
“I mean it, I—”
“I said you’re right! I think it’s just the holidays, my dad, whatever, I felt like I missed you. I promise it was only for a second.”
She laughed. “You know the way to a girl’s heart, Bake.”
“We’ll talk soon?”
“Yeah, we’ll talk soon. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I spent New Year’s Eve with a huge group of friends and got blackout, and the next night took the overnight plane to Heathrow, slumbering through every movie and meal they tried to press on me, the sky outside pure black, as if I were traveling between worlds.
The Last Enchantments Page 14