The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  She laughed now, a sincere laugh, as I did, too—and suddenly as we stopped laughing a formal feeling came over the moment, a hush; a junction, an ending, in the affairs of two people who might have been something else to each other, but who have after all been something. From then on we would only be friends—truly nothing more. We stood just at an angle to each other, as daily and yet ceremonial as two figures in one of those de Hooch interiors, the people milling around us in Blackwell’s unaware that life was happening near them.

  “Well, good-bye, Will,” she said.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  She stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek and gave me a swift hug. Then we parted, and I went up to pay.

  * * *

  I was one of Anil’s closest friends at Oxford, less close to him only than perhaps Timmo, Anneliese, and a school friend of his from Mumbai, Shateel, who did economics at Wolfson—and who, I am sad to report, did not find his name’s resemblance to “shitheel” as humorous as Tom did—but I don’t know how well I can say I knew him until the end of the year. Seven or eight days before the fateful weekend of the Boat Race, I met the limits of my knowledge.

  I was at loose ends one afternoon, having finished my work for the day not long before, and I wandered through the quads. Out on the lawns there were three undergraduates in boaters with champagne and a wind-up gramophone, a mockery that was nine-tenths love. The day was flooded through with the bright yellow light of near evening, the delible mercy of a beautiful sky. I decided to go to the teak chairs by the river. These were mostly empty now, the libraries full in their stead as year-end exams grew close. The air smelled of the grass of the lawns.

  Only when I was close to the water did I see Anil was sitting on the chairs, staring at the swans on the riverbank. “Hey,” I called out.

  He was startled by my voice. “Oh, hey!” he said. He stood up quickly. “It’s too bad you’re just getting here, I have to go.”

  “Where?”

  He paused, twisting the cord of his white iPod headphones around his finger. “Did you know Ella and Peter are dating?”

  “I heard something about it.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking it is good for them. They are both very nice people. Okay. So I’m going.”

  “See you back at the house.”

  He took an irresolute step, then stopped.

  “Is anything the matter?” I asked.

  “No, nothing.”

  “Is it because Tupac’s dead?”

  He laughed. “Tupac’s alive.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Something was off, plainly. He sat down in the chair again. There were tufts of dandelion fluff suspended over the river, lying against the soft wind. I waited him out. “Will you keep a secret?” he asked at last.

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t know what to expect. Because he was so irrationally self-assured and so good-natured, it was hard to imagine him suffering. He had always seemed as steady and forward-bound as one of those battleships that needs fifteen miles to stop.

  “I’m homesick,” he said. Then he laughed. “Have you ever eaten a panipuri?”

  “What is that?”

  “No, I’m not even really homesick I don’t think.” He looked into my eyes for the first time. “Will you keep it a secret?”

  “Anil, yes, obviously.”

  He sighed from the bottom of his stomach, and said, “I think I very much like Ella.”

  “What, our Ella? From the MCR?”

  “Who else?”

  “When did you—when did you start liking her?”

  “A while ago,” he said. “She’s so nice to me. Not like you and Tom. I know you’re my friends, but not nice friends.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “It’s fine. I like you even after the cream cheese.”

  A week before, Tom had snuck into Anil’s bathroom while he was showering, lopped off the top of his deodorant stick, and molded cream cheese over what remained. The yelp of dismay had echoed through the Cottages.

  “Tom didn’t like you saying the word ‘Paki.’”

  Anil looked skeptical. “He is far more racist than I am.”

  “Would you ever talk to Ella?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “In this world there are people who can say things to people like Ella and there are people who cannot say things to people like Ella.”

  “You never know what she’ll say.” He merely shook his head, and in truth I understood. “Has it been a while since you’ve dated anyone?”

  “Not since I left India.”

  “Ella likes you a lot.”

  He didn’t say anything, and for the first time I saw that he was in a state not of mild distress but of real true unhappiness, nearly grief.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “Jem’s opening the bar early tonight. Would you like to get a drink?”

  “Absolutely.” He stood up. “I’ve been meaning to try gin and juice.”

  “It’s disgusting,” I said. Then, because the pause was getting long, I added, “So, do you seriously think Tupac’s alive?”

  “Will, don’t be naive.”

  “Maybe he’ll be at the Boat Race Saturday.”

  “No, he’s in hiding.”

  I waved a hand. “He’s not even that good.”

  Anil rolled his eyes. “Haters gonna hate.”

  * * *

  So, the Boat Race: as marmoreal and anachronistic as Hall at Fleet, as Chatsworth, as the House of Lords, all of England’s spruced-up subjugations, and yet, like all of them, vivified by its straight-faced enactment.

  It happens every spring and lasts twenty minutes, two long, slim boats from Oxford and Cambridge, lined with eight giants and one pixie, traversing a turn of the Thames. What struck me about it wasn’t that people at the two schools cared about it but that everyone in England did. Pubs show it, tuck shops set up small TVs on rickety tables, and in all the staid little row houses of towns and cities unvisited by greatness, Mams and Pops put it on for an hour after their Yorkshire pudding. It’s part of some dank collective nostalgia that people who have never been to Oxford or Cambridge have for the universities. As if they were national property, like Buckingham Palace, rather than preserves of the rich where people can afford to spend all of their time rowing. Another vanquishing myth of hierarchy handed down to Britain from the Victorians.

  Maybe I’m being unkind. The British seemed to me to have a vexed and painful longing for what they call Merry England, Deep England, the country of sheep-scattered fields and wireless radio that never existed. Where everyone boat-raced. The French have it, too, La France profonde, a phrase that calls to my mind a boy in a striped shirt running down a Paris alleyway with a baguette under his arm, headed home.

  As ever, Orwell got it best, this island quality, this peculiar blind wistfulness, the titanic security of tradition and money, predicated on people being poor—but elsewhere, elsewhere: “There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound … At the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts.” I suppose it was this vision that I had loved myself, as a teenager reading about Blandings.

  We left at sunup on that Saturday, aboard a bus that Fleet had hired. Most people went, even, somewhat to my astonishment, Sophie. She sat with Anneliese. A row back Tom snored away on Anil’s shoulder for the whole ride.

  At Hammersmith Bridge it was chaos, cockney teenagers selling beer from drag-behind coolers, unlicensed souvenir stands, pubs with their doors flung open in surrender. People in Cambridge pale blue and Oxford dark blue crowded both banks and hung their feet off the bridge.

  It was a sunny day, and by eleven o
’clock or so, when we arrived, girls were already in their halter tops. We walked along the east side of the river, finding a picnic bench at last to settle at, and just as Anneliese wondered out loud whether anyone really could expect us to start drinking in the morning, Tom caught up with us after lagging behind, his arms full of eight oversized cans of Stella. Soon we had all drunk them except Anil, who was unwell, but even sober was vowing to sabotage Cambridge’s boat—possibly by playing a Method Man song with a heavy bass line that he knew, which he claimed would throw the cox off rhythm. How he planned for the music to affect only the Cambridge cox he never made clear.

  “We’re in for a long day when Anil is making plans about rap music at eleven,” Tom said.

  Anneliese had overheard. “What is a Method Man?” she whispered urgently.

  Anil heard this and, speaking low in his clipped Anglo-Indian accent, as if it were almost too embarrassing to discuss, said, “You don’t know about Wu? Rza? Gza? Inspectah Deck?”

  “No.”

  “Ghostface Killah? Cappadonna? Oh, Anneliese!”

  Anneliese shook her head apologetically. “I don’t think they’re very big in Germany.”

  “Hasselhoff,” Tom and I said in unison, imagining that we were tremendously clever for making this well-worn joke.

  “Shut up,” she said. “I told you clowns a thousand times that nobody really likes him.”

  “Clowns!” Tom cried. “You got it right! You didn’t call us jesters!”

  She allowed herself a prim smile. “Yes, my command of English is excellent.”

  Meanwhile Anil looked agitated, and Sophie, sensing an incipient monologue, said, “What time do the boats come by?”

  “Not until three thirty,” said Tom. “How I hope one of the boats sinks, you can’t imagine.”

  “Cambridge’s boat, you mean,” said Timmo.

  Tom shrugged. “Preferably. Either would be good. Cambridge sank in 1978.”

  Sophie acted strangely as the day went on. Her manner was athwart of my intent, which was simply that we should be friends. She often whispered in my ear, or rested her head on my shoulder, or grabbed my hand to draw my notice to something. At last, after we had all moved into a shady spot farther down from the bridge, she said, “Will you go find a souvenir with me, Baker?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What kind?”

  “I don’t know, some tatty thing to pin to my bulletin board. Or for my father.”

  “How about a poster?”

  “Hmm … actually I want one of the big foam hands with one finger sticking up.”

  “An elegant choice.”

  So we went off together, promising to be back soon. As we walked, we passed dozens of people we knew, saying hello and good-bye without too much ceremony, as if we were in Oxford. Sophie stopped and had a brief word with a guy I had never met, but who from their talk I gathered was one of Jack’s friends. About his news, perhaps. We stopped at each of the souvenir stands but couldn’t find exactly what she wanted, and kept on walking in the hopes of stumbling upon the right place.

  It was after about half an hour, full of genial chatter, that we saw something astonishing: Jack, the Jackal, in a group coming out of a pub.

  It was astonishing, that is, to me; I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Sophie.

  “Jack!” she cried out involuntarily.

  He swung around, his eyes heavy-lidded with drink and indifference. When he saw her he raised them slightly but didn’t say anything. Then he saw me and laughed.

  “This dickhead. Thought you and I had a talk,” he said to me, as if that alone meant I should have ceased to exist.

  Sophie was rigid with anger. “You’re here?”

  The smile left Jack’s face. “My grandfather died.”

  The information didn’t deflate her indignation. “And you didn’t feel like telling me you’d be back?”

  “It’s only three days,” he said. “Dad was a friend of my brigade’s commander out in Affgo, so he let me hitch back without kicking up a fuss.”

  “And you didn’t feel like telling me? That you’re at the fucking Boat Race?” she asked. “You didn’t think that maybe you might see me here, you idiot? Or that it might be nice for me to know that you’re in fucking England? Jesus, Jack! I never get a fucking letter from you, I’m worried sick all the time, and—and—”

  He was a dark brown color now, exceedingly handsome. “I can’t be with a girl that holds me down,” he said.

  “You’re drunk and showing off.” This accusation seemed to make her notice that she was amid people, and she said, “We can talk about this over there.”

  So they went behind one of the pubs, down an uninhabited alleyway. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, though her voice rose now and then.

  I waited, obviously.

  After twenty minutes she came back to me. She was crying. It had grown windy, and her hair was flying around her face.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just take me to a bar,” she said, “and not one of these crowded ones. And for God’s sake don’t try to kiss me if I get drunk, for once.”

  “Of course not. Of course not.”

  I texted Tom that we were leaving. She and I walked away from the river and found a calm pub, the Boat Race coverage on muted TVs here and there. I ordered us red wine, her preferred drink, and we sat at a table far from everyone else.

  “I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been,” she said.

  “You haven’t been stupid at all.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’s broken up with me.” She said this in a normal voice, but tears were rolling from her eyes. I thought I had never seen anyone so hurt. “Why on earth would he do that?”

  I loved her to the degree now that I would have put them back together if I could, to lessen her unhappiness. Yet it was strange: Much of me went to Jack, then, and less to Sophie. For one thing I wondered if his grand and brutal diffidence, his almost cruelty, came from being Over There, as I thought of it—fighting. He was in a war, really a war. Not the television war, the thing itself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I tried so hard. I wrote him every day and sent him e-mails and pictures. And he never really wrote back much more than a line or two. Not that I needed much to get by. I spoke to his mother on the telephone once a week, and visited his brother at Eton and sent him tuck, which Jack used to do. I tried very hard.”

  “You were great to him.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was racked with guilt every day. I missed you,” she said. She paused. “I wanted to come see you every night when I went to sleep.”

  “Me, too.”

  “No, but it’s not like that, I wanted to go see him every night, too, I wanted to hold him, too. Don’t make it seem that way. I wanted him to move to Oxford and I’d be in school and we could have one of those houses by St. Giles and—” She broke off, having shared, I saw, too much of a private vision that had become more real to her through unspokenness than it should have. “But I felt so content with you, that weekend. You were so nice to me.”

  “Jack wasn’t?”

  “No, but that’s okay. That’s the kind of thing I can forgive. But not to care—that’s different. Imagine him not calling me! Can you believe—” She burst into fresh tears, and two reddened white-haired men at the bar looked at me reprovingly. As if she had remembered how far she was forgetting herself, Sophie turned away and cleared her throat, trying to achieve some restoration of her usual guardedness. Then she gave me a formal look. “I’m glad you’re here, Will, but nothing’s going to happen.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Maybe we should have a cigarette. Not even a secret one.”

  She laughed and hiccupped and cried at once. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  Eventually we roused ourselves to go back to the race, but it was over. I called T
om, and he said they were all going to the Cheshire Cheese, a pub on Fleet Street. (“Double Fleet time!”) However, Sophie said she wanted to go do something, not just sit around, and so we went and drifted through the cold of the British Museum, never really looking at anything much. Aztec bowls, Egyptian funeral boats, Turkish tiles: all these civilizations at such a desperate disadvantage to us because we, happy or unhappy, were alive. At some point she started to hold my hand.

  We missed the bus back and then had a forlorn pizza near St. Paul’s. Still she kept talking about Jack, still her shield was down. When at last it was time for the second bus we walked silently across the dim city, back to pick it up at Marble Arch. On the way there were endless repetitive shops full of clothes and books and jewelry and electronics, the uncaring intricate rented world, and soon the only thing that seemed real to me was her. I thought to myself at one point that perhaps all the gold wreathed around her, the stars and moon and streetlight, her lips slightly parted, her face worn out from crying—thought to myself it might have been no more than my love, which surrounded her wherever she went.

  Oxford won, by the way, even though Cambridge was the heavy favorite. Floreat Oxonia. Or Greyfriars, or what you will.

  * * *

  I suppose in the next days I expected Sophie to be around more, but she wasn’t. For the last two weeks of April, after the Boat Race, she went to her parents’ beach cottage in Dorset to finish her long essay, trundling all the way home first to pick up Chessie, her ancient spaniel, for company. She did text me occasionally—random jokes and complaints—and once we spoke on the phone. I asked about Jack.

  “I still get his daily e-mail,” she said. “Otherwise nothing. I expect he’s with Minka now, the slut. I’m sure she does all sorts of things with him I wouldn’t.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, three-ways and coming on your face and playing with your bottom and all the stuff boys want to do.”

  I felt a sense of relief that she hadn’t allowed Jackal those violations. “Are you coming back soon?”

  “Soon,” she promised.

  “What about the Swift?”

  “I don’t have to tell them for a month. I’ll see how the essay goes. Speaking of which, I should get back to work.”