“Say hi to Chessie for me.”
“I will.”
“And make sure you’re stocked up on Hobnobs.”
She laughed. “See you soon.”
“Good-bye.”
* * *
The next week, as April ended, Tom knocked on my door. It was late at night, past midnight, and I was downloading music illegally and chatting with Ella on AIM about a summer trip we might make to Amsterdam. I told her to wait.
“What’s up?”
“Hey.” He was holding his phone and biting his lip, his face thick with concentration. “I just got a text. Daisy is in town.”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Do you think I should? Will you come?”
“Won’t that be awkward?”
“Just come.”
At a table at the King’s Arms sat a girl with feline eyes and dark, lustrous, Trianon-milkmaid hair. She had big sunglasses propped on her head (it was past midnight, let me repeat) and a handbag large enough to hold an infant. On her face was that constantly recalibrated baseline sullenness of the pretty English upper-class girl. Her shirt was of some fashion I was too ignorant to appreciate, with a dorsal pleat that ought to have looked absurd but made her shoulders seem especially soft and beautiful.
She ignored Tom. “I’m Daisy.” She put out her hand, her bag hanging from her forearm so that I had to reach. “Pleasure to meet you.”
I knew who she was, of course. I also knew that she and Tom had spoken only once, for five minutes, after his sister died. “How do you do,” I said. “What brings you to town?”
“My firm is consulting here. I’m at the Old Bank.” She gestured lazily behind her. “Poky city.”
Tom was staring at her. We hadn’t sat down yet, and just as I was about to, he burst out, “Will’s on his way to meet our friend Ella, actually.” He turned to me. “Thanks for walking me, mate.”
“Sure,” I said.
Daisy wasn’t fooled.
On the short walk back to the Cottages, I got a text from Tom. I owe you one.
No worries, I wrote back.
I was just about to go to sleep, an hour later, when I heard the door. Anil and his friend Shateel were visiting Hadrian’s Wall overnight, with Anneliese—both Anil and Anneliese had a checklist of places to see while they lived in England—so I knew it was Tom. Accompanying his footsteps was the peal of a girl’s laughter. It wasn’t Jess.
I ran to open my door and steadied it to make it look like I’d left it that way casually, then sat with a book in the armchair that faced the hall.
“Hi, Will,” said Daisy. “How was Ella?”
“She’s good.”
“I look forward to meeting her.”
“Daze, grab yourself a beer from the fridge,” Tom said and ushered her into his room. “Will, this is that Web site I was telling you about.”
“What Web site?” Daisy called from Tom’s room.
“Just about football.”
“Oh,” she said without satisfaction.
He opened Google and typed “THIS IS A FUCKING DISASTER JESUS CHRIST” into the search bar. A Web site called Jesus Fucking Christ popped up.
“Yeah, look around it, there’s some pretty cool stuff about Arsenal on there,” he said to me. “All right. Daisy and I are off for a walk. We just stopped back here for beers.”
They were gone an hour, and when Tom returned he was alone. He came into my room and without saying anything spilled himself into one of the armchairs by my open windows.
“My life is fucking over,” he said. “She’s here for five weeks.”
“You don’t have to see her.”
“I’m the only person she knows in the entire city.”
“That’s not your fault.”
He sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “It’s not so simple.”
“Why?”
“You know better than anyone that I never wanted to break up with her.”
“But that was a long time ago.”
“She’s single,” he said, not quite irrelevantly. Then, more relevantly, “Fuck.”
“Stick with Jess,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Yep.”
“She looked great.”
“Daisy?”
“Daisy, yeah.” Then, ruminatively and summarizingly, he said, “Fuck.”
* * *
That April and May run together in my mind. I spent more time with Anneliese and Ella than with anyone else. Anil suddenly had to study very hard for exams, and Tom, though I knew he had seen Daisy now and then, was still with Jess every night. At some stage Sophie returned, but we only saw her once or twice a week. As I should have realized after she got the Swift, she had all along been working much harder than any of us realized, and like Anil she spent most of her time in the library. After she was back from Dorset I would visit her there most evenings, bringing a cup of coffee, a candy bar, and she would squeeze my hand and thank me and after ten or fifteen sentences of conversation turn back to her work. Slowly and gently I began to let go of my hopes of her. No, that’s not accurate: I never let go of my hopes, but I saw that they were slipping away whether I wanted them to or not, and the excuse of her work, of Jack’s desertion, softened the pain.
In the second week of May, on a very hot day, the lawns scattered with undergraduates burning themselves imperial red, I received an unexpected phone call. There was a booming American voice on the other end of the line.
“Is that Will Baker?” it asked.
“It is.”
“You’re a hard man to get ahold of. Dougie Bryson,” said the voice. “Maybe you’ve heard of me?”
“It rings a bell,” I said, which was a lie.
“I thought it might. I was on Kerry, too, but in Colorado. I ran the field office out there. It was rough. Hopefully we set ’em up for the next election, at least. We definitely cut some good turf.”
“Doug Bryson, sure, of course.”
“So listen, any interest in getting back into politics?”
“You know I’m in England, right?”
“I just called you, smart guy.”
“Very true. What’s going on?” I asked.
“If you want it I have a job for you, actually.”
“Wow.”
“Well, we’re short on time. What it is, I’m running a congressional candidate out of the Ohio Seventeenth, a Democrat named Viskovitz, David Viskovitz. You’d love him. He’s a veteran, Panama, and he’s owned a contracting business out here for about ten years. The business is clean, which it’s reassuring to know. Really weirdly handsome, blond wife, the kids. Actually one of the kids is Down’s, too, which—it’s not a disadvantage, quality of life aside and all that, not trying to be insensitive. Sweet kid. Anyway, Viskovitz, he’s local chamber of commerce, hangs out at the hardware store, concerned parent at school meetings. The whole thing. Sounds like a Republican, doesn’t he? That’s why we’re excited to have him.”
“And you’re running him.”
“We need a comm director. I know you worked senior staff, but the people I was in touch with from Ohio told me you were a decent writer, and if I’m not mistaken you freelanced in the comm shop?”
“Yeah, all the time. It was us who got Polsky.”
“Nice. Well, it doesn’t pay much, sixteen hundred a month, but there’s a car and an apartment, and you get fifty bucks per diem on weekdays, so that’s another thousand a month.” He paused. “I won’t lie, the numbers are trending against us, and right now it’s me and a phone bank, and some people from the community who are, look, they’re nice folks, but they’re not exactly seasoned operatives. The presumptive nominee had to drop out, some shady financing stuff. It’s last minute. But even still, it’s close, man. We gotta fight, right?”
“Of course. I’m honored. It would just be a big change.”
“Two years of votes against Bush. If we can get this guy in office, I don’t give a shit if he g
ets voted out in oh-eight, I don’t give a shit if he fucks the prom queen in the ass on Main Street or does meth with Marion Barry, it’s two years of votes against Bush. Just a big ‘Nay’ next to his name on C-SPAN every day. Because fuck those guys.” His pitch was done, and he waited for my response. “Will? Did I lose you?”
“No, just thinking.” The thing was, now I did remember Doug Bryson’s name. He and a small band of field operatives in Colorado had stopped taking the orders of the national campaign in August, not long before the election, a briefly famous trahison des clercs that immediately bumped Kerry six points in local polling. In the end it had gotten him promoted, and he had been on TV a few dozen times. He was an interesting contact.
“Well?”
“Can I get back to you?” I asked.
“I can give you a few days to answer and two or three weeks to get out here, but that’s it. No more, just because we’re trying to get this thing up and running and we’re already short on time. Look up my guy, Viskovitz. And take down my number.”
I wrote it down. “By the way, have you heard of a guy named Jim Sawyer?” I asked.
“Of course, in New York?”
“He didn’t call you, did he?”
“I’ve never spoken to him in my life. Why?”
“Sometimes he—he’s looked out for me once or twice.”
“No, no, this is a Kerry thing. I knew some of those Ohio people pretty well. Tucker, Monty, Steiny—”
“Oh, how is Monty?”
“I love that little guy. No idea how he’s doing. Anyways, think about it. We’d love to have you on board.”
“Cool. Thanks, Doug. I’ll be in touch.”
“Make it soon, okay?”
I hung up and stared at my phone, feeling a powerful ambivalence. I decided I would put the subject out of my mind for a couple of days. But part of me already knew that I would go.
* * *
The next week, three things happened that made me realize that the call was only a taste, after all, that whether it was in two weeks or three months or whenever it was I would actually have to leave Oxford. In the morning I turned in my long essay, the final piece of work I had to submit to the faculty; in the afternoon I got a slip under my door confirming that I could keep possession of my room until August 31 and not longer; and just before the business day ended at five o’clock, I got an e-mail from Franklin Cross, telling me my start date was September 3 and I should give them a correspondence address in London at least one week before that, appended with the details of firm-approved housing agents (they would pay), gyms (they would pay), and London Underground passes (they would pay).
I wrote back to acknowledge the e-mail and said nothing about the possibility that I might not take the job. How often I thought of that $190,000, how I spent it in my head! Yet each morning when I woke up it was with campaign thoughts. I had researched Viskovitz and already had a notebook a quarter full of plans for him.
The long essay I submitted, incidentally, was about Orwell and his imbrication of cultural and personal writing, history and autobiography, which I argued prefigured the generic uncertainty of so much late twentieth-century fiction. To this day the essay is considered a minor classic. No, I’m kidding, of course. I doubt anybody ever read it all the way through then, including my supervisor, and certainly nobody has since. I got honors for it, however. So did Anneliese. So did all the Chinese statistics students except one, who was rusticated for plagiarism.
I was there on the day when Sophie turned in her long essay, whose subject was Mauriac and Camus. I proofed it for her. She had promised again and again, to all of us, that when this piece of work was finished she would be free again to spend time with us, and of all people it was Anneliese who decided that we should trash her, to keep her to her word. Trashing was the tradition at Oxford when someone handed in their final piece of work: as they left the Exam Schools in their subfusc—black tie for men, white shirts and ribbons for women, academic gowns for both—you pelted them with flour, glitter, and champagne, or, in the case of the university’s more laddish contingents, disgusting variations, fish that had been left to rot, ketchup, vinegar, soap, milk.
In the morning Sophie texted me. Somehow she had caught wind of our plans. Just don’t let them throw eggs.
Well, I can promise you that I won’t throw any eggs. I’m not in charge of Tom.
So Tom’s going to throw eggs!?
I don’t know what he’s planning.
At ten to three all of us walked through town together, plotting strategy. “We have to throw the water and then the flour,” said Anneliese. “That way it will stick.”
“Good thinking,” said Ella.
“Neither of you has any eggs, do you?”
“YES, WE GET IT, NO EGGS!” Ella said. “It’s not like she’s allergic to eggs!”
Anil was waiting for us on the corner of the High. He had a dozen yellow balloons that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY! in big blue letters. Balloons were a tradition, too.
“You got birthday balloons?” asked Ella.
“You noticed that?” he answered, crestfallen. “I thought they would blend together and look blue and yellow.”
“Anil.”
We reached the Exam Schools just as Sophie was coming out, and her face lit up. “Guys!” she said. She ran toward us in her black gown, cap under her arm. She looked happier than I had seen her in a long while. “I’m done!”
Instinctively I opened my arms and she flew up and hugged me. “Congratulations!”
Then I felt a firm thwack in the middle of my back.
I turned, and Tom was there with two cartons of eggs. “You don’t get off without a pelting.”
Then Anneliese, Anil, Ella, Timmo, and Peter, all of them so recently my allies, started to spray Sophie and me with champagne, toss water in our faces, burst open bags of flour over our heads, dust us with handfuls of glitter. Tom roved around the perimeter, throwing eggs.
“Tom, you asshole!” Sophie yelled.
“Eggs are a tradition!” he said. “You’ll thank me when you see the pictures!”
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Anneliese’s taking pictures, isn’t she.”
Then there was a whoop and a massive red streak in the air. It was Jem and two of his friends.
“Ketchup?” I said. “Fuck.” I wiped it out of my eyes.
“Congrats, Bake,” he said. “You dick.”
Sophie and I huddled together until everything they had brought was clotted in our hair and grimed into our clothes. “Motherfuckers,” she said in her proper accent, smiling.
We were disgusting, but by the rules we had to stop at the King’s Arms and sit outside in the heat, the flour and champagne turning into a coat of cement on our skin. Afterward we went off and showered, then reunited at the porters’ lodge and went punting together in a large, loud group, returning at eight, sunburned and drunk.
There was a bop that night, the Saturday of Trinity Seventh Week. Masses of undergraduates had finished in the previous days.
“I can’t believe I’m here another three years,” said Ella as we watched them from the bar. They were all dancing outside on the terrace and the lawns, finding mischief with each other early in the night.
“I’m sure they’d all be jealous. Anyway, I’ll be back to visit.”
“If I’m going to bops in two years, please shoot me.”
“Please shoot me if I’m not.”
She looked at me. “Are you going to say anything to Sophie?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not tonight.”
Ella and I did a shot then; Tom showed up with Jess; Anneliese and Sophie were already dancing and laughing together outdoors. Soon enough we started to dance, too. I remember the songs so well: There was “Angels,” by Robbie Williams, and we all yelled the chorus together (“Nothing like a bunch of pissed mates screaming ‘Angels,’” Jem observed), and there was “Back for Good,” obviously.
The bops ended at midnight
. (Coming from New York, where that was the time when Alison and I would leave the apartment, that always seemed touchingly provincial.) For the last song the DJ put on something slow, that one by Alphaville, I think. Sophie and I had been dancing in a group together all night, and earlier she had bought me a beer and sat at the bar with me, talking and giggling, but only now did we find each other among all of the nineteen-year-old couples swaying on the lawn and dancing together, just the two of us.
Her skin was warm and soft. I put my arms around her waist. Neither of us talked, but she rested her head on my shoulder, her face against my neck.
When the song ended neither of us let go. “I might be leaving sooner than I expected,” I said in a low voice.
She looked up at me. “For where? For London?”
“No. For the States.”
“In how long?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“What about your job?”
“There’s a different job I might take.”
“I was so looking forward to all of us being here this summer,” she murmured. She stayed in my arms, though no new song had come on.
My heart started to race. “Could anything happen between us, if I stayed?” I asked.
There was a long pause. “No,” she said at last. Then she squeezed me in her arms and stepped back. “I’m sorry. It’s not possible. All that is over for me.”
“Is it too soon after Jack?”
“It’s not that. Please don’t ask me again, Will. I don’t like to hurt you.”
I went home that night in a daze of grief. I woke in the same daze. The trouble was that I believed her. I spent the day heartsick, lying in my bed, immune to distraction, a lump in my throat the whole while. Finally at four o’clock (when it was still just ten in Ohio) I called Doug Bryson and took the job.
“Welcome aboard,” he said.
“I have a bunch of ideas. I’ll e-mail you. I think there are persuadables in Pine Heights.”
“The trailer parks? We’re polling fifty-five there.”
“I think it could be eighty. He just has to soften up on guns a bit.”
I could hear Doug smile. “Get over here as fast as you can.”
America was where they kept real life anyhow. I didn’t want to go back; in particular I didn’t want to miss the chance of seeing her at random every day, and at moments it felt as if that would be enough, my aspirations had so diminished. In more sensible moods I knew the best thing I could do was leave.
The Last Enchantments Page 25