The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  “Do you love him as much as Tom, then?”

  She puzzled over this and then answered. “More and less at the same time.”

  There was a pause. “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “When you’re a mom are you going to wear all this stuff? The safety pins, and coloring your hair?”

  She smiled. “No, probably not.”

  “Just curious.”

  “You know why I do it? Because fuck them. I like it.”

  I laughed and put my arm around her shoulder, squeezing. “I love you,” I said.

  “You, too.”

  We talked for another few minutes, not so directly now, and then shoved off in the punt, soft light striking against the tree-sheltered river. When we were nearly all the way back to Fleet my phone buzzed. It was Sophie.

  I need you to come back.

  On my way. What is it?

  You’re still punting?

  Ten minutes away.

  I took the pole then and started to push us more quickly downriver. When we came into view of the lawns I saw that she was standing there, arms crossed, face dense with unhappiness, the wind troubling her hair. I feared that something terrible had happened.

  “Are you okay?” I called out. I let Ella lock the punt to the shore and jumped out.

  “It’s Chessie,” she said. “She’s gotten sicker. They want to put her down, straight away.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “No, I convinced them to wait. Will you come with me?”

  “Of course.”

  We left half an hour later in her car. I drove, even though I still wasn’t accustomed to the left side of the road. It took nearly three hours to get there—we ran into traffic near Birmingham—with Sophie silent most of the way. It was dusk when we arrived in her small village.

  “Which way?” I asked.

  “Left,” she said and then changed her mind. “No, let’s go straight to the vet’s. Turn right. My parents left her there, the bastards.”

  The stainless steel and fluoresced white tile of the vet’s office looked, somehow even more than in a hospital for humans, like a well-organized mind’s idea of death. A receptionist led us back into the holding room, and through a large window we saw the dog, a beautiful white-and-brown animal with an intelligent face, before she saw us. She was lying on her side, breathing very raggedly. Her shanks looked thin. You could tell she was ill. She didn’t pay any attention to the vet’s assistant who was in the room with her.

  When Sophie came into the room, though, some dim sensation of smell or sight must have told the dog that its friend was here. Her tail thumped once and then twice against the gurney and she lifted her head, her tongue lolling out, and snorted with happiness, then struggled—a losing battle—to rise up to her haunches.

  It is absurd to care too much about a dog’s death and inhuman not to care—that is the world. The anguish in Sophie’s face was terrible and real. She went and cradled Chessie’s head in her arms, soothing her down and down until she was resting still again. Occasionally the dog’s tail would beat in happiness, and when it did I felt a lump in my throat. As for Sophie, she was so silent and impassive that I knew her to be inconsolable, beyond the range of any speech to help her. I thought about Hitler poisoning his dog to make sure his cyanide caplets worked and hated him for it, the trust of the dog taking the pill with a bit of steak. The torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind against a tree. This was followed by a hiss of revulsion at myself for the emotion: Who cares about Hitler’s dog; what an absurdity.

  The vet came in and introduced herself, a hardy Yorkshire woman of fifty or thereabouts with a monkey face. “You’re her owner?” she asked. Her voice was sympathetic but professional.

  “I am,” said Sophie.

  “There’s only so much we can do for the pain at this stage.”

  “How much longer if we—if we kept her like this?”

  “She’s a very old dog. Maybe two weeks or so. But they would be painful weeks.”

  Sophie wiped the tears away from her face with the heel of her hand. “I don’t care,” she said. “Let’s keep her alive. Let’s do it.”

  I stayed silent, but the vet said, “It would only be unkind.”

  Chessie’s tail thumped, and Sophie covered the dog’s face in kisses. She was quiet for a few minutes, long minutes. “Okay,” she said at last.

  “You can give her a last treat, if you like, take your time,” said the vet. I honored her for her patience; the rest of the practice was shut up for the night.

  “Will, go get some peanut butter, would you? There’s a shop two doors down to the left.”

  I went and returned; Sophie scooped some of the peanut butter out with her fingers, and Chessie licked at it once or twice, but it seemed to me it was more to please Sophie than out of any real desire to eat. Finally the vet interceded.

  “I’m going to give her the shot now.”

  “What will you do with her body?” asked Sophie.

  “We can give you the ashes, if you like. It takes a day or two.”

  “Yes, I want them.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

  To my surprise, she nodded. “Yes, please.”

  As I left I watched Sophie envelop the dog in her arms more carefully and wholly, as if she could lift her clear away from death. I went into the lobby and waited twenty minutes. After that Sophie emerged, her face dull. She didn’t want to see her parents, so despite the lateness of the hour we began the drive back to Oxford.

  * * *

  When we were twenty or thirty miles from home it began to rain, the red lights in front of us and the white lights coming toward us stained together, the trees along the side of the road no longer individual, a cliff of green-black. Sophie hadn’t spoken much during the trip, and when I asked about Chessie she had shaken her head. Then she said something that took me aback entirely.

  “I’ve been e-mailing with Jack.”

  That saying “My blood ran cold”—it’s true, it feels as if your blood loses its heat in your veins for a second. “What?”

  “I didn’t get his daily e-mail for three days. I worried. I called his mother.”

  “And, so?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Oh, great,” I said, without regretting the sarcasm.

  “They lost power at his base. Then he had a satellite phone but he couldn’t get through on it, to home, I mean, and so he had to wait until the power came back. He started up with the daily e-mail again.”

  “What have you been e-mailing him?”

  She started to cry. “Only asking how he is.”

  “Why did you even ask me to come up to the vet’s with you?” I asked. My voice was more detached than I felt. “Why didn’t you ask Jack?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “That’s the only reason.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Will you stop e-mailing with him?” I asked.

  She was silent.

  “Sophie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  My skin started to prickle. There was a gas station on the side of the road, with a bright hopeful sign lofted above it in the black of the sky. I pulled in.

  “Are you breaking up with me?”

  “No,” she said, “of course not.”

  I turned the car off, and with the engine sound gone it seemed too quiet. Now that I started to think of it we had seen less of each other in the past few days. She had a job doing research for her adviser, tedious hours combing through records, and she had been too tired, she said, to do much at the end of the day, though we had still been sleeping in her room, still smiling when we saw each other. Had something been different?

  “I don’t deserve this,” I said.

  “Lula told me you two kissed,” she said and for the first time in a while looked straight at me.

  I heard the words and felt a sense of injustice. How could I po
ssibly explain to her how entitled I felt to those kisses, and how badly they had done the job I set them out to do? I couldn’t say any of it. Nor could I explain that it was different if I wrote to Alison, even though I knew in my heart it wasn’t. “She did?”

  “Did you?”

  “This has been the best summer of my life,” I said, more to myself than to her.

  “Did you?”

  Finally I nodded.

  “Well,” she said.

  I threw up my hands. “It’s not like what you think, though. I was drunk and I was, I was mad at you. I overheard you telling Plum you missed Jack.”

  “You eavesdropped?”

  “Not on purpose.” Then I paused. “No, that’s a lie. Half on purpose.”

  “Then you deserved to hear whatever you heard.”

  “I know,” I said. We looked at each other unhappily. “Does Jack want you back?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him no, of course.”

  My heart lifted slightly. “Good.”

  “He said that he couldn’t promise he would never cheat, but that he would try, and if he did he would tell me, and it wouldn’t be with anyone I knew…” She said this as if she knew the madness of it, in a dismissive voice, but to my shock I discerned that beneath her attitude she saw some glimmer of reason in the offer, she didn’t altogether mind it. My deferred conviction of his cruelty returned and deepened. Then I thought, She’s his Alison.

  “Will you stop?”

  “I’ll stop,” she said.

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes, I promise. Will you kiss anyone?”

  “Never again if you don’t want me to. Except you.”

  She looked at the wet windshield, at the thicket of trees off to the side of the road. “I’m tired.”

  I turned on the car. “We should go home, I guess.”

  “Let’s do. It would be nice to fall asleep together.” She leaned her head on my shoulder as we drove. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a day.”

  Slowly we started to say warm words to each other again, but none of them seemed to count.

  * * *

  I probably haven’t conveyed the contentment we had felt that summer. From the outside that night in the car might have seemed like merely another reversal in the now somewhat wilted drama of our relationship, but that would be wrong. Almost as if in compensation for those reversals, the summer had been impenetrably calm. Immediately we had become comfortable living together, she just as comfortable as I. For a very long stretch of time, until Lula’s party I guess, it didn’t even cross my mind that we wouldn’t be married, and we talked about distant plans, about returning to Fleet for reunions together in five or ten years, about long trips we would take, about the places she wanted me to show her in America. There was none of that teleological weight some summer relationships bear, like the pages thinning toward the end of a book; there was no skittishness in her attitude toward me. She was as stable as Alison had ever been. I wasn’t sure if it meant me living in England for the rest of my life, or if she might be willing to move to my country, but I didn’t especially care. She didn’t either. At Lula’s party I was touched again by that fear I had once felt of losing her, that obsessive feeling, but almost immediately I had accepted and forgotten what she said. It was only natural that she worried about Jack.

  Now something changed. There was no diminution in Sophie’s affection toward me in the next weeks, as August ended, but our conversations cast a shorter shadow. When we spoke about the future it was in less expansive terms. Perhaps I was in the wrong—I worried that she was writing to Jack, and it might have affected the mood of our companionship.

  Others were luckier.

  One morning a few days shy of September Sophie left my room to go to the library, to do research, giving me a kiss as she left. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out I saw that standing with Tom in his doorway was Jess.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, Will,” she said, then to Tom, “Okay, I should go.” She put her arm around his waist and squeezed him.

  “Bye.”

  He walked her out, and when she was gone he came back to my room. “Beer?”

  “It’s like ten.”

  He went and got a beer from his refrigerator, a bottle of water for me, and we sat down in my two armchairs by the window. “That’s back on, Jess,” he said. “I broke it off with Daisy.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Last week.” His face took on an embarrassed defiance. “I missed her.”

  “And she was happy to come back?”

  He smiled. “Do you know why I love her? When I called her she just came back. And not like a doormat, or like she was waiting for me to call. She told me she’d been seeing someone else, even. But she didn’t see the point in shouting at me or in pretending she didn’t want to be together.”

  I nodded. “Do you remember what your sister said about Daisy when we had lunch?”

  Caution stole over his face. “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “No, what?”

  “Well—she said that you felt the need to date girls like Daisy, but if she had her choice she would see you with someone different. I can’t remember how she put it exactly. Someone like Jess, I think.”

  He looked out at the clear sky. “Funny, I didn’t remember that. I always think I’ve remembered it all and then someone reminds me of a part I forgot.”

  “She knew you best.”

  “I woke up this morning, and I thought, it popped into my head randomly, I’m going to marry this person.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  I was, though; and I was wrong.

  * * *

  A few days before I was meant to move out of my room and to London, Sophie came over. Her face was tired. We hooked up, and afterward we lay together for a while, silent.

  “Jack comes back on leave next week,” she said at length.

  “How do you know?”

  “He e-mailed me. He e-mails me every day.”

  “Do you write back?”

  “No. I promised you.”

  “Are you going to see him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please don’t.”

  She sat up on the side of the bed, still frankly naked, her beautiful hair falling down around her shoulders. Her high pink coloring and the faint freckles around her nose made her look as if she had just come back from a trip to a cold place, or maybe been sunburned badly once, long before.

  “I do love you, Will,” she said.

  “I love you.”

  She put a hand on my face and looked straight into my eyes. “I think I need to give him another chance.”

  This was what she had come to say to me, I saw. “I love you.”

  “And I—”

  “No, no, I love you.”

  Those words: They had never not been enough to say before, in any of my previous relationships. I looked at her face and saw a blankness that chilled me. At this time I was reading Proust and becoming obsessed with certain sentences he had written, to the point that I would read them when I woke up and before I went to bed, puzzle over them throughout the day, sentences that seemed to me to describe not just life but how we conceive of life. “To have a kind heart was everything” was one of these sentences, and as I looked at her I wondered if she had a kind heart. I thought perhaps that she didn’t. Then I realized that Alison could have said the same of me, even as I tried to be kind to her, and that now I was the one who loved without reserve, not Sophie. It didn’t mean that she didn’t love me.

  “Please just wait until his next leave,” I said.

  “Oh, Will,” she said pityingly and lay down next to me, holding me tight.

  It would be hard to portray the crashing, ruinous unhappiness I felt from that hour forward
. In the next days we spent more time together than we had even at our happiest in June and July, and slept with each other over and over, having sex until we were ragged with exhaustion. She drove that even more than I did, and I wondered what she was storing up. I called her cold, called her hateful, and she merely acquiesced to those judgments. All of these hours I could describe in their minute particulars, what we ate and what we drank; how kind Tom and Anneliese were from afar, and then after Sophie left up close; how she left, to go visit Jack, with pained apologies.

  Instead what I think of is a different memory completely. It’s from one of those first beautiful, breezy days at Oxford, just after I arrived that fall. I was at an MCR new students’ picnic. Sophie was speaking to someone—it was the day after I first met her—and when she saw me looking at her she rolled her eyes imperceptibly and grinned over the person’s shoulder.

  It felt so intimate somehow. She had chosen me. Then what happened next: She made her excuses to whomever she was speaking with and started to walk toward me across the lawn, her tan arms at her sides, her high pink cheeks, her wonderful corona of copper-auburn hair, her white smile. I think it was in that moment, when she started coming toward me, when the world was full of time for us, that I gave over to her mercy my entire future and all its happiness.

  Larkin wrote a poem about the maiden name of a woman he loved:

  Now it’s a phrase applicable to no one,

  Lying just where you left it, scattered through

  Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two

  Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon—

  Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly

  Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.

  No, it means you. Or, since you’re past and gone,

  It means what we feel now about you then:

  How beautiful you were, and near, and young,

  So vivid, you might still be there among