The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  Those first few days …

  On my last morning in Oxford, all of my stuff bundled into a moving van, the job in London lying ninety miles south, she came back to the city and saw me, an hour or so before everyone gathered around to say good-bye. We stood along the street before the Cottages, the indifferent white stone of Fleet high off to our right, and she gave me a long and tight hug.

  “I’ll always love you, you know,” she said.

  I didn’t say it back because I feared it would be true. I didn’t ask her to change her mind either, as I had for the last few days. I felt numb. She looked prepared to discuss it, but also decided; so I didn’t say anything, and I saw myself far in the future—a future that for her would contain a whole life, that I didn’t get to see for myself—feeling as I had felt about her at that dumb picnic on the lawns: how beautiful she was, and near, and young.

  We said our last, meaningless words and hugged again—even kissed for a few minutes—and then like that she left.

  * * *

  Here is something everyone starts saying to each other when they turn twenty-six or twenty-seven, near the end of parties, the complacent grandeur of melancholy in their voices, and it’s true: When you’re finally a grown-up, one of the things you find out is that there are no grown-ups.

  For a month I burrowed like a mole into the investment firm, only seeing occasional glimpses of my friends—Anneliese was taking pictures, Tom lived two streets down and came over to mine for beers late most nights, still in his Freshfields suit and tie, Anil visited on weekends—and learning how to be a banker. I loathed it. The exhaustion of the work was annealing, however, after the self-indulgence of Oxford. Punting seemed like an impossible vanity after I had spent eighteen hours staring at a spreadsheet and adding numbers on it, trying to decipher whether the books of a pharmaceutical holding company in China were too pristine.

  One morning Franklin, my cousin’s husband, didn’t show up at the office, and four days later the firm quietly shuttered its doors. There was no great drama about it, no Ponzi scheme. They just ran out of money. It was late 2006—he was one of the first to go under, though of course far from the last. Franklin himself still had the three houses and the helicopter, as I heard it. I got a month’s pay, though I had barely been there a month.

  The next several weeks I spent at loose ends in London, until finally I knew that it was time, and I packed my things for a second time to take a plane back home.

  The last person I saw from Oxford was Anil. His friend Shateel was taking over my lease, and Anil had come down as a favor to him to get the keys from me, because Shateel was in Edinburgh for a conference. When he arrived I was already packed, still an hour or so before I had to leave, and he suggested we get breakfast. He was in terrific spirits then because he had a new Welsh girlfriend, Pippa, from St. Hilda’s (Tom called her the Hildabeast, though she was petite and pretty), and he was full of plans to stay in England past the end of his course, to be with her.

  In the café we sat at a table by the window. Anil picked up the menu sitting on the table and lifted his glasses with a small frown, peering at it with his accustomed rabbinical focus, which at restaurants always led to decades of vacillation. I felt a huge affection for him. I stood up.

  “If she comes by get me the full English and a decaf, okay?” I asked.

  He nodded without looking up, brow furrowed, and I went to find the bathroom.

  It wasn’t immediately clear where the bathroom might be. I took a short hallway leading back away from the street, but it must have been the wrong way, because at the end of it I reached only a small room.

  This room looked different than the other parts of the restaurant. There was a Persian carpet in it, and from the floor to the ceiling, in a ring around the whole room, were bookshelves lined full with books. Just off-center there was a single table, and sitting at it was an extremely skinny little boy with blond hair. He had a plate with toast and jam on it, one or maybe two bites gone, and a mug of something steaming, hot chocolate I would guess. There was a stack of books on the table. He was reading something bound in blue cloth, I couldn’t see what. He was ten or eleven.

  I lifted my hand to waist height and said, “Sorry!” and simultaneously he said, “Oh, sorry!” We laughed. I wondered if he was the son of the owner. He looked a bit like me. I glanced around the room at the bookshelves for another beat while he stared up at me expectantly. After a moment I looked back at him and smiled and said, “Sorry again,” and then waved good-bye.

  EPILOGUE

  I know that as an American September 11th was supposed to have a deep effect on me, and it did, but for whatever reason the images that haunt me from the decade of the 2000s are not of that event but of what happened in New Orleans that August, during Hurricane Katrina. Maybe because the World Trade Center going down was so outlandish, whereas Katrina was all grit and reality and terrible decisions. Still in Oxford as it happened, I searched online for snippets of news, streaming video, op-eds; and I had dreams at night about the flooded streets, the ruined houses, the floating cars, and the stranded people. I felt lacerating anger at the officials on the scene. When President Bush stood in the yard of a senator’s fallen country house and vowed to rebuild it, as if that were a priority, I wanted to explode out of my skin. Anyway, it was Katrina—that was why, after returning to New York in the middle of October, I went back into politics.

  * * *

  The job I found was good; being in Congress itself, rather than on the trail, cleansed me of the leftover bitterness from 2004. There was still work to be done. I was staffed in a senator’s office, as a deputy in the communications department, writing the less important speeches, updating the blog, occasionally talking strategy.

  Living in Washington I missed the week when Anil visited New York with his family, and nobody else came stateside. Tom, Ella, James, Peter, Anneliese, Anil, Timmo, and I kept up a ragged e-mail chain, no e-mails for a few days and then forty in an hour. So did a few people in my class, led by Sullivan, and I discovered that I missed the arcane metalanguage of academic study, looked forward to reading some old classmate’s Marxist interrogation of Eliot, offered in a rush when they needed last-minute advice for a tutorial.

  Even technology has not removed attrition from life—there were faces I had seen every day at Fleet that I understood, with moving new clarity as time passed, I would likely never see again in this mortal life, because they were in Adelaide or Istanbul, because we had never been that close to start with, humans like me, out there on the great earth, people who had briefly been my friends.

  Still, on Facebook I could track people’s lives. Lula had joined up again and according to her profile was doing charity work in London. Jem’s trio—they had added a bassist—played London four nights a week, and I received invitations to all their shows in my messages folder. I looked for Anneliese’s photos on Die Zeit’s Web site first thing every morning when I sat down at my computer, and she had invited me to come back to Germany with her in the spring. Fleet’s master, old Ballantine, died of liver failure. They brought in a woman, Dame Jessica Mote, to take his place.

  In spite of these lingering connections it fell away, as I had known it would.

  I had friends in D.C. and became absorbed in my work; I took weekend trips up to New York to see people there; I met a cute girl I didn’t like very much, and we started to date. She worked two doors down from me for her mother, who was a congresswoman, and for that reason my choice of her unsettled me, so that I didn’t want to look at it too closely. Still, in Washington there were bills to pass, campaigns I had my eye on, opponents who absorbed me. There were big buildings, but people weren’t just fucking around in them—and I mean that in the nicest way possible—as they did in Oxford.

  It certainly seemed different. If you look for endings you can always find one, but truly I felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it all feels expeditionary, inexact.r />
  Except: One day in April Tom e-mailed the group from his office (he was getting along well at the firm, while Jess, in London now with him, was working at Harrod’s) and suggested a minireunion, and almost everyone said they could make it. I booked my ticket and took my vacation days, and in June, nine months after leaving Oxford, I landed again at Heathrow, again met a surly customs agent, again walked under the weight of my bags to Fleet, looking up at its shining high tower before I went in. The porters remembered me, and in fact when I went to see them Jerry, the porter who had given me and Tom our tour, was leading three girls through the front gate. “The oldest gargoyles and grotesques in Oxford,” I heard him say, which made me grin.

  We were spread out among two rooms, Liese in with Ella and Peter while Tom and I slept on borrowed mattresses in an empty room in Anil’s new cottage. The core of our group was together again except Sophie, who was in London.

  I don’t need to describe what we did, really. We went and danced at the Turtle; we had drinks at the King’s Arms, the Bear, and the Turf; we went to Hall and to the Fleet bar; we walked across Christ Church Meadow; we punted up to the Victoria; we played table football. It was like being back again and not like that at all, because so much of being at Oxford is the stretch of days behind and before you, the feeling of shelter inside that great mammoth body, the security of it. I was very happy. I loved these friends dearly, I’d half-forgotten. It was so easy for all of us to fall back into that blur of verging, canceling pink light each evening, with white wine and cigarettes out on the grass, beneath the high sway of the trees, the quiet river nearby, laughter ringing from all the small congregations out on the brilliant green lawns, and surrounding us the high sun-struck golden-stone walls of Fleet and Oxford: the beauty and camaraderie of it lifting us into a different consciousness of ourselves, a new kind of love, and seeming to speak to other verities than the ones I’d always known. Home again, so far from home.

  * * *

  I was leaving on a Tuesday, and on Sunday night Anneliese, Timmo, and Tom had to return to London, because all three were working in the morning. The Oxford contingent of Ella and Peter (and indeed Pippa) had to work again, too, though they agreed to meet up the next evening, and so I was left with Anil. I felt a mixture of melancholy and merriment in his company. I thought about calling Sophie, just for the hell of it, but I didn’t. He and I wandered around the Ashmolean and took pictures of Balliol and Merton.

  Then Soph texted me. Are you still in the country, I hope? she said. I’m actually going to be back in Oxford in an hour or two.

  Yep, till tomorrow. At Pitt Rivers with Anil.

  Lunch?

  Sure.

  I have my car, pick you up at like two?

  Okay.

  So the last time I saw Sophie it was the two of us—and Anil. We drove to a village outside of town called Woodstock and walked around, looking for a pub.

  After some initial awkwardness it was perfect again, just as it had been in the fall when she and I were best friends. Everything either of us said we laughed at, and we talked about things that had happened when we were both in Oxford without self-consciousness. It was perfect to have Anil there, in fact, now that I think of it. The whole thing took about two hours. I realized that I still wasn’t past her, and in realizing it much of the pain ended. In Washington there had been so many desolate-hearted Saturday nights when I couldn’t face the bars, or times when I stopped in my tracks and thought of her. It didn’t matter anymore.

  She drove us back to Oxford, but just before we left the restaurant Anil went to the bathroom.

  “You look good,” she said when we were alone.

  “You look great.”

  “Do you like Washington?”

  “I miss Oxford sometimes, but yeah.”

  “I miss Oxford, too, and I live here.” She smiled. There was a pause. “I wish it hadn’t ended the way it did.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  She took my hand under the table. “You mean the world to me, you know. All those times mean the world to me. I think about them all the time.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Someday we’ll all get back together and hang out again, anyway.”

  I shook my head. “For a day or two, maybe.”

  “We’ll have a reunion. When we’re all forty and you’re gray-haired and I have wrinkles.” She laughed.

  I thought of the line in Cyrano de Bergerac when Cyrano asks Roxanne to spare just a few of the tears she’s shedding for her lover for him, Cyrano, and I felt that wish; to be in just a corner of her heart, wherever life took her, whether I saw her again or not.

  She didn’t let go of my hand again until we left the restaurant, and when she dropped us off in Oxford and Anil was stepping out of the car, she surprised me: She gave me a quick kiss on the lips, a quick run of her tongue along mine. Then she looked me in the eyes.

  “Good-bye.”

  “Bye,” I said.

  That afternoon was gray, the sky shifting among the clouds. Anil put me on the bus to Heathrow, waving cheerfully and promising to visit Washington, and as we pulled out past Christ Church, and went on past Magdalen and out of the center of Oxford, a soft rain started to tap on the windows. I looked out at those beautiful fields along the side of the road England has, at the baffled yellow-gray light, and thought, I miss it. I thought, too, about time. How fleet it is, and how certain, and like death how indifferent to our commentary upon it. Once not long before we had been boys and girls, and soon we would be middle-aged, thickening with rueful pleasure toward the thinness of old age. Would we all see each other, as she said?

  I wished suddenly that I could have it all back for good, with Tom shouting at me from his room, or Sophie and Anneliese coming up the stairs to talk about the bop that night, or Anil listening to bad music. I thought that no matter how it had ended, still I wouldn’t change any of it.

  Honestly, this world. It’s the strangest thing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHARLES FINCH is a graduate of Yale, where he won the Veach Prize for Fiction, and Oxford. He has written for The New York Times and regularly reviews books for USA Today and The Chicago Tribune. His most recent novel is An Old Betrayal.

  www.facebook.com/charlesfinchauthor

  www.twitter.com/CharlesFinch

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE LAST ENCHANTMENTS. Copyright © 2014 by Charles Finch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Excerpts from “The Trees” and “Maiden Name” from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Excerpts from “The Trees” and “Maiden Name” from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by James Iocabelli

  e-ISBN 9781250018700

  First Edition: February 2014