The Last Enchantments (17 page)

Then he stood, and we were ushered out by the crimson martinet who served as junior dean. In an anteroom to the master’s office he asked if any of us had any questions for him. We all shook our heads except Allie, who asked, “When will Tom get back?” The junior dean didn’t know. So ended our brush with greatness.

“I’m not sure about you,” Jem said, as we walked out into Anna’s (where Ballantine’s office was), “but I feel loads better.” Everyone chuckled except Allie, who was brushing tears out of her eyes. Jem put his arm around her. “Come on, you lot. I’ll open the bar early. First round is mine.”

So it was in mingled disbelief and banality that the days after Katie Raleigh’s disappearance passed. I still thought about her constantly, catching myself staring into space for long stretches at my carrel in Bodley. Someone once told me that if you were careful, your understanding of the people you know who had died would deepen and evolve even after they were gone, like characters in a novel whose reasons for acting you piece together days and weeks past when you’ve finished reading it. The opposite is true, too: Think of someone who is gone too casually and you lose their capacity to surprise you. Then you find a letter they wrote, or a video, and see how effortlessly your brain has diminished them into a few characteristics. I tried to think about her.

I read in one interview, with a group of Katie’s friends from Fleet, that none of them had known her to have a boyfriend. It was a throwaway line, but it was what stuck with me, and combined with the memory of her ugliness this fact swelled in me every so often. I could still hear her as she had been singing when I came into the Cottages the day I met her, “On the Street Where You Live,” and that song, light-spirited, lovely and slight, persuaded of itself, seemed to represent in its contours what her life had been missing. She had been so decent (an Orwell word) herself, had seemed so eager for other people’s happiness; that made it worse, that apparently she felt no bitterness or envy, and was perhaps stoic in the face of her obscure inner disappointments, which, if she felt unloved, may have been greater than the average person’s. Her parents’ death, raising Tom, her possible loneliness—how cruel it seemed. I wondered what her world looked like from the inside. I found myself hoping that she had believed in the cross on her neck.

*   *   *

Then, just when it seemed that everything had gone quiet, we had news.

Turn on the TV—good about Katie?
Timmo texted me.

With a surge of hope I ran to the common room. So she was alive. When I opened the door I heard the TV going and saw that Ella was watching it alone.

Her back was to me. “Ella!”

She turned, and her face was wet, her black eye makeup smudging down her cheeks. “Oh,” she said.

“What happened?’

“She’s dead.”

“But Timmo said—”

She looked at me curiously and then understood. “Oh. No video. No rape. Just dead. They found her.”

Just dead. “How?”

“Shot in the head.”

I almost never cry. I do whatever the opposite is, some involution. I sat down. “In Damascus.”

“Thirty miles outside of the city, close to the highway. A rainstorm uncovered the body. I guess they just scraped some dirt over her, not much.” She gestured toward the TV, as if it were responsible, not her. Then she came and slouched down heavily into the couch, leaning her head against my shoulder and quietly crying. We sat there for a while and watched the BBC. “Should we call him?” she asked eventually.

“You know he hasn’t been picking up.”

“We should go to the funeral at least. They said on the news that it would be at St. Luke’s in Chelsea. There are already bouquets outside and notes—handwritten notes, like posters.” She sobbed. “Poor Tom.”

“I’m not sure we should go. We should ask him if he wants us there.”

“Okay.”

I realized I had believed she was still alive. No matter how many people die I still, somehow, live in a deathless world; and then death comes back again and I remember, oh, right, that’s what happens; that’s where we’re going; that’s what it all means. At the same time I felt tremendous relief. When a woman is involved there is a restless, should-we-think-it-or-not taint of sexuality, an added fear. This worst fate precluded even worse ones.

We got no answer when we called Tom. We left a message, asking if we could come to the funeral, and started to plan our trip down, all of us—including Allie—but the next day we got back a text that said
No thanks.
Despite this we debated going, before concluding that it would be better to respect his refusal. There would have been something forced about going, I think, our friendship still new, forced into florescence by the hothouse of school. Instead we watched it on television. Like everything else. The clip the news shows had of Tom from the funeral showed him flashing a quick smile at someone he saw, one of those wordless messages of thanks you see go across the room at such events. In isolation it looked strange, though: like one taillight still glowing on a wrecked car.

I liked that they chose the regular old hymns, “All people that on earth do dwell,” “Ten thousand times ten thousand,” “Guide me, O thou great redeemer.” (That last one: I wondered if they chose it because of Syria, “Pilgrim in a barren land…”) There was an atavistic pleasure in seeing the family—the three of them who were left—leave the church for the burial ground with the casket between them. They had the body back.

A couple of days after the funeral Ella and I chanced another e-mail to Tom. We told him about watching the service and said we were sorry. Then we asked if he was coming back soon.

His only answer was
Thanks. Probably not for a while. TR.

“How long do you think till he comes back?” Ella asked me.

We were hanging out in my room. “Maybe never, right?”

“Do you really think so?”

“He doesn’t need the degree.”

She looked disconcerted. “It never occurred to me he would stay away for good.”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t it feel wrong to go to a bop after your sister died?”

“You can’t not have fun for the rest of your life.”

I frowned. “Look around you, though, the parties, Oxford is—”

“Maybe yours is,” she said. “I’m here to work. Why don’t you work harder at your course?”

“That seems self-indulgent to me, too.” My face started to get warm. “Leaving Alison, no job, just for … what … to go punting and worry about Sophie?”

“You can’t think about things like that.”

“I don’t see why not.”

*   *   *

Life resumes, of course; that scarcely needs to be said. The week you die magazines and newspapers will go on appearing, all with the same urgency as usual, only on behalf of the living now, and not even in infinitesimal part for you any longer. A new song will come out, something you would have loved and listened to on repeat. There will go on being news: earthquakes, the deposition of dictators, museum shows. They’ll keep giving out the Oscars and electing presidents, whose names you won’t know. There will be new geniuses. I think of it sometimes and feel sad to contemplate how it will be, this place I love so much, finished with me before I’m finished with it.

Nevertheless, for then, as it will be until I die, it was I who kept going on.

There were ten days until Christmas, and I threw myself into work. Despite what I’d told Ella, I liked being a student again. I looked forward to the evenings I spent in the Fleet library, reading and taking breaks to drink tea with friends. Taking a break between college and Oxford, predictably, had made me appreciate it all.

(I wonder about this: In the future, when we’ve grown more intelligent, will education change? I think it might, unless we’re living in bombed-out shelters, collecting rainwater and avoiding zombies. The long dwindle of learning from five to twenty-one seems pointless for most people. I bet in the future we’ll go to college for a year or two after high school, then do life things, marriage, kids, jobs, before returning at forty, like travelers circling home, for another year or two of education. That’s when you need it: before it’s too late, after you’ve realized it can get too late. A chance to rejigger. How grateful most forty-year-olds would be to spend two years reading
The Spirit of the Laws
and retraining themselves, I imagine. Then again I also have a theory, widely mocked by my friends, that in a hundred years our clothes will be superstrong exoskeletons, and that people in that time will look back and marvel at us and pity our weakness, our broken arms and skinned knees. Probably I’m wrong about all of it.)

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.