The Last Enchantments (30 page)

“Do you? Do you mean that?”

“I really do. He seems different.”

She looked reassured. “I’m so glad you said that. I think he does, too.”

She really had changed him. Unlike Ella she had a soft touch, a yielding that was its own variety of strength, and over the past few weeks I had watched Tom come to more closely resemble himself again. He never slept at the Cottages anymore, but I saw him each day, and he seemed more at ease with himself.

It was strange because Tom could be such a snob sometimes, and Jess, working in her teashop … Before they started dating I would have expected him to comment on how she held her fork and knife or her diction, “skive,” “cock-up,” “bollocks,” but he didn’t.

I said none of that to her, just, “Really different. And you, are you happy?”

“You have no idea.”

I was hurt by the fervor of this. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

“Oh, yeah, it was a doddle.”

I wanted to hear it. “What?”

“I don’t need to tell you the ways you were a shit to me, Will. I never heard from you. You made plans with me and didn’t follow through with them, even when I was so excited.” She shook her head. “I’m happy now, let’s leave it at that.”

There was a pause, as I contemplated her own anxieties by the telephone, her own unhappy autumn. “I’m sorry,” I said at last. “I was selfish.”

“Everything worked out.”

“No, I mean it. I’m sorry.”

She looked away, perhaps embarrassed by the honesty in my voice. Her eye caught the book she was holding. “Do you think he would like this?”

“That book? Sure.”

“But do you really think so? I never know—I feel so nervous about messing it up.”

My heart went out to her. “He would like this better,” I said and pulled down a similar book about George Stubbs, Katie’s favorite painter.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, relieved. “Thank you.”

There was a beat. “Is Tom weird about it?”

“About us?”

“Yeah.”

“No.” A foxish smile stole across her lips. “He’s funny about it. He just talks about how it’s a good thing he’s amazing in bed, or it might bother him. I mean, you know.”

I laughed. “He must be fun to sleep with.”

“Will! What a weird thing to say. Anyhow, you were fun, too.”

“I guess a threesome would have been insanely entertaining for you.”

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—”