The Last Enchantments (16 page)

“It doesn’t have to be weird.”

“Don’t start that. Give me another kiss.”

For ten minutes we stayed there, then another ten. She smiled as she pulled away from me at last and suggested we go outside and have a cigarette together. Lula’s station at the front door was abandoned, and the air was brisk, the streetlights shining a sallow gold over the massive row of white houses. They looked comfortable and immovable, those houses, built and kept with men’s money, with men’s salaries. Large, red, hale men with capacious laughs who voted Tory and drank decent wine and wore expensive watches. Members of Parliament, men from hedge funds. Sophie and I held hands and I pictured us, middle-aged, living here.

“I have to go,” she said when we had stubbed our cigarettes out.

“What?”

“I’m late.”

“Didn’t you just get here?”

She shook her head. “I was up in Peregrine’s room, Lula’s brother, with all the girls. For ages.”

“Are you going to see Jack?”

She leaned into me and left her head on my shoulder. “Yes.”

We stood like that for a few minutes, sometimes tilting our faces to kiss again. Then Lula stumbled out of the front door with a cigarette.

“SOPHIE!” she screamed when she saw us. “My God, Billy Lownes has gotten tedious. I used to think he hung the moon. And those boys from Albion Hall are absolutely disgusting. How the scales fall from your eyes. Oh, Soph, I’m so glad you came!”

Sophie grinned. “Lu, do you know Will Baker? He’s my favorite friend from Fleet.”

“Hullo, Will.”

“Would you two entertain each other while I find my coat?” Sophie said, and skipped back up the front steps of the house.

“Are we friends, Will?” asked Lula when Sophie had gone.

“We are. Before tonight, even.”

“Oh, hurrah,” she said, putting her arm around my back and facing me, “then would you give me a birthday kiss? You look lovely under the streetlamp.”

“What about Sophie?”

“I won’t tell, darling.”

I could have said no, maybe, but I knew Sophie would be a minute or two and so with one eye on the door I gave her a long kiss. We disentangled just in time to see the girl I loved come out of the house again. The betrayal felt warm under my skin. At last I knew something she didn’t.

The two girls hugged each other and said good-bye, and then Lula, her cigarette long cold by now, went back inside to find another wind.

“Good-bye, Will,” said Sophie. She had a pink scarf wrapped tightly around her throat, her long hair tumbling over it, and that scarf pushed the two of us outside of the refuge of the party, placing her back in the real world.

“Isn’t there anything I can say that would make you like me, Soph?”

Again she softened; that dance. “You know I do.”

“Can we meet?”

“No,” she said and turned to the street.

“No?”

She was hailing a cab, which slowed for her, as everything did. Turning back, and relenting one last time under my gaze, she came back and kissed me on the cheek before running to the cab. “Oh, Will,” she said quietly. Then, through the window of the cab, as it rolled off, “I suppose you could text me. That would be nice.”

*   *   *

As the sun rose the last of us, a few dozen people, were draped over couches; there were little squadrons of boys and girls engaged in intense coked-up conversations, a group of guys trying to pool their resources to fill one last bong, a few individual dancers. Lula was asleep on a chaise. Her friends had written in Sharpie on her arms and legs.

“What do you say, Bake?” Tom asked me. We were smoking amid the wreckage of the back terrace, which had small vanishing islands of foam left in it.

“I can barely think.”

He smiled. “I lost you for an hour or two there. And Sophie.”

I sighed and looked up at the pale sun, its pink vale of light above that fine, pure white of morning. “I know,” I said.

He looked at me. “It was fun.”

“Really fun.”

“Still, if we went back, we could make it to St. John’s bop tonight.”

I laughed. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“Back to Oggsford?”

We kissed the slumbering Lula on the cheek and said good-bye to the one or two people we knew who remained at the party. We went to catch the bus at Hyde Park (the train didn’t run so early) and ended up falling asleep on the grass, waiting for it to come, until the driver honked at us. Cold, bruised, hungry, and at least half happy, we returned to our city; we stopped to pick up coffee and a packet of sandwiches and ate them on a bench in Anna’s Court, shivering. I talked about Sophie and Lula, and he talked about the memories of his schooldays that the night had conjured up. At eight we stood to leave, and he said, as he did so often in Anna’s, “Look at this castle we live in.”

We walked back to the Cottages and up the stairs to our rooms side by side; and though I didn’t say it to him, as I dozed off it occurred to me that because we lived in these castles, all of us felt like kings.

*   *   *

I woke to a panicked knocking at my door. “Yeah?” I called into my pillow.

Ella came in. “You guys are back from London?”

“What time is it?”

She opened my curtains. “Noon. Will, get up.”

“What is it?”

“Have you seen the news?”

“Not since yesterday.”

She went over to my clock radio and turned it on to the BBC. The report was about a stabbing in East London. “Is it that?”

“No, no, wait.”

I sat up and put on the T-shirt that was on the floor next to my bed. I turned the radio off. “Ella, tell me what the hell is going on.”

She sat down on my bed and turned the radio on again. “Just wait, it will come back on. It’s every other story right now.”

She was right, it was next. In a BBC voice, a woman said,
Authorities have begun their investigation of the bombing that took place in Syria late last night at the British Embassy. According to Sir Denis Busby, the men who raided the compound are unconnected—

Suddenly I understood. “Not Katie.”

Ella turned down the radio. “Someone came in with explosives padlocked to his chest. They tried to clear the room, but at least eight people are dead. Six of them were Syrians, waitstaff, and there was a French couple. But they can’t find two people, and one of them is her. Her face is all over the TV.”

“Oh my God.”

“Do you think anyone’s called him?”

“He keeps his phone on silent when he sleeps,” I said. I went over to my computer and started to look at the news. “Holy shit.”

“What do we do?” she asked.

I turned in my desk chair and looked at her. “Do we tell him? Or wait? Do we let him sleep?”

“I don’t know.” We were silent for a moment. “I would want to know the second it happened.”

“Me, too.”

“Okay then.”

Birds took off from a tree outside my window, a gust of life, wobbly at first but then steadying themselves with air, only air. “Jesus,” I said and felt some hugely complex series of emotions, which I don’t think I can even begin to dissect; they were about Tom, they were about Katie, they were about politics. Since in any situation any person is capable of sociopathic selfishness they were about Sophie and Alison, too; they flashed through my head. They were about me.

We went into Tom’s room. He was sleeping with one arm off the bed, his face untroubled by his dreams. Ella put a hand on his shoulder, gently, and said, “Tom, Tom,” and we woke him up and ruined his life.

CHAPTER
FIVE

The writer I primarily studied in my course at Oxford was George Orwell. I believed him to be not merely a great writer but one of the very greatest, in particular his nonfiction—
Homage to Catalonia
,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, his long ruminations about England, Dickens, language, and writing. These seemed to me to have the authenticity and lucidity of the best essays and the humanity of the best fiction. He was a genius, of course, it’s impossible to write so simply without being one. Perhaps more importantly, I loved him as a person. “Decency,” that word seems to recur so often in his work, that humans should behave as decently as possibly toward one another, a Christian ethic to carry forward beyond the end of Christianity’s days. He lived in darker times than my own and never turned his face from what he saw. Certainly I’ve never known a more honest writer. Ironic, considering the doubtful accuracy of some of his work, but what I felt nevertheless. That was why I chose to study him.

As I read more into Orwell’s essays, his letters, and his journals, he became the Greek chorus of my days. One evening in the Fleet library I was glancing at
The New York Times
online and saw an editorial about waterboarding, then turned to a book review Orwell wrote as the year 1939 began and came across this sentiment, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Another time I saw an exhortatory speech given before a few hundred soldiers on an air force base by George Bush (who spent his war in Texas) and Dick Cheney (whose statement that he had other priorities during Vietnam was making the rounds), and thought of the passage in which Orwell wrote, “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

I think I only disagreed with him once. The day after Katie Raleigh went missing, I sat in the MCR with Ella and watched the BBC interview Tom’s uncle. I thought of the last line in Orwell’s diaries, “At 50, every man has the face he deserves.” This had seemed so true to me, how smiling or anxiety works its way into the face over time, how it shows character, but here was this virtual father to Tom and Katie—brother to their own father—who looked so haunted and lost, his face deformed by tragedy.

The tabloids found a picture that made Katie look what she was not: beautiful. There were journalists at Tom’s door in London, we saw on television. They reported that he had tried to go to Syria himself but been denied a visa. Eventually it emerged that the suicide bomber had been part of a group of Saudi Arabians with ties to a terrorist camp in Khartoum, Sudan. He had entered Syria illegally through northern Iraq. There had been other bombings down the years, of course, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, but this one was different—to England anyhow—because of Katie.

On the second day after the bombing there was a report that a young white woman had been seen traveling by car through Damascus, but that lead evaporated and no other emerged. The only certainties were that her remains were not at the embassy and that the terrorist had been driving a blue Mercedes truck. That was all. Slowly, without fresh news, it became the second story on the news, then the third, then the fourth. Was she dead? We decided that it was likely—in fact, hoped that it was likely, because by then we knew about the hostage videos on the Internet. I never had the stomach to watch them.

That morning we had woken Tom up, and without even looking at us, after he took in the information, he had turned on his phone, seen what was waiting for him on it, and bolted from the room, without a bag, for the taxi stand, his fastest way of making it into London. We hadn’t seen him since, nor had he replied to any of our anemic caring e-mails, and I kept recalling how he had seemed to cease to exist when he found out, how his face too had changed. What seemed so unfair was the absence of his parents. He had no margin for this loss.

Even as the national news turned away there was a great stir about Katie around Oxford, and specifically in college. She had been an undergraduate there only a few years before, and many of the staff and dons remembered her, and of course there was Tom. After a few days they remembered that he had friends and sent for us.

The dean of Fleet then was a man named Sir George Ballantine, and like Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, the beginning and end of him was vanity.

He was tall, with stiff white hair and a long pink face, a handsome man, and by all accounts an exceptional astronomer. The queen had knighted him “for services to the field of astronomical science” before he was fifty. Yet in his capacity as dean, no minor ignominy was beneath his wonderful brain. If Trinity beat us in rowing, he looked stern at Hall; if Worcester beat us, pale and harried. If we raised less money than Lincoln, he fretted euphemistically about it in unscheduled speeches during chapel. When Merton added those four words to their Latin grace, none of the returning students would bar the possibility of Ballantine jumping off the Magdalen Bridge.

It was Sir George who called for eight of us to come to his private office, two days after Tom had left: Anil, Ella, Jem, Anneliese, Timmo, an undergraduate girl named Allie whom Tom had hooked up with twice, Sophie, and me. I don’t know how he found out about Allie. Ella was displeased to see her there.

It was a hexagonal room, with books and portraits of past deans of Fleet lining the walls, big comfortable armchairs and couches around a fireplace at one end of the room, and an immaculate desk at the other. The window was ajar even in the cold, and what must have been a powerful amateur telescope stood on a tripod near it.

He welcomed us in by saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, please sit, please sit.” He offered coffee, which we all declined because it was nine thirty at night. Afterward Jem said he was famous for offering whatever he knew people wouldn’t want because he liked to use his entire personal catering budget on champagne, which he drank throughout the day. I don’t know if that was true. Hopefully.

“Ah,” he said and heaved a gargantuan sigh. “I knew her, Katherine Raleigh. I’m sorry to say I think her dead.”

Anneliese said, “Perhaps they can find her.”

“Indeed,” he said with what we were meant to see was a sage nod. “Well.” Another long pause, then, “This Tom. I never met him. Good chap?”

We assented.

“He’ll be all right, in time. The great healer.” After this ex cathedra proclamation he offered us another sigh. “You all are coping, too?” Nobody said a word. “Hm. Good. If you need anything I’m always here.”