The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch Read Free Book Online Page B

in a lower voice, she added, “Wish me luck.”
    “Good luck.”
    She went. “Who was that?” I heard her boyfriend ask her.
    I didn’t watch them go, turning back toward Fleet and finding Tom after a short while. He said good-bye to Gobbs and apologized for running off, and we started to walk back to the college, again tossing the ball back and forth. It was an hour full of meetings; I told him about Sophie, and on the way back to the bar we met a girl who would be one of our closest friends at Fleet, Anneliese.
    *   *   *
    Then again, in those young hours of the school year there were always chances to meet new people. There were movie nights, cocktails with the Master on the lawns, unskilled games of croquet that devolved into a kind of loose, horseless polo. All of these activities originated with the MCR, or Middle Common Room, which was the graduate students’ chief social center. It was located in three rooms on the ground floor of First Quad, with a view of the gates and porters’ lodge, and had couches, a kitchen, and a television. At a cheese-tasting there in Noughth Week Anil became friends with Tim, or Timmo, as we all eventually called him, a short, silent, very strong personage—not overburdened with charisma—who Anil assured us belonged to the very elites of Liverpool.
    Timmo’s chief ambition in life was to participate in any reality TV show, ideally Big Brother, which was culturally definitive in England as it never was in America. (Aside from the normal half-hour show every night, one channel on British TV had a twenty-four-hour feed of the Big Brother house, in obeisance to the insane demand of the public, apparently.) It was never totally clear, though, why he wanted to be on the show.
    “Do you want to be famous?” I asked him one day.
    “No way,” he said with a snort, as if I knew nothing at all about the nature of television.
    “Or rich?”
    “He is rich,” said Anil quickly.
    “Why do you want to do it, then?”
    “It looks like a laugh.” (Loff, as the Brits pronounce it.) “And there’s some lovely girls on there.”
    Whenever he got drunk he would practice his confession-booth monologues, which he had planned out in arresting detail. Example: “I know I shouldn’t have had sex with Keeley, but Ricky can fuck off. She had her choice.” We would nod appreciatively at his slurred and heartfelt speech, our faith in humanity, and Oxford, too, shaken. Keeley’s identity is one of the world’s ageless mysteries.
    These early MCR events were in the next weeks; for that afternoon, we found Anneliese. She was kneeling by a tree, holding a seventies-era Nikon—she came from a family of amateur photographers, we learned—and staring down at something on the ground with great concentration. She was an earnestly pretty person, round-faced with gray eyes and curly brown hair.
    We went over to see what she was looking at. It was a flat grave marker with weeds growing over it. “Can you read this?” she asked, pointing to the old, faint cursive.
    I couldn’t, but Tom could. “Francis Cholmondley-Chapman. Looks like he died in the Crimean War, ‘that freedom might not perish from the earth.’ It also says ‘and who fought that fighting might end.’ Sorry, chaps, missed that one.”
    “Ah,” she said, with a radiant smile on her face. “That makes me happy for the first time in days. A true English experience.”
    “Have you not been happy?” asked Tom.
    Her face turned serious. “No, not at all,” she said in her German accent. “I’m homesick, you see. It’s very bad. I haven’t made any friends yet, either.”
    This was so like her. She was incapable of dishonesty. It meant that to know her for a few minutes was almost to begin to love her.
    “You have two now,” Tom said with embarrassed gallantry, and she beamed at him.
    “Oh, good.”
    We invited her to the bar terrace, where we had beers and watched the sun finally vanish. She had done an undergraduate