The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch Page B

and there, friendly, unromantic. In those weeks I began to talk to Alison as often as I could, and at the same time I thought about Sophie obsessively. Whenever I went to Hall for a meal I scanned the room for her, and when I passed the laundry room I would hope to see her big blue bag lying on the dryer, because if it was there it meant she would be killing time in the MCR, watching TV or reading. Coming home from class I always looked to see if her white Vauxhall was on the street—she called it “Little Car,” and loved it—because twice I had been in the right spot and she had picked me up to drive around on errands, killing the afternoon together. For the first time since high school I experienced that thrilling boredom beneath an unspoken crush, which makes going to McDonald’s for fries a stomach-fluttering experience. I remembered for days afterward every accidental physical touch between us, some of them sneaky—letting my leg fall in next to hers as we slouched down on the couch, collapsing into her with laughter when Anil freestyled for us in the MCR one day. Of course, that was all inside of me and nowhere else.
    Besides, there was a whole new life to get used to. The first days passed gradually away, and before I realized it I had already been in Oxford for five weeks. The city’s wide, intimidating thoroughfares became intimate to us, as we moved outward from Fleet to the bars and the bookshops. During the week after the first Hall, we started our studies in earnest—or rather, with varying degrees of earnestness. Tom did next to nothing, for example, while on the other hand Anneliese began to work long shifts in the history library on Holywell Street.
    I have always had the habit of solitude, and I spent a great deal of time on my own, at lunch counters each afternoon, and two or three times a week at the Ashmolean, where I liked to sit by the Night Hunt and read. I used to escape at Andover the same way, a respite from the fetor and dirty imaginations and long-running jokes of the dorm, which we loved and loathed at once. It had probably been then that I last spent so many aimless hours with new friends.
    These weeks were happy and full, passing in soundless avalanches of contentment. My classes I found deeply absorbing. I had friends—Tom and Anneliese especially—and seeing Sophie gave life a gloss of excitement, without, in the end, changing anything. By the Thursday of Fourth Week, in fact, when Alison came to visit for three nights, I was myself again, removed from the recklessness of those first days. I had only needed time to settle.
    Her visit was unremarkable, which was the best thing I could have wished for. Tom and Anil both happened to be out of town that weekend, and so she didn’t meet any of my Oxford friends, which seemed strange but apposite. We spent a lot of time in my room, did a little bit of sightseeing. There was a twinge of unreality about having her there. When I dropped her at Heathrow she shed a few quiet tears and walked her solitary way, looking back once or twice, past security, but there was nothing histrionic in it. We had developed a routine by now—a quick call when she woke up at six o’clock, eleven in the morning for me, a longer one when I was done for the day and she was in the doldrums of the afternoon, eight o’clock in England, three at home, cards and letters when we thought of it, and e-mails buzzing back and forth between us all the time—and I knew that would be enough to see us through to the safe harbor of Christmas vacation.
    *   *   *
    The longer I stayed in Oxford the more confounding the university came to seem. It was very beautiful, home to first-rate researchers and teachers; it was also a scam.
    One day I walked into the Fleet MCR and found a group of nine Chinese students, arguing furiously. I knew one of them, Fu-Han, and when he came to the kitchen for a glass of water—I was making coffee—I asked him what it was about.
    He waved