The Last Enchantments Read Free

years. My sister was at Fleet. My father was at Magdalen, and I remember that better.”
    “Where did you go?”
    “LSE. I haven’t been in Oxford for ages. Shall we go see it, do you think? It’s fucking hideous, I bet, but I’m sure the porters will show us around.”
    Three porters were sitting in the lodge. They looked at us so dourly, as if we, the students, were the only blemish on their otherwise perfect happiness—which may well have been true—that I suspected the sign posted by the window that read ASK US FOR A TOUR! to be insincere.
    “We were thinking about a tour of the college.”
    “JERRY!” they roared in unison.
    “Bloody hell,” said Tom.
    The head porter pointed to a door at the far end of the lodge. “Jerry’ll show you about. He likes ’em, the tours. I can’t be asked personally.”
    Expectantly we looked at the door, and after a moment an immensely dignified figure, not above five foot three, stepped through it. He had dark gray hair, a paunch under his college-crested blue sweater and college-crested blue button-down, and glasses that made him look like an owl.
    “Tour?” he asked in a voice full of hope.
    “These lads want to see the college,” said one of the porters.
    “This way, this way, this way,” said Jerry, walking through the door to Fleet’s high front gate. “Tour begins now. Only two of you? Good, excellent, I like a smaller group.”
    These were the only complete thoughts that Jerry spoke. The rest of the tour he conducted in a single chattering run-on sentence, unpunctuated and unceasing, stylistically similar to Finnegans Wake but without that book’s charm of comprehensibility.
    Still, it was very beautiful—that half hour of a late Oxford afternoon when the harsh white light of midday and the melancholy pink of evening merge and everything turns gold, soft and dim, generous, coloring the city’s high towers at a slant.
    Fleet is a modestly venerable place. The first Oxford colleges came into existence when the university did, just before 1300, and Fleet was four hundred years younger than they were, respectably old but not ancient. (This is within the hierarchy of the colleges, among whom to have been established after the United States achieved independence from Great Britain is considered gravely humiliating.) Like most colleges it was divided into irregular quads, circumscribed by high buildings. First Quad, or “Firsts,” as Jerry denominated it, was directly through the high archway that led into college from the street, a rectangle of shaved grass looped with a slender stone path. Opposite was a bell tower. Like all of the other buildings in college it was made of the same honey-colored stone as Parliament, with the same intricate filigreed stonework, and like Parliament, indeed like all the buildings of the college, the bell tower seemed to bear in its beauty and mass a strange immunity to life, to time.
    “… oldest gargoyles and grotesques in Oxford, dating to the foundation of Fleet and the construction of the tower, now if you’ll follow me here you’ll see on either side of the First Quadrangle two three-story dormitories, same quarrystone as the chapel and the dining hall, keep up, keep up, Fleet’s first master was a gentleman named Merryweather, known abuser of opium—thought he saw unicorns flying over the Radcliffe Camera—quite inappropriate—wholly inappropriate—entirely impossible, of course—a brilliant linguist, however—portrait in the hall—”
    Continuing to speak the whole while, Jerry trotted us briskly through Firsts, into the dorms and the bell tower, up to the top, and back down again. (“Bells, bells, wonderful bells,” was his full gloss when we reached the pinnacle of the tower. Though he did tell us as we descended that several people had jumped from the tower and died over the years. “Fantastic,” said Tom.) Then he took us through a narrow corridor at the back of Firsts, paneled with the names of the war