The Last Enchantments Read Free Page A

dead and lit with old black hanging lanterns, into the Second Quad—Anna’s.
    It was a hexagonal stone courtyard, not very large, without any grass. Ringed around the hexagon was a row of medieval houses, overgrown with rose bushes, that Fleet had bought with its first endowment and turned into the library. Over their roofs we could see all the dreaming spires of Oxford, ranged together for a quarter mile. There was a dusky hush in that small courtyard, a silence through which even Jerry’s voice couldn’t break, really. It seemed deeply romantic to me. What fools Americans can be for England.
    “… named for Queen Anne, as no doubt you know, this way to Third Quad, mustn’t linger, Queen Anne founded the college in 1702, portrait of her you’ll see in dining hall, now Fleet has graduated four Nobel laureates, try not to let the side down, lads, ha, ha, four Nobel laureates, two in physics, one in medicine, one in literature, this way, through the gate, should have had at least one in peace if you ask me, several of the young gentlemen I’ve seen have done quite a lot more than their bit for peace, but you have to ask the fellows in Stockholm about it—now—this way—through the gate, as I said—come along.”
    “What do you think we should do tonight?” Tom whispered. Jerry had put ten feet between us with his short-striding canter. “We could try to scare up one or two other people from the Cottages”—the other arriving graduate students—“and then drag them over to the Turtle.”
    “What’s that?”
    He looked at me wide-eyed. “Shocking cultural ignorance.”
    “What is it?”
    “The big nightclub down in the city. Horribly dodgy. I bet Anil Gupta knows all about it.”
    “… Third Quad, our newest addition here at Fleet, contains the preponderance of our dormitories—sleeping halls—halls of residence—”
    Third was unspectacular, but it had one great virtue: the Fleet Tavern. Because the drinking age in England is eighteen, not twenty-one, every college at Oxford had its own bar. The consequences of having regular access to a bar in my dorm at Yale would have been catastrophic, but then drinking is different for American students, who are always on a desperate hunt for extralegal means of getting drunk and when they find alcohol drink it as quickly as possible, so it can’t be taken away from them.
    “Will the bar be open?” I asked Tom in a low voice, seeing the sign.
    “I shouldn’t think so. The undergrads don’t come till next week. They’re meant to be the best bops in Oxford, Fleet’s. After St. John’s maybe.”
    “Bops” were what Oxford called dance parties. “Is the bar just for the undergrads?”
    “No, no, but it’s mostly undergrads that go there. A lot of graduate students here never come out of their rooms.”
    As it happened, though, the bar was open. Jerry showed us inside. Through the wide doors that covered one wall of the room I glimpsed the lawns behind the college. It was these for which Fleet was most famous; most colleges had just such long, manicured stretches of grass, but Fleet’s, lying against the river, were the largest and best-situated. We didn’t go out, that evening, and I wouldn’t see the lawns, or Sophie, for another two days.
    “… and that, I think you’ll agree, gentlemen, was a thorough tour of Fleet College. Welcome. I’ll leave you here for your pint of beer.”
    *   *   *
    Other than the bartender, who was smoking a cigarette by the jukebox, flipping through it with a look of moralizing distaste on his face, the bar was empty. He was a big guy with black hair down to his shoulders, glasses, and a soft, affable countenance. His name was Jem, we would find out later. We bought two pints of Carlsberg from him and took them to the other end of the room to play a strange version of pool with wooden dowels sticking out of the table, which Tom told me was called bar billiards.
    I found it easy to talk to him, perhaps