The Last Enchantments Read Free Page B

especially after the shared comic formality of the tour, and as night fell outside we had a long unforced conversation. At first it was about neutral subjects, sports and travel especially. (He had spent the year since his graduation from LSE traveling through Asia. “Mostly sex tourism,” he said and laughed at his own joke.) He had an ambling way of walking around the pool table, a boyishness left intact by going away to school—I recognized it. Gradually we began to ask each other more personal questions. I told him about Alison. He’d had a girlfriend until recently, too, Daisy.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “She dumped me. She wanted me to stay in London.”
    “That sucks.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s for the best.”
    “We’re only an hour from London by train.”
    He laughed. “She isn’t very bright.”
    His course at Oxford—that was the term for any degree program—was the Bachelor of Civil Law. He had studied law as an undergraduate and had a job waiting for him at Freshfields at the end of the year, one of the Magic Circle firms, which made his course ornamental, a distinguished but inessential garland. Really it was a tactic to delay the start of his career for another year.
    I perceived at some point in those first few hours of our acquaintance—later in the year, when I was better attuned to British mores, it wouldn’t have taken me as long—that he belonged to the upper classes. His accent should have alerted me immediately, with its long vowels and back-of-the-throat intonation, but really it was his reference to Ascot (“Daisy and I got hammered at Ascot last year, it was lovely, we snogged in one of the private boxes all afternoon and shook hands with Prince Philip, the old racist”) that signaled it first.
    Tom grew up in South Kensington. His father was a banker who belonged to a landless cadet branch of a ducal family, and his mother was first cousin to a Sussex title. She did administrative work for this cousin’s land-mine charity two days a week. They were both formal people, Tories, with clear ideas of their responsibilities. They sent Tom to Westminster when he was eight; his older sister, Katie, to Roedean. Their small assertions of class—his father’s membership in a Northumberland hunt, his mother’s activities at the National Portrait Gallery, their Vizslas—were conscious, I think, rather than reflexive. To nearly everyone they seemed an exalted family; to those whose opinion genuinely mattered to them, however, merely a decent one.
    Tom, too, was a terrible snob. As a carbuncular he had been to the Ritz and the Savoy for coming-out balls, served as a page at one or two demi-royal functions, and rowed for his school. There is nobody as hopelessly vulgar as a British aristocrat, and he bore their customary equipment, the signet ring, the diamond tie pin, the colorful handkerchiefs, the Toryism, the rah. He openly looked down on me for being American—“News from the colonies?” he asked when I got mail—but that was nothing to his scorn for the people of his own country whom he believed to be fraudulently claiming a connection to his class. These were the rugby-obsessed MPSIAers— Minor public school, I’m afraid —and Brookes frauds, pretending they were entitled to their signet rings, the Sloane Rangers, the affected Barbour “northerners” who implied a great deal of land somewhere the other side of Yorkshire. Like all authentic snobbery—backed by public affirmation, by heritage—it was disagreeable and also cunningly pleasant, an occasional remoteness that made his friendship seem more valuable. It also made it all the stranger when he picked the person he did to fall in love with.
    This account of his life—his account, Westminster, LSE, Thailand, Oxford, the City—makes it sound perfectly ordered. Indeed until five years earlier it had been that way. Then it had changed.
    The house he grew up in was at the center of a long row of