Stephen was a short man, not unlike Bethan’s father in that respect, and he was perhaps five years older than me, but totally bald, and I could see, despite his gray three-piece suit, carefully tailored or bespoke as the British say, that he was muscular to the point of looking almost like a bodybuilder but with none of the usual bulk. In other words, he was short and sinewy, so that, at the knocking of the grace, when he was standing up, he looked as slender as a sprinter. It was only seated, bringing his arms forward to eat, his spine always very erect, that I sensed how physically fit he was. He had a pug-like face, pugnacious, popping eyes, and wore narrow, Germanic-looking glasses that made him resemble a kapo or even a capo, a Neapolitan consigliere. At any rate, he had the face, body, and style of a fascist.
Our first meeting was one of those odd dances of half-deception and barely concealed interrogation. Initially I could tell nothing about his origins, although it began to be apparent that he was, like me, an American, but one whose displacement was longer standing than mine. His accent had drifted farther off course, or rather, like my own, it retained all the sounds of American speech but none of its rhythms and few of its idioms.
At first, I seemed to have been more opaque to him than he to me, although as time went on and we became friends after a fashion, I suspected that had only been a ruse, that in truth he knew a great deal about me before we had ever met.
‘Oh, are you also American?’ he purred, looking just to the side of me through his very thick lenses. This peculiar Oxford — or perhaps more generally British — affectation, to have a direct conversation with someone while refusing almost all eye contact, never failed to unnerve me. ‘I thought for certain you must be German, although of course the kind of German who has spent most of his adult life in England.’
‘But I don’t have a German name.’
‘Oh? I didn’t catch your name.’ We had all been introduced in the Senior Common Room before processing into the hall, gathering and robing ourselves in preparation for that parade past students who must, I always thought, have looked upon us with a sense of resentment, or a few perhaps with some desire to join us, to be one of those graduate students who occasionally earns the privilege of dining at High Table, the Junior Dean and such, who are often more interesting and stimulating company than the aging Senior Fellows.
I reminded Stephen of my name and told him my field and area of expertise, what I was working on at the time, my interest in film as well as in history. As I spoke he ate his fish, using his fork and knife in the European way: fork in the left hand, tines pointed down to spear the food, knife in the right to cut and trowel a mouthful’s worth onto the back of the fork. When I had finished talking about my work, he put his utensils down on the plate, and before he had stopped chewing dabbed at the corners of his mouth with the large white napkin drawn from his lap.
‘Jeremy O’Keefe. O’Keefe. No, no, no,’ he shook his head. ‘That doesn’t fit, not really, you’re not a Jeremy, or perhaps you are, though you seem more a Jeremiah to me, you have an Old Testament voice and look like the kind of man the Tetragrammaton might raise, but O’Keefe is completely, but so completely wrong,’ and here he glared at me, made brief eye contact, studying my face so closely that his gaze registered almost as a tangible weight on my skin. ‘There’s nothing Irish about you, Dr. O’Keefe. Not even anything very Celtic. No, you have a quite Teutonic face and a number of New Canaan ancestors. That is my guess. Am I right? Have you done one of those DNA tests? Finding your roots? Who do you think you are? Are you half Berber?’
Despite myself I found Stephen’s assessment flattering. That sharp-edged flattery, I later learned, was his most dangerous charm.
‘Entirely wrong, as far as I know.’
‘Saxon, then, a slew of Saxon ancestors way, way back, but your grandparents grew up in New England.’
‘That’s correct, but not New Canaan. Southern Vermont and Poughkeepsie.’
Stephen clapped his hands with pleasure.
‘Poughkeepsie! How divine! You see! I knew it! I knew it! I always win at this game!’
‘And you, Dr. Jahn? Where’d you grow up?’
‘Please, we must now be Stephen and Jeremy to each other,’ he whispered, leaning towards me across the table, ‘for we are Americans, little though we sound it. No, my dear, I grew up on Long Island, Port Washington, or near there, though do not jump to false conclusions. My father and I are very much nouveaux pauvres. Thank you, Matthew,’ he said to the College Butler, who always waited at High Table and was clearing away the main course dishes. ‘Tell Chef the fish was perfection.’
‘I will do, sir,’ Matthew said, adding another plate to the bow of his left arm.
As soon as Matthew had left through the door to the kitchen Stephen leaned even farther across the table and whispered, ‘They had to bail Matthew out of jail last week. Brawling. In a student pub. Luckily none of our members was involved. If they had been, he’d have got the sack for sure. Now, though, it’s perfect. Even if he wanted to leave he couldn’t. He’ll be indebted to the College for the rest of his working life. You know what these English peasants are like. West Country farmers.’
Stephen could get away with saying such a thing that evening because there was, by chance, not a single British person at the table and the undergraduates were too far away and too engrossed in their own raucous conversations to overhear. On that first meeting, after the dessert, and then the second dessert in the Senior Common Room dining room, and the passing of the port round the table, always clockwise, and the increasingly befuddled and self-aggrandizing or self-recriminating or self-exculpatory conversation that threatened to compromise all assembled if anything was remembered the following morning, I thought of Stephen Jahn as merely one more colorful barnacle on the boat of my Oxford life, which is to say I was amused by him, by his pomposity and the ways in which he had embraced a European life and lifestyle, how he had affected habits that most Americans would find distasteful if not immoral, but believed that our acquaintance would never become more intimate, since he was, first of all, patently a homosexual and I had, at the time, no close gay friends (in retrospect this now seems more like a failing on my part, a failure of my own ostensibly liberal credentials, than anything else), and secondly because it was apparent even on that first meeting that although he might have been something like a Centrist Democrat in America, in Britain he could only be a Conservative, and I had forsworn friendship with Tories because too often I found that conversation quickly foundered on the rocks of my own sense of political correctness (yes, I know, that absence of gay friends makes my own position at the time slightly indefensible), so it seemed impossible to be relaxed around men and women who were so dispiritingly inclined to say offensive things about women (yes, even the women), people of color, Africans, Asians, not to mention Southern Europeans (‘the Latin is racially distinct, you can tell by the way he treats his women,’ a Fellow in Anthropology once told me), homosexuals, transsexuals, and, sometimes most of all, Americans. From the Tory perspective Americans were gauche, ill bred, poorly educated, little better than children, and yet useful geopolitical allies. From the perspective of the hard-left ranks of Labour, Americans were racist hoodlum militarists seeking to take over the planet. There was, I once told Stephen Jahn, nowhere for someone like me in British politics. I voted Labour because I could not stomach the Tories but I did so holding my nose, as the British like to say.