‘You avoid each other?’
‘Not by any agreement. It just. . ended up that way.’
‘You were badly behaved?’
‘Listen, Stephen, I like you and respect you as a colleague, but this is none of your business.’
‘I ask as a friend.’
I was unsure whether Stephen Jahn was the kind of friend I wanted, but he smiled with such ingenuousness I found myself persuaded to speak, or perhaps it was merely the whisky. ‘I didn’t end it as elegantly as I should have.’
‘You left her for someone else? You dog! I knew you were a dog!’
‘No, it’s not that. I just left. But I didn’t say I was going. I was visiting her parents and left without telling anyone.’
Stephen clicked his tongue and wagged a finger at me, but beneath the disdain there was a smile that said he had found the information he wanted.
‘I want you to do me a favor, Jeremy. Make it up with Bethan. Not romantically, don’t worry, just professionally. Go and apologize. Women appreciate a sincere apology even if they do not, initially, seem to accept it. And tell her you know you were badly behaved but frankly since the two of you have to work together for as long as she’s at the College, which will be until next summer, and undoubtedly she’s the kind of young woman who will find a permanent place here in the Faculty and in one of the other Colleges, it only makes sense that you should have a cordial working relationship. Get on your knees if you must, but make her see the apology is sincere.’
I was baffled by this request, since it demanded a kind of self-abnegation out of keeping with my character. Also, I did not see how a few glasses of expensive whisky put me so deeply in Stephen’s debt. ‘Why should I?’
‘Because, as I said, I need a favor.’
‘To do with Bethan?’
‘Bethan is merely a component force in the performance of the favor. You and she are interviewing candidates together in December.’
It was true, though I had allowed my mind to draw a veil over this small irritation in my academic life, for it meant a rather tedious two days spent interrogating bright and not so bright adolescents who wanted to study History in the College and by bad luck — or perhaps, I now think, by Stephen’s design — I had been paired with Bethan for the interviews. In practical terms, it only made sense that I should try to patch things up with her in advance. I nodded and held out my glass, which was empty.
‘Time for the thirty-year-old. This is a very special whisky. I’m not going to tell you where it comes from or what it is, because it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway, but I have never quite had its equal myself, and I pour you this drop,’ he said, filling the bottom of yet another new glass, ‘with liquid of great rarity and expense. It is, quite literally, worth its weight in gold.’
I took the glass and raised it to my nostrils and was instantly overcome with an almost hallucinogenic vision of a great library, such as Duke Humphrey’s in the Old Bodleian, full of exquisite leather bindings, but a library that is also a gentlemen’s club, with a whiff of fine cigars, excellent tobacco, and perhaps, wafting round the edges of the room, a sublime and subtle perfume, like those made by Santa Maria Novella in Florence, such as the scent of ambergris and pomegranate blossom, and then, as I tilted the edge of the glass between my lips, those scents merged together and were transformed into an astonishing and dizzying rhapsody of taste that coated my tongue and filled my mouth and floated again into my nostrils, going down my throat with an absolute smoothness and clarity unlike any alcohol I had tasted in the past.
‘My friend in Egypt, Saif, he has a younger sister, whose name is Fadia. She will be coming to the College to interview for a place. Her marks are unspectacular, but she is bright. She will be impressive in interview but perhaps not as impressive as some and not quite as impressive as she ought to be to make up for the marks. Nonetheless, I want to be certain she does not leave this College without an assurance that she will be able to come here to study. You and I will head up the two interview teams and it is, therefore, as much in your hands as in my own that we end up with the proper result.’
I inhaled the aromas of that extraordinary whisky and let Stephen’s request settle, though as I did so I was conscious that what he had just done was to give me a gift (fine drink) in expectation of me doing something to merit his generosity, and that this act of meritorious behavior prospectively rewarded would, quite likely, compromise my own position in the College and the Faculty if this Fadia proved to be embarrassingly ill-equipped to study at Oxford.
‘You want me to rig it? I can’t rig it.’
‘You are senior to Bethan. She, perhaps, feels wounded by your behavior. You will be supportive of Fadia in ways Bethan will find persuasive. In any case, she might herself be on Fadia’s side, but you understand that given Bethan’s junior position in the College and the Faculty I cannot possibly approach her in the same way I trust I may confide in you.’
‘And pressure me.’
‘Pressure is too physical a word. We are not men of physics. I have been observing you and I know that we both understand how, from time to time, certain individuals need help. Fadia is one such person. She needs to come here, she needs to stay out of Egypt. I thought you, of all people, would understand. Mubarak’s Egypt is, in many respects, not unlike East Germany. There are more than a million security staff members monitoring the citizens of Egypt, who number less than eighty million. Egypt under Mubarak is a police state, nothing less, and a very nice one for tourists, provided they don’t find themselves on the sharp end of terror. And in some quite important ways Egyptian society is not as disunited as some police states, but it is, I would argue, a police state nonetheless — one in which life can soon become untenable for those holding the placard of democracy and freedom of speech, as young Fadia has rather rashly been doing every time she goes home on holiday. As I said, her mother is French, and the spirit of revolution is hereditary. Fadia needs the protection that life in Oxford can offer. She needs exile that does not look like exile to the authorities. She needs to be able to come and study and remain studying until such time as things change in Egypt or she can be persuaded to remain in Europe on a permanent basis. What I am asking you to do is to make allowances for a young woman of fierce intelligence who has lived a rather coddled existence, who has never been forced to work hard. Do you see?’
The finger’s depth of brown liquid in the crystal glass sat heavy in my hand. I swirled it to release the aroma before holding it again to my nose and mouth. Stephen was, I could see, almost desperate for my help and had approached the problem in perhaps the only way a man like him knew how, by trying to leverage influence through the imposition of a forced sense of gratitude. It was as unseemly as it was pathetic.
‘I ask you again. Why should I?’
Stephen’s eyes popped and his mouth spluttered. He had not been expecting resistance. Perhaps in his world men like me do not defy whatever demands men like him make, and in thinking this I realized I had already been making assumptions about the kind of person he was, and I mean not just ordinary conclusions about character but a more profound level of supposition that Stephen Jahn was only notionally an academic and was, chiefly, something else altogether.
Sitting in my living room looking over Houston Street on Thanksgiving night, swirling a glass of much less interesting scotch than those Stephen once served me in that room overlooking the Thames, listening to my mother’s snores resonating from the guest room down the hall, snores of such depth and volume they made the floors vibrate, I understood that the real beginning of this story was not my departure from New York, not my arrival in Oxford, not my brief affair with Bethan, but allowing myself to be suckered into a compromising acquaintance with Stephen Jahn. He admitted that night to observing me. For how long? And why? Was he looking for a pawn? Now I begin to see how that moment, the night in his flat, and everything that has unfolded thereafter, all the ways in which Stephen and Fadia came to inhabit my Oxford life, has been haunting my return to New York.