Home > My Oxford Year(33)

My Oxford Year(33)
Author: Julia Whelan

We were in Hall when I told Maggie, Charlie, and Tom that Jamie and I were officially together, and they were happy for me. When I told them I got us tickets to the ball, they had a collective psychotic break. Tom fell to the floor in a giraffe-like sprawl, Charlie stood and slowly ascended to the tabletop, arms outstretched, singing “Jerusalem,” and Maggie just started quietly weeping.

I look over at Charlie in his tails and the Salvador Dalí mustache he grew (or attempted to grow) for the occasion. Tom, in a top hat that adds an unnecessary eight inches to his height, bounces on the balls of his feet, and just misses bumping the little blue-haired biddy in front of him. His attentions are elsewhere. He’s eye-darting Maggie, glancing at her and then quickly looking away before being caught. She looks like Veronica Lake, decked out in a floor-length, cowl-neck, ruby satin dress. Her hair’s dyed platinum blond for the night and styled in long 1940s waves cascading over one shoulder. When Tom first saw her, his eyes goggled and he yelled, “Oi, Mags, you’re gorgeous! You look nothing like yourself!” Charlie and I both swatted him and he turned immediately silent. He kept an openmouthed stare going all the way to the limo before seeming to decide—after giving her a hand to help her into it—never to look at her again. Until now. He looks slightly repentant. And confused. I catch Charlie’s eye and we share a hopeful grin. So far, so good.

I’m in a vintage yellow gown that Charlie picked out for me and Maggie did my hair in some intricate pin-curl updo. She also did a smoky-eye thing that I would have never attempted on my own and can’t stop looking at in any mirror I pass. I definitely look nothing like myself.

We enter the palace and I have to remind myself to breathe.

It’s decorated for Christmas. The marble floors are like glass, reflecting light from two twenty-foot Christmas trees standing sentry in the entry hall and the garlands strung across the gallery railing. The soft orange glow emanating from the vaulted and frescoed ceiling forty feet above bounces off the stone columns and refracts in the paned windows with hushed luminescent whispers.

Everywhere I turn there’s another statue, another piece of art, another tapestry, bookcase, alcove, mural. Jamie guides us through the rooms and hallways (the ones we’re allowed in) as if he grew up here, pointing out historical architectural details, recounting the palace’s ancient scandals, hinting that one or two of his ancestors may have been key players in them. It’s unnerving how unaffected he is by all of this, how easily he moves in this setting. Servants open the door for him, take his jacket, hand him champagne, and Jamie moves through them by rote. Conversely, I’ve turned into a parrot, compulsively squawking, “Thank you! Thank you! You don’t have to do that, thank you!” He wears his tux like a second skin; his posture straightens, his head tips back slightly. He’s like an actor slipping into character.

Jamie’s words come back to me: it’s just awful rich people affirming how awful and rich they are. As someone who wasn’t raised with money, or even remotely near it, I’m simultaneously awed by this kind of wealth and also deeply uncomfortable with it. As much as I may choose to ignore it, Jamie is a product of this system. I’m only now realizing just how much. And yet he’s chosen to toil away in academia, researching, writing, teaching. I wonder if this is the source of some of his familial tension. Maybe they want him to have done something more . . . fitting with his life? Something more profitable? Prestigious? Where I come from, ending up with a PhD, teaching poetry at Oxford, living in an inherited Victorian town house would be inconceivable; but maybe that life is just as inconceivable where Jamie comes from, only for the opposite reason: it’s a failing.

Jamie must see some of this transpiring on my face, because he peers at me and asks, “You all right?” We’re alone now. Maggie, Charlie, and Tom have wandered off to find a bar and we’re scouting for a place to situate ourselves.

I turn to answer him, but my eyes are drawn to a middle-aged woman about ten feet behind him. She’s wearing one of the more colorful gowns, a paisley floral pattern. She also holds a fan. Like, an actual fan. Like it’s Gone with the Wind and she’s about to tap someone flirtatiously on the shoulder with it. She drips money like a leaky faucet.

“Don’t look now,” I murmur lowly, “but the very definition of ‘awful and rich’ is standing right behind—oh shit, she’s looking at us. Let’s go.”

“Steady on, chin up,” Jamie murmurs, a smile playing at his lips. “I’m sure whoever she is, she’s simply thinking how stunning you look tonight.” I lean in to kiss him, but the woman heads decisively toward us. She winks at me (odd), then breaks into a run, and attacks Jamie, grabbing him around the waist. Jamie’s face registers shock, but he looks down at the bejeweled fingers entwined on his stomach and smiles. He quickly spins, enveloping the woman in a hug. They pull apart and she clasps his cheeks between her hands. She gazes into his eyes, her face lit from within by that combination of love, pride, and joy that only exists in one person: a mother looking at her child.

“Gorgeous boy,” she breathes.

“Beautiful mum,” he says back, clearly echoing some childhood game.

Looking at her love for him is like looking directly into the sun.

She steps back like a general, assessing her son fully. “You’re looking quite well, my love, quite well.” She pokes his stomach. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am that you came.”

Whatever I was expecting Jamie’s mother to be like—their relationship to be like—it wasn’t this. At all. I’m so confused I’ve been standing here with my mouth wide open since she grabbed him.

She eyes me. “Shall you introduce me, or must I do everything myself?”

“Yes, of course.” Jamie touches my shoulder. “Eleanor Durran, may I present my mother, Antonia Davenport.”

She takes my hand with gusto. “Eleanor! How lovely. You don’t often hear that name anymore.”

I smile. “That’s why I go by Ella.”

She chuckles. “Family name?”

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” I answer. “My father had delusions of grandeur.”

Jamie chimes in. “You’ll appreciate this, Mother, Ella actually saw you standing—”

I grab the sentence out of his mouth. “Standing over there and wanted to tell you that I absolutely love your dress!” I smile hugely and quick-flash my eyes to Jamie, silently threatening death if he contradicts my story.

“Likewise,” she says, still smiling. It’s as if she’s physically incapable of not smiling. It’s natural, real, written on her face with caring penmanship. There’s a mischievous quality to her, a whimsy that I’ve seen in her son when he’s at his happiest. It’s infectious. “That yellow is extraordinary. In truth, it was the first thing I noticed, and I thought to myself, ‘Who is that stunning light of a woman standing there?’ And then I realized you were standing with my son.” She pokes Jamie’s stomach again. “Well done, you!”

Jamie grabs her wrist and peers at the fan hanging off it. “And what is this?”

“Oh, Jamie, I’ve discovered the most exquisite escape hatch.” Her wide eyes and open enthusiasm strip thirty years from her face. “If I find I’m unable to extricate myself from a particularly dire conversation, I simply wave this and insist that I must get some air. Menopause is truly the most miraculous excuse.”

Jamie lifts an eyebrow. “Is it? I must try it sometime, then.”

Her eyes flit behind me and she calls, “William! Come say hello!”

I look over my shoulder and find the man who stormed out of Jamie’s office, looking as though he has been forcibly stuffed into a tuxedo. A rugged, feral man tortured into elegance. I smile at him as he approaches. He barely returns it, the side of his mouth spasmodically jerking to the left. I don’t wait for an introduction, extending my hand gamely. “Ella Durran. Nice to meet you, sir.”

He takes it, brief but firm. Unisex. He’s not changing his greeting because I’m a woman or, more, his son’s girlfriend. I can respect that. “William Davenport,” he intones, low and rumbly, like a cartoon lion. “I had heard my son was dating a beautiful American girl,” he continues, trying to be endearing, but like his tux, this, too, seems unnatural. He doesn’t look at me.

“I had heard those rumors, too, sir, but I didn’t let them stop me.” Antonia laughs, Jamie smiles, but William gives me nothing more than a tight smirk. He glances at his son. “Jamie.” I can’t tell if it’s a greeting or a reprimand.

“Father,” Jamie replies, suddenly austere, as if he’s mimicking William.

Antonia steps in. “Eleanor, have you ever been to Scotland?”

“No, ma’am.”

She turns to Jamie. “Invite her at Christmas! We’d adore having her.”

“Most kind of you, Mother, but actually”—Jamie softens his voice—“Ella and I are going on holiday.” A flicker of disappointment crosses Antonia’s face and she turns back to me.

I stall, trapped. Jamie hasn’t talked with them about this? “Thank you so much—really—but you see, I’ve never been to Europe,” I say. “It might be the only chance I’ll get while I’m over here.”

Her smile returns. “Oh, then you must go!” she cries. “Another time.” What a gracious, lovely woman. Antonia’s gaze catches something behind me and she rolls her eyes slightly. “You’ll excuse me, but duty calls. I really must say hello. Be back straightaway,” and she moves off, leaving Jamie, William, and me in a loose triangle.

Wasting no time, William leans in to Jamie. “Dr. Solomon said you weren’t willing to do another round of stem-cell replacement.”

Even though he has one round of chemo left, and he won’t have conclusive test results until January, Jamie has decided not to try the stem-cell replacement therapy again. He says it only gave him a year of remission last time, and it was painful, and depleting, and required him to live in a hospital for a month in total isolation. The only other option is a different kind of chemo, which Jamie seems to prefer. I’m doing my best to stay out of it.

   
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