My Oxford Year

“No, I really do want to go, it’s just that—”

His smile broadens. “I’ll put the tickets on my parents’ tab.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. The shock of my attendance will cause them to buy everything at the silent auction just to gloat. A case of Rothschild, a chef’s-table dinner at the Dorchester, yet another round of golf at St. Andrews my father will never use. We’re single-handedly contributing to the prosperity of the foundation.”

I throw my arms around him.

He mutters into my hair, almost to himself, “I ought to see if Cecelia will be coming.”

“Cecelia?” Even now, after everything, her name still doesn’t sit as well with me as I would like. Which I’m not proud of.

“Yes. I’m sure my father took care of it, but I’ll ask.”

I pull back and look at him. “Why would your father take care of Cecelia?”

“He does whatever he can to be kind to her.”

“But why?”

Jamie quirks his head at me. “Because Cecelia was Oliver’s fiancée.”

Chapter 21

What is he buzzing in my ears?

“Now that I come to die,

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”

Ah, reverend sir, not I!

Robert Browning, “Confessions,” 1864

Blenheim Palace is mind-bogglingly big. Trying to understand how the massive horseshoe-shaped structure used to be—and a portion of it still is—a home, makes my brain hurt. Yes, America has its great mansions, but they’re provincial by comparison. Cute colonial attempts. Summer cottages. Cabins in the woods. And we’re only twelve miles from Oxford. It was a fifteen-minute drive. A drive in a sleek, black Mercedes limo.

With Jamie’s family crest on the door.

Which he tried to block from view by standing in front of it and insisting, “No, please, by all means, after you.”

Today is a “good day.” He woke up feeling normal, much to his chagrin. I know he would have loved to have an excuse to cancel.

But damn, does he look good in his tux.

Everyone looks good. The gowns aren’t sparkly and flashy, they’re understated, the material thick and sumptuous, the cut impeccable. The suits are throwbacks to double-breasted days of yore. As we follow the crowd toward the front door, two giant braziers on each side dart firelight across the guests. Maggie slips her hand into mine and squeezes.

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.