My Oxford Year(61)
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!”