Daniel was suddenly shaken awake by an obese, bald-headed man with a gruff, gravelly Manchester accent, which Daniel recognized from hearing the Gallagher Brothers in interviews on MTV. It was the verger, Reg, who had worked at the college for almost fifty years. “No sleepin’ in the chapel. Do one now and be off. That’s a top lad.” Daniel apologized and told Reg it was his first day at the college. “The hall’s open now. You’ll have the whole place to yourself. Go and have your dinner, lad. You look skin-and-bone, you.” Dinner meant lunch, and Daniel was game for it.
The dining hall was just down the corridor from the chapel in what was universally appreciated as the most beautiful quad in Oxford. It was called the Cloister. Daniel arrived at the bottom of a steep stone staircase that went straight up, and he could smell a familiar blend of institutional meat and potato. At the top of the stairs stood a tall man with golden blonde hair, short on the sides and back and swept up in front with pomade. He was wearing a traditional Austrian Tracht jacket in olive green, with welted brogues in walnut brown on his feet.
“I say! Hello there,” the stranger bellowed down.
“Hello,” Daniel replied hesitantly. He began his ascent up the stones that were smoothed down on the edges from centuries of wear.
“You must be Daniel Perrin. The porter told me one of our new Americans was wandering about on the grounds someplace. Have you been round Addison’s Walk? Out to the Ford? Oh, I know. The chapel! You’ve been in there striving for an experience like Augustine and Monica at Ostia, haven’t you?”
“What, n-no. How did you…” Daniel stammered.
“Oh, I saw you come out of there,” the young man laughed. “I’m teasing. Let me introduce myself properly. I’m Ferdi Fremantle, second year graduate in Modern History. Excepting a few of us elder statesmen, no one is up yet.”
“Up?” Daniel asked.
“Yes, up. That’s what we say here. Haven’t you read any Waugh? In an earlier age, everyone studying here came from somewhere further south. And if they disgraced themselves they got ‘sent down.’ Oxford being Oxford, the old expressions endure, thank God. Shall we go in?”
As he entered the buttery, Daniel noticed a large chalkboard with the day’s lunch menu, featuring a main course of Lancashire sausages, which Ferdi told him would be presented again as Toulouse sausages on another day. In addition to the main course, there were always chips, baked beans, and salad, with curious individual packets of salad crème. There was also cheese pizza and an assortment of pasties and pies, and at the end of the line there was the pudding, which few students ignored. Today it was blackberry and apple crumble portioned in individual bowls, with a vat of hot yellow liquid and a ladle next to it. Daniel had certainly had custard before, but he had never seen it presented in such a large quantity.
As Daniel moved into the hall, he followed Ferdi to a table in the middle of the enormous medieval room. Daniel regretted he was too far from the perimeter to see who was depicted in the many portraits hanging high above the tables. These pictures would have been in a museum where Daniel came from, not in a cafeteria. For now, Daniel and Ferdi were alone, with the faces of the past staring down at them from three of the four long walls of the hall as they began to eat. Ferdi crossed himself, muttered something in Latin, crossed himself a second time, smiled at Daniel, and picked up his knife and fork.
“Oh, are you Catholic,” Daniel asked?
“Yes, although I spend more time now with Anglicans and hedonists, and Anglican hedonists for that matter, than with my own spiritual tribe. My mother was born in Austria. Distantly related to the Hapsburgs. I hear she was a fun-loving Baroque religionist.” Ferdi paused to compose a meticulous forkful of sausage, chip, and beans.
“So, your name,” Daniel interjected, “is it short for Ferdinand, like the Archduke?”
“The name, yes, Ferdinand. As for its origin, I like to think I’m named after Ferdinand I, who fought off Muslims and Protestants in the sixteenth century. But it’s likely my mother just liked the name. She died when I was a child, and my father simply doesn’t know or care. Anyway, mother had me Christened in her family church before leaving me with my hapless and religionless English father, who took me with him to Texas, then Russia, and finally Saudi Arabia working in the oil industry.”
“I had never even lived in England until I started here at Oxford when I was eighteen. I like to think I appreciate everything about this place more than most. And although I am somewhat at odds with Rome for personal reasons, I am proud of my Catholic and continental heritage, and my English heritage too, of course. Being from here but not having grown up here makes me very suspicious of what I see all about, even in a fortress like Oxford. You see, it’s as if the people here don’t want a country. They seem quite content to be replaced over the long term, and before then to abandon what was once great about a place like this. Have you been by the monstrous new business school building by the railway station?”
Daniel made no reply.
“Well, even if you had,” Ferdi continued, “you wouldn’t have known. It’s an inconsequential box of glass and steel. An unremarkable credential factory for nobody from nowhere.”
To Daniel’s ears, which were used to hearing idealistic rhetoric about melting pots and color-blindness and, as the Ambassador had put it, “tolerance,” Ferdi’s discourse was beyond the pale. And yet, Daniel was now in a new world, which happened to be the Old World, and he found his companion’s contrarianism entertaining, even intriguing. Perhaps it was the accent. Ferdi could tell Daniel was unaccustomed to hearing such tosh. He picked up his spoon to eat his pudding before changing the subject slightly.
“Daniel, your country has been through quite a fright recently, and we shall see what it all means; but it is really nothing compared to what happened in the Great War. Now that was the worst disaster in history. The beginning of the end, perhaps. It’s my area of interest. I am working on sort of a counter-factual thing my supervisor hates, but he tolerates it because we get on so well. I contend the modern Christian imperium, over which the Hapsburgs were just beginning to preside, was the last great hope of the West. Ever since Sarajevo, it’s been mustard gas and death camps, yes, but also plastics and pop music and adverts for stomach complaint remedies. Americanism is quite unfortunate, I’m sorry to say, Daniel. But enough about that. How are you getting on so far? You look dreadfully pale and tired, I must say.”
Daniel filled his water glass from the jug on the table and took a long gulp. He was devouring the food which, the Ambassador was right, Daniel’s family and friends had ridiculed in advance of his departure. He began to explain his current predicament. “Well, I’ve lost my things. My bags. I left them on the Oxford Tube. But Susan…,” he blushed, “um, the lady who runs my scholarship program. She’s looking for them. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I think maybe Susan and I like each other. Fancy each other, as you would say. Anyway, she’s helping me.”
“Well now. Good heavens, Daniel. Have you gone and fallen in love with the first British woman you’ve met? Susan, you say? Not a Susan but a rose, no doubt. A lady?!” He laughed, wiped his mouth and set his cutlery down on the plate. He folded his hands, and his facial expression went serious. “Let me give you some unsolicited advice, Daniel. I’ve seen this before among young men who are at once too interesting and too immature for the girls their own age. There is a reason your Susan has not yet met Mister Wonderful.”
Daniel felt embarrassed. What possessed him to say something about Susan? But also, how dare this fop presume to know anything? Visibly perplexed, Daniel was at a loss for words, his mouth agape.
“Now Daniel, don’t be cross with me. I don’t know what experience you’ve had, but if you’re here to meet a woman, you ought to look down, not up. Go younger! You mustn’t think of yourself as anybody’s. You are a man of the world. A catch.” He concluded with what seemed to Daniel like a non-sequitur, “I shall never marry, you know.”
Daniel began shoveling spoonfuls of gooey crumble into his mouth to stifle his frustration. But with each bite, he thought it more likely Ferdi was right. What were the chances the first attractive female he encountered in his new life abroad would be his soulmate? Susan had a career in government, and Daniel had his studies ahead of him. Maybe they were not walking the same path.
Daniel and Ferdi finished lunch and carried their empty trays back to the buttery, where they were met by a white-coated man named Jerry, nicknamed Jerry Chips, who had worked at the college for over thirty years, since he was fourteen. He served plates of food twice a day during the peak times before moving over to wash them as the meal services finished. Jerry stood barely taller than five feet, and he was “slow” as people used to say when Daniel was a kid. He was generally pleasant, except when students became distracted and broke his rhythm of his piling on food, or when they were not quick enough to hand him their dirty dishes. So much for “slow.” He tolerated a break in his routine only if you asked him which football teams were worth betting on that weekend. Daniel was silent and straightforward, receiving from Jerry a smile of brown, crooked teeth and a “thank you, sir,” emitted on nicotine flavored breath.
As they headed down the stairs, Daniel explained his present material needs in a little more detail to Ferdi. “Well, it’s settled then,” Ferdi declared. “Marks and Spencer. You can get everything there, apart from the mobile, of course.”
As the two men walked down the High Street, it occurred to Daniel to ask where Ferdi got his haircut. “Oh, Walter’s! It’s just here. Why, yes, of course, you need one.” At that, Ferdi led Daniel into Turl Street and through the door to a men’s clothing shop, full of tweeds and flat caps and tattersall dress shirts, only without the button-down collars Daniel had seen on the few decent shirts he had received from his father as gifts, usually a size too large. He suddenly wondered, was his dad subtly ridiculing his son’s slight build by ignoring the fact that he wore a Medium, 15/32? Daniel tried to calculate what that was in centimeters, as Ferdi bounded up the staircase next to a large display of umbrellas. Daniel followed, suddenly finding himself in a barber shop. It was warm outside now, but it was downright hot up here where Daniel immediately saw serious work being done. This was no discount “clips” chain salon in the mall.
Ferdi called across the room, “Helen!”
A pretty, middle-aged brunette sweeping up hair between the chairs of two large, mustachioed barbers turned and smiled. She walked towards Ferdi with a limp. A birth defect perhaps, Daniel thought. Polio? She spoke with a slight west country accent, but she came across as educated in the traditional academic disciplines beyond the standard of most people in her profession. “Mr. Fremantle, what are you doing back so soon? You were in the chair just two days ago, I reckon.” “Oh, it’s Ferdi, Ferdi. Please, Helen. No, no, it’s not for me. It’s for my new American friend here. I would like for you to meet Mr. Daniel Perrin. We’re awfully sorry to burst in here, but is there any way you can do him now? His new life demands a new style. We’ll eliminate the use of a comb now, Daniel, won’t we? Something quite short you can fix with your hands. I hate to tell you, Daniel, but you are thinning a bit. Never mind. But this parting and wave thing doesn’t suit you. What do you say, Helen?”
Helen was free. She liked Americans and was happy to have a new one as a client, so she went to work on him. In a quarter of an hour, Daniel had a new look, kind of a spiky forward thing, but rather dignified. This would do nicely. But what did Ferdi mean by “thinning”?
On their way out of Walter’s, Ferdi turned back to the umbrella display and grabbed a medium-sized black one with a curved wooden handle. He tossed it to Daniel and nodded his head towards the sales clerk standing behind the till. £20. He could never have imagined paying the value of more than five used cd’s on something to keep the rain off. Back home in Florida young people simply made a run from the car to the front door as fast as they could. In Pittsburgh people made do with cheap giveaways, little extendable things ladies kept in their purses. Golfers, Daniel remembered, walked around with umbrellas as long as their clubs, and those seemed to achieve something. But in this old English university town, a proper brolly was part of the uniform, at least among the Oxford true-believers like Ferdi, the kind of guy, minus some of the affect, that Daniel came to Oxford to become.
With his supply of cash down to £140, Daniel followed Ferdi back onto the High Street and up to Carfax Tower at Cornmarket Street through the covered market, with stalls of meats, cheeses, baked goods, an engraver, a picture framer, poster salesmen, and various other venders. Three American football fields further along and they were in a modern supermarket that gave way to a fully stocked department store. Marks & Spencer was a popular chain store; but this location had a unique distinction. It displayed a large bronze cross in the floor of the entryway, a mark that showed the meeting point of the old parish boundaries of the city.
It was in this very establishment that Susan had acquired the little black dress in which she had suffered at the Ambassador’s luncheon. She had purchased it on a return trip to her alma mater for a gaudy, an event which Americans would simply call an alumni dinner.
Ferdi walked quickly through the food aisles towards the escalator to the men’s clothing department. “Daniel, knowing as I do the unlikelihood that your luggage will be recovered in tact, we must proceed as if it is lost. Now, what of your present wardrobe do you expect to arrive eventually from America?”
“Oh, you really think my things are gone,” Daniel said, alarmed. He re-composed himself. “Right. Well. Mostly what’s coming from the States are books and cd’s. My blue suit, a decent dress shirt or two. More underwear, socks. I don’t know. Not a whole lot. I almost feel now, what’s coming isn’t right for me anymore anyway.”
Ferdi nodded solemnly. He looked Danie up and down one final time, then he espied the racks carefully, and went on the attack. Meanwhile, Daniel wandered around the men’s department scanning the room, finding another parish boundary marker carved into a piece of stone sitting behind a piece of plexiglass in the wall. He then started “people-watching,” as Roger would say. Suddenly, he saw a familiar face.
About ten feet in front of Daniel, there was a small man with a droopy eye and three or four-days’ growth of beard. He was wearing a t-shirt with the cover art from R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction on it, and he was standing behind a collapsible baby stroller containing a fidgety toddler. There was no mistaking. It was Thom Yorke, the frontman of the band Radiohead. Daniel’s jaw dropped and he began to breath quickly and shallowly from his chest. He looked all around him qickly, as if at any moment a crowd might overwhelm the scene and crush him and everyone else in the store. He called out to Ferdi, intensely focused, who was rifling through a pile of shirts.
“Ferdi, come here!”
“What? Oh Daniel, what is it? I’m working on your new look here!”
“Just come here for a minute,” Daniel insisted.
Ferdi complied, but he showed pre-emptive disinterest in whatever Daniel had discovered.
“It’s Thom Yorke! From Radiohead! Right there!”
Ferdi replied, “Who?” He then looked around and landed his gaze on the same man Daniel had spotted with astonishment. “Oh, yes, that rock and roller chap. ‘Creep’ and all that. I’ve seen him here before. And in the Whittard tea shop too. And in the covered market. Daniel, you must drop this middle-class fascination with celebrity. That man is from Oxford, and he likes it here because he can depend on people to let him live like a normal person. Because, you know, he is a normal person. You will see him again, Daniel. Come now and look at these.”
In Daniel’s old life, it would have been unthinkable for him to see one of his musical heroes and not ask for an autograph. But now, Ferdi was right. It seemed wrong to put anyone on a pedestal. Here was a man - an eccentric, talented man - out doing some shopping with his family in a town full of many oddities.
Ferdi had picked out a pair of medium grey gabardine trousers and another pair of tan corduroys, two versatile dress shirts, one light blue and one white with a subtle herringbone weave, both with French cuffs. Finally, there was one Navy blue jumper – a word that would take time for Daniel to use himself – and a package of white underwear, briefs.
“I don’t even have cuff links, Ferdi,” Daniel noted.
“Oh, no bother,” he replied. “You will. For now, you’ll wear them rolled up when the weather is warm and it won’t matter in your jumper sleeve the rest of the time. No decent shoes coming, am I right?”
Daniel was wearing his favorite brown bluchers, and Ferdi approved of them.
“As you don’t have a decent suit right now anyway,” Ferdi explained, “we shall have to wait on black cap toes. I assume the dress shoes you’ve lost were not up to standard. Composite leather, rubber soles.”
“Not rubber soles, no,” Daniel corrected him.
“Ah good,” Ferdi replied. “That said, when you come into any more money, you must get some real calfskin Oxfords, a second suit, and most of all a proper overcoat. I’m sorry, Daniel, but that suede jacket is a disaster. You cannot walk around here as if at any moment you might withdraw your hacky sack and lie around on the lawn with scruffy intellectual pretenders. Oh, and I am afraid we are out of money for your new telephone gadget, but surely that’s not urgent. Unless, there is the matter of that Susan you mentioned. Well, she knows where to find you.”
By now Daniel was so caught up in Ferdi’s spree that Susan was receding further back in his mind. He did, for a moment, wonder what Roger would think of all this. After all, he worked in a store not unlike this one. He had many of the same fashion ideals as Ferdi, but he now settled mostly for cut-rate alternatives, even with his employee discount. He no longer even bothered to shine his favorite tassel loafers, which he wore most days on the sales floor.
Roger had concluded his fashion sense would die out with him. He assumed his son did not think clothes made a man. But perhaps he had judged too soon.
