“Maybe next time,” he said.
When Tom was seven, they took the boys to London for the first time. They went to the Tower, Hyde Park Corner, Madame Tussauds, the Mews at Buckingham Palace, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. They had high tea at the Dorchester, fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s, and bangers and mash at Wimpy’s. They saw The Mousetrap in its twenty-fourth year. The boys thought Cornish pasties the worst things they ever ate, after English ice cream, which didn’t melt. They saw England play Australia at Lords and Chelsea play Aston Villa at Stamford Bridge. Rupert bought them each a cricket bat and ball and they played in Hyde Park, drawing a small audience attracted by their loud voices and colonial accents.
The boys declared it a great vacation, and Rupert seemed reconciled to England, almost taking pride in his homeland as he explained the rules of cricket and the War of the Roses. Tom acquired an English accent that passed on the plane for the real thing. “An English cousin,” Eleanor said to the stewardess. Sam added to his list of Anglicisms. “What’s a bugger?” he asked his father. “There are two equivalents,” Rupert said. “As a throwaway insult, ‘asshole’ pretty much covers it. More literally, a bugger is a butt fucker.” Sam stared at his dad. He had never heard him use bad language. This must be English Dad speaking, he thought. “I wouldn’t use it around adults, if I were you,” Rupert said. Jack had brought his trumpet, smuggled like contraband in his backpack, a violation of Eleanor’s packing rules. “There will be no place to play it,” Eleanor had said to him before they left. He carried it with him at all times. During their scratch cricket match, he played “God Save the Queen.” The audience applauded. Harry called him a suck-up. “It’s ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’ I was playing,” Jack said, kicking at Harry’s shin. “I was fooling them.” Will asked his dad why no one in America played soccer. “Your children will play soccer,” Rupert said. “Americans think a World Series is Detroit against Cincinnati.”
—
Rupert visited Will at Cambridge in 1989, during Will’s second year there. He went alone. Eleanor insisted. “It means something special to both of you. Off you go.” It was his tenth return trip but the first time he had left London’s environs. He rented a car, a Peugeot. He liked driving in England. The transition to left-hand drive was easy and he liked shifting. It gave him a false but comforting sense of belonging. He turned the radio on. Melvyn Bragg was interviewing Penelope Fitzgerald. He fiddled with the knob, searching for music. He could feel the blood rushing in his ears as he drove east.
Will was at King’s, where Rupert had been. They spent their first day walking around the college, pointing things out to each other. Will introduced his father to his tutor, Dominic Byrne, a shambling, humorous, heavy-drinking ex-Jesuit with a Derry accent and an Irish appetite for irony.
“A lot has changed since you’ve been here,” Byrne said. “And a lot hasn’t. Your boy, a chip off the old block.”
“He’s a chip off his mother’s block,” Rupert said. “I was a scholarship boy.”
“Will said you went to Longleat,” Byrne said.
“Scholarship boy,” Rupert said.
“Before that?” Byrne said.
“The Prebendal School. Chorister. Scholarship boy.”
“Before that?”
“St. Pancras Primary School, Chichester. It was attached to the orphanage I grew up in,” Rupert said.
Byrne rocked back on his heels.
“Yes, I know,” Rupert said, “I could almost pass for a gentleman.”
“Would you be my guest at high table tomorrow?” Byrne said. “I know Will will want to have dinner with you tonight, but by tomorrow the two of you could no doubt use a break.”
“Are you setting me up? Will the provost ask me for money?” Rupert asked.
“We’ve got a scholarship fund,” Byrne said. “Just up your alley.” He paused. “Though we’re short of orphans these days.”
Rupert endowed a scholarship at King’s in the name of the Reverend Henry Falkes, orphans preferred but not required. He and Byrne became good friends, close friends, as close as both were able. Byrne visited Rupert six months before he died, a last visit when Rupert was still himself. He came back to speak at Rupert’s funeral. Eleanor wanted to pay his fare. He refused. “My pocket can sustain the loss, dear heart,” he said. “It’s my heart that can’t.”
“I was right to wait to go back to Cambridge,” Rupert said to Eleanor when he was back in New York. “It’s almost a different place. I could breathe there for the first time.” He looked away from Eleanor as he often did when emotion caught up with him. “It was effortless for Will. He felt as comfortable there as at Princeton.” He turned toward her. “He has a beautiful English girlfriend, Frances, Francie,” he said. “Blond.”
—