And we were off into the world of history as if Jack weren’t there at all. We talked about France and kings and battles. We chatted about research and how difficult it was to write history that had long ago disappeared and left only hints of its life for us to unravel.
Soon Jack joined in our conversation and we returned to the present. I reached to take another bite of my grilled sausages and tomatoes and noticed that Jack had polished off every bite on his plate.
“Am I a slowpoke?” I glanced at Warnie. “I’m sorry. Do you have someplace you need to be? I’ve been talking too much.”
“No!” Jack stated with a loud voice, his hands held in supplication. “It is a problem of mine. I eat too fast. I blame it on Oldie.”
“The horrid headmaster at your old boarding school,” I said, remembering a story from one of his letters.
“You know?” Warnie asked.
“Not very much, but some.” I glanced at Jack. Was I betraying a confidence?
Jack placed his fork over his empty plate, lit a cigarette. “We were in great trouble if we didn’t finish our meals on time or finish at all. It led to this terrible habit of gobbling, which I’ve tried to no avail to break.”
“That or he’s just itching for his cigarette,” Warnie said with a laugh.
“Well, I will savor mine.” I took an exaggeratedly slow bite, the tomato juice dripping onto the plate.
They laughed, as I’d hoped. After a few moments passed and I pushed my plate away, Jack asked, “Shall we walk to the deer park perhaps?”
“That sounds smashing,” I said with a terrible false English accent.
“Then off we go.” The bells of Magdalen rang again, chiming out the hour, the rich ring of sacrament.
Enveloped in the soft buzz of sherry and companionship, Jack, Warnie, and I exited the dining room onto the great lawn. Men ambled past with pipes and cigarettes, books tucked under their arms. Grass leached its green to the coming winter, turning the brunette color of fine hair, and yet the leaves fell, adorning the lawn’s nakedness. Students sat in clusters on blankets, books scattered around.
Jack pointed at a long rectangular building ahead of us across the lawn. “That is where my rooms are.” He swung his walking stick and headed away from the building and under the iron archway we’d passed through the day before. The three of us sauntered slowly across the small stone bridge, a miniature version of the larger Magdalen Bridge across the street, and onto Addison’s Walk and to the deer park.
Warnie walked next to me as a speckled fawn sauntered across the lawn, looking over her shoulder.
“My boys will love this,” I whispered before I realized I’d spoken aloud, a prayer or incantation for the future. “Those eyes of the deer,” I said. “As if they are looking at just us, so round and brown.”
“Like yours,” Jack said so matter-of-factly that it took me longer than it should to seize upon his statement.
“Mine?”
He didn’t answer, as if he’d already forgotten what he said. He walked ahead of us with his walking stick in sway. Warnie and I caught up to him; I already felt the blisters forming in the shoes I’d worn for beauty, not comfort.
“In the forties,” I said, “I spent a few months in Hollywood trying to be a screenwriter. The only screenplay that was nearly filmed was about fawns.” I watched the little deer before us as it sprang forward into the underbrush. “I borrowed Kipling’s white deer theme.”
“How very clever of you,” Warnie said. “Why was it never made?”
“Well, we had a director, but deer are mighty hard to find in Hollywood. If I’d known how to import them, I would have. But my powers have their limits.”
They both laughed.
“What else did you write out there in California?” Warnie asked. “It seems a land a million miles away.”
“You don’t want to know. It was a terrible time. Except for the MGM lion—his name was Leo—whom I came to love as greatly as you can love any animal, it was a time I’d rather forget. But I had a dream to cast Tristan and Isolde in a love story at sea. It’s one of my beloved myths of all time.”
“Irish love,” Jack said, “that ends in death.”
“But true love,” I said and paused at the edge of the park, lifting my face to the sky where layered white clouds were spread flat against an unseen barrier. “The kind that makes you notice every small thing in the natural world, bringing you to yourself.”
“Oh, you’re a romantic,” Warnie said and lifted his hands to the sky. “You two will get along properly well.”
Jack either didn’t hear Warnie or didn’t reply, because his next comment ended the afternoon. “Tomorrow we shall walk Shotover Hill.”
“That sounds interesting,” I replied without asking where Shotover Hill was or why we would walk it.
“Then tomorrow it is.” Jack’s smile fell over me. Swallows spun above and the song of skylarks filled the air.
With plans to meet in the morning, the brothers departed, one home to the Kilns and the other to tutor a student. It could have been the newness of it all, and how I tasted it as unspoiled as new fruit, but Oxford and the Lewis brothers had cast their spells; I was enchanted.
CHAPTER 13
The world tasted fragrant and new
When we climbed over Shotover Hill
“BALLADE OF BLISTERED FEET,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Shotover Hill rose from Oxford like the breast of a woman in recline. Jack, Warnie, and I began our hike in silence, our conversation lulling and beginning again like waves. Through bracken-covered slopes we walked; blackbirds and wrens swept above us. The brothers swung their walking sticks in a step-step-swing-step rhythm, swatting at nettles and pushing rocks or debris from the path for me to pass. We climbed the hill and our breathing synchronized.
With the physical exertion, logical thoughts fell away, unspooling and leaving nothing but sensation and the bliss of nature’s quiet. Jack had already told me that it was a mistake to combine talking and walking—the noise obscuring the sounds of nature. So through switchbacks and jagged turns, soft heather swept us forward. When we reached the top, all out of breath, we stood above the patchwork of valleys and rivers, ponds and forest, an area called South Oxfordshire.
“A land fashioned of someone’s fairy tale,” I murmured, out of breath as we reached the top. The sunlight settled on me with such warmth as I sat on the ground, my knees tented to rest my hands.
“Yes,” Warnie said. “It does seem so from here, does it not?” He took in a deep breath and bent over to clasp his knees. “But it’s just plain ole Oxford.”
“Oh, Warnie!” I said, looking to him, his baggy cuffs puddling at his feet as he leaned on his walking stick. “There is nothing plain about Oxford.”
“The eye of the newcomer,” he said and straightened. “Let me look again.” He squinted against the sun and leaned forward as if on the bow of a ship. “Yes, a fairy-tale land it is. You are very right, Mrs. Gresham.”
“This land must be part of you.” I inhaled the cleansing aroma of grass and soil, the blue sky above like the bowl of an alpine lake. “I want this landscape to be mine and the landscape to have me.”
“Then you shall,” Jack said. “I doubt there is much you set out to do that doesn’t get done.”
The brothers came to sit on either side of me, and we talked: of Warnie’s new work, of Jack’s students’ upcoming Michaelmas semester exams, of the Socratic Club meeting he must attend the next day. We debated Winston Churchill’s conservative views and his recent announcement that England had an atomic bomb. Would they test it? Where was it? We talked of how Prince Philip must feel with his wife becoming queen, and of course the tea rationing, which had all of England annoyed. We were three chums who’d been friends all our lives, or so anyone who came upon us would have believed.
“Even the Garden of Eden could not be as beautiful.” I poked at Jack. “Although I know you don’t believe there is such a thing at all.”
Warnie put his fingers to his lips. “Hush, don’t tell anyone that the great C. S. Lewis believes that Adam and Eve are a myth.”
Jack made a snorting sound and stood to stretch. “I’ve never claimed to be a theologian.” He shook his head. “Now let’s walk off this hill to a decent pub. A beer is due us.”
As we descended, Warnie piped up. “Where to next for you, Joy?”
“Well, I’m here for another week.” I stopped at a switchback to catch my breath and ease the ache in my knees. “Then I’ll travel to Worcester, where my king lost his battle at Powick Bridge. Then on to Edinburgh to dig into the library archives.”
“Worcester!” Warnie turned to Jack. “Isn’t that where the Matley Moores live?”
“It is,” Jack said. “I’ll tell them you’re coming.” He turned to me. “Dear old friends of ours who might give you accommodation.”
“Oh, that would be simply wonderful,” I said. “To save what little money I have.”
“Consider it done.” Jack nodded, and then we slowly walked down the hill, the sun at our backs warming us. We reached town and collapsed onto the hard benches of a nearby tavern, guzzling our thick brown beer eagerly. Warnie ordered pork pies, and we dived into them with abandon.
“Pubs might be the greatest invention of the English,” I said, basking in the warmth and the smell of whiskey and fried food.
“You think so?” Warnie asked. “Not pork pies or the pencil or the electric telegraph?”
I almost sputtered against my glass. “The pencil?”
“Yes.” Jack nodded seriously. “In Cumbria in the 1500s, or so Oldie told us.”
“Then yes, the pencil is grand, and after that, the stories. What is it,” I asked, “that makes British stories so much better? Or am I just being seduced at every angle?”
“You are being seduced,” Jack said and reached his arms across the back of his chair.
Our glances caught and then slid away. I swore he blushed at his blunder.
“But what do you believe is the difference in the stories?” Warnie asked and motioned to the waitress for another beer.
“Your stories, the English I mean, contain magic. Mysticism. Our American stories are more realistic. You know, Tom Sawyer for us, Mary Poppins for you. That kind of thing. The day-to-day– ness in our American stories weaves a tale but doesn’t transport. Nothing pragmatic about your George MacDonald and The Light Princess. And that extraordinary Phantastes, nothing like it in the world.”
“Phantastes changed my life,” Jack said simply. “I didn’t know it at the time, but it did.”
We’d written about this, but how much better it was to talk about it. There was no comparison.
“I felt the same.” I slugged back another gulp of beer to dull the throbbing of my blistered feet. “Tell me,” I said and lifted my drink too eagerly, splashing it onto my face and into my eye, causing both men to laugh.
“Oh, laugh at me, but look at you,” I said and leaned forward to wipe a fleck of crust from Jack’s chin.
Warnie coughed. “That’s what happens when old bachelors live together. We don’t notice when food has fallen onto our faces.”
I nodded. “Well, that’s what happens when a woman gets excited. She spills beer in her eye.”
Jack smiled, falling back into reverie. “Phantastes. I found it in a bookshop at Great Bookham Station on my way back to school one lonely afternoon. One shilling and a penny was what I paid for it. I, who have no head for money, remember exactly what it cost.” He wiped at his chin with his napkin, as if to make sure nothing remained.
In a gust of emotion, I wanted to travel with him to that train station. I wanted to be with that lonely boy when he found the book that baptized his imagination.
He smiled at me. “You weren’t yet born.”
“Not yet,” I agreed.
He continued. “Only now do I know to call the experience of reading that book, holy. Books can help make us who we are, can’t they?” Jack settled back in his chair. “What a treasure it is to find a friend with the same experience.”
“MacDonald sees divinity in everything,” I said. “But when I first read it, I would have just said he saw magic. You do the same in your work.”
“Not like MacDonald. He was such a corking good writer. He so influenced me that I wrote my first poem in answer.”
“Dymer,” I said. “A poem you wrote at seventeen. It was Chad Walsh who showed it to me, and I loved everything about its allusions to a life of fantasy . . .” I paused and then quoted a line, one that had snagged long ago in the crevices of memory. “‘She said, for this land only did men love; The shadow-lands of earth.’” I paused. “And to think you wrote that as an atheist—how beautiful. How profound.”
Jack’s ruddy face turned ruddier, his smile crooked and his eyes averted. “Thank you, Joy.”
“Yes,” Warnie said, and we both looked at him as if we’d forgotten he was there at all. We were deep in our cups, but Warnie, I realized, was sloshed. Adorably so, but sozzled.
For an hour, or maybe it was longer, I lost track of time. The three of us talked about our favorite books, what had influenced our childhoods and our minds, and most importantly what had ignited our imaginations. Our voices grew quiet as we drew closer and closer to each other.
When our yawns overcame our words, we rose to leave. Outside, rain thrashed the sidewalks, blurring the sky with a waterfall veil. Gray skies and bent tree limbs, leaves loosening from their final anchor and swaying to the ground, socked us in. Yet there was nothing in that moment that could dampen my soul. Water dripped into my shoes, filling them as if I’d waded into Crum Elbow Creek.
We bade a soggy farewell with promises of tomorrow. I made it to my little room and collapsed wet as a fish, exhausted but satiated. Before I allowed sleep to steal the memories of the day, I took pen to page and started to write “Ballade of Blistered Feet.”
But my mind was restless. Away from Jack and Warnie, I was back in the guest room, where a letter from Bill sat on my bedside table. My other life rushed in like a tidal wave.
Bill:
Thanks for the story suggestions. I’m working hard to get something together. The boys are doing well and they have enclosed letters here. Davy now has turtles and Douglas is building a fort down at the creek. Renee is keeping us all together—I don’t know what we would do without her. Right now she is mending the boys’ clothes.
Joy:
Dear Collection of Poogles,
I miss you! I wish you could see the complex splendor of this city. I could never, ever grow tired of Oxford and its towering buildings and moss-covered stone. I don’t miss London at all but for the chummy friend I’ve found in Michal Williams. I pray every day for all of you and hope that things are getting better there financially. Bill, once you set your mind to it, I know you’ll find the right story. You have always been talented this way.
P.S. Will you please send my thyroid meds, and a copy of “Longest Way Around”?
As I readied for bed and thought of my sons, I sent a prayer to cover them with love. Oh, how I wanted them to see everything I’d seen that day, let them touch the heather that ran across Shotover Hill, have them feel the rain soft on their faces, raise a kite in the wind at the top of the hill.
Putting the pen and paper aside, I gave up on the poem that memorialized the day. I drew the pillow close—all that was soft for me to hold.
CHAPTER 14
And yet, not too forlorn a memory:
Oxford, autumn leaves, and you, and me
“SONNET VI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Oxford held ancient secrets, and if I leaned close enough and was quiet, I could hear its whispers, and then maybe even hear my own. In that place I started to feel the contours and edges of my internal landscape, a world that at thirty-seven years old I’d still never quite mapped.
I saw Jack and Warnie every day during that week and a half. When we weren’t together I wandered Oxford, wh
ere I’d found a corner in Blackwell’s Bookshop to read or write until my eyes ached for nature. In my letters to home I attempted to describe the landscape, but found myself giving up and walking outside, leaving the letters unfinished on my bedside table at Victoria’s.
In New York I’d spent hours anticipating Jack’s letters—the anticipation to see him now was no less than that waiting, just more pleasant, like being hungry but smelling the meal to be served in the very next room.
For days I’d walked the paths from my room in Victoria’s house on High Street, a cramped room full of dark English furniture too big for the room, dusty and mildewy, but warm enough with her chatty companionship, to the staid elegance of Eastgate and around the green and flower-speckled perimeter of Headington. I climbed to the top of its hill and spied the hummocks and lakes below. Jack’s home—the Kilns—was a three-mile walk along Headington to Kiln’s Lane, but I didn’t venture there. I hadn’t been invited.
On Tuesday afternoon I wandered slowly to meet Jack in his rooms. Students spilled out from the heavy, carved door of Magdalen with books under arms, laughter echoing just as it had in the generations that had come before. Coasting as if I were on a punt in the Cherwell, I passed the deer park and imagined my boys, how they would run through it, battling with imaginary swords, chasing the fallow deer with the huge curved antlers. I closed my eyes and offered a prayer for my sons’ safety.
Jack’s rooms were on the third floor of the New Building, “new” meaning built in 1733. The building was a beige stone rectangle behind the quad of Magdalen proper. I strode under the arched entryways on the bottom level and then climbed the curved stairwell, worn smooth by shoes and time. I ran my hand along the cool stone wall and then found myself in front of his door—third floor, third door. Mr. C. S. Lewis stated the brass nameplate, Tutor of English Literature. I knocked timidly, and yet the door sprang open as if he’d been waiting with his hand on the knob.
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