“We felt the fear in America,” I said, “but nothing like that. I’m not sure that the fear of invasion would have been something I could have tolerated.”
“You tolerate what you must when it becomes your reality.” Jack pointed to a pew on the left-hand side about halfway back and walked that way; I followed him.
“This is our pew, Warnie’s and mine.” He sat and I joined him. “Not exactly ours, but where we prefer to sit. We started coming here all the way back in . . . I don’t know, 1930 or thereabout? I like the eight a.m. service. The organ music in the other services grates on my nerves.” He lowered his voice as if the organ might hear his insult.
I leaned close to him. “I don’t much mind organ music; it’s the eternal sermons I can’t stand.”
Jack laughed and pointed to the Communion table. “It was here during the Eucharist, during World War II, that I thought of Wormwood and his story.”
“Oh, Jack,” I said. “Tell me. I love hearing where stories began.”
He turned slightly in the pew to face me. “I’d heard a speech Hitler gave over the radio waves, and I was easily convinced by him, if only for a moment. I started thinking what it would take to convince one of evil, just as the sermon that morning was trying to convince one of good.” His voice was quieter than usual. I didn’t want him to stop talking; I wanted him to unload his heart into mine.
“While the preacher spoke of temptation, my mind wandered. How would a head devil instruct his underlings on such things? Would he do it in the same but opposite manner as this preacher?” He paused and smiled at me. “I had almost the entire book in my head before I returned home. And then I believe I wrote the whole thing during the Battle of Britain with airplanes overhead. Young children were sent to live here. Hitler was on the radio with his fierce voice. And during all of that, my mind was churning with the idea.”
“I’m envious,” I said. “You just decide to write a book and then you do it.” The church was growing warm, or I was. I removed my coat and laid it gently in my lap. “You have tapped into something others have not.”
“Don’t admire me in that way, Joy. I write stories just as you do, one after the other. People believe I spent years studying for Screwtape and Wormwood, but the idea and words came from the wickedness of my own heart.” He rose from the pew and motioned for us to leave.
I sat for a moment longer. “Maybe they are the type of stories we think of during war—the devil and his works. Paradise Lost was written during the English uprising.” I stood and followed him.
He opened the door to the outside and wrapped his coat tighter. “I read that when I was nine years old and fancied myself a critic.” He paused. “And how do you come to know these things, Joy?”
I donned my coat and squinted into the sunlight. “Because I’m writing about King Charles II. It was his father who was executed during that time. I retain the oddest information, Jack. I can’t quite remember to pay the bills or buy a new button for my jacket or answer a letter, but I can remember a piano score after seeing it once and little facts like Milton writing Paradise Lost during that terrible war. Those obscure things burrow themselves into my brain. But ask me to catch a train on time?”
He laughed. “No one really knows you, do they, Joy?”
“I wouldn’t say no one.”
With a few tentative steps back into the courtyard, Jack spoke. “That’s what Tollers says about me also. But I don’t believe he says this with great affection, merely annoyance.”
I laughed. “Tell me more about Tollers. How did you become such grand friends?”
“We met in 1926 at a Merton College English faculty meeting.” He sat on a bench in the courtyard, and I joined him. “I thought him a pale little chap, but soon found that we had the same mind about many things. From poetry to English literature. We’ve been each other’s first readers, and we haven’t always liked what we’ve read.” He paused before telling me, “He’s not a big fan of the Narnian stories.”
“What does he know?” I said, obstinately horrified.
“Oh, he knows very much indeed. As with any good friend, we have many of those moments when one turns to the other and says, ‘You too?’”
“Like?”
“We don’t like politics. Neither of us has bothered to learn to drive a car. Dante. Theology.”
I nodded, but felt envious also.
“But there are our differences also. He’s the don of linguistics and language. Not a literature fan as I am. Yet what draws any two people together toward friendship is what drew you and me—that we see the same truth and share it. For example, there was this moment in an Inklings meeting when we both agreed to this—if someone won’t write what we want to read, then we shall write it for ourselves.” Jack paused. “For now he’s working on a sequel to The Hobbit. I’m quite astounded at his ability to create another world.”
“You’ve done the same.”
“I try, at least.”
“Let’s always do so.”
“Indeed.” He nodded with that smile, and we stood to head down the path.
Once home, Jack retreated to his room to “enter the fourth dimension,” and I took his O.H.E.L. papers into the common room and began to read with a pencil in my hand. For many pages I had to pretend this was not his work on which I wrote, to feign that I wrote marks on any old paper, and not become muddle-headed with admiration, forgetting to be honest.
A new twist but plenty good, I wrote in the margin and continued.
The fire puttered out, and Mrs. Miller came in to stoke it. She turned to smile at me, and I thanked her.
“’Tis wonderful to have a nice woman in the house,” she said as she hung the poker on the hook.
“Was there a not-so-nice one here before me?” I asked cheerily, not expecting an answer.
“Oh, not-so-nice is a kind way to describe her.” And with that, Mrs. Miller was off to the kitchen, not allowing for any more questions.
I closed my eyes as the fire reignited and a flood of gratitude and grace filled me. How very blessed I was to be there reading Jack’s work, warming by the fire after spending a morning in his church. But, oh, how many women had Mrs. Miller seen come and go in this house?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
CHAPTER 25
Why, you may call the thing idolatry
And tell no lie; for I have seen you shine
“SONNET X,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Jack awoke early in the mornings, which wasn’t in my particular bag of tricks, and began returning letters to his wide array of correspondents, some fantastic and some boring. It occurred to me that maybe his morning letter writing greased the wheels for his stories. He spent hours doing this, bent over his desk, a cigarette burning a long dry ash before falling onto the carpet or into the ashtray, his spectacles perched low and his brow furrowed with thought. He read the Bible every day, not from beginning to end, but wherever his eye fell. Sometimes he perused it in the original Greek and other times in Latin.
It was his upstairs office where he worked, and I adored it—crammed from corner to ceiling with books, stacked and lined up on floors and tables and bookshelves. There were two upholstered chairs, one in which he bid me to sit many times when we were working on separate writings. The desk, large and dark wood, had belonged to his father and was set for Jack to see out the front windows to the garden and beyond. To the left of his desk was the door to his bedroom, always closed and bolted. He didn’t even unlock it to go through the office and down the inside stairs to use the downstairs bathroom, but instead used the door in his bedroom that led outside to the metal staircase that descended to the side door of the kitchen. He’d then enter the kitchen and use the only bathroom in the house. I wanted to ask why he had this funny little habit, but bathroom behaviors didn’t seem quite right for discussion.
In his office Jack didn’t just read; he went deep inside the work his eyes fell upon, taking apart the sentences and themes. And while
I was nearby, he would often call my name.
“Joy,” he’d say, “what do you think . . .”
Off we’d go into a theological or thematic discussion. Sometimes I feared I would wake and be back in the rambling, falling-apart house in Staatsburg, Bill stumbling drunk down the hallway smelling of sex and whiskey, and find my time with Jack had only been a dream. But instead I sat in the armchair of his office at the top of the staircase discussing the meaning hidden in stories.
With rain lashing the windows of his office one morning, I looked up from my pages. “You’re fortunate that you are deeply seeded in one place—that you were a student at Oxford and now a tutor there. It’s home for you, I can see that. I wonder if Oxford has any idea how very fortunate they are to have you.”
“They don’t quite give me the reverence you assume.” He didn’t look up from his papers, his fingers tight around his fountain pen.
“I don’t believe that.” I eased to stand and padded to the window, glimpsed the property shrouded in the downpour.
“I was just recently turned down for the Professor of Poetry at Oxford,” he said, his voice dropping away from the usual joviality. “A horde of English teachers didn’t want me to have the position.” I turned back to him, and he set his pen in the inkwell. “It was political, but still disappointing.”
I leaned against the windowsill. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
He laughed and shook his head. “My dear Joy, whatever would you be sorry about? It all comes with the academic life.”
“But your poetry; it’s brilliant,” I said. “How could they not . . . ?”
“Yes, you think so, but most of it was published under my pseudonym, Clive Hamilton, so some never knew of it. I wasn’t quite posh enough.”
“I don’t understand,” I said and felt the regret for him as if I were the one they’d turned down.
“It isn’t my first disappointment with Oxford,” he said. “And it won’t be my last.”
“Not your first?”
“Just two years ago, when the Merton Professorship of Modern English Literature became available, Tollers believed I would be best for the slot. He gathered the forces and suggested that the two of us could split the title. But it seems I wasn’t quite up to snuff. To the electorate, I didn’t have nearly enough published scholarly works.” He smiled at me, but I sensed his sadness.
“For goodness’ sake, how many publications did they need?”
“It wasn’t the number, it was the kind. It seems that my most popular works were my novels, and this was not what they wanted.”
“Did Tollers take the position?” I asked.
“Yes, he did. And it was my old tutor, Wilson, who took the slot I was to have. It is told that I would have discredited their great reputation.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Well then, if only you’d been on the committee.” He again dipped his pen into his inkwell.
“I don’t know if it helps to say this, but I believe the world would rather have your stories than your titles.”
He nodded. “Well, enough of academia. Let’s get back to our work.”
I often watched Jack write when he believed I was working myself. He wrote with a quill, dipping it slowly into the inkwell and then bringing it back to paper. He said it “allowed a thought to form between well and paper.” I imagined stories and fantasies unfolding in the slow dance of pen to ink, back to paper and then again to ink. When I offered to type those written words for him, he took me up on it straightaway.
But that day he wasn’t writing, he was marking on my Ten Commandments manuscript. A nervous flutter rose in my throat until he looked up, feeling my stare.
“If you’d like me to write the preface, I will,” he added. “When it is time for the British edition, you let me know.”
“Like you to write the preface? Well, whiskers and cat’s ears, of course I would,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
Then we both bent our heads back to the page.
In those mornings, we worked; in the afternoons, we walked and we drank and we ate and we read.
One late afternoon after a nap, I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser in my room looking for my favorite green sweater, one I’d knitted before coming here, which seemed to be missing in action. Instead I found a pile of drawings, childlike drawings. I withdrew them and knew what they were: Jack’s and Warnie’s childhood drawings of a country called Boxen. Pencil drawings of anthropomorphic creatures—there was a cat wearing a tuxedo and a top hat, smoking a cigarette and having drinks with men. A frog in a suit and a bird in formal wear. I smiled and felt a bit like I was in a dream and waking in the attic of Little Lea, his childhood home, where I knew these had been sketched and imagined.
I carried the drawings with me, just two sheaves, into the common room where Jack and Warnie sat at the fire reading. They both glanced up with smiles as I entered the room.
“What have you there?” Warnie asked.
I stood there, barefoot, not yet having put on my house shoes. My hair fell over my shoulders, and I brushed my free hand through it, suddenly quite self-conscious. “I found these. I’m enchanted.”
Jack rose and walked to me. “Are you sleepwalking, Joy?” he joked and took the papers from my hand before letting out a laugh. “Oh, Warnie, it is Viscount Puddiphat.”
Warnie came to us also, holding his drink in one hand and stroking his moustache with the other. “Indeed it is. Look at him visiting us from Little Lea. I don’t believe I’ve looked at him since we stored him in that dresser. No matter how long we were cooped up in the little end room of that attic, we had our paper, pencils, and paint boxes.”
“And your imagination,” I said.
“Yes,” Jack replied. “Always we had that. How else could we have survived? We made a whole world, didn’t we, Warnie?”
“I believe we still are,” he said.
I brushed my hair off my shoulders. “The world should see these. They should not be hidden in a drawer.” I looked back and forth between them. “It’s as if you imagined Narnia even then. As if you always knew what waited.”
“How could we ever know what waited for us?” Jack smiled at me. “Who could have known you would be here with us?” He took the papers from me and wandered off to his office without another word.
It was during these times when Jack left us that Warnie and I came to know each other. We talked of history and book ideas.
“Joy,” he said to me as Jack disappeared with Viscount Puddiphat, “how would you feel about a collaboration with me?”
“A collaboration? Cat’s whiskers, Warnie,” I said, sitting in the chair next to him and leaning forward. “Anything. What’s your idea?”
“Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV. She has never been written about, and she is as fascinating a character as any in that court.”
“She was from the West Indies, right?” I asked. “And wasn’t she married to someone else first?”
“Yes indeed. It’s a modern-day Cinderella,” he said. “And I know you can do it justice. She was the king’s governess for his illegitimate children and then he fell in love with her.”
“More,” I exclaimed. “Tell me everything.”
Then Warnie and I were off and running on Queen Cinderella, as I called it, and we began to throw ideas at each other as if we’d been a writing team for ages. Warnie had already written an outline and done most of the research—I would write the story. It was a match made in heaven: the Lewis men and me.
Or so I believed.
At night I returned to my sonnets. If there would ever in some far future come a day when someone read them and set them against my letters to home, would they feel the disparate and divided parts of my self?
What Bill’s letter had set loose in me, what I’d hidden from my conscious admissions, what my sonnets had been hinting at all along, could no longer be denied. I didn’t just love Jack; I was falling in love with him.
CHAPTER 26
You are not God, and neither are you mine
“SONNET X,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I awoke on Christmas Day and for a long while lay still in the bed thinking of home, of my boys waking with Renee and Bill. I imagined the Christmas tree and wondered if they put it in the galvanized bucket as I’d always done. I imagined Topsy tearing through the wrapping paper, and I almost smelled the bubbling cider on the stove. I’d practically handed my family over to Renee, and here I rested, in an empty bedroom in Oxford.
The fog had rolled back days before, and there was both ice and snow along with wicked gales. Yet every day these men still bundled up and, taking me with them, walked for miles—into Oxford to the Bird and Baby or Blackwell’s Bookshop, up Shotover Hill or into Magdalen’s parks. We walked and how we talked. And laughed so deeply and richly that if it had to last for all my days, I could make it stretch beyond its time.
Two nights earlier we’d gone to a Christmas pantomime, where Jack had sung at the top of his lungs and I had reveled in the silly display like a child.
Still in bed, I could hear the men gathering wood for the fire, murmuring to each other, a sound now familiar.
I rose and dressed, taking time with my appearance for Christmas morning. From my suitcase I withdrew the two gifts I’d bought and wrapped for them—both books—and entered the common room, already warm and smoke-filled. Both men rested in their chairs, Jack reading a book I couldn’t see and Warnie resting with his eyes closed.
We’d decorated over the past week with my urging to chop down the smallest fir from the acreage. Paxford had cut it down for us and hauled it into the room, dropping it into a bucket, temporarily transforming the aroma from smoke to evergreen. We decorated it with popcorn strings and pinecones, making up the silliest songs about the holiday.
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