Becoming Mrs. Lewis(23)
There was something lit up about him, the way the landscape of his face was animated beneath his strong eyebrows. His lips and mouth were full. These attributes—his mind, which I knew in letters, and now the light of his spirit—combined into a singular word: beautiful. The birds in my mind moved to my chest, fluttering there in anticipation.
And then, as if someone placed a hand over his mouth, he stopped midlaugh. He looked to me as if my stare had tapped him on the shoulder.
Our gazes caught and stayed. He grinned, as did I.
I gathered myself and ambled toward him, came to a stop in front of the couch as he stood. Those brown eyes of his, they were sparkling as if lit.
“Well, well. My pen-friend Joy is finally in England.” His voice was a song: part Irish brogue, part English. He wasn’t quite as tall as I’d expected, perhaps five foot ten at the most, yet his charisma stretched to the beams overhead. He wore a ragged tweed jacket with brown leather patches on the elbows and a white-buttoned shirt with a bright-blue tie.
“And you,” I said with a jittery smile, “must be my very famous friend, Jack Lewis.”
He bellowed with laughter and thrust out his hand to take mine in a rigorous shake. “Famous? Infamous perhaps, in very small circles.”
My voice sounded breathy and silly. I lowered it. “I’m really happy to see you. After all these years of friendship and an entire month here in England, finally we meet face-to-face.” I held to his hand and we smiled at each other. For what was most likely only a few seconds, time paused. He let go of my hand as Phyl stepped closer. “Oh! I’ve forgotten myself! Please meet my friend Phyl Williams.”
The man next to Jack lifted his eyebrows, and at once I knew what I’d done wrong—I’d spoken loudly in my New York accent.
Jack shook Phyl’s hand and in that brogue stated, “George, may I introduce you to Joy Gresham and her friend from London, Phyl.”
George nodded once at each of us and Jack explained. “George is a dear friend who was once a student of mine at Magdalen.”
I glanced at George. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you.” I held out my hand and he shook it without a word. Nervous, I pressed my lips together, hoping the lipstick was still there and hadn’t bled into the small creases around my mouth.
“Come,” Jack said, “let’s sit down. They’ve sorted a table for us.”
The four of us wound our way to the low-lit dining room table reserved in the middle of the restaurant, where four cut-glass tumblers sparkling with amber liquid waited.
We settled in, shook open the napkins on our laps, as I quickly assessed George. He possessed a long face like a horse with a deeply etched forehead, a road map to years of furrowed brow. Large ears perched as if tilting toward his eyes, and his long nose ended in a rounded bulb from which he seemed to look down at me as he caught my eye. I looked away.
“Sherry,” Jack said and raised his glass. “Welcome to Oxford.”
We all lifted our glasses and together took a sip. “Hmmm,” I said, “Lovely. In America we would’ve started with hard liquor and moved to wine and we’d be drunk before the meal even began.” I shook my head. “Then I’d have felt the particular hell of a hangover before the food was gone. But everything here is very . . . civilized.”
Jack laughed, and George gave me the furrowed brow look. I smiled my best smile. “Mr. Sayer, Jack says you were a former student of his? What do you do now?”
“I teach at Malvern.”
“Oh, lucky you. This city of Oxford,” I said. “It makes me wonder how different my life would have been if I had spent it in a place like this with men like you two.”
“I daresay your life is much better spent around men other than us.” George lifted his glass. “Boring as we can be.”
“But the intellectual life here—what, nine hundred years old?” I leaned forward. “How stimulating.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “It can be, but then again it is also quite boorish at times, the tedium of teaching and grading and lecturing.”
“Well, I would have liked to give it a shot.”
Then Phyl told some joke lost to me in time, and we began to talk in circles and with laughter. We ate salmon mousse as light as whipped cream, and I lost track of the wine refills. Gaiety increased exponentially with the wine, and jokes were told badly and histories regaled with embellishment. We talked about the new queen’s upcoming coronation, of the tea rationing. The long lunch felt but five minutes. Often Jack and I caught each other’s eye and smiled, but shyly. We knew each other as well as any friends—he’d heard my secrets and my fears—and yet it was just now that our eyes could catch as our minds already had.
“How did you come upon our friend’s work?” George finally asked as trifle was delivered for dessert.
“Like Jack, I was surprised by God. Both of us midlife converts.” I smiled at Jack and then looked back to George. “When I was eight years old I read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and marched right into the family room to announce to my Jewish parents that I was an atheist.”
George flinched. I saw it, and knew it was the word Jewish. Brits could claim they weren’t anti-Semitic, just as white Americans could claim they weren’t racist as they segregated their schools and neighborhoods.