Becoming Mrs. Lewis(25)
Well, that would teach me to speak without thinking. “The water flowing,” I said decidedly. “It reaches its end at the sea no matter what.”
He considered this. “I believe life is more like a tree. Each branch differentiating as it grows. Each an individual choice.”
“Jack.” I pointed at the river flowing beneath us. “That is the river of life. It’s bound by its edges but still it is free. Do you sometimes debate for fun?” I asked with a laugh. “Just to see if I can keep up with you?”
“Ah, no—I am quite sure you can keep up with me. But the river, as beautiful a metaphor as it is, isn’t right for our choices in life. We don’t all meet in the same place, as rivers do.”
His eyes were deep and rich brown, and I wondered what they saw in me—he knew how to hold kind attention, a presence.
“Choice.” I bent over and picked up a handful of leaves, let them fall through my fingers. “What if we choose wrongly? Do we burn in an everlasting hell? You believe this?” I tossed a leaf at him. “As you wrote in The Great Divorce? You can’t take any souvenir of what you love with you?”
He laughed. “I have enjoyed our correspondence, yet it is even better to be chatting with you.”
“Yes.” I took in a long breath and stated the truth. “Through the years my sluggish heart began to beat again with words, our words, and the very power of them.”
Jack smiled as that golden English sunlight crested from behind a pleated cloud, resting gently on his face as if the light desired to touch him. For just a moment, no longer or shorter than the one on my knees in my sons’ nursery, my body felt untethered from the earth, as if we were merely a dream fragment. My heartbeat fluttered in my wrists, in my chest, in my belly. A warm flush, timid but sure, flooded me.
Oh, Joy, be very, very careful.
He had captured my intellect, my mind, and my thoughts; I could not allow him to do the same to my heart.
I turned away from his smile, those teasing eyes, and together we strolled back from where we’d come, passing trees with birds’ nests like tiny hats in the naked branches, till we were only a few paces from the entrance to Magdalen. When I first saw the college’s name in print, I had said it incorrectly. I thanked the heavens that I heard the correct pronunciation before I met Jack—“Maudlin” it is. Yet still we didn’t enter. Jack sat on a bench, crossed one leg over the other.
He held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, and the smoke circled upward. He spread his arms along the back length of the bench.
“It’s not so much any souvenirs we want to take, it’s our hearts we need to carry,” he said. “They yearn for what I call the High Country, and we can’t get there without abandoning the belief that this is all there is, and that we must get the most out of it, and take something with us.” He looked at me then, silently, like a man in a debate who had just nailed his point.
“Oh, Jack,” I said and sat beside him, twisting to face him. “Your High Country is my Fairyland. I’ve dreamt of it since I was a child. When I read Pilgrim’s Regress, I knew you meant the same place—’the Island,’ you called it.” This repartee with a man whose mind I had come to esteem and value felt like water to a parched soul.
I continued. “You and I both had the same experience as children, that same thrill that nature brings, the knowing that sometimes the world evokes a feeling so full of longing that words can’t capture it. And that longing hints at a place where evil can’t exist and heartbreak can’t abide. Even when we weren’t believers, we still believed. It’s as though we took the same path, and the High Country called to us both.”
He nodded, and I almost believed he blushed. “Pilgrim’s Regress was the first book I wrote after my conversion, wondering about yearning and what it might mean.” He smiled at me slowly. “With the yellow leaves and the happiness of this afternoon, I long even more for such a place,” he said. “Isn’t it odd? That we can be happy here and yet want to go . . . there?”
“As if at our happiest, we want even more. Like this is the hint.” I took a breath. “Jack, I look back at my life, and I understand the lure of atheism, but it now seems almost impossible. How could I have not believed when my heart always knew?”
“Maybe we were too simple.”
I shook my head with remembrance. “I don’t know; I think I just wanted my soul to be my own.”
“Indeed.” He nodded as if he remembered the same.
“Have you ever . . .” I paused.
“Ever what?”
“Felt another presence? Felt like the veil lifted for a minute? And I don’t just mean in prayer.”
“Tell me what you mean, Joy.” He leaned closer.
“When my friend Stephen Vincent Benét passed away, I felt him. I think . . . no, I know I even saw his wraith pass by.” I cringed. “Is that crazy?”
Jack drew nearer to me, and his tone lowered as he dropped the last of his cigarette. “Joy, I was devastated when Charles Williams passed; I was dazed and stunned. I went to the pub we frequented together—the King’s Arms—and ordered a pint. It was then that I felt my friend. He was with me, and he passed by. No one will ever convince me otherwise. Tollers believes I am quite absurd, but I know it to be true.”