Becoming Mrs. Lewis(29)
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.”