Becoming Mrs. Lewis(54)
“Bill has not given you a choice, Joy. You mustn’t stay there.”
I glanced up, ready to receive any advice he had. “But how can I desert them?”
“This is not your doing. These are his choices.” He gazed intently at me. “What did you answer in return?”
“I told him that we’d discuss the issue when I returned home.” I smiled and shrugged. “What else was there to say? I’ll be home in two weeks, and what good would another letter do? So many letters. So many words. What good?”
“Yes, what good?” Warnie mumbled.
“I try very hard to believe in God’s best for this,” I said. “It is a newly acquired habit that I sometimes forget to employ.” I laughed to alleviate the darkness I’d brought into the room.
Jack stared at me with gentleness. “Maybe you aren’t doubting that God will do the best for you, but wondering how painful the best might be.”
“You are very right, sir,” I said.
“But to return to abuse isn’t anything God would demand of you. Of any of us. His commandments aren’t meant for that. You know that as well as anyone.” He paused and the fire popped. “What you’ve tolerated at home isn’t about being a good wife or about obeying God. You must know that.”
I stood and walked to the fire, facing the flames. I rubbed my hands together. “I do know, but I forget. When I’m in the middle of all the chaos and arguing, I feel like such a failure, so demeaned, and then I blame myself for not being able to be someone else, someone better.”
“You blame yourself for not being who Bill wants you to be?” That was Warnie, blurting out the question with a frustrated voice.
I turned around to face them both again. “Yes.” The absurdity of it felt simple, a fact overlooked. “In your words it’s all so easily seen. You take a truth and boil it down to its essence.”
Jack eased to stand. “It’s easier to do when you aren’t in the middle of it. My heart isn’t blistered and mangled by his abuse. That privilege is yours, it would seem.”
I walked toward him then, wanting to reach across the space between us, to touch him, to wrap my arms around him, allow my head to rest on his shoulder the same way my heart was resting in his words. “How do I ever thank you for this kind friendship? It sustains me.”
He nodded, his cigarette ash falling to the carpet.
I exhaled and brushed my hands through the air. “But I’m here to celebrate the holidays, not to bring doom and gloom. Let’s play some Scrabble and forget this affair for now.” I pointed to a half-finished game on the table a few feet away.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Can we use Latin and Greek words too?” I inquired.
He laughed, that low rumbling sound. “Any language. If it’s been used in a book then it is fair game.”
“German? French?”
“Anything at all,” he said.
“The best way to play,” I replied. “Warnie? Will you join us?”
“Not tonight.” He rose but smiled at me.
Jack and I moved to the table and sat, bowing our heads over the board. It was a game he must have started with Warnie. I scanned my row of letters in their tray and chose five squares to spell verti against his word article, and scored a triple. Jack leaned back in his chair and bellowed loud enough to make Warnie poke his head back into the room.
“I’ve met my match.”
CHAPTER 24
How the wind
Whips all our talk and laughter out of mind,
And time, far more than Thames, has power to drown
“SONNET VII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I awoke slowly in that cold room in Jack’s house and pulled the covers to my chin. A pounding came from inside the walls, like someone trying to escape from a stone-walled dungeon. The plumbing, ancient and groaning like one of Jack’s fictional frozen statues come to life.
The house bustled around me, doors opening and closing, Warnie’s voice calling out to Mrs. Miller. A man’s low voice, must have been Paxford, and then Jack’s reply, that rumble of familiarity.
I stretched and rolled over to glance at the clock. Already nine. They must think me lazy, but I didn’t mind. At home, this one thought—lazy—would have made me nervous, the jittery feelings overcoming me as I thought about Bill being angry that I’d slept in.
After I dressed and finished my morning routine, I entered the common room to find Jack reading the Bible, a Latin version that morning.
“Good morning,” I said quietly.
His pipe bent down from the corner of his mouth and he startled, sending it to drop onto his lap. He brushed the ashes onto the carpet as if they were crumbs from breakfast and smiled at me. “Good morning, Joy.”
He didn’t move to stand but held his finger fast to the spot in the Psalms. “Mrs. Miller has some breakfast in the kitchen if you’d like some. We were gifted a few extra eggs from the neighbor.” The war was over but egg rationing wasn’t, and Jack always managed to finagle a few extra.
“Thank you,” I said, suddenly a bit shy. We were no longer at a pub or on a hike or in his Oxford rooms. This was his home, and he had his routine.
I spent some time in the sunny warm kitchen with Mrs. Miller, satisfied with tea and a biscuit when Jack joined us.