Becoming Mrs. Lewis(55)
“My correspondence is done for the day, and Warnie is off to work on his Sun King. How’s for a walk, just enough to get the blood flowing for the day’s work?”
A smile was my answer.
Once we bundled and left the house, the wind came in great gusts as if the sky were holding its breath and then exhaling. I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and moved as close to Jack as possible. We were headed to the Headington Quarry’s Holy Trinity Church, a half-mile walk on sidewalks and then down a frozen-mud lane. A high stone wall with bits of broken bottle capping the top like a crown bordered the narrow walkway to the church. Jack walked ahead of me, only room for one at a time, and I followed quietly. As we neared the churchyard he opened a wrought iron gate to enter a graveyard with a stunted forest of headstones.
I turned away from the irrefutable proof of death and instead focused on the church. It appeared as old as the land on which it sat, a limestone building with a bell cote and two bells on the west end. A slate roof sloped toward the ground and then seemed to take an abrupt halt at the building’s edge. White and stolid, the church spread east and west, its doorway hidden under a portico of stone where a cross was mounted, another engraved in a circle above the doorway.
“Anglican,” I said.
“Yes.” Jack surveyed the church with a proud stance. “Are you?”
“If I defined myself as anything, it would be Anglican, but I’m hard-pressed to be put into a category.”
“I don’t believe you need a category,” he said, and it sounded very much like a compliment.
“It’s very medieval looking,” I added with a shiver, closing my coat tighter, “like something out of one of MacDonald’s stories.”
“I’m quite sure that’s what the designer was after; he’d be flattered to know you think so.” He put out his cigarette in a puddle. “Let’s see if it’s any warmer inside.” He opened the doorway of the church and then stepped aside to allow me entry.
The pews, dark wood and shining in the dim light, were lined to face an altar and stained glass window of Christ with his hands spread wide. The simplicity of this church compared to the grand cathedrals in London brought my heart to humbleness. White plaster walls surrounded us. To the left a white curtain hung, separating the sanctuary from the back hall. Candlesticks sprouted from pews’ ends, and wan sunlight washed through the stained glass windows in multicolored hues, a nimbus on the angels and saints, the pews and floors.
“That’s beautiful,” I said and pointed to the window above the altar. “So beautiful that I wish I possessed a better word.”
“Words,” Jack said quietly. “The joy and art of them. Saying exactly what you mean.”
I pondered for a moment, staring and then closing my eyes. “Sublime,” I whispered.
“Yes! That’s it.” He paused. “That window was installed just last year as a memorial to those who died in World War II.”
“I wonder sometimes what those days were like for you. For all of you.”
Jack ran his hand across the back of a pew, and his sight seemed far off, as if those wartime days danced on the altar. “There was a time I believed that they’d invade and we would belong to them,” he said. “I threw my pistol into the river off Magdalen Bridge because it was rumored that the SS would find me for all the Royal Air Force lectures I’d given, and that a gun would be my demise.” He shook his head at the memory.
“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.”