Becoming Mrs. Lewis(58)
Jack rose and walked to me. “Are you sleepwalking, Joy?” he joked and took the papers from my hand before letting out a laugh. “Oh, Warnie, it is Viscount Puddiphat.”
Warnie came to us also, holding his drink in one hand and stroking his moustache with the other. “Indeed it is. Look at him visiting us from Little Lea. I don’t believe I’ve looked at him since we stored him in that dresser. No matter how long we were cooped up in the little end room of that attic, we had our paper, pencils, and paint boxes.”
“And your imagination,” I said.
“Yes,” Jack replied. “Always we had that. How else could we have survived? We made a whole world, didn’t we, Warnie?”
“I believe we still are,” he said.
I brushed my hair off my shoulders. “The world should see these. They should not be hidden in a drawer.” I looked back and forth between them. “It’s as if you imagined Narnia even then. As if you always knew what waited.”
“How could we ever know what waited for us?” Jack smiled at me. “Who could have known you would be here with us?” He took the papers from me and wandered off to his office without another word.
It was during these times when Jack left us that Warnie and I came to know each other. We talked of history and book ideas.
“Joy,” he said to me as Jack disappeared with Viscount Puddiphat, “how would you feel about a collaboration with me?”
“A collaboration? Cat’s whiskers, Warnie,” I said, sitting in the chair next to him and leaning forward. “Anything. What’s your idea?”
“Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV. She has never been written about, and she is as fascinating a character as any in that court.”
“She was from the West Indies, right?” I asked. “And wasn’t she married to someone else first?”
“Yes indeed. It’s a modern-day Cinderella,” he said. “And I know you can do it justice. She was the king’s governess for his illegitimate children and then he fell in love with her.”
“More,” I exclaimed. “Tell me everything.”
Then Warnie and I were off and running on Queen Cinderella, as I called it, and we began to throw ideas at each other as if we’d been a writing team for ages. Warnie had already written an outline and done most of the research—I would write the story. It was a match made in heaven: the Lewis men and me.
Or so I believed.
At night I returned to my sonnets. If there would ever in some far future come a day when someone read them and set them against my letters to home, would they feel the disparate and divided parts of my self?
What Bill’s letter had set loose in me, what I’d hidden from my conscious admissions, what my sonnets had been hinting at all along, could no longer be denied. I didn’t just love Jack; I was falling in love with him.
CHAPTER 26
You are not God, and neither are you mine
“SONNET X,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I awoke on Christmas Day and for a long while lay still in the bed thinking of home, of my boys waking with Renee and Bill. I imagined the Christmas tree and wondered if they put it in the galvanized bucket as I’d always done. I imagined Topsy tearing through the wrapping paper, and I almost smelled the bubbling cider on the stove. I’d practically handed my family over to Renee, and here I rested, in an empty bedroom in Oxford.
The fog had rolled back days before, and there was both ice and snow along with wicked gales. Yet every day these men still bundled up and, taking me with them, walked for miles—into Oxford to the Bird and Baby or Blackwell’s Bookshop, up Shotover Hill or into Magdalen’s parks. We walked and how we talked. And laughed so deeply and richly that if it had to last for all my days, I could make it stretch beyond its time.
Two nights earlier we’d gone to a Christmas pantomime, where Jack had sung at the top of his lungs and I had reveled in the silly display like a child.
Still in bed, I could hear the men gathering wood for the fire, murmuring to each other, a sound now familiar.
I rose and dressed, taking time with my appearance for Christmas morning. From my suitcase I withdrew the two gifts I’d bought and wrapped for them—both books—and entered the common room, already warm and smoke-filled. Both men rested in their chairs, Jack reading a book I couldn’t see and Warnie resting with his eyes closed.
We’d decorated over the past week with my urging to chop down the smallest fir from the acreage. Paxford had cut it down for us and hauled it into the room, dropping it into a bucket, temporarily transforming the aroma from smoke to evergreen. We decorated it with popcorn strings and pinecones, making up the silliest songs about the holiday.
“Merry Christmas,” I called out and bent over to put my gifts under the tree.
They both startled, and Jack rose with a stretch. “Feliz Navidad, Joy!”
He went straightaway to the tree and retrieved a package wrapped in brown paper with a red string ribbon. “For you.”
“Wait,” I said. “I have something for you also.”
“Open yours first,” Warnie said and rose to stoke the fire.
I stood for a moment, taking in the room and the Lewis men I had grown to love with such depth. Soon it would be over. I wanted to hold this moment close, tuck it into my heart, because I would need it when I went home.