Becoming Mrs. Lewis(60)
In the lull of another story about Warnie and his childhood happiness at Little Lea, I spoke.
“I once believed that it was Christianity that would finally make me happy.”
“Oh, the history of man looking for something to make himself happy.” Jack smiled.
“Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier than I’ve been today, even with the melancholy of missing of my little boys.”
“If you’re looking for a religion to make you happy, it wouldn’t be Christianity,” Jack said with a laugh. “A bottle of port might do that, but Christianity is rightfully not here to make us comfortable or happy.”
“Cheers to that,” I said and lifted my glass. “Tell me another childhood story.” I poured a cup of burgundy from Magdalen’s wine cellar into the gravy and stirred.
“Wait!” Warnie stood. “You pour wine into gravy?”
I stopped midstir. “You’ve never seen such a thing?”
“Never,” Jack said.
“Well, I’m here to educate you on finer cooking.”
Warnie scoffed with laughter. “Oh, don’t you let Mrs. Miller hear you talk of any finer cooking than hers.”
“I won’t let her hear me, but my goodness, of course there is.”
Silence settled for a moment, and then it was Warnie who answered me first. “My favorite times were the ones when our family would go to the seashore. It was where I fell in love with the ocean. With ships and with mariners.”
“When Mother was alive,” Jack added, in a voice so tender it took great self-control not to put down my whisk and sit before him, take his soft and beautiful face in mine, and kiss every corner of it.
“Let’s not talk of this on Christmas Day,” Warnie said firmly. “Look at that huge turkey. I’m not sure where you found one that size, but in anticipation, let’s imbibe immediately.”
“What we need,” I said, “is some champagne.”
“Oh no.” Jack placed his burgundy glass on the table and lifted his hands in surrender. “Anything but champagne.”
“Who doesn’t like champagne? That seems nearly impossible.”
His brow furrowed between his spectacles, his eyes going distant in the look I’d come to understand meant his mind’s eye had been cast to the past. “It was the Battle of Arras in 1915,” he said, but then fell silent.
This was the first time I’d heard him talk of his time in the First World War. I knew from his writing he’d been a commissioned officer in the Somerset Light Infantry and he’d reached the front line in France on his nineteenth birthday. I could barely imagine his fear, yet he not once had spoken to me of it. That May he’d been injured in the Battle of Arras—these were the facts, but I knew nothing else. I set my wineglass on the counter in a silent urge for him to continue.
“It was during an artillery barrage when I’d taken my men over the parapet.” He shook his head. “A debacle. It was my sergeant who died instead of me.” He blinked slowly, as if all these years later, it still cut deeply in his psyche. What the public saw was a mask, just like any I wore. Behind it was a man who still trembled with sorrows and pain: the death of his mother, the harsh bringing-up at boarding school that had tortured him as a young boy, two wars, his failures at Oxford.
Humankind’s cruelty in its entirety.
“The shrapnel buried into my body and sent me to the hospital. While the cries of other men echoed in my ears, they moved me behind the lines. The only liquor available was champagne, and I swallowed rivers of it. I’ve not been able to abide the taste of it since.”
I stepped closer to him. “I’m sorry for that,” I said. “Blast the champagne then. We shall break out more wine!”
“It’s all in the past,” Warnie said.
“Except when it isn’t,” Jack replied, and they exchanged a look, the kind that only those who know your innermost spirit can read.
“I wish I could scrub the horrid parts of the past clean for both of you.” I paused. “For all of us.”
We were silent for a while longer until I served the food and Warnie lit the candles, and we all began to sing the verse from the Christmas pantomime we’d gone to a few nights before.
Jack first: “Am I going to be a bad boy? No. No. No.”
Warnie next: “Am I going to be awful? No. No. No.”
And then finally my tone-deaf voice joined in: “I promise not to pour the gravy over baby’s head.” And with that I poured the Magdalen burgundy gravy over the turkey and we sat to eat.
We prayed over the meal and lifted our glasses to Christmas Day. Before he took his first bite, Jack reached over and took my hand. “Merry Christmas, Joy.” He ran his thumb over the top of my hand in a motion so innocent and yet intimate that my limbs loosened and my breath was lost.
“Merry Christmas to you too, Jack.”
CHAPTER 27
A thing to move your laughter or your loathing;
Still, you may have my love for what it’s worth
“SONNET XII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The morning of my leaving I stood in the hallway of the Kilns, its friendliness holding me one last time. My valise and suitcase were packed and waiting by the door, and I glanced at them with scorn, hating them for what they represented.