Becoming Mrs. Lewis(80)

Davy removed his gloves and took the pages from Jack’s hands and held them against his chest. “No one has read it yet?” he asked with wide eyes.

“Only my publisher, and your mother, who typed some of the pages for me. And I’ll tell you a couple secrets about it, if you please.”

“Yes!” Douglas’s enthusiasm could not be bound. He, like his mother, could not hide what bubbled below the heart.

Jack lowered his voice and placed his hands on either side of his full mouth as if telling a grand secret. “I wrote it before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released. The events happen before The Silver Chair.”

“What’s it about?” Davy asked, looking down at the treasure he held in his hands.

Jack sat up and resumed his normal voice. “After the last chapter in Wardrobe, there is a battle in Narnia.”

“What happens?” Davy’s voice dropped.

“I won’t tell you what happens, but I will tell you my favorite part.”

“What is that?” Davy asked.

“The battle cry.” Jack paused for great effect until the boys were straining forward. “Narnia and the North!” he said with great gusto and lifted his hand to the sky. “Narnia and the North!”

“Where home is,” I said softly. “North.”

“Yes, true home.” His kind eyes held such a look that I would have believed it love if he had not told me otherwise in every possible way.

“Home?” Davy asked as if just remembering we didn’t truly have one. “Where will we spend Christmas if we don’t have a home? What about . . . Santa?”

I switched on my brightest voice. “Oh, Davy, we do have a home. Avoco House. We’ll get a little tree and I’ll cook turkey and Mrs. Bagley and some other friends are coming to eat with us. Jack.” I turned to him. “This is too kind. Dedicating the book to them.”

“I could not think of any two boys more worthy.” He smiled at them.

“Early Merry Christmas,” Warnie said as he entered the kitchen. I hugged him and breathed the stale whiskey and sweat, and that very aroma punched a hole in time: I thought of Bill coming home late, this same smell wafting through the house like evil. I released Warnie and stared at him, grounding myself in the present, in England, in Oxford, at the Kilns.

With lavish good-byes and promises to return, my sons and I strode with the new manuscript in the opposite direction of the Kilns.

Somehow I felt that we were a new kind of family. Who was to say there was only one way to love someone? I knew he loved us; words didn’t have to be spoken. And this, for now, would be enough.





CHAPTER 36


And yet the horror is a woman still;

It grieves because it cannot stroke your hair

“SONNET XXI,” JOY DAVIDMAN



April 1954

My first spring in England was like the first day of being alive in the world, a deaf woman’s first chord of Beethoven. Daffodils, tulips, and blue primroses the color of sky filled London in wild bursts. The anemones and bluebells and star-faced daisies were overwhelming in their intricate beauty. Like the Greek goddess of spring, Persephone, it arrived in a slow seduction. First the cherry trees, scattering their pink-white petals through the air like snow, then the currant bushes with their fiery blossoms. Gardens erupted with earth’s desire to create a torrent of color and aroma.

It was now April, the boys were home from school for the holidays, and soon we would leave for the Kilns. I would again see Jack, his smile turned up at the corners, eyes crinkling under his spectacles, cigarette ash falling onto his lap.

I allowed the boys to sleep a little longer before I roused them for our journey to Oxford.

It had been late January when I’d dropped Davy and Douglas off at Waterloo Station with a tall, Adonis-like man they called a headmaster. Other little boys in uniform, clean and buttoned, gathered like a herd of baby lambs around the man, who, in his bowtie and jacket, drew my sons to him as if he’d known them all along. This, I thought, was the exact right decision. Though the boys had said they didn’t want to go, I could see the goodness in it. I would miss them, and yet I felt a sense of relief. They would be educated, well, and taken care of, and I could work again to provide for us.

January then birthed a winter so fierce and frigid that I’d given it a name—Fimbulwinter, after the great Norse winters that came right before the end of the world. I wrote like death was knocking at my door and my work could convince its dark specter to depart. It’s not the best way to write—in a panic of poverty—but it was all the inspiration I had. In four months I’d finished a novel called Britannia and also written at least twenty-two short stories, which I sent to my agent at Brandt and Brandt.

Nothing sold.

I had also ripped away anything in Smoke on the Mountain that sounded “American” and then sent it off to the English publisher, who wanted it because Jack had agreed to write the foreword. In it he’d said, For the Jewish fierceness, being here also modern and feminine, can be very quiet; the paw looked as if it were velveted, till we felt the scratch.

Is this about my work or about me? I wondered, but didn’t ask.

I even took out my mentions of Ingrid Bergman and Ginger Rogers, as the publisher was fearful they might sue me for using them as examples of breaking the Ten Commandments.