Becoming Mrs. Lewis(88)
“I’ll run,” he shouted into the wind to Douglas. “You keep it up.”
Davy ran forward, lifting his ten-year-old hands into the air with an offering of kite to wind.
Jack trotted alongside him to lift the kite until the fabric caught the wind and flapped like a bird, a slapping sound in the sky.
It was simple—a kite in flight. It was also a miracle, a grace.
“Ay up,” Jack yelled, and the scene filled my heart.
Gold light fell upon him, and they all laughed about something I couldn’t hear. Jack was beyond my greedy and needy hands, on top of that hill, and I could still be grateful for all he was to me, and to my sons.
Before I could climb to meet them, the three joined me and we ambled back to the Kilns. The boys chattered endlessly about plans for the orchard with Paxford, about cleaning the canoe, about visiting the deer park and punting on the Cherwell.
“Mr. Lewis,” Davy asked as he threw a rock across the tufted grass expanse, “when does our book come out?”
“Our book?”
“The Horse and His Boy? The one you dedicated to us?”
“Ah, that,” Jack said and lifted his walking stick before setting it down with his answer. “This fall.”
“What’s next after that?” Douglas asked.
“I just sent off The Magician’s Nephew, where we see Aslan create the world, and we find out how the White Witch got there, and”—Jack whispered—“we discover that the Professor had seen and known it all from the very beginning.”
Douglas stood on his tiptoes as if reaching for the sky. “I want to read it now.”
Jack laughed. “Then you shall.”
Davy and Douglas were gone in an instant, and Jack stopped at a large tree trunk, as round as a table, gutted in the middle and set up in the shade of a fern glen. “This,” he said in a conspirator’s whisper, “is a soaking machine.”
“A what?” I raised my eyebrows and fiddled with my glasses as if attempting to see a machine somewhere in the thick green of the forest.
“It’s my name for a place so private that I’m free to be alone and sit idly and do nothing, or think away a puzzle, or write with a notebook and pencil. A place to be free outside and sheltered. That, Joy, is what a ‘soaking machine’ is.”
“Well then, here’s to a lifetime of finding soaking machines.” I drew back a step or two. “In fact, let’s find another one now.”
We were soon at the back door of the Kilns. Far off, Douglas’s voice rang out with Paxford’s name, and Jack looked over his shoulder as if he might be bowled over by one of my sons.
“They’re exhausting, aren’t they?”
“I’m glad you’re all here. It would be morbidly sad without Warnie in the heat of summer.” He opened the back door and we entered the house, Mrs. Miller arriving in her swirling apron and chattering inquisitions about our day and our well-being.
“Tomorrow,” Jack said over his shoulder as he headed to his room to rest, “we’ll go punting at Cherwell with some friends. The boys will enjoy it.”
“Jack, your friends don’t seem keen on me. Maybe you’d like to go without us.”
“Hogwash,” he said and came back down the two stairs he’d already climbed. He faced me.
“What did Moira and George have to say about me?” I asked. “I hadn’t seen George since our first meeting in Eastgate, and when we had tea last month he was cold and clammed up. His wife looked at me like I was naked at the table.”
“Moira is quite proper. Maybe she didn’t like that you could talk circles around her. Or that you drank whiskey while she drank tea. I suggested Childhood’s End to them based on your suggestion, and they both loved it.”
“I don’t want your friends to avoid me; I have plenty of my own.”
“No one is avoiding you. And even if they were, I most certainly am not.” Jack smiled at me and then took the stairs to his room, leaving me to stare after him with an almost irrepressible urge to follow him uninvited.
While Jack napped, I wandered outside to the garden, where Paxford had planted the tomatoes and beans I’d suggested. I closed my eyes, allowed the golden sun of Oxford to press gently on my head and body. I’d celebrated my divorce with a pint of cider and a hike with Jack and my boys. I couldn’t have hoped for such when that first letter arrived in my Staatsburg mailbox over four years ago.
Even as Jack withheld his body from mine, he pressed his heart and mind as close to me as skin to bone. No, I thought, love has never quite succumbed to my sense of timing.
CHAPTER 39
Yes, I know: the angels disapprove
The way I look at you
“SONNET XXXVIII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I tucked Douglas and Davy into bed in the cozy side room off the kitchen, pulling the sheet tight under their chins and kissing them each before reading a chapter from the unpublished Narnian chronicle. I hadn’t yet typed it, and the story spread before us in Jack’s cursive quill and ink handwriting.
“What will this one be called?” Douglas asked, eyes already at half-mast.
“He hasn’t decided. Maybe The Last King of Narnia. Or the other title he likes is Night Falls on Narnia. Warnie and I suggested The Wild Wastelands.”