Becoming Mrs. Lewis(91)

I glanced to the bottom of the page.

Yours, C. S. Lewis


It was in the same fashion he wrote to me, no different. No better. No worse, yet still it hurt. Her poetry a delight? A bright light?

My throat clenched; my stomach sank and swooped up. This was jealousy, and I knew well its taste and its vertigo. I turned away from the letter and searched for a sheaf of her poetry. I could not help myself. But as much as I wanted to read the rest of the letter, the goodness in Jack seeped through the office. If it had been Bill’s papers, I would have torn through them, reading every word to find some infidelity, some betrayal. To invade the privacy of a good and decent man seemed far worse even if logically I knew it to be the same.

On the side table by the sitting chair were sheets of her poetry. I glanced at only three: “Early Rising,” “If You Came,” and “As When the Faithful Return.”

And I was sad, O my true love, for the love left unsaid.


This was clearly a woman poet, brilliant and clear-minded, lucid and soaked with longing, expressing her love, which was subtle and meant to be discovered. This was his kind of woman—aloof and sedated. Not me—open and outspoken. Nothing was left unsaid with me.

He was right—her poetry was a delight. A bright light. And an admission. She loved him; I had no doubt. But did he love her?

She was willing to hint, while I was too eager to admit.

She hoped; I reached.

She was coy; I asked forthright.

Dizzy with envy, I finally turned away from Ruth’s poetry. Tears hung on the edges of my lower eyelids, blurring my vision.

What if I placed one of my sonnets on top of Pitter’s poetry? What if Jack saw my growing need for his touch? If he glanced down and expected her “bright light” and instead saw my words, “I take you for my pleasure,” or even “Forever the tingle and flash of my body embracing you.” What if he read my poetry about bodies coming together, of its ecstasies, of the ways I’d loved other men? Would he want to read of this?

I shuddered.

What if the reason he didn’t love me as I was growing to love him was because he loved another?




“This is all yours for two weeks.” Jack spread his arms out wide in his Magdalen rooms. “I want you to make yourself at home. Write to your heart’s content while I’m gone.”

“I don’t know what to say.” I walked to the open window facing the deer park. A long whinny, which sounded more like a horse than a deer, echoed across the grass. I turned to Jack and removed my glasses, wiped at my eyes. “First you pay for Dane Court. Then you put us up for holiday. And now this?”

“My pleasure.” He paused. “All day I’ve been trying to find the right moment to tell you this news—I’ve been given the job at Cambridge. Seems after I turned them down twice they offered it to someone else; therefore there were days when I thought it was over. But she didn’t take the job, and now it’s mine. I start in the new year.”

I threw my arms around him, startling both of us. “That’s wonderful,” I said and stepped away.

“Yes, I believe it is.”

I smiled at him and jostled his arm. “A new job, by golly.”

“Yes,” he said. “Even this old man can start over.”

“I do believe you can.” I braved another touch to his arm.

Jack took two steps toward me, but no more.

Should I tell him what I’d seen on his desk? Ask him if he was in love with Ruth Pitter? The questions quivered below my throat, wanting escape.

He spoke first, almost as if he could read my mind. “I read another one of your poems last night, ‘One Last Spring.’ Did I tell you that? I meant to if I didn’t.”

“No, you didn’t.” A warm blush filled my face.

“‘Out of my heart the bloodroot.’” He clasped his hands behind his back and quoted my words. “It’s no wonder I quit poetry, I have neither ear nor hand for it as you do.”

“Thank you.” I leaned against the windowsill and soaked in the beauty of his voice reciting my poetry. “You can’t know how much that means to me, to have my words praised—especially since Macmillan turned down my Queen Cinderella proposal. I’ll have to write the entire thing to sell it.”

“Then you will.”

“Do you ever think of writing one more Narnian chronicle? Just one more? Because you know it will sell?”

“I think it’s best to put an end to it when the readers are clamoring for more rather than when they’re weary of the whole everlasting thing. There will be seven of them published in seven years. Sometimes you must know when it’s enough.”

Discernment fell down on me with great weight: You must know when it’s enough. I would not ask him about Ruth Pitter or his feelings for her or for anyone else. I must know when it is enough. And I must trust God—again and again I was learning and relearning to trust the Truth who had entered my sons’ nursery. The rusty and decrepit habit of trusting in only myself, only abiding in my own ability to make things happen, died hard and slow.

I glanced up to see outside the opposite window, where groups ambled toward the deer park and riotous flowers blossomed in the gardens.

“Tourists,” I said, pointing out the window at a family with four children running behind. “I was one, and now here I am in your Magdalen rooms. It seems quite miraculous, Jack.”