“Sherry,” Jack said and raised his glass. “Welcome to Oxford.”
We all lifted our glasses and together took a sip. “Hmmm,” I said, “Lovely. In America we would’ve started with hard liquor and moved to wine and we’d be drunk before the meal even began.” I shook my head. “Then I’d have felt the particular hell of a hangover before the food was gone. But everything here is very . . . civilized.”
Jack laughed, and George gave me the furrowed brow look. I smiled my best smile. “Mr. Sayer, Jack says you were a former student of his? What do you do now?”
“I teach at Malvern.”
“Oh, lucky you. This city of Oxford,” I said. “It makes me wonder how different my life would have been if I had spent it in a place like this with men like you two.”
“I daresay your life is much better spent around men other than us.” George lifted his glass. “Boring as we can be.”
“But the intellectual life here—what, nine hundred years old?” I leaned forward. “How stimulating.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “It can be, but then again it is also quite boorish at times, the tedium of teaching and grading and lecturing.”
“Well, I would have liked to give it a shot.”
Then Phyl told some joke lost to me in time, and we began to talk in circles and with laughter. We ate salmon mousse as light as whipped cream, and I lost track of the wine refills. Gaiety increased exponentially with the wine, and jokes were told badly and histories regaled with embellishment. We talked about the new queen’s upcoming coronation, of the tea rationing. The long lunch felt but five minutes. Often Jack and I caught each other’s eye and smiled, but shyly. We knew each other as well as any friends—he’d heard my secrets and my fears—and yet it was just now that our eyes could catch as our minds already had.
“How did you come upon our friend’s work?” George finally asked as trifle was delivered for dessert.
“Like Jack, I was surprised by God. Both of us midlife converts.” I smiled at Jack and then looked back to George. “When I was eight years old I read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and marched right into the family room to announce to my Jewish parents that I was an atheist.”
George flinched. I saw it, and knew it was the word Jewish. Brits could claim they weren’t anti-Semitic, just as white Americans could claim they weren’t racist as they segregated their schools and neighborhoods.
“We’ve been writing about our spiritual journeys,” Jack said to George and then turned to me. “And you have brought to my attention holes and missing links in some of my arguments. I must say I have rarely met such a worthy adversary.”
Adversary? I wanted to be anything but.
George cleared his throat. “Well, do tell us what you think of England, Mrs. Gresham. You’ve been here a month now?”
“Well, I have fallen in love, Mr. Sayer. In mad, passionate love.” The heat of a blush filled my face and neck. I reached my hand to my décolletage, grabbed onto the pearls I’d strung there that very morning thinking they looked elegant, and took in a long breath. “It is England I’m talking about, of course!”
George nodded, patting his lips with a napkin.
I continued as I often did when nervous, words pouring out. “I love everything about it. I’ve practically walked my legs off. I’m enamored with the golden light. And how can air be softer here? I have no idea, but it is! The kindness of strangers is unparalled. And oh, the pubs.” I exhaled. “I adore the pubs. The dark warmth of them, the murmur of conversation, the music played by a man with a fiddle tucked away in a corner.”
George burst out in hearty laughter. “You obviously haven’t yet seen the bloody English fog. Just you wait; we’ll see if you’re still romanticizing our country then. Which, by the way, is jolly fine by me.”
Jack lifted his glass. “When I first saw Oxford I wrote to my father and told him it was a place beyond my wildest imaginings, a place of the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I’m quite envious of your view of Oxford today. There’s only that one first time.”
We all fell silent and finished our desserts slowly, as if not one of us desired the parting that would naturally follow. I felt bereft by Jack’s absence, even though it was merely an idea and had not yet happened.
Then he stood, wiped crumbs from his jacket, and smiled. “Why, let’s walk to Magdalen and I’ll show you around a bit, if you have the time.”