“What else did you write out there in California?” Warnie asked. “It seems a land a million miles away.”
“You don’t want to know. It was a terrible time. Except for the MGM lion—his name was Leo—whom I came to love as greatly as you can love any animal, it was a time I’d rather forget. But I had a dream to cast Tristan and Isolde in a love story at sea. It’s one of my beloved myths of all time.”
“Irish love,” Jack said, “that ends in death.”
“But true love,” I said and paused at the edge of the park, lifting my face to the sky where layered white clouds were spread flat against an unseen barrier. “The kind that makes you notice every small thing in the natural world, bringing you to yourself.”
“Oh, you’re a romantic,” Warnie said and lifted his hands to the sky. “You two will get along properly well.”
Jack either didn’t hear Warnie or didn’t reply, because his next comment ended the afternoon. “Tomorrow we shall walk Shotover Hill.”
“That sounds interesting,” I replied without asking where Shotover Hill was or why we would walk it.
“Then tomorrow it is.” Jack’s smile fell over me. Swallows spun above and the song of skylarks filled the air.
With plans to meet in the morning, the brothers departed, one home to the Kilns and the other to tutor a student. It could have been the newness of it all, and how I tasted it as unspoiled as new fruit, but Oxford and the Lewis brothers had cast their spells; I was enchanted.
CHAPTER 13
The world tasted fragrant and new
When we climbed over Shotover Hill
“BALLADE OF BLISTERED FEET,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Shotover Hill rose from Oxford like the breast of a woman in recline. Jack, Warnie, and I began our hike in silence, our conversation lulling and beginning again like waves. Through bracken-covered slopes we walked; blackbirds and wrens swept above us. The brothers swung their walking sticks in a step-step-swing-step rhythm, swatting at nettles and pushing rocks or debris from the path for me to pass. We climbed the hill and our breathing synchronized.
With the physical exertion, logical thoughts fell away, unspooling and leaving nothing but sensation and the bliss of nature’s quiet. Jack had already told me that it was a mistake to combine talking and walking—the noise obscuring the sounds of nature. So through switchbacks and jagged turns, soft heather swept us forward. When we reached the top, all out of breath, we stood above the patchwork of valleys and rivers, ponds and forest, an area called South Oxfordshire.
“A land fashioned of someone’s fairy tale,” I murmured, out of breath as we reached the top. The sunlight settled on me with such warmth as I sat on the ground, my knees tented to rest my hands.
“Yes,” Warnie said. “It does seem so from here, does it not?” He took in a deep breath and bent over to clasp his knees. “But it’s just plain ole Oxford.”
“Oh, Warnie!” I said, looking to him, his baggy cuffs puddling at his feet as he leaned on his walking stick. “There is nothing plain about Oxford.”
“The eye of the newcomer,” he said and straightened. “Let me look again.” He squinted against the sun and leaned forward as if on the bow of a ship. “Yes, a fairy-tale land it is. You are very right, Mrs. Gresham.”
“This land must be part of you.” I inhaled the cleansing aroma of grass and soil, the blue sky above like the bowl of an alpine lake. “I want this landscape to be mine and the landscape to have me.”
“Then you shall,” Jack said. “I doubt there is much you set out to do that doesn’t get done.”
The brothers came to sit on either side of me, and we talked: of Warnie’s new work, of Jack’s students’ upcoming Michaelmas semester exams, of the Socratic Club meeting he must attend the next day. We debated Winston Churchill’s conservative views and his recent announcement that England had an atomic bomb. Would they test it? Where was it? We talked of how Prince Philip must feel with his wife becoming queen, and of course the tea rationing, which had all of England annoyed. We were three chums who’d been friends all our lives, or so anyone who came upon us would have believed.
“Even the Garden of Eden could not be as beautiful.” I poked at Jack. “Although I know you don’t believe there is such a thing at all.”
Warnie put his fingers to his lips. “Hush, don’t tell anyone that the great C. S. Lewis believes that Adam and Eve are a myth.”