A voice behind us called out Jack’s name, and a man in long black robes approached through the film of autumn sun. I wanted to shoo this man away.
“Good afternoon, Lowdie.” Jack greeted him with gusto.
He introduced me to his colleague, and I felt the shiver of knowing that I often ignored—it was time to take my leave. I departed with promises to meet Jack and Warnie for bangers and mash at the Eagle and Child that evening. I was anxious to enter its doors, settle into its corners, and be another part of Jack’s life, the very place where the Inklings—his group of fellows and writers who met to indulge in a pint or two while quipping about philosophy and writing—met on Tuesdays. No women allowed, of course.
As I wandered off I wondered what might have happened if right there on the banks of the river, as we talked of poetry, I’d told him of all the other poems I’d been writing—love sonnets naked with yearning, so quivering with need that he might jump into the river in fear of me. If they weren’t about him directly, they were most definitely about the feelings he disturbed inside me.
No, I would never show them to him.
Never.
CHAPTER 16
What I am saying is that I have nothing
To give you that you possibly could want
“SONNET XII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
It was my last night in Oxford, and eventide fell across the city’s architecture as I left Victoria’s house to walk the lamppost-lined sidewalks. Men rode by on bikes, their coats streaming behind them. Women strolled, pushing children in prams. In England I felt a sense of fragile joy, as if everyone was stepping into the sunlight yet still waiting for the sirens and overhead whir of aircraft, hesitant after the horror of the bombs and gunfire of World War II to believe in peace.
In my little clutch I had tucked the sestina Jack suggested I write. Forever I would be able to read it and summon our time as clearly as if it played on a screen. I planned to give him the carbon copy that night.
We’d had such grand times, and I knew he admired me as I kept up with him, whether it was speaking in Latin or quoting Shakespeare or poetry. But did he more than admire? If so, he kept it hidden well beneath his banter. He’d not so much as touched my sleeve; his comment about my eyes was the only physical attribute he’d ever mentioned. Yet he praised me for my writing or my wit or my intellect. He made plans for us to see each other every day.
I’d never been around a man who looked at me the way Jack did, and talked to me as he did, and yet never once made a pass. I expected a touch in the natural pauses between man and woman, but he kept an armor about him invisible as air but impenetrable as iron.
He was fifty-four years old, and he’d never married. Was it past the time to think of women as anything more than friendly companions? As many times as these thoughts prodded, I shoved them away. The theological quandary I found myself in was nearly laughable. I was a married woman trying quite desperately not to fall for a man whom I’d made an idol as I wrote about the commandments of God.
Instead of changing my emotions, I needed to surrender them. Maybe I could find a way not to indulge them, but the company and the walks and the intimate talks didn’t lessen the longing that flourished deeply in the places of me that had been lonely for a long while. After I left, would the emptiness inside be deeper? I was willing to pay that price.
My bags were packed—the next day I would head off to research King Charles II and try to forget my life by delving deep into another man’s. It would be a long journey to Edinburgh by train, through Worcester. Jack had, as he’d promised, arranged for me to stay in a cottage with some old friends of his, the Matley Moores, and I wondered at the fact that we’d become such grand friends he’d make arrangements for me with others he cared for.
I walked two more blocks toward the pub to meet him, my musings keeping me company. The woman I’d become in exploring England, and in spending time with Jack and Warnie, felt like who I really was. The real self, Jack would say, in God. I’d been covered so long in the coal soot of my home, buried in the laundry, silenced by the screaming of my children and the berating of first my parents and then my husband—it wasn’t until England I saw who I could be: a brilliant light, cherished for who I was.
I stopped at the corner of St. Giles and Wellington and allowed a red double-decker bus to pass. Across the street was the Eagle and Child. It was a whitewashed three-story building on St. Giles Street, its paired windows set beneath gables with a matching pair below. The sign that hung above the dark wooden door showed an eagle in full flight against a sea of blue, carrying a baby in his wings. That explained the loving nickname: the Bird and Baby.