In his office Jack didn’t just read; he went deep inside the work his eyes fell upon, taking apart the sentences and themes. And while I was nearby, he would often call my name.
“Joy,” he’d say, “what do you think . . .”
Off we’d go into a theological or thematic discussion. Sometimes I feared I would wake and be back in the rambling, falling-apart house in Staatsburg, Bill stumbling drunk down the hallway smelling of sex and whiskey, and find my time with Jack had only been a dream. But instead I sat in the armchair of his office at the top of the staircase discussing the meaning hidden in stories.
With rain lashing the windows of his office one morning, I looked up from my pages. “You’re fortunate that you are deeply seeded in one place—that you were a student at Oxford and now a tutor there. It’s home for you, I can see that. I wonder if Oxford has any idea how very fortunate they are to have you.”
“They don’t quite give me the reverence you assume.” He didn’t look up from his papers, his fingers tight around his fountain pen.
“I don’t believe that.” I eased to stand and padded to the window, glimpsed the property shrouded in the downpour.
“I was just recently turned down for the Professor of Poetry at Oxford,” he said, his voice dropping away from the usual joviality. “A horde of English teachers didn’t want me to have the position.” I turned back to him, and he set his pen in the inkwell. “It was political, but still disappointing.”
I leaned against the windowsill. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
He laughed and shook his head. “My dear Joy, whatever would you be sorry about? It all comes with the academic life.”
“But your poetry; it’s brilliant,” I said. “How could they not . . . ?”
“Yes, you think so, but most of it was published under my pseudonym, Clive Hamilton, so some never knew of it. I wasn’t quite posh enough.”
“I don’t understand,” I said and felt the regret for him as if I were the one they’d turned down.
“It isn’t my first disappointment with Oxford,” he said. “And it won’t be my last.”
“Not your first?”
“Just two years ago, when the Merton Professorship of Modern English Literature became available, Tollers believed I would be best for the slot. He gathered the forces and suggested that the two of us could split the title. But it seems I wasn’t quite up to snuff. To the electorate, I didn’t have nearly enough published scholarly works.” He smiled at me, but I sensed his sadness.
“For goodness’ sake, how many publications did they need?”
“It wasn’t the number, it was the kind. It seems that my most popular works were my novels, and this was not what they wanted.”
“Did Tollers take the position?” I asked.
“Yes, he did. And it was my old tutor, Wilson, who took the slot I was to have. It is told that I would have discredited their great reputation.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Well then, if only you’d been on the committee.” He again dipped his pen into his inkwell.
“I don’t know if it helps to say this, but I believe the world would rather have your stories than your titles.”
He nodded. “Well, enough of academia. Let’s get back to our work.”
I often watched Jack write when he believed I was working myself. He wrote with a quill, dipping it slowly into the inkwell and then bringing it back to paper. He said it “allowed a thought to form between well and paper.” I imagined stories and fantasies unfolding in the slow dance of pen to ink, back to paper and then again to ink. When I offered to type those written words for him, he took me up on it straightaway.
But that day he wasn’t writing, he was marking on my Ten Commandments manuscript. A nervous flutter rose in my throat until he looked up, feeling my stare.
“If you’d like me to write the preface, I will,” he added. “When it is time for the British edition, you let me know.”
“Like you to write the preface? Well, whiskers and cat’s ears, of course I would,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
Then we both bent our heads back to the page.
In those mornings, we worked; in the afternoons, we walked and we drank and we ate and we read.
One late afternoon after a nap, I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser in my room looking for my favorite green sweater, one I’d knitted before coming here, which seemed to be missing in action. Instead I found a pile of drawings, childlike drawings. I withdrew them and knew what they were: Jack’s and Warnie’s childhood drawings of a country called Boxen. Pencil drawings of anthropomorphic creatures—there was a cat wearing a tuxedo and a top hat, smoking a cigarette and having drinks with men. A frog in a suit and a bird in formal wear. I smiled and felt a bit like I was in a dream and waking in the attic of Little Lea, his childhood home, where I knew these had been sketched and imagined.