“It was during an artillery barrage when I’d taken my men over the parapet.” He shook his head. “A debacle. It was my sergeant who died instead of me.” He blinked slowly, as if all these years later, it still cut deeply in his psyche. What the public saw was a mask, just like any I wore. Behind it was a man who still trembled with sorrows and pain: the death of his mother, the harsh bringing-up at boarding school that had tortured him as a young boy, two wars, his failures at Oxford.
Humankind’s cruelty in its entirety.
“The shrapnel buried into my body and sent me to the hospital. While the cries of other men echoed in my ears, they moved me behind the lines. The only liquor available was champagne, and I swallowed rivers of it. I’ve not been able to abide the taste of it since.”
I stepped closer to him. “I’m sorry for that,” I said. “Blast the champagne then. We shall break out more wine!”
“It’s all in the past,” Warnie said.
“Except when it isn’t,” Jack replied, and they exchanged a look, the kind that only those who know your innermost spirit can read.
“I wish I could scrub the horrid parts of the past clean for both of you.” I paused. “For all of us.”
We were silent for a while longer until I served the food and Warnie lit the candles, and we all began to sing the verse from the Christmas pantomime we’d gone to a few nights before.
Jack first: “Am I going to be a bad boy? No. No. No.”
Warnie next: “Am I going to be awful? No. No. No.”
And then finally my tone-deaf voice joined in: “I promise not to pour the gravy over baby’s head.” And with that I poured the Magdalen burgundy gravy over the turkey and we sat to eat.
We prayed over the meal and lifted our glasses to Christmas Day. Before he took his first bite, Jack reached over and took my hand. “Merry Christmas, Joy.” He ran his thumb over the top of my hand in a motion so innocent and yet intimate that my limbs loosened and my breath was lost.
“Merry Christmas to you too, Jack.”
CHAPTER 27
A thing to move your laughter or your loathing;
Still, you may have my love for what it’s worth
“SONNET XII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The morning of my leaving I stood in the hallway of the Kilns, its friendliness holding me one last time. My valise and suitcase were packed and waiting by the door, and I glanced at them with scorn, hating them for what they represented.
Jack and Warnie were bumbling about in the back of the house; I heard their footsteps and the water running fierce through the pipes.
The kitchen was empty. The copper pots hung clean from their hooks where Mrs. Miller had put them, but there was no leftover evidence of our frivolity or deep conversations. When I left, the house would resume its natural rhythms.
I’d become at home in the kitchen, and I took a frying pan from the hook. It clattered as it hit the stove: iron on iron. The black market eggs huddled in a bowl on the counter. I took one and cracked it open against a white porcelain bowl. The yoke remained whole and floated in the globular whites. I lifted a fork and punctured that yellow dome, watching it spread and stain before I stirred it. Somewhere in the back of the house Warnie called Jack’s name, and then there was laughter and a closing door, shuffled footsteps.
I dropped a dab of butter into the warming pan and inhaled the comforting aroma as the butter spread and melted, sliding to the edges of the pan. The lump of fear about going home lodged beneath my throat. I poured the eggs into the hot pan and began to stir them as they cooked. A sprinkle of salt, and I whisked the eggs to finish.
“Good morning, Joy.” Jack’s voice startled me, and the spatula clattered to the floor.
“Jack.” I turned and pasted on the smile, lifted the utensil from the ground, and wiped it off on a towel.
“Today you leave us.” He brushed his hand across his unshaven cheeks, staring out the wide windows to the garden outside.
“Yes, today,” I said. I placed my scrambled eggs on a plate and sat at the kitchen table. Jack joined me. “I have a story I want to tell you.”
“Please!” He leaned back in his lounging clothes and worn slippers.
“When I was a child,” I said quietly, “my brother, Howie, and I would sneak out at night to go to the zoo. We’d slink through the dark streets of the Bronx, holding our hands so tightly together it hurt. We’d slip through a hole in the fence, and the first thing I would do was run to the lions’ cages.”
“You as a child.” Jack smiled tenderly. “I would have loved to have known that little girl.”