The month before I had awakened one morning to a man’s face on the pillow next to mine: Harry Williams from the sci-fi crowd. His soft snore let me know he was still asleep. We’d flirted for a few weeks, and then one night when the whiskey and the thick beer had done their intoxicating job, we admitted that we both needed some love, and not the permanent kind or the I’ll-take-care-of-you kind. Just the variety that warmed the last of winter’s chill from our bodies.
It didn’t last long, this brief, tepid affair, but it was enough to quench a rising hunger for touch and skin. It was only Jack I wanted to be near, but it was Harry with his jolly Cockney accent, deep belief in aliens on other planets, and large soft hands who slept next to me that morning and a scattering of others.
This was a sin. I wasn’t a fool; I knew the commandments of my religion. I wrote about them. Still I fell. And repented. And fell again. Maybe I always would, but somehow grace felt big enough, sturdy enough as I stood again, resolute to do better. Meanwhile, I wrote my sonnets. I eased the pain and loneliness by forging sheaves of poetry no one would ever read.
My friendship with Jack and Warnie grew—we wrote back and forth as always, our conversations pausing and beginning again, making plans to meet in London or Oxford. On rare times we chatted on the crackling phone in the hallway.
My most pleasurable hours were either with the writing crowd on Thursday nights or typing Jack’s biography, both critiquing and editing as he’d asked. Surprised by Joy, it was titled. He was coming to depend on me with his work, but alas, the title had nothing to do with me! Slowly I ran my eyes over his handwriting, able to decipher even phrases he couldn’t read after he’d written them from his inkwell.
During these hours of typing Surprised by Joy, my emotions swung wildly. His words, the means by which I had first come to love him, now told me of his childhood and life, and it only made me love him all the more. I read much of what he’d already told me: the pain of losing his mother when he was ten years old; the horrific boarding school; the war and its horrors. I also spied parts of our relationship in the telling of his story, or did I only see what I desired? Whether it was the description of his conversion sounding similar to mine, or the phrasing of a thought he’d voiced on our long walks through the moors, nettles stinging our ankles and laughter following us high into the hills.
And my sons—on Sundays I would worship at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, where I had once been cleansed by the one o’clock bells, and then hop the train to visit them in Surrey. Those visits were the lifeblood I needed to begin another week.
As spring arrived, the trees covered in milky mist as they moved toward green, I walked for miles and miles through London. I sat in Primrose Park with a notebook and ball pen overlooking Hampstead and Belsize. I spread an inexpensive orange blanket I’d found in the market on the thick grass to write and revel in earth’s rebirth: the May trees, the roses everywhere, the rhododendron and elder trees competing in a beauty contest. It was there that I plotted Queen Cinderella with Warnie’s outline as a guide. I felt like she could be a real moneymaker, something to free me from begging Bill for money or depending on Jack for the boys’ education.
I also planted a small garden behind our Avoco House room, and by April the vegetables were just beginning to sprout from the ground. Sometimes I would imagine a green bean or tomato busting forth and be taken back in a rush to my garden on Staatsburg. But by then another family lived there, other children ran through its acreage and splashed in its creek. I hoped they were happier than we’d been.
Do you miss it? Jack had asked in a letter a few weeks before.
I felt inside myself, poked around for the answer. No, I’d written. I mourn what it could have been. I feel sad for what I wanted it to be but it never was. Maybe I miss the idea of what I wanted for all of us. But no, I don’t miss what was.
Never had a man been such an integral part of my life without also being in my bed. It was taking some getting used to, and included some heartache to boot.
But on this April morning, instead of typing more of Jack’s biography or forging another sonnet （now numbering more than thirty）， I took the quiet time to mend my boys’ frayed clothes and sew name tags on their new shirts and pants. My little calico cat, Sambo, curled in my lap, and I worked around his soft, purring body.
The boys awoke without my prodding, and soon they came running into the hallway, their traveling clothes buttoned and ready. Sambo flew from my lap, and Davy tripped, landing flat on his bottom. Douglas roared with laughter, staying on his feet with a deft move.