I’ll measure my affection by the drachm
“SONNET I,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The brick of the Eastgate Hotel, a grand dame of a structure in Oxford, was the tawny color of my cat’s fur. I was, even after a month, still struck by the solid antiquity in England—the fashion in which structures were built as if they’d known their ethereal beauty would be needed for thousands of years. The windows were inset like sleepy-hooded eyes. The four steps to the front door were wide and curved. To our right was what one might believe was a medieval fortress but was really one of Oxford University’s thirty-four colleges, Merton College, with the long stone wall that followed the curved street as closely as a lover.
“Phyl,” I said, and we paused at the dark wood doorway, “although I miss my collection of poogles, I’m very happy to be here.”
She gave me a calm and knowing look, her blue eyes squinting against the sunlight. “This will be interesting, my friend. Enjoy it.”
I nodded at her and placed my hand over my stomach to settle the nerves. Dabbed my lipstick with a tissue. For years I’d hoped to meet Jack, yet doubted I would, and now I stood on an Oxford sidewalk outside the place he met friends for lunch.
We entered the hotel bar lobby, where he’d said he would be waiting. I called to mind the photographs in which Bill said Jack looked like a kindly old basset hound. In those images, Jack sometimes wore round black-rimmed glasses, and he always appeared in a suit and tie—did he wear these things on a regular day to eat lunch at a hotel? Or would he be in his teaching robes? A pipe between his lips? A cigarette dangling?
My thoughts winged everywhere—caged birds.
Did I look all right? Beautiful but smart? Kind but intelligent? I’d never admired my looks, per se, except for one very lovely photograph on the back of Weeping Bay. And every time I tried to reproduce that exact pose, I came up short and disappointed. I fiddled with my strand of pearls and glanced around the bar. It was full at lunch hour: men in three-piece suits and ties, women in pearls and hats no different from what I wore. The room was a haze of chintz and velvet, low lighting from lamps at dark wood side tables. The walls were covered in green damask wallpaper, the ceiling with dark wood gables thick as railroad ties. It was all very stately and noble, which caused me to stand taller, shift my shoulders back.
My gaze roamed the room until I found him.
Jack.
There he was, animated, in deep conversation with the man across from him. His smile was kind and curved as he listened.
I took stock of him as if I had eternity to stare without his noticing.
His hairline had receded, and what dark hair remained on top was slicked back with comb marks. His smile sparked with life. His eyes were shadowed by his sloping eyelids beneath rimless glasses, as if he’d just woken and was happy to have done so. He sat casually, with one corduroy-clad leg over the other.
There was something lit up about him, the way the landscape of his face was animated beneath his strong eyebrows. His lips and mouth were full. These attributes—his mind, which I knew in letters, and now the light of his spirit—combined into a singular word: beautiful. The birds in my mind moved to my chest, fluttering there in anticipation.
And then, as if someone placed a hand over his mouth, he stopped midlaugh. He looked to me as if my stare had tapped him on the shoulder.
Our gazes caught and stayed. He grinned, as did I.
I gathered myself and ambled toward him, came to a stop in front of the couch as he stood. Those brown eyes of his, they were sparkling as if lit.
“Well, well. My pen-friend Joy is finally in England.” His voice was a song: part Irish brogue, part English. He wasn’t quite as tall as I’d expected, perhaps five foot ten at the most, yet his charisma stretched to the beams overhead. He wore a ragged tweed jacket with brown leather patches on the elbows and a white-buttoned shirt with a bright-blue tie.
“And you,” I said with a jittery smile, “must be my very famous friend, Jack Lewis.”
He bellowed with laughter and thrust out his hand to take mine in a rigorous shake. “Famous? Infamous perhaps, in very small circles.”
My voice sounded breathy and silly. I lowered it. “I’m really happy to see you. After all these years of friendship and an entire month here in England, finally we meet face-to-face.” I held to his hand and we smiled at each other. For what was most likely only a few seconds, time paused. He let go of my hand as Phyl stepped closer. “Oh! I’ve forgotten myself! Please meet my friend Phyl Williams.”
The man next to Jack lifted his eyebrows, and at once I knew what I’d done wrong—I’d spoken loudly in my New York accent.
Jack shook Phyl’s hand and in that brogue stated, “George, may I introduce you to Joy Gresham and her friend from London, Phyl.”
George nodded once at each of us and Jack explained. “George is a dear friend who was once a student of mine at Magdalen.”
I glanced at George. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you.” I held out my hand and he shook it without a word. Nervous, I pressed my lips together, hoping the lipstick was still there and hadn’t bled into the small creases around my mouth.
“Come,” Jack said, “let’s sit down. They’ve sorted a table for us.”
The four of us wound our way to the low-lit dining room table reserved in the middle of the restaurant, where four cut-glass tumblers sparkling with amber liquid waited.
We settled in, shook open the napkins on our laps, as I quickly assessed George. He possessed a long face like a horse with a deeply etched forehead, a road map to years of furrowed brow. Large ears perched as if tilting toward his eyes, and his long nose ended in a rounded bulb from which he seemed to look down at me as he caught my eye. I looked away.
“Sherry,” Jack said and raised his glass. “Welcome to Oxford.”
We all lifted our glasses and together took a sip. “Hmmm,” I said, “Lovely. In America we would’ve started with hard liquor and moved to wine and we’d be drunk before the meal even began.” I shook my head. “Then I’d have felt the particular hell of a hangover before the food was gone. But everything here is very . . . civilized.”
Jack laughed, and George gave me the furrowed brow look. I smiled my best smile. “Mr. Sayer, Jack says you were a former student of his? What do you do now?”
“I teach at Malvern.”
“Oh, lucky you. This city of Oxford,” I said. “It makes me wonder how different my life would have been if I had spent it in a place like this with men like you two.”
“I daresay your life is much better spent around men other than us.” George lifted his glass. “Boring as we can be.”
“But the intellectual life here—what, nine hundred years old?” I leaned forward. “How stimulating.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “It can be, but then again it is also quite boorish at times, the tedium of teaching and grading and lecturing.”
“Well, I would have liked to give it a shot.”
Then Phyl told some joke lost to me in time, and we began to talk in circles and with laughter. We ate salmon mousse as light as whipped cream, and I lost track of the wine refills. Gaiety increased exponentially with the wine, and jokes were told badly and histories regaled with embellishment. We talked about the new queen’s upcoming coronation, of the tea rationing. The long lunch felt but five minutes. Often Jack and I caught each other’s eye and smiled, but shyly. We knew each other as well as any friends—he’d heard my secrets and my fears—and yet it was just now that our eyes could catch as our minds already had.
“How did you come upon our friend’s work?” George finally asked as trifle was delivered for dessert.
“Like Jack, I was surprised by God. Both of us midlife converts.” I smiled at Jack and then looked back to George. “When I was eight years old I read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and marched right into the family room to announce to my Jewish parents that I was an atheist.”
George flinched. I saw it, and knew it was the word Jewish. Brits could claim they weren’t anti-Semitic, just as white Americans could claim they weren’t racist as they segregated their schools and neighborhoods.
“We’ve been writing about our spiritual journeys,” Jack said to George and then turned to me. “And you have brought to my attention holes and missing links in some of my arguments. I must say I have rarely met such a worthy adversary.”
Adversary? I wanted to be anything but.
George cleared his throat. “Well, do tell us what you think of England, Mrs. Gresham. You’ve been here a month now?”
“Well, I have fallen in love, Mr. Sayer. In mad, passionate love.” The heat of a blush filled my face and neck. I reached my hand to my décolletage, grabbed onto the pearls I’d strung there that very morning thinking they looked elegant, and took in a long breath. “It is England I’m talking about, of course!”
George nodded, patting his lips with a napkin.
I continued as I often did when nervous, words pouring out. “I love everything about it. I’ve practically walked my legs off. I’m enamored with the golden light. And how can air be softer here? I have no idea, but it is! The kindness of strangers is unparalled. And oh, the pubs.” I exhaled. “I adore the pubs. The dark warmth of them, the murmur of conversation, the music played by a man with a fiddle tucked away in a corner.”
George burst out in hearty laughter. “You obviously haven’t yet seen the bloody English fog. Just you wait; we’ll see if you’re still romanticizing our country then. Which, by the way, is jolly fine by me.”
Jack lifted his glass. “When I first saw Oxford I wrote to my father and told him it was a place beyond my wildest imaginings, a place of the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I’m quite envious of your view of Oxford today. There’s only that one first time.”
We all fell silent and finished our desserts slowly, as if not one of us desired the parting that would naturally follow. I felt bereft by Jack’s absence, even though it was merely an idea and had not yet happened.
Then he stood, wiped crumbs from his jacket, and smiled. “Why, let’s walk to Magdalen and I’ll show you around a bit, if you have the time.”
If I have the time . . .