Between two rivers, in the wistful weather,
Sky changing, tree undressing, summer failing
“SONNET VI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
September in Oxford is a glory of color and silken air, of golden hues and ivy-covered hope. It was like being transported to the land of a fairy tale you’d forgotten you read.
I ambled next to Jack as he swung his walking stick with each step, his fisherman’s hat settled crooked on his head. We crossed High Street for my first view of Magdalen College, which rested regally on the River Cherwell. I stopped midstep. “Stunning!” I stared at the college’s stone tower with six spires reaching toward the bluest sky. A great fortress of walls and doors surrounded the limestone buildings. It was a painting, a diorama from a fantasy movie, the architecture medieval and mystical.
“My first view of it stunned me the same,” Jack said. “It still does. It’s just as beautiful as you draw close. Come.”
“You know,” I said, “after the bustle of London and the bombed-out spaces, this feels pristine and untouched.”
A wistful expression passed over Jack’s face, but then he turned to me and nodded. “Yes, we were spared the bombs—Hitler planned on making Oxford his own and he wanted to save it. We’d watch the planes head here and then veer to the left or right using the river as their guide.”
I glanced up as if the planes were whirring overhead. “I’m so glad to be here.”
“I’m quite happy you made the journey.” He smiled at me.
Phyl and George walked ahead and through the great wooden door of Magdalen, leaving Jack and me alone. The yellow leaves formed a plush carpet under our feet while a few still clung to the trees by their fragile stems. Gravestones were as common along the sidewalks as benches or stone walls.
We ambled; I was in no great rush. We passed the gray weathered wooden doors to Magdalen, as grand as the castle doors I’d seen at Buckingham, and Jack motioned for us to first walk across a stone bridge. Halfway across he paused and we stood together, leaning against the ancient wall and absorbing the sight of the River Cherwell. We stood, our shoulders only a breath apart, as a line about rivers from Shakespeare’s King John came to me. “‘Trust not those cunning waters of his eyes, For villainy is not without such rheum.’”
With a sudden laugh Jack lifted his face to the sun and finished. “‘And he, long traded in it, makes it seem like rivers of remorse and innocency.’”
Our eyes met, widened, and together we said, “King John.”
Jack removed a case from his pocket and took out a cigarette, striking the match hard against the flint in a swift movement. He set the fire against the end and puffed until it was lit. This was all done slowly, carefully, as if he had all the world’s time to complete this singular act on a stone bridge over a river. Below, punts were crowded against the banks, lashed together and held tight, waiting to be chosen. The willow trees swept downward as if to stroke the river, their branches waving with a breeze.
I broke the silence. “This river,” I said. “It’s very much like life.”
“How so?” Jack turned to lean against the stone parapet, taking a long drag of his cigarette.
Well, that would teach me to speak without thinking. “The water flowing,” I said decidedly. “It reaches its end at the sea no matter what.”
He considered this. “I believe life is more like a tree. Each branch differentiating as it grows. Each an individual choice.”
“Jack.” I pointed at the river flowing beneath us. “That is the river of life. It’s bound by its edges but still it is free. Do you sometimes debate for fun?” I asked with a laugh. “Just to see if I can keep up with you?”
“Ah, no—I am quite sure you can keep up with me. But the river, as beautiful a metaphor as it is, isn’t right for our choices in life. We don’t all meet in the same place, as rivers do.”
His eyes were deep and rich brown, and I wondered what they saw in me—he knew how to hold kind attention, a presence.
“Choice.” I bent over and picked up a handful of leaves, let them fall through my fingers. “What if we choose wrongly? Do we burn in an everlasting hell? You believe this?” I tossed a leaf at him. “As you wrote in The Great Divorce? You can’t take any souvenir of what you love with you?”
He laughed. “I have enjoyed our correspondence, yet it is even better to be chatting with you.”
“Yes.” I took in a long breath and stated the truth. “Through the years my sluggish heart began to beat again with words, our words, and the very power of them.”
Jack smiled as that golden English sunlight crested from behind a pleated cloud, resting gently on his face as if the light desired to touch him. For just a moment, no longer or shorter than the one on my knees in my sons’ nursery, my body felt untethered from the earth, as if we were merely a dream fragment. My heartbeat fluttered in my wrists, in my chest, in my belly. A warm flush, timid but sure, flooded me.
Oh, Joy, be very, very careful.
He had captured my intellect, my mind, and my thoughts; I could not allow him to do the same to my heart.
I turned away from his smile, those teasing eyes, and together we strolled back from where we’d come, passing trees with birds’ nests like tiny hats in the naked branches, till we were only a few paces from the entrance to Magdalen. When I first saw the college’s name in print, I had said it incorrectly. I thanked the heavens that I heard the correct pronunciation before I met Jack—“Maudlin” it is. Yet still we didn’t enter. Jack sat on a bench, crossed one leg over the other.
He held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, and the smoke circled upward. He spread his arms along the back length of the bench.
“It’s not so much any souvenirs we want to take, it’s our hearts we need to carry,” he said. “They yearn for what I call the High Country, and we can’t get there without abandoning the belief that this is all there is, and that we must get the most out of it, and take something with us.” He looked at me then, silently, like a man in a debate who had just nailed his point.
“Oh, Jack,” I said and sat beside him, twisting to face him. “Your High Country is my Fairyland. I’ve dreamt of it since I was a child. When I read Pilgrim’s Regress, I knew you meant the same place—’the Island,’ you called it.” This repartee with a man whose mind I had come to esteem and value felt like water to a parched soul.
I continued. “You and I both had the same experience as children, that same thrill that nature brings, the knowing that sometimes the world evokes a feeling so full of longing that words can’t capture it. And that longing hints at a place where evil can’t exist and heartbreak can’t abide. Even when we weren’t believers, we still believed. It’s as though we took the same path, and the High Country called to us both.”
He nodded, and I almost believed he blushed. “Pilgrim’s Regress was the first book I wrote after my conversion, wondering about yearning and what it might mean.” He smiled at me slowly. “With the yellow leaves and the happiness of this afternoon, I long even more for such a place,” he said. “Isn’t it odd? That we can be happy here and yet want to go . . . there?”
“As if at our happiest, we want even more. Like this is the hint.” I took a breath. “Jack, I look back at my life, and I understand the lure of atheism, but it now seems almost impossible. How could I have not believed when my heart always knew?”
“Maybe we were too simple.”
I shook my head with remembrance. “I don’t know; I think I just wanted my soul to be my own.”
“Indeed.” He nodded as if he remembered the same.
“Have you ever . . .” I paused.
“Ever what?”
“Felt another presence? Felt like the veil lifted for a minute? And I don’t just mean in prayer.”
“Tell me what you mean, Joy.” He leaned closer.
“When my friend Stephen Vincent Benét passed away, I felt him. I think . . . no, I know I even saw his wraith pass by.” I cringed. “Is that crazy?”
Jack drew nearer to me, and his tone lowered as he dropped the last of his cigarette. “Joy, I was devastated when Charles Williams passed; I was dazed and stunned. I went to the pub we frequented together—the King’s Arms—and ordered a pint. It was then that I felt my friend. He was with me, and he passed by. No one will ever convince me otherwise. Tollers believes I am quite absurd, but I know it to be true.”
We stared at each other then—another thread that bound us.
We strode through the archway to Magdalen, and the happiness I felt couldn’t be measured as Jack turned tour guide, his voice deepening.
“You must know, of course, that Oxford is made of thirty-five colleges, and this is but one—Magdalen—and it is outside the gate of the medieval city.”
“Nine hundred years old,” I said. “That’s what I’ve read. It feels humbling to be in the place of such deep history.”
Magdalen’s glistening white stone tower shot toward the blue sky, her six spires secured to stone buildings that splayed in every direction, a master of geometric precision. I pointed at the tower as we drew closer. “It’s a phallic symbol for a male-dominated institution, ain’t it?”
Jack paused, his eyebrows raised above his spectacles, then, with an exhale of laughter and cigarette smoke, he bellowed with delight. “You call them as you see them, don’t you, Joy?” he said in a brogue so beautiful that my heart fell to its knees.
His voice, I thought, is like an ocean in a shell.
“I feel that I could never get enough of this place.” I paused and ran my sight over the buildings and the ivy-covered walls, the thick pristine lawns with well-groomed pathways. “And that entranceway . . .” We were nearing the massive wooden door that was decorated with thick brass and sat protected under a stone archway. “It looks as though one of your magical beings should saunter out.”
“The grand entranceway to the quad,” he said. “Or the Ancient Door. It’s fascinating seeing the familiar through your eyes.”
The stone wall, Jack informed me, was called the Longwall, enclosing Magdalen—the dining hall, the Cloisters, the classrooms, the chapel, student rooms, dining room, library, and more. We entered, and the stone hallways and limestone alleyways were as numinous as any I’d seen, echoing with the past. Lichen grew along the pathways and in the cracks between the Headington stones. I joked about private and hidden rooms—a dungeon, perhaps. The Middle Ages clung to the air and seemed concealed in the hallways and thin stone stairwells.
In a perfect square, the hallways of the Cloister surrounded a green lawn. These walkways were pale-yellow plaster, the open archways to the quad garnished with corbels and carvings. We walked together, turning left and left and left to end up where we began, talking as though we’d never stop. After the second round we paused, both facing the green quad. Gargoyles peered down from the buildings that hovered over the Cloisters. “I can’t decide if they are watching us or guarding us,” I said and pointed up.
“Hieroglyphics.” He pretended to cower beneath them with a feigned fright. “Now this way.” He motioned forward. “Let’s walk by the river.”
I followed him out the hallway opening to a wide-open field. “A hundred and twenty acres,” he said. And then we walked through a wrought iron gate and archway onto a smaller stone bridge, under which ran a tributary of the Cherwell. “And this is Addison’s Walk.” The dirt pathway was strewn with leaves of all hues, the trees so densely gathered as to crowd the pathway yet leave enough room to feel free and protected both.
“The whole of this was first built in 1458,” he told me, standing with his arms spread out. “And this meadow”—he pointed ahead—“in the spring, it is full of flowers of a purplish-green color that fills the senses.”
“Fritillaria meleagris,” I said.
He laughed in that already familiar bellow.
“And are you a walking Latin nomenclature appendix?” he asked.
“My sons think so,” I said. “I survived many a childhood day by wandering the botanical gardens in the Bronx and memorizing the genus and species for all the plants and flowers.”
We stood together on that pathway, and I wondered if my eyes would ever be able to see all the glory of that place; it was too much for one visit. The architecture and the natural world melded together into something so sublime it would take years or decades to see it rightly.
I turned back to him. “Jack, there’s something I’ve been wondering.”
“And what is that? What questions have I not answered as of yet?”
“Why are you called Jack when your name is Clive?”
“Ah!” He swung his walking stick up and then stuck it into the ground. “Well, it’s a bit of a story.”
“Then tell.” I set my hands on my hips and planted my feet. “I’m ready, sir.”
“All right then. When I was a young boy we had a dog named Jacksie. On a warm summer day, when the world was good and right, Warnie and I were walking to town when a car came roaring around the bend and hit our dog. Killed him right there in front of us.” Jack shook his head. “If I could make a request of God it would be that no young boy ever see his beloved dog killed.” He shuddered and then continued. “Therefore I announced my name was Jack and vowed never to drive a car.”
“You named yourself after a dog, and you don’t drive.” I laughed, and he took a step forward with his stick, glancing over his shoulder to see if I was following.
“Now maybe you know all there is to know.”
“I doubt that,” I said as we caught up with Phyl and George.
“Darling,” she called out and came to us. “I must be going if I’m going to catch the last train.”
“And I,” George said, “must return to Malvern. Today has been a pleasure.” He bowed his head and tipped his hat before walking away.
I thanked Phyl, and once again Jack and I were alone. We talked and strolled through Magdalen’s grounds until the afternoon sky’s pink hues hinted toward evening.
Our parting was polite, and when I told him that I’d be there for ten more days, he smiled. And that man, when he smiled . . . it was the only thing you wanted to see. His face was so serious in photos, yet in person both animated and buoyant. He seemed continually prepared to burst into laughter if given the chance. I wanted to give him every chance.
I didn’t know whether to embrace him or shake his hand. In the end I did neither, as he wrapped both his hands around the top of his walking stick. “My brother, Warnie, will be available tomorrow. Would you like to meet us here for lunch?”
“I would very much like that,” I said.
“Where are you staying?”
“With a friend of a friend, Victoria Ruffer. Meanwhile I’ll be taking full advantage of the city, walking and admiring. The autumn here might be the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.”
“Yes, it’s glorious. Autumn makes all things seem possible.”
“It is spring that does that.” I swept my palms open like a flower blossoming. “All that life coming back from frozen earth.”
He gave a sly smile.
“What? Did I say something awful?”
“No.” He shook his head. “But you certainly have your own opinion about everything. I knew this from your letters, but now I can see it’s true all the time, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I’m awful that way. I know.”
“I’m not yet sure it’s awful.” He looked at me closely then, as if seeing me for the first time.
We parted ways, and I headed along the storyland sidewalks of Oxford, back to Victoria’s. I knew what I would do the minute I shut the door to my little guest room: write a poem. What else was one to do with these emotions that seemed to say, like springtime, that the world was about to begin anew?