Even the bells in Magdalen tower were ringing
Death to the drooping afternoon
“SONNET VI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The second day in Oxford arrived, luminescent, the honey-hues of sunlight falling from the leaves to settle on the grass like spilled paint. The air was as clear as glass and soft as cotton. I rolled out of bed and into the day, expectant.
Lazily, I started a letter to home and also set my eyes for a quick read-through of my Second Commandment article before leaving to wander toward Magdalen for lunch. Fifteen minutes later, when I reached the college gate, I paused, the old fatigue threatening at the edge of my bones.
“No,” I said out loud. “We are here in Oxford and healthy and well. We are going to see Jack and meet Warnie.”
Something in the trees and the river breathed of holiness, and I said a silent prayer—You’ve brought us together. Please be with us—and then I eased under the ancient stone archway of Magdalen into the quadrangle. Men rushed past in black robes, open and flapping in the wind, like so many crows. The students wore their suits—boys dressed as men with their buttoned sweaters and rumpled suit jackets with only the top two buttons fastened. And the cigarette smoke—it seemed a fag sprouted from every mouth. This was a man’s domain if I’d ever seen one. It reeked of leather and pipe smoke. I made it to the dining hall door with timid steps, my mask of bravado slowly cracking.
What was I doing?
Women of course weren’t prohibited (except as students, fellows, or tutors), but I could feel in every nerve ending that here we were most welcome as appendages or footnotes. Pleasant company at best.
I wore a prim sheath dress fashioned of taupe tweed, and the double strand of pearls hung around my neck. My new nylons rubbed pleasantly against my thighs. A silk pale-blue Liberty scarf, one I’d purchased in London, was tied artfully around my neck as if I’d casually thrown it on, and yet I’d had to try the knots more times than I would admit.
I stood at the entranceway of the dining hall and waited, trembling. Doorways in this fortress were small and unmarked, almost hidden except for those who knew what they were. I entered slowly, blinking in the dim light. Dark paneled and cavernous, the room seemed built for men of knowledge, for fine literature and discourse of philosophy. Great oil paintings hung from the walls, portraits of men in robes with striped stoles around their necks, unsmiling and serious men. The tables were long and rectangular, set for lunch with white napkins tented at each place setting and sparkling crystal glassware awaiting the sherry. Dark brass chandeliers hung low, casting circles of light. At the end of the room a long table was set up on a foot-high platform, and there sat the dons in their black robes. The high table. Stained glass windows watched over the room, and a carved stone fireplace dominated the left wall.
I wanted this room to be mine.
I adjusted my dark-blue plate hat and smiled as widely as I knew how, but my thoughts were preoccupied with one thing: I needed to find a ladies’ room. It had been a lovely but long walk from Victoria’s guesthouse, and I shouldn’t have had the last two cuppas before I left.
Jack spotted me before I did him.
“Good afternoon, Joy.” He approached me with a smile that settled on me with warmth, as if we met for lunch every day. He wore the same tie as he had yesterday, and his black robe hung unbuttoned over his gray suit, his spectacles poking above the pocket of his jacket as if to spy what was happening.
“Thank you so much for having me here.”
It was my accent that made the men turn from their plates to stare. Another man drew near. “Well, good afternoon. You must be Mrs. Gresham. How very much I’ve enjoyed your letters.” The man was shorter than Jack, but I knew who he was immediately, his sincere smile and earnest eyes the giveaway.
“And you must be Warnie.” I smiled. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to meet you.”
Warnie’s face was much rounder than Jack’s, and his chin seemed to fade into his neck, but his smile lit his features. He wore a similarly drab suit but without the robe. His tie was askew, as was his smile, and he was charming in his rumpled way.
“We’re pleased you’ve come to visit,” he said from under the hood of a bushy moustache.
And with that greeting, Jack guided us out of the main room and through the arched hallways to a private dining area where lunch was set for us. We settled into the warm stone room, the dark wood and towering bookshelves nearly making me forget the press of my bladder. The deep plush furniture seemed made for men to sit and light their pipes and read to their hearts’ content. What did it say of me that I felt more comfortable there than in any ladies’ sitting parlor?
Jack turned to greet another man, and I turned to Warnie. “Is there anywhere in this man’s enclave that a woman might relieve herself?” I asked, slightly desperate by then.
Thank goodness Jack and his acquaintance didn’t hear. As it was, Warnie blushed and averted his eyes. Women must not talk about the bathroom in this country.
He pointed me in the right direction and off I went. My low heels clicked against the cobblestones. Instead of feeling embarrassed, I experienced a flash of envy: I wanted to be a part of a place like this—a tutor, an academic, a writer of great import. I wanted so much. But I’d start with lunch.
In the wavy and dusty mirror over the sink in the lavatory, I stared into my own wide eyes, surrounded by horn-rimmed glasses. What did Jack and Warnie see? I swiped on red lipstick and smoothed my hair. Not bad at all.
I returned to have sherry poured into cut-glass goblets, and I drank mine too quickly, feeling the soft buzz that came with it. Far-off bells rang and then more, echoing upon one another’s cymbal-sounding peals.
“It seems that bells never stop ringing around here,” I said. “From your high pinnacled towers.” I feigned covering my ears.
“Yes, our bells in the various colleges are off a few minutes here and there,” Jack said and waved his hand toward the window. “Not as congruent as we’d like.”
I allowed my attention to wander as I glanced around, pausing at the words etched on the Magdalen crest. “Floreat Magdalena,” I murmured. “‘Let flourish . . .’”
“You read Latin?” Jack asked me.
“Excuse me?”
He pointed to the crest.
“Oh. Yes. Latin, German, and French. I’ve taught myself Greek, but I’m a bit rusty. The Latin and Greek tend to flip over into each other sometimes.” I paused, embarrassed, afraid that I sounded like a braggart. “My college roommate, Belle, spoke Russian, but I never could quite get the hang of it. But you know more languages than I do, Jack. Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. Probably some others as well.”
Warnie’s laughter echoed through the room as we sat to eat. “It seems there isn’t much our American friend can’t do.”
“Oh, there’s plenty,” I said. With that I turned my attention to him. “Tell me, Warnie, what are you working on? What are you writing now?”
“I’m toiling away on a book about Louis XIV, the Sun King. Probably not of much interest to you, but an exceeding obsession to me.” He sounded so like Jack that I felt a kinship I was not due.
“Not of interest to me?” I asked. “Well lordy! I’m working on a book about Charles II, and my Lord Orrery, whom I wrote my thesis about for Columbia, sat in the House of Commons at the very same time as your king.”
And we were off into the world of history as if Jack weren’t there at all. We talked about France and kings and battles. We chatted about research and how difficult it was to write history that had long ago disappeared and left only hints of its life for us to unravel.
Soon Jack joined in our conversation and we returned to the present. I reached to take another bite of my grilled sausages and tomatoes and noticed that Jack had polished off every bite on his plate.
“Am I a slowpoke?” I glanced at Warnie. “I’m sorry. Do you have someplace you need to be? I’ve been talking too much.”
“No!” Jack stated with a loud voice, his hands held in supplication. “It is a problem of mine. I eat too fast. I blame it on Oldie.”
“The horrid headmaster at your old boarding school,” I said, remembering a story from one of his letters.
“You know?” Warnie asked.
“Not very much, but some.” I glanced at Jack. Was I betraying a confidence?
Jack placed his fork over his empty plate, lit a cigarette. “We were in great trouble if we didn’t finish our meals on time or finish at all. It led to this terrible habit of gobbling, which I’ve tried to no avail to break.”
“That or he’s just itching for his cigarette,” Warnie said with a laugh.
“Well, I will savor mine.” I took an exaggeratedly slow bite, the tomato juice dripping onto the plate.
They laughed, as I’d hoped. After a few moments passed and I pushed my plate away, Jack asked, “Shall we walk to the deer park perhaps?”
“That sounds smashing,” I said with a terrible false English accent.
“Then off we go.” The bells of Magdalen rang again, chiming out the hour, the rich ring of sacrament.
Enveloped in the soft buzz of sherry and companionship, Jack, Warnie, and I exited the dining room onto the great lawn. Men ambled past with pipes and cigarettes, books tucked under their arms. Grass leached its green to the coming winter, turning the brunette color of fine hair, and yet the leaves fell, adorning the lawn’s nakedness. Students sat in clusters on blankets, books scattered around.
Jack pointed at a long rectangular building ahead of us across the lawn. “That is where my rooms are.” He swung his walking stick and headed away from the building and under the iron archway we’d passed through the day before. The three of us sauntered slowly across the small stone bridge, a miniature version of the larger Magdalen Bridge across the street, and onto Addison’s Walk and to the deer park.
Warnie walked next to me as a speckled fawn sauntered across the lawn, looking over her shoulder.
“My boys will love this,” I whispered before I realized I’d spoken aloud, a prayer or incantation for the future. “Those eyes of the deer,” I said. “As if they are looking at just us, so round and brown.”
“Like yours,” Jack said so matter-of-factly that it took me longer than it should to seize upon his statement.
“Mine?”
He didn’t answer, as if he’d already forgotten what he said. He walked ahead of us with his walking stick in sway. Warnie and I caught up to him; I already felt the blisters forming in the shoes I’d worn for beauty, not comfort.
“In the forties,” I said, “I spent a few months in Hollywood trying to be a screenwriter. The only screenplay that was nearly filmed was about fawns.” I watched the little deer before us as it sprang forward into the underbrush. “I borrowed Kipling’s white deer theme.”
“How very clever of you,” Warnie said. “Why was it never made?”
“Well, we had a director, but deer are mighty hard to find in Hollywood. If I’d known how to import them, I would have. But my powers have their limits.”
They both laughed.
“What else did you write out there in California?” Warnie asked. “It seems a land a million miles away.”
“You don’t want to know. It was a terrible time. Except for the MGM lion—his name was Leo—whom I came to love as greatly as you can love any animal, it was a time I’d rather forget. But I had a dream to cast Tristan and Isolde in a love story at sea. It’s one of my beloved myths of all time.”
“Irish love,” Jack said, “that ends in death.”
“But true love,” I said and paused at the edge of the park, lifting my face to the sky where layered white clouds were spread flat against an unseen barrier. “The kind that makes you notice every small thing in the natural world, bringing you to yourself.”
“Oh, you’re a romantic,” Warnie said and lifted his hands to the sky. “You two will get along properly well.”
Jack either didn’t hear Warnie or didn’t reply, because his next comment ended the afternoon. “Tomorrow we shall walk Shotover Hill.”
“That sounds interesting,” I replied without asking where Shotover Hill was or why we would walk it.
“Then tomorrow it is.” Jack’s smile fell over me. Swallows spun above and the song of skylarks filled the air.
With plans to meet in the morning, the brothers departed, one home to the Kilns and the other to tutor a student. It could have been the newness of it all, and how I tasted it as unspoiled as new fruit, but Oxford and the Lewis brothers had cast their spells; I was enchanted.