To be rejected, O this worst of wounds.
Not for love of God, but love of blondes!
“SONNET XX,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The sunrise had barely lit the trees when the boys were full of Mrs. Miller’s sausage and eggs and bundled up, their ear-flapped fur caps drawn with tight strings beneath their chins. Off we went into the day, interrupting Jack’s normal slow morning of Bible reading and correspondence. But his buoyancy belied any annoyance if he felt it at all.
Once deep into the forest, ice tinkling in the trees and crackling under our feet, Jack crouched down as if peering behind an oak tree, his jacket flapping in the wind and the faint smell of tobacco wafting toward me. “Keep a lookout for Mr. Tumnus,” he said to Douglas.
“He isn’t here,” Douglas half whispered.
Davy plodded on, not seeming to want to be a part of the fantasy, still weighing the merits and deficits of England in his ten-year-old way.
“But how can we know they aren’t here?” Jack asked Douglas, his hands resting on top of his walking stick.
“We can’t know for sure.” Douglas peered at the ground.
“And what about giants?” Jack asked in a low voice.
Douglas stopped and glanced upward as if expecting to see one as real and obdurate as the birch tree with its silver bark glistening in the winter frost.
“Giants can’t hide, though,” Douglas said, his words echoing in the winter quiet.
Jack pulled his old fisherman’s hat lower and stated with authority, “Oh, Douglas, my boy. How could you know? You would only see his foot and you might think it a tree. If you don’t pay attention, you might miss it.” His laughter bellowed and off they went, the two of them on a hunt for magical creatures.
I saw the forest and pond, the guesthouse and the gardens, through my sons’ eyes, and then through those of Jack, the storyteller. Yes, a White Witch might ride on her sled down the path leading to the pond. Tumnus might prance under this very snow-clad forest with his umbrella. And the pond, padded at the edges with tall grasses, could very well shroud a talking beaver. And of course Aslan could come plummeting through that forest, crashing his way toward the children or carrying them on his back to safety.
This man, with a mind as sharp as any I’d known, could become as childlike as my sons, imagining a world so intense and full of color and myth that it became more real than reality.
As we reached the pond, Douglas asked Jack how to cross it with the old punt, which bobbed against the rickety dock.
“You see that old stump sticking up in the middle?” Jack asked.
Douglas squinted against the sun, took two more steps to the edge of the pond, where thin ice cracked when a ripple moved against it. “Yes! I see it,” he said.
“When it’s warm, that is where I tie the punt and dive in. Swim to our hearts’ content.” Jack smiled as if he could already see the next sunny day when leaves would rest on top of the murky water and he would dive into its chilly depths.
“Let’s go.” Douglas took another step forward.
“Not now,” I told him. “It’s freezing, and if you fall in, I’m not the one to save you. I’ll have to let you both sink to the very bottom of that muck.”
“I’m so cold,” Davy said and moved closer to me. “I want to go back to the house and play chess with Warnie.”
“No!” Douglas cried, and I put my fingers to my lips.
“Shhh,” I said. “You’ll scare off Mr. Tumnus.”
With that both Jack and Douglas burst into laughter.
I grasped Davy’s hand. “Look. I’ll take Davy back, and you two follow along when you’re ready.”
Davy and I began to walk back, skirting fallen branches and patches of ice. Far off a loud crash sounded. Davy looked skyward. “There’s not really giants here, are there?”
“Only if you want there to be,” I said.
“I don’t want there to be.” He drew closer, and his head banged against my ribs. “Mommy?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“There’s a really awful noise in the wall where me and Douglas sleep. What if the giant is in there instead of out here?”
“The giant, if there is one, is not in the walls.”
“Well, there was a terrible banging.”
“Maybe the sun bangs for you before it wakes.” I tried to joke with my son, to lighten his somber mood.
“No, Mommy. That can’t be true or I would have heard it before.”
“I’m being silly, sweetie.” I squeezed his hand. “I heard the same noise when I stayed in there. It’s the water in the pipes. It’s an old house, and they haven’t done much to fix it.”
“And it’s very cold,” Davy said. “Except by the fire.”
“You don’t like it here?” I asked.
“I do like it.” Davy stopped before the green door and lifted his thumb to obey the sign PRESS.
“We can just go in,” I said and opened the door.
Mrs. Miller must have heard us approaching because there she was, kerfuffling around us, taking our coats and brushing ice off Davy’s cap. “I have tea for you,” she said.
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Miller. I know that three extra guests right before the holidays is not something you much looked forward to. And two little boys to boot.”
“It’s lovely,” she said in her thick brogue. “Absolutely luvvly-jubbly. The house seems to wake when you arrive, Mrs. Gresham.”
I took this admission and let it warm all the cold doubt about my place in this new world.
That night, as Warnie taught Davy chess as promised, and Jack and I read by the fire, Douglas came bursting through the door carrying an armload of wood.
“I cut all of this with Paxford,” he called out and dumped it on the hearth. “Mommy, there are real kilns. That is why this house is called ‘the Kilns.’ There is even an air raid shelter by the pond.”
“I’ve seen it, Douglas. Isn’t it marvelous? Except if you’d had to go there during the war, of course.”
“Except that,” he said and fell, covered in wood chippings, into a chair. It was only moments later that he fell asleep, all that energy expended, his mouth slack. He was as spent as were we. I imagined Jack and Warnie had not had this much activity since the war itself.
“Boys,” I said, “it’s time to hustle off to bed.”
Davy groaned. “But I’m almost done winning.”
“And that he is,” Warnie said. “But you have saved me from the disaster of losing to a ten-year-old who has never played before. So off to bed with you.”
I gently shook Douglas. “Bedtime, son.”
He roused himself, and both boys stumbled to the back bedroom where they’d been sleeping with the framed steamships above their heads. They settled into their little room off the kitchen, warm water bottles tucked into the beds to stave off the cold. Piles of blankets covered their little bodies as I tucked them in.
“Nothing here is the same as home,” Davy said as I kissed his cheek. “I don’t like it like I thought I would.”
“I’m here, and so is your brother. All will be well. It takes time, my love.”
“I like it,” Douglas said from the next bed. “But I wish we could just stay here at the Kilns with the pond and the big forest and the guest cottage full of little creatures and the garden and Paxford . . .”
I knelt at the bedside for nighttime prayer, closed my eyes, and told the truth. “Me too, son. Me too.”
Four days passed too quickly. Paxford and Mrs. Miller took to the boys as if they’d known them all along. Warnie rang a gong for lunch (only he was allowed to ring the small treasure from his time in Hong Kong during World War I), and Mrs. Miller cooked for us. Paxford showed the boys all through the property, giving them jobs and teaching them about the land. While Davy looked to the stars and wanted to know every constellation, Douglas touched each plant and wanted to know its name. In their individual ways, they were both trying to find their place in the world.
On the last night I approached Jack in the common room. “I have a gift for you,” I said.
“Oh, you do? Is it a ham?”
“The ham! I sent that all those years ago.” I laughed and found myself in a coughing fit—the cold settling in my chest. I shook my head. “No, not a ham.” I held up my finger. “Wait here, it’s in my room.”
I returned quickly with the long box I’d carried from London. “You can save it for Christmas under the tree or—”
“Open it now,” he interrupted and ripped the top off the box.
And there it was—an antique Persian sword I’d found in a flea market in London the week before. He pulled it from its sheath, and it shimmered in the light of the fire.
“It reminded me of your stories, of the magic in them,” I said.
“Joy. A shamshir—a magical sword from all fairy tales. It’s exquisite. I shall hang it right above the fireplace, allow it to remind me of you, our friendship, and your boys fighting with their invisible swords.”
He ran his hand across the top of the metal sword, and then his finger slipped ever so slightly. A thin line of blood appeared on his forefinger as he withdrew his hand.
“Oh, Jack.” I took his hand in mine and bent to kiss the wound, a quick and natural reaction to injury.
He withdrew quickly and with such deft sureness that my lips landed on nothing but air. He put his finger against the wool of his coat and laughed. “I’m such a clumsy bloke. It’s no wonder they never let me play sports.”
Red heat filled my chest. He turned to place the sword on the mantle, and the structure of his chin, the lines of his smile, caught the firelight. A line of poetry surged forward in my mind: the accidental beauty of his face.
I was dangerously close to allowing this love to become what it must not.
He set the sword on top of the fireplace mantle. “Thank you, Joy. Look at it up there, so stately.”
Together we sat on the chairs and stared into the fire, the quiet stretching into sleepiness until I shifted in my seat. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about a book I just finished. It really must be your next.”
“Tell me.”
“I think I’ve told you of Arthur Clarke. He’s one of the sci-fi boys in London. He’s written a book titled Childhood’s End. He’s sold so many copies, hit the jackpot if you will.”
“Jackpots aren’t always the best things,” he said. “But it will be my next read so we might talk about it.” He leaned forward, his eyes catching the shadows of the fire. “It is jolly well one of my favorite things to do—talk about stories with you.”
“And I, you.” I glanced around the room. “Where has Warnie gone?”
“He fell asleep in his chair when you tucked the boys into bed. I helped him upstairs.” Jack’s voice held the anxiety and grief I knew well—that of loving another who is destroying himself with alcohol.
“I’m sorry, Jack. I know how you feel.”
“Just when I believe he’s kicked it, he hasn’t. It’s the war. It still lives in him, and he tries to quiet it. I’d rather not speak of it. But thank you for your sympathy. It’s a hell of a thing.”
I did reach for him then, across the space between us. I touched his skin, the small space between his shirt sleeve and wrist. I ran my finger down to the knuckles, a gentle trace, and then gave his hand a squeeze of sympathy. This time he didn’t withdraw.
“You love Warnie deeply and with such devotion. If only everyone in the world had such love.”
“He’s my brother,” Jack said, as if that answered all doubt. “When Mother died, I would have also if not for him.”
I withdrew my hand from his wrist and settled back into the chair. “Jack, have you ever been in love?”
He laughed, and in his way scattered the question across the room like ash. “If I ever find the beautiful blonde I’ve been looking for all my life, I will let you know.”
His joke, so like him to deflect, hurt no differently than if he’d taken down the sword from above the mantle and swiped it across my heart. But I tried to laugh. “I will keep my eyes out for you.” I smiled.
“Of course I’m being cheeky, Joy.”
“Your humor, Jack, you use it to hide your heart, an armor to keep anything from touching it. I know because I do the same.”
He was silent for a long moment, and I wondered if I had crossed a boundary. When he spoke it was with his face set to the roaring fire. “Do you know the German word sehnsucht?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “The idea of an inconsolable longing for what we don’t understand. You believe that longing is for God. Or heaven. And that we can confuse it with longing for someone or something else.”
He leaned forward, and for a moment I thought he might touch me, but no. “This deep and abiding friendship means more to me than I can say.”
“Yes.” I bowed my head. “It means more than we can say.”
The morning came bright and clear, the fog lifting for the first time since we’d arrived. By the time I appeared in the kitchen after a restless night’s sleep, the boys had already gobbled down their breakfast and set off into the woods to say their farewells to the pond and the kilns and the forest itself. I dropped our packed bags by the front door. Jack sat at the wooden kitchen table still in his lounging clothes, a cigarette already lit. “You must eat before you leave,” he said.
“I’m not hungry.” I patted the packed bags. “I’ll eat when I arrive back at Avoco so I don’t get travel sick.”
The boys then burst back into the kitchen, a whirling cyclone of my sons.
“Well, boys,” Jack said. “I have something here you might enjoy.”
They stopped dead still, bundled in their coats, and looked at him.
“What is it?” Douglas asked eagerly.
Davy adjusted his crooked glasses and leapt forward.
From the side table Jack produced typeset pages. “This is the newest Narnian book, set to come out this year. I’ve dedicated it to the both of you. It’s called The Horse and His Boy.”
Davy removed his gloves and took the pages from Jack’s hands and held them against his chest. “No one has read it yet?” he asked with wide eyes.
“Only my publisher, and your mother, who typed some of the pages for me. And I’ll tell you a couple secrets about it, if you please.”
“Yes!” Douglas’s enthusiasm could not be bound. He, like his mother, could not hide what bubbled below the heart.
Jack lowered his voice and placed his hands on either side of his full mouth as if telling a grand secret. “I wrote it before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released. The events happen before The Silver Chair.”
“What’s it about?” Davy asked, looking down at the treasure he held in his hands.
Jack sat up and resumed his normal voice. “After the last chapter in Wardrobe, there is a battle in Narnia.”
“What happens?” Davy’s voice dropped.
“I won’t tell you what happens, but I will tell you my favorite part.”
“What is that?” Davy asked.
“The battle cry.” Jack paused for great effect until the boys were straining forward. “Narnia and the North!” he said with great gusto and lifted his hand to the sky. “Narnia and the North!”
“Where home is,” I said softly. “North.”
“Yes, true home.” His kind eyes held such a look that I would have believed it love if he had not told me otherwise in every possible way.
“Home?” Davy asked as if just remembering we didn’t truly have one. “Where will we spend Christmas if we don’t have a home? What about . . . Santa?”
I switched on my brightest voice. “Oh, Davy, we do have a home. Avoco House. We’ll get a little tree and I’ll cook turkey and Mrs. Bagley and some other friends are coming to eat with us. Jack.” I turned to him. “This is too kind. Dedicating the book to them.”
“I could not think of any two boys more worthy.” He smiled at them.
“Early Merry Christmas,” Warnie said as he entered the kitchen. I hugged him and breathed the stale whiskey and sweat, and that very aroma punched a hole in time: I thought of Bill coming home late, this same smell wafting through the house like evil. I released Warnie and stared at him, grounding myself in the present, in England, in Oxford, at the Kilns.
With lavish good-byes and promises to return, my sons and I strode with the new manuscript in the opposite direction of the Kilns.
Somehow I felt that we were a new kind of family. Who was to say there was only one way to love someone? I knew he loved us; words didn’t have to be spoken. And this, for now, would be enough.