(Love) You can be very sure it will not kill you,
But neither will it let you sleep at night
“SONNET III,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I saw the letter from another woman on his desk, and all propriety and all goodness told me not to read it, but my eyes could not turn away. I don’t know how I couldn’t have read it, although it had been a full two blissful weeks in Oxford with Jack and my sons, and I had no need to go ruin it.
The four of us had been a kind of family—we traipsed around Oxfordshire and took a train out to Studley Priory, a country estate that had been both a nunnery and a sanatorium—what a combination! We’d gobbled clotted cream and biscuits while the boys rampaged about with the animals, from Dalmatian puppies to hamsters.
Through those summer weeks, the house became an author’s workshop—Jack and I toiling away on all of our projects. My work was still as important to me as it had always been, and I fit it into the open spaces of our days.
We worried about Warnie, and Jack called the facility to check on him every day, hoping for the news that he was sober and well enough to travel. Meanwhile, the boys turned the Kilns acreage into their personal playground—playing cricket on the lawn, picking fruit, building forts, fishing in the pond. Shotover Hill became their conquering lands. There was chess at night, and walls and piles of books to peruse.
It was a rainy evening when I found Davy reading a French translation of Prince Caspian, muttering out loud and slowly—French words in a part American/part English accent.
“I’m proud of you, Davy. Greek and French and Latin all there in your brain; you’re brilliant.” I hugged him so tightly that he had to push me away.
The time passed in this pleasant way until it was midmonth and the news arrived that Warnie was being released from the hospital and was healthy enough to travel. Jack was to launch off to Ireland the next day. I’d slept in later than usual that morning and wandered upstairs to look for him in his office. So why I felt I must wreck this peaceful bliss with my nosiness, I’ll never understand.
The room was empty but for the things of him: the papers, letters, notes, and manuscript pages written in his tight cursive handwriting; the pipe tobacco and ash-scattered rug. I went to the desk checking for pages to type. The letters he’d answered that morning were piled to the left. The sealed letters, his answers, were stamped and stacked to the right.
He tossed letters after he answered them. I knew this because when I’d asked if he still had my first letter, he’d told me, “No. If something were to happen to me, I’d never want a greedy chap to come in here and gather my personal correspondence. People write to me of the most personal things.”
“As I did,” I’d said.
“Yes, as you did.”
I lifted the morning pile of correspondence—it was from a wide array of people on varying subjects: Oxford-related news, dinner date requests, notes from the publisher, a letter from Dorothy Sayers, another from the Socratic Committee from which he’d just resigned. There were authors soliciting advice, children who asked if Aslan was real or if they might find Lucy in London. And every morning Jack rose and read this pile and answered nearly every letter.
I glanced to the right and saw the one unfinished answer in his handwriting—it was to Ruth Pitter. He hadn’t finished or sealed this one yet.
I knew who she was, of course—a renowned poet and a friend of his. He sometimes visited her garden; he’d told me as much. Was it wrong for me to look? He’d written to Ruth on the stationery I’d given to him as a thank-you gift after the last visit: thick cotton paper with his name and the Oxford address on the top right corner, the emblem of Magdalen College stamped on the top middle in gold filigree. I’d spent an hour picking it out, designing the paper at the custom stationery store in London with the last few of my month’s shillings.
My Dear Ruth,
No “Miss Pitter,” or any other formal name. “My”?
I am writing to you on this fancy stationery given to me by the American.
“The American”? Bloody hell.
Your poetry collection is brighter each and every time I read it: drunk or sober, it’s always a delight.
I wanted to look away, to wrench my attention from the private letter, but I could not. Wormwood had hold of my eyes, setting them farther down the page.
Surely you shall come to Oxford one day soon? Whether for the books or the shopping? If so, let us lunch together.
I glanced to the bottom of the page.
Yours, C. S. Lewis
It was in the same fashion he wrote to me, no different. No better. No worse, yet still it hurt. Her poetry a delight? A bright light?
My throat clenched; my stomach sank and swooped up. This was jealousy, and I knew well its taste and its vertigo. I turned away from the letter and searched for a sheaf of her poetry. I could not help myself. But as much as I wanted to read the rest of the letter, the goodness in Jack seeped through the office. If it had been Bill’s papers, I would have torn through them, reading every word to find some infidelity, some betrayal. To invade the privacy of a good and decent man seemed far worse even if logically I knew it to be the same.
On the side table by the sitting chair were sheets of her poetry. I glanced at only three: “Early Rising,” “If You Came,” and “As When the Faithful Return.”
And I was sad, O my true love, for the love left unsaid.
This was clearly a woman poet, brilliant and clear-minded, lucid and soaked with longing, expressing her love, which was subtle and meant to be discovered. This was his kind of woman—aloof and sedated. Not me—open and outspoken. Nothing was left unsaid with me.
He was right—her poetry was a delight. A bright light. And an admission. She loved him; I had no doubt. But did he love her?
She was willing to hint, while I was too eager to admit.
She hoped; I reached.
She was coy; I asked forthright.
Dizzy with envy, I finally turned away from Ruth’s poetry. Tears hung on the edges of my lower eyelids, blurring my vision.
What if I placed one of my sonnets on top of Pitter’s poetry? What if Jack saw my growing need for his touch? If he glanced down and expected her “bright light” and instead saw my words, “I take you for my pleasure,” or even “Forever the tingle and flash of my body embracing you.” What if he read my poetry about bodies coming together, of its ecstasies, of the ways I’d loved other men? Would he want to read of this?
I shuddered.
What if the reason he didn’t love me as I was growing to love him was because he loved another?
“This is all yours for two weeks.” Jack spread his arms out wide in his Magdalen rooms. “I want you to make yourself at home. Write to your heart’s content while I’m gone.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I walked to the open window facing the deer park. A long whinny, which sounded more like a horse than a deer, echoed across the grass. I turned to Jack and removed my glasses, wiped at my eyes. “First you pay for Dane Court. Then you put us up for holiday. And now this?”
“My pleasure.” He paused. “All day I’ve been trying to find the right moment to tell you this news—I’ve been given the job at Cambridge. Seems after I turned them down twice they offered it to someone else; therefore there were days when I thought it was over. But she didn’t take the job, and now it’s mine. I start in the new year.”
I threw my arms around him, startling both of us. “That’s wonderful,” I said and stepped away.
“Yes, I believe it is.”
I smiled at him and jostled his arm. “A new job, by golly.”
“Yes,” he said. “Even this old man can start over.”
“I do believe you can.” I braved another touch to his arm.
Jack took two steps toward me, but no more.
Should I tell him what I’d seen on his desk? Ask him if he was in love with Ruth Pitter? The questions quivered below my throat, wanting escape.
He spoke first, almost as if he could read my mind. “I read another one of your poems last night, ‘One Last Spring.’ Did I tell you that? I meant to if I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t.” A warm blush filled my face.
“‘Out of my heart the bloodroot.’” He clasped his hands behind his back and quoted my words. “It’s no wonder I quit poetry, I have neither ear nor hand for it as you do.”
“Thank you.” I leaned against the windowsill and soaked in the beauty of his voice reciting my poetry. “You can’t know how much that means to me, to have my words praised—especially since Macmillan turned down my Queen Cinderella proposal. I’ll have to write the entire thing to sell it.”
“Then you will.”
“Do you ever think of writing one more Narnian chronicle? Just one more? Because you know it will sell?”
“I think it’s best to put an end to it when the readers are clamoring for more rather than when they’re weary of the whole everlasting thing. There will be seven of them published in seven years. Sometimes you must know when it’s enough.”
Discernment fell down on me with great weight: You must know when it’s enough. I would not ask him about Ruth Pitter or his feelings for her or for anyone else. I must know when it is enough. And I must trust God—again and again I was learning and relearning to trust the Truth who had entered my sons’ nursery. The rusty and decrepit habit of trusting in only myself, only abiding in my own ability to make things happen, died hard and slow.
I glanced up to see outside the opposite window, where groups ambled toward the deer park and riotous flowers blossomed in the gardens.
“Tourists,” I said, pointing out the window at a family with four children running behind. “I was one, and now here I am in your Magdalen rooms. It seems quite miraculous, Jack.”
“They will knock on the door, you’ll see.” He came to my side, and together we looked down at the park. “They expect King Caspian or a man in long black robes with the keys to God’s kingdom, and all they ever find is an old balding man with glasses.” He laughed, and the family below looked up. He waved, and they wandered away.
I rested my head on his shoulder, only for a moment. “Thank you, Jack. Thank you so much.”
He’d leave in the morning, and the boys and I would have the run of the house and gardens, and I of his college rooms.
This was dangerous territory in the land of love—he wasn’t yet gone, and I already missed him.