Jack quotes from Shadowlands (1993)

Jack, what a surprise!

What do you mean, surprise?

Not out plying your trade?

What trade is that Christopher?

I see you as a species of medieval pedlar selling relics of the saints of dubious authenticity.

Harry

Fair play, Christopher. Jack’s no Roman. I can vouch for that.

I speak metaphorically, Harry. Jack’s trade is the manufacture and supply of easy answers to difficult questions.

Warnie

Why is the beer in this pub always cold? Cold beer. Chills the stomach. Has no taste.

I have a complaint about the wardrobe.

Complaint ? Our children love it.

I will not have another blasted conversation about Jack’s blasted nursery.

No. No, listen. Listen. In the book you describe the house as belonging to an old professor who has no wife and yet… You say when the little girl enters the magic wardrobe she finds it full of fur coats.

Very good, Eddie. Not bad.

It’s simple. Simple. It belongs to the professor's old mother. Simple.

So to reach the magic world the child must push through the mother’s fur?

No, John, it’s not like that hand-me down Freudianism.

Harry

But the imagery is Christian surely.

No, Harry it’s what it is. It’s just itself. It’s…. It’s just magic: Magic. Look. Let me show you. The child steps into the wardrobe. The coats are thick and heavy.

What about the fur?

Fur’s not important, John. The child must push through. They’re pressing close, almost suffocating and suddenly there’s white light. Crisp cold air. Trees. Snow. Total contrast you see. It’s a gateway to a magical world.

Another letter form Mrs. Gresham.

Warnie

I can’t remember any of it.

Jewish Communist Christian American.

Warnie

You may ask me how I know it was strange if I’ve forgotten it. Can’t answer that one.

I like her letters she can be quite sharp sometimes. Listen to this, Warnie. She says :”I can’t decide whether you’d rather be the child caught in the spell or the magician casting it.” Her letters are rather unusual. She writes as if she knows me somehow. And, I suppose there is something of me in my books, isn’t there?

Warnie

I expect it’s just the American style. Americans don’t understand about inhibitions.

Oh she is coming to England. And she’s coming to Oxford. She wants to meet us.

Warnie

Well she can’t come here.

No of course not, but she does suggest tea in a hotel.

Warnie

Tea is safe. A hotel is safe. Though she might be mad.

No I don’t think so. She does write poems.

Warnie

Poems ??? She‘ll be barking.

Warnie

You won’t be too agreeable, will you Jack?

Don’t worry, Warnie. I won’t.

Warnie

She’ll turn out to be writing a dissertation on wardrobes. She’ll ask you whether she can come and watch you ”create”. She’ll say ”I’ll sit in the corner. You’ll never know I’m there.”

It’s only tea, Warnie. An hour or so with polite conversation and then we go home and everything goes on just as it always has.

Joy

Jack don’t you sometimes just burst to share the joke?

What joke ?

Joy

Well here's your friends thinking we're unmarried and up to all sorts of wickedness, when all along we're married and up to nothing at all.

Which friends?

Joy

God, you can be so hard work sometimes. So what do you do here? Think great thoughts?

Teach mainly.

Joy

What do they do? Sit at your feet and gaze up at you in awe?

No, not at all.

Joy

I bet they do.

Joy

We have some fine old battles in here, I can tell you that.

Joy

Which you win. Must be quite a boost for you, being older and wiser than all of them. Not to mention your readers.

What?

Joy

Your readers and that gang of friends of yours. All very well trained not to play out of bounds.

What are you talking about?

Joy

Of course there’s Warnie. Not much competition there.

That’s nonsense. And what about Christopher Riley. He never let’s me get away with anything, you know that.

Joy

Except doubt and fear and pain and terror.

Where did all that come from?

Joy

I’ve only now just seen it how you’ve arranged a life for yourself where no one can touch you. Everyone that’s close to you is either younger than you, or weaker than you, or under your control.

Why…why are you getting at me? I thought..I thought we were friends?

Joy

I don’t know that we are friends not the way you have friends anyway. Sorry, Jack.

I don’t understand.

Joy

No, I think you do. You just don’t like it, nor do I.

I wonder what it is that everybody wants from me?

You know that is the first question I have ever heard you ask that sounds like you don’t know the answer.

Oh, is that good? Is that what you want? Ignorance? Confusion?

Look, I just don’t think I see my way ahead as clearly as you do.

Shadows.

What?

It’s one of my stories. We live in the Shadowlands. The sun is always shining somewhere else. Round a bend in the road. Over the bough of a hill.

I want to marry you Joy, I want to marry you before God and the world.

Joy

Make an honest woman out of me?

No not you. It’s me that hasn’t been honest. Look what it takes me to see sense.

Joy

You think I have overdone it?

Please don’t leave me, Joy.

Joy

You know Jack, back where I come from there's this quaint old custom. When a guy makes up his mind to marry a girl, he asks her. It's called proposing.

It’s the same here.

Joy

Did I miss it?

Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man... who needs you more than he can bear to say... who loves you, even though he hardly knows how?

Joy

Just this once.

Harry

Well, she is your friend of course. But, well she's not...family.

She’s not my wife.

Harry

No of course not.

Of course not. It’s impossible. It’s unthinkable. How could Joy be my wife? I'd have to love her, wouldn't I? I'd have to care more about her than anyone else in this world. I'd have to be suffering the torments of the damned. The prospect of losing her...

Harry

I'm so sorry, Jack. I didn't know.

Nor did I, Harry.

Joy

We almost made it.

Now I don’t want to be somewhere else anymore. Not waiting for anything new to happen. Not looking around the next corner, not the next hill. Here now. That’s enough.

Joy

That’s your kind of happy, isn’t it?

Yes. Yes it is.

Joy

It is not going to last, Jack.

We shouldn’t think about that now. Lets’ not spoil the time we have together.

Joy

It doesn’t spoil it. I makes it real. Let me just say it before this rain stops, and we go back.

What’s there to say?

Joy

That I’m going to die and I want to go with you then, too. The only way I can do that is if I’m able to talk to you about it now.

I’ll manage somehow. Don’t worry about me.

Joy

No, I think it can be better than just managing. What I am trying to say is that the pain then is part of the happiness now. That’s the deal.

What’s happening to me, Warnie? I can’t see her anymore. I can’t remember her face.

Warnie

I expect it's shock.

I’m so afraid of never seeing her again--thinking that suffering is just suffering after all. No cause, no purpose, no pattern.

Warnie

I…I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.

Nothing, there is nothing to say. I know that now. I’ve just come up against experience, Warnie. Experience is a brutal teacher…but you learn. My God you learn.