Once Upon a Wardrobe(4)
“You’re rarely wrong, sister, but you are now. It’s not a children’s book. It might look like it on the cover, but it’s a book for everyone. Please, Megs. I need to know if Narnia is real.”
“Of course it’s not real. It’s a story, like Squirrel Nutkin and that book you like about the girl who dropped into a hole in the ground.”
“Alice,” he says. “This is different. I know you think the whole world is held together by some math formula.” His voice has an unaccustomed annoyance in it. “But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the world is held together by stories, not all those equations you stare at.” He’s rarely angry, and this might not even be anger but something sparks up like a quick flame.
“My, my, I see.” I feel my eyebrows lifting. “You’ve definitely given this some serious thought.”
“Please. Just ask Professor Lewis, Megs. This book of his is different. It’s as real as Dad’s apple tree outside, as real as Mum’s flowers, surely as real as this house. I need to know where it came from.”
George doesn’t have to say any more, because I realize the answer he wants means life and death to him. If my little brother needs to know where Narnia came from, I will find out.
“I will ask him. I promise.”
From that moment, the weekend slips through my fingers like I’m trying to hold on to morning fog. I stay with George, and I study until my eyes burn. I flop around the house in an old wool sweater and fuzzy slippers. I think sometimes of the others at university who are having a chat in groups, and I feel so disconnected from them. It’s not that I don’t want to wear the latest fashion of pleated skirts and cute cardigans and have a smart exchange with a handsome boy in a waistcoat, but I just wasn’t made that way. It’s all so uncomfortable. I don’t understand how girls get their hair in sleek ponytails or wear it in bouffant while my dark curls spring wild in the wind about my round face. Their skin is smooth and porcelain while the freckles on my cheeks and nose will not be covered with powder. They call me cute; I’ve heard them. But not beautiful, never that.
Mathematics doesn’t care what I look like or what I wear, and that’s what I’ve been focused on all weekend. On Sunday, right before I prepare to leave, I sit down and open the book that has consumed my little brother, that has him hiding in the wardrobe and telling me about fauns and beavers and winters where Christmas never comes.
“I can read to you before I go to the train station,” I tell him. “Would you like that?”
He smiles. “Yes.”
“‘Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy . . .’”
I mean to read for just a few minutes, to show him I’m not such a prig about math, that I can read a fairy tale as well as anyone else. A few minutes, I said.
Just a few.
But when I look up hours later, having missed the train, and the final pages resonant in the room with my tears blurring the last lines, I understand my brother. I understand it all.
We must, absolutely must, find out where Narnia came from.
Three
Welcome to the Kilns
Three days have passed since I promised George I would ask his question of Mr. Lewis. And this is my third time trespassing on his property, which is called the Kilns. December snow reflects sunlight like sequins. The frozen lake behind the house is a silver-gray disc of light and shadow. I sit on a large boulder, which from just a few yards away looks like the head of a giant buried in a mound of winter white. Cold seeps through my trousers, and I don’t care. I’m enchanted by the hushed and mystical quality of the woodlands smack in the middle of Oxfordshire. I’m captured by the closest thing to magic—which I don’t believe in—that I’ve ever known.
I’ve done just as George has asked—well, almost—and I’ve tracked down C. S. Lewis, the tutor of English literature at Magdalen College. I’d have gone straight to Magdalen, but it doesn’t admit women as students. I am more often seen as a girl, not a woman, reminded constantly of my youth and diminutive size. They call me “little lady” and “darling” and “cutie.” Let me see them undo an equation as long as their arm; I doubt they can.
So instead of storming Magdalen’s gates, I’d decided to attend one of his famous talks. Although the event interfered with my study group, I found myself in the Examination Schools on High Street for a lecture on Edmund Spenser’s tales, something I cared little for, but I wanted to hear Mr. Lewis and try to ask him the only question that mattered to me: George’s question.
Mr. Lewis entered the dusty, crowded lecture hall in a flurry of black coat and hat and cold air. The room was crowded to its edges with enthusiastic students, some sitting on the windowsills and others standing at the back of the hall. While Mr. Lewis settled in at the lectern, still unwrapping his scarf, and now standing in his black gown, he at once commenced speaking in a bass and booming voice about Mr. Spenser and his book The Faerie Queen. “You may hear angels singing—or come upon satyrs romping . . .”
He lectured with such enunciation and clear speech that I heard every word. When he was nearly finished, he reached over and donned his coat and hat, then wound his scarf around his neck, lecturing all the while until he walked out the door.