Once Upon a Wardrobe(10)

Endless passageways ran through the family’s house. Jack would run down hallways and through empty room after empty room. Sometimes when the sunlight fell through the windows, the house was just as jolly as a forest glade. Jack knew that anywhere he looked could be magic if he saw it with his imagination. Peter Rabbit might scurry under the dining room door. Farmer McGregor might be hiding in the vegetable garden, and Celtic faeries could be dancing beneath an oak tree’s bough of leaves outside the window.

With his “weak constitution,” Jack wasn’t allowed outside as much as other boys. That was fine by him, because the house was also full of innumerable books, so many that when they moved from the old house to this one, which his father had built for them, Jack didn’t understand where all the books had come from. They seemed to have simply appeared.

Now sick enough to stay in bed but not too sick to read, Jack leaned over to pick up his Squirrel Nutkin book. The bedroom door creaked open and Lizzie, his nanny, with her dark Irish curls springing from beneath her white cap and her blue eyes so vivid they seemed to spark, entered. She spoke in her thick Belfast brogue.

“Jacksie.” She pulled up a chair and sat next to his bed, then set a cuppa on the bedside table and grinned. “I am here to regale you with the one tale worth the telling.”

This was his clue that a story was to begin. Jack smiled at her and sat up straight. He put down the book and picked up his tea.

“Across the western sea is an invisible world, a parallel world where one year of time equals seven of ours; where the fairies live in the sidhe, the people of the Goddess Danu.”

The familiarity of this beginning soothed Jack and he leaned in, wanting more of the Tuatha Dé Danann and their adventures.

“This,” she crooned, “is the story of King Nuada.”

“Tell the one where he loses his hand and—” The bedroom door opened, and the loamy aroma of earth and adventure blew in with Warnie.

Warnie reached Jack’s bedside in hasty steps, his smile at the ready. “I have something for you!”

The metal lid of a biscuit tin rested in Warnie’s hand. He placed it in the nest of Jack’s palm. A tiny garden made of twigs and moss rested inside the lid, a miniature world as mightily real as the ones Lizzie had begun to spin from the air. Jack stared at the mossy collection and a feeling passed through him, a warmth and an opening of his heart that he could barely put into words: a yearning, a longing, a wanting . . .

Jack held that tiny world his brother made for him and also held the deep feeling, even as the day of his brother’s departure approached like a speeding train.

For the remaining hours and days they had together at Little Lea, the brothers played chess, checkers, and Halma. They read books and created their new land called Boxen.

When Warnie finally departed for boarding school—across the sea to England by ferry and then on a train to Wynyard in Hertfordshire—Jack guarded Boxen and the miniature garden as if his attention to this made-up world would hurry Warnie home to him.

*

One frigid November night, after Warnie had been gone for weeks, the house felt emptier than ever. Mother tucked Jack into bed, holding The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. Jack thought for a moment to protest that he was nine years old now and much too grown-up for such stories, but that would have been a lie. His love for the story was greater than his pride.

Mother sat next to Jack’s bed and a light snow began to gather outside the window, a tinkling of sleet and a slip of white building up on the outside windowsill. Jack imagined Warnie in some common residence hall with other boys snoring about him and possibly not enough blankets to warm him. But Mother, with her long black hair piled on top of her head and her warm voice of love, began to read.

Jack’s mournful thoughts faded.

He could almost see the impertinent Squirrel Nutkin slip under the door, running from the owl, Old Brown. Nutkin and Twinkleberry tripped across the story, and Nutkin almost lost his tail when he taunted the owl.

Jack snuggled deeper in the blankets. Safe. Warm.

When the story ended, Mother kissed him good night. As she went to turn off the light, she spied a pile of papers. She lifted them and held them under the puddle of lamplight. “Jacksie, what is this?”

“I wrote it. It’s called My Life.” Jack beamed with pride. “Everyone in the house is in the story.”

Mother bent closer to the light as she flipped through the pages. Jack held his breath; he wanted her to love it. Finally a laugh erupted when she read out loud, “‘A bad temper, thick lips and generally wearing a jersey.’ This is how you describe your father? I am not so sure he’ll want to read this.”

“But it is true,” Jack said indignantly.

“All the same . . .” She read a few more pages, then looked to her son. “You include all the pets: our mouse; the canary, Pete; and our terrier, Tim! You are wonderful, my child, wonderful. You know, I was once a writer.”

“You were?” This was astounding. Mother always seemed as if she had only and ever been Mother.

“Yes. Someday I shall tell you about it. But for now, you must sleep.” She lifted the pages. “May I take these to read myself?”

“Yes! And, Mother?”

“Yes?”

“Only fourteen days until Warnie returns,” Jack said and rolled over to sleep.