Once Upon a Wardrobe(30)

“Oh, Megs, you are so lucky,” George says. “And look at you, telling a very good story about a walk in the woods.”

I feel surprise catch me. George is right. I described it differently, with more detail, I’d say, than I had before. “I know I’m lucky, George. I wish it could be you walking with the brothers. You’re the one who should be there, not me.”

A log in the fire pops, and we both startle and laugh. “Go on. What else did you talk about?” George asks.

“I told him I looked for Narnia in his woods the way he looked for Wagner’s story in the nature of Little Lea. I’ve already figured he isn’t too keen on me trying to get something factual from his stories. So I tried to get ’round him. I asked if he wrote a fairy tale because he liked fairy tales.”

“And?” George asks.

“He told me his friend Mr. Tolkien says, ‘Myth-making is the art of the sub-creator.’ And then Mr. Lewis stomped his foot against a tree trunk, banging snow from his boot.” I smile, hoping it tells my brother how much I love him, how I wish he could stomp through the snow with Mr. Lewis and that I am doing it for him. But I do believe the smile also tells him that this adventure, the one he sent me on, is one I am beginning to enjoy.

“Then he told me something else.”

“What?” He nudges me.

“He told me that when he was young, his secret and imaginative life were quite separate from his real life. He said his imaginative life was as important as breathing—or I think that’s what he said. He told me he never confuses the two, the real and the imaginary. Even Boxen wasn’t something they put themselves into but something they created. And Wagner’s world—it wasn’t something to believe in. It was something that brought him that feeling of joy.”

“Joy,” George repeats the word. “It even tastes good saying it, doesn’t it?”

I laugh and pull him closer.

“I wonder,” George says. “What was it about that story—of all the stories he’d read? Why the Norse one that took him over? He had the Greek ones and the Celtic ones and—”

“I asked him the same question. He said he had a poet friend named Charles Williams who once wrote a line that says, ‘the sky turned round,’ and that’s how it felt for him when he found Wagner’s opera, as if the sky had turned round.”

“Have you felt it, sister? Have you felt that joy?”

I want to answer him. I close my eyes. “I think so. When I solve a problem or equation that seems impossible, it’s like there’s some kind of light breaking through, or the knowing leads to some kind of satisfaction . . . and maybe joy. Or when I walk outside on a spring afternoon and the first crocus is born from the snow and the sunlight runs across the spider webs like messengers from tree to tree, that’s when I remember something, something I’ve forgotten and is waiting for me, something larger than me. And then it’s gone. And I want it back. I think that’s what Mr. Lewis is talking about.”

“Like when you finish a story and you wish you could read it like you’d never read it before. Like you want to read it for the first time again,” George says.

“I think so,” I say. I pause while our breaths synchronize. I ponder whether I want to tell George the next question I asked Mr. Lewis.

I decide I will.

“I also asked him what his favorite parts of the Norse myths were.”

“And?”

“He said ‘Northernness,’ and then he said ‘tragedy.’”

“Yes,” George said as if Mr. Lewis’s wisdom had reached out and beyond the countryside, past the trees and then over the train tracks, and landed smack in the middle of the common room at the Kilns. “Tragedy.”





Twelve

The Other Professor




George pulls at the blanket around his legs and looks to his sister. He wants to hear another story. He wants the stories to last forever.

Nothing does, of course.

Not even winter in Narnia. Even it was finally broken.

“Tell me the next one you brought home?” he says to her and she nods.

His sister can’t see what he sees, and she can’t hear what he hears, and that’s okay. Because she’s doing her best to turn facts into story, and he knows how to take it the rest of the way.

“Once upon a wardrobe,” Megs says. He grins and she continues, “Not very long ago.”

“And not very far away,” he says.

“Sixteen-year-old Jack Lewis arrived at a train station . . .”

The fire burns low in their cozy living room. George closes his eyes, then the pop of the fire turns into the click clack of a train arriving fast, smoke pouring from its stack, its brakes squealing into the Surrey station at the town of Great Bookham.

In the crisp September air, a crowd pushed and shoved to disembark the black train before the men in suits and the women in tight-waisted dresses waiting on the platform climbed the stairs into the car. A young man stepped off the train.

Jack was taller now and he carried a valise. His brown hair caught the wind of the train as it departed, leaving him looking around for a man he didn’t know and hadn’t ever met.

William Thompson Kirkpatrick would recognize Jack Lewis, or so Jack had been told, because he had been Jack’s father’s headmaster once a long time ago and, more recently, Warnie’s tutor before Warnie had set off for Sandhurst to train in the British army. Jack thought of his brother training for war. Over and over he dreamed of Warnie caught in a battle or stranded in a field. Jack worried for his brother and tried to imagine him slaying every dragon, defeating every giant, conquering every Fenrir-type wolf of Germany that he might cross.