Once Upon a Wardrobe(46)

I sink onto the chair and begin to gobble the dinner, realizing I haven’t eaten since the porridge early that morning before I caught the train at dawn. After I finish, Mum and I sit in amiable silence as sleet ticks against the windows. Day slinks toward night.

“Why did you return to Oxford today, dear? Are you concerned about your marks?”

I look up and shake my head. “Not at all. Have you been worried about that all day, Mum? I thought I told you; I took Mr. Lewis up on his offer to come to his rooms and tell me a few last stories.”

“You didn’t let this silly storytelling ruin your status at Somerville, then, aye?”

“Mum.” I pause because I want my words to be real and true. I want her to understand that although I had been the first to call Mr. Lewis’s stories silly, I no longer can. Indeed, I am well aware they have changed me. I don’t yet know how, but I want to convey this without worrying her.

She waits patiently, a wide-open space of love between us.

Finally I say, “It’s not silly.”

She nods, stands, then absently wipes the counter.

“I might have thought so too,” I say. “But there is something in his stories, Mum. Answers without answers.”

“You know that makes no sense, right, my dear Margaret Louise?”

“I know it sounds like it makes no sense.” I put down my teacup and dig into my satchel to bring out my notebook. “Look. It’s full of stories. Why would such an important man spend so much time with me if it weren’t meaningful? He wouldn’t do this if it meant nothing, if it were silly.”

Mum takes the notebook from me and opens it smack in the middle, reads a few lines quietly and looks as if she wants to say something, but George’s voice interrupts. He’s calling for us, and after a few steps down the hallway we are both at his side. I sit next to him in the chair and Mum perches at the end of his bed. She still holds my notebook open and continues our discussion.

“You’ve written all of this.” It is not a question.

“Only as much as I can remember. Mr. Lewis and I walk and we have tea and I can’t take notes, so some of it might not be exact, but it’s all true.”

“Why would he waste his time telling you about things like”—she runs her finger down the page—“a horrible boy who teases him in public school?”

George pipes in now with a sincere laugh that is his alone. “Maybe because that’s what Edmund is like when he teases Lucy about finding Narnia. Maybe the cruel boy who tortured Mr. Lewis for not being good at football shows up in Narnia as Edmund.”

Mother and I lift our brows, and Mother walks to the head of the bed, leans down, and kisses his forehead. “My brilliant son.”

I look at George and say, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

He sits up straight, then swings his legs over the edge of the bed. “Did he tell you more stories when you went to Oxford today?”

“He did, and I’m afraid these are the last. I can save one until Christmas.”

“We don’t know such things! He might tell you more.” He suddenly sounds to my ears like Mr. Lewis himself. “Now tell me everything,” he orders.





Eighteen

The First Start




Megs settles back in her chair and opens that black notebook that George has come to love so much. Its pages chronicle a man who turned all he was and all he is into a magical story about Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.

Mum leaves the room to clean up the dinner dishes and Megs begins to read. “Now we skip all the way to World War II. There were, astonishingly, only a little more than twenty years between the two wars. This means that men who fought in the First World War could fight again in the next, or their sons or their brothers or their nephews would be fighting in it.”

She pauses; they give each other a knowing look. Yes, they are in the middle of their own kind of war.

She continues. “Mr. Lewis told me that Warnie said it was like he went to sleep after the first war and had a pleasant dream and then was called back up to return.”

“Warnie had to go back?” George asks.

Megs nods. “But as you know, he returned unharmed. Now let me tell you what happened.”

George listens, moving over on the bed so his sister can climb in beside him. She scoots closer to him, and they are shoulder to shoulder, his head nestled against her. “Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”

“And not very far away,” he says.

“During the war, there was a government program called Operation Pied Piper. In 1939, the Nazis were taking over countries across Europe, and even France had fallen. But Britain held out, keeping Germany from totally dominating Europe. After Jack graduated from university, after a stint as a subbing philosophy tutor, he was eventually hired at Magdalen, where he still teaches today. He and Warnie had been living in the Kilns for nearly ten years already at this part of their story.”

She looks away from her notebook toward the memory of the story, as if finally getting the hang of telling a tale. She speaks in a soft voice.

George stood on a busy London street, where the threat of bombs was whispered day and night. Notices that read “Evacuation of Women and Children” fluttered from lamp posts and were slipped inside children’s school knapsacks.