Once Upon a Wardrobe(50)

He wipes a tear from his sister’s face. “Tell me what’s left in the notebook.”

“Well,” she says without even looking at it, “after that night with his friends, Mr. Lewis began to write books, almost a book a year—stories, allegories, and arguments for God’s very existence: The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. He wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce. He met with his writer friends, the Inklings, in a pub called The Eagle and Child—Bird and Baby is its nickname—every Tuesday between one and two in the afternoon.”

“Have you been there?” George asks.

“I have. It’s a lovely place, and they have gorgeous fish and chips.”

“Have you ever seen the Inklings there? Reading to each other and such?”

His sister shakes her head. “No, when they read their manuscripts out loud it was in Mr. Lewis’s Magdalen rooms on Thursday nights. They stopped meeting years ago, but they are all still friends. Mr. Lewis’s dearest Inkling, Charles Williams, has died. But this group of men all shared their stories and work.” She half smiles. “No women far as I can tell.”

“Did Mr. Lewis take Narnia to them? Did he read it to them when he wrote it?” George is afraid she’ll skip over the part that matters. The part where the author shares his story with his friends.

“Let me go on,” Megs says and opens the notebook once again. “One afternoon at the Bird and Baby, pints on the dark wood table, low lighting casting shadows across their pages, Jack turned to Tollers and a conversation among the Inklings began about what they should write next.”

She stops and takes his hand.

“Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”

George smiles and closes his eyes. “And not very far away . . . in a pub in Oxford.”

*

Jack, Tollers, Warnie, Hugo, and man named Dr. Havard, those Inklings who were there that afternoon at the Bird and Baby, were settled on chairs and on the long bench along the wall. Frothy pints, tobacco tins, and matchboxes littered the table under a circle of lamplight in a small alcove called the Rabbit Room. Wood-paneled walls almost glowed. The men’s hats hung on a stand in the corner with their coats.

Tollers, his thinning gray hair swept back from his high forehead, his angular features beginning to soften with age, tapped his pipe on the table and ordered another pint. Spectacles low on his nose, he said, “I despair for the state of children’s literature these days. They are reading pure rubbish.”

Jack nodded, his laughter at something Warnie had said fading. “Yes,” Jack said, “no more Edith Nesbit or Beatrix Potter. That’s true.”

“If we”—Tollers took a long swig of his pint, then slammed his hand on the table—“if we are to read something like that then . . .”

“We must write it,” Jack declared, crossed his right leg over his left, and nodded as if he’d just won a debate point.

There under the low-slung ceiling and on hard benches, with their rustling papers and ink-stained fingers, all the Inklings agreed.

Jack Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien decided they would write what they would have wanted to read when they were children. Tollers began working on a story called The Lost Road. His book The Hobbit was already a huge success. And Jack remembered the story with the four children who tumbled out of his pen in 1939.

One afternoon in the summer of 1948, after Jack had completed a lecture at the library and answered his correspondence, he sat down in his study at the Kilns and began the story.

“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy . . .”

And this time, he didn’t stop writing.

*

Megs ruffles the pages of her notebook, turning to the end. George interrupts the jolly good story to tell his sister, “Look at you!”

George sits straight and turns to her, placing his hand on her shoulders. “Did you just hear what you told? That was so beautiful. You described it perfectly. Megs, you’re . . . a storyteller!”

She blushes, truly blushes, and kisses George’s cheek. “This is fun.”

“So what did his friends think of it? Surely he brought those pages back to the pub, right? To the Inklings.”

“Yes. Some loved it, but sadly, Tollers didn’t like it so much. He said that Jack mixed up too many mythologies.”

George nods. “Maybe he did, but it worked to make something mighty, so what does that matter?”

Megs laughs at George, and a warm flush of love flows through his chest. She is everything good and true, he thinks.

George remembers something from the story and it rushes to the top like cream. “You said he also started his autobiography a few months before that. So he’s been writing about his life at the same time as he’s been writing about Narnia.”

“Oh, yes. Yes,” Megs says, kicking back a blanket. “Look at you, making connections that skipped right by me. Maybe that’s why he’s sharing it with us, his life, I mean, because he’s writing about it and it eased its way into Narnia. That’s as good a guess as any, but he’s working so hard on writing more Narnia stories, so I don’t know where his head is exactly. Maybe his thoughts are in both places—his life and Narnia . . . so . . .”

“Yes!” George exhales. “So maybe his imagination is in both places while he writes both books, real and made up, and they crisscross.” He closes his eyes and sees the stories, words weaving over and around each other, fashioning a net of a story to catch him in. “Like a web, all those stories making another story, flowing in and out of one another.”