Once Upon a Wardrobe(51)

“That’s as good a guess as any,” Megs says.

“It’s more than a guess,” George says. He wants his sister to truly understand what he means. “Like when you know the answer to a math equation but you don’t know how you got there.”

She nods and her lips draw in and there are red splotches mixed in with her freckles. He knows the look; she is going to cry and doesn’t want to.

George also knows the stories are over, even as in some ways they are just beginning.

He can’t find anything else to say, so he closes his eyes to imagine the man who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He sees C. S. Lewis walking at the edge of a river on a small island behind Magdalen College. A lion is hiding in the far woods, and the man’s heart is filling with a truth that years and years later he pours onto paper—another myth, another story to reveal the truth.





Twenty

It All Began with a Picture




It is three days before Christmas, and even as I’d spent the previous night in my own bed at home, telling myself not to bother Mr. Lewis again, that Mum needs my help preparing for Christmas dinner while Dad works extra hours to get the Christmas orders in at market, and that George knows I’ve reached the end of Mr. Lewis’s stories, I arrive uninvited at the Kilns with a written list in my pocket. I stand in front of the green door, waiting for someone to answer my knock. I still have questions.

I must ask now or never.

Mrs. Rounder, her hair still askew, opens the door and wipes her hands on her apron.

“Miss Devonshire! So happy you’ve returned. You know, we’ve been getting the most annoying visitors. People who think that if they come here they will find a knight in shining armor or the White Witch. They arrive just knocking at our door as if this wasn’t a private home. But the brothers will be happy to see you!”

The aroma of sage and rosemary fills the hallway as I enter. Something’s cooking.

“Mr. Lewis is in the common room. Go on in,” she says.

I slip off my coat and hang it on the peg by the door before entering the common room. There, before the bright fire, sit Mr. Lewis and Warnie, right as can be. Each has a book in his hand and a cup of tea at his side. Looking up, both beam smiles at me.

“Hallo!” Mr. Lewis says. “Have a seat. What a surprise. We didn’t expect you today.”

“I know.” I stumble as I walk in, suddenly self-conscious. It was rude to just show up. They might have had holiday guests. I dig into my satchel and pull out my notebook. “I don’t want to bother, but I have a list of questions. They are for George, so forgive me for the bother.”

“Oh, these questions are from George?” Mr. Lewis taps his pipe against the edge of his chair and ash falls to the carpet. “Are you sure they aren’t for you?”

“No!” My defensiveness flares and then sinks under his warm gaze, beneath Warnie’s laugh. “Well, maybe a little.”

Mr. Lewis sets down a G. K. Chesterton book and grows serious. “What else would you like to know? Is there something you don’t understand?”

“I do want to understand. And I still can’t answer when George asks, ‘Where did the lion come from? The faun? The lamppost and the names of the children?’ So now I ask you, Mr. Lewis, are they real in this world at all?”

“I don’t fully know,” he says. Mr. Lewis’s voice is quiet but sincere. Maybe I have disappointed him by not seeing what needs seeing in the stories he’s told me.

“But how can you not know? It is you who wrote it.”

“Miss Devonshire, I had hoped to show you, and show George, how our lives unfold in so many different ways. How our individual stories become part of something much bigger. But I see now that you need more.”

“I only need more because I want to tell George where it all came from.”

“Here is the thing, Miss Devonshire: you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they write their books. When the story is finished, he has forgotten a good deal of what writing it was like.”

“How on earth can you not know about a book that you wrote?”

“I shall end our litany of stories with the place I usually start when asked about Narnia. My story all began with a picture. One day when I was sixteen years old, I imagined a faun with an umbrella carrying packages in a snowy wood. Then, on another day when I was in my forties, I decided to write the story that went with the picture. But even then, I didn’t write so much of it. Not until two years ago.”

I nod, feeling something opening up, a cloud cover breaking under blue skies.

“Meanwhile,” he said, “I’d been having dreams about lions, and I’d read my friend Charles Williams’s book—you heard me mention him, another one of the Inklings. He’s gone now.” Mr. Lewis closes his eyes and grief runs past; I feel it.

Warnie pipes up as if to fill in the spots where Mr. Lewis is faltering. “Charles’s book was called The Place of the Lion.”

Mr. Lewis nods. “But who is to say where the idea of Aslan arrived in my own story?”

My heart beats fast and I lean closer. “Aslan is George’s favorite. He draws that lion everywhere—picture after picture of him.” I pause before I tell Mr. Lewis that he is in the pictures too. I am not entirely sure how he will take this, so I keep it to myself. “Who is he? Who is Aslan?”