Narnian fanfic
Inspired by reading Yuletide Treasures I decided to try and overcome my natural inclination towards shying away from fanfic and write a Narnian piece. It's maybe a bit overly long, and I'm not sure if it's very good, but I quite like it.
As a random note, I've never bought into the 'Susan doesn't get to go to Narnia because she grows up and discovers sex' line. First of all, I never read it that way. I always thought that Susan doesn't get to go to Narnia at the end of the Last Battle because she's stopped believing. She's stopped believing in things that are magical, or intangible, or not obviously real and material. Susan's ending is a warning against letting 'here' and 'now' and 'shiney stuff' become too important and all that there is to you. Furthermore, I never believed that it was a 'banned from Narnia forever' type ending. CS Lewis, in a letter, apparently said that he always hoped that Susan would find her way back to Narnia in the end.
That is what has been floating through my brain as I wrote.
As an additional, my timeline for the Chronicles of Narnia has the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe taking place in 1940, when Susan was about 13. Everything else, date-wise, is sort of based off that.
Finally, the pictures referred to in the text can be found here and here.
Return to Narnia
The drive home was relatively easy. It was a Sunday and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads. My battered old mini had had a few problems starting that morning, and had required a bit of TLC to coax the ignition into action, but now I was underway. Phil Collins was warbling on the radio, and the sun was shining brightly, giving the frost on the ground a kind of brittle beauty.
I hadn’t called home before I left London. I didn’t think I could bear to hear my father’s voice waver again. He had always been a rock before; calm and solid in the face of almost any crisis. But now my mother was dying, and my father was breaking apart as well.
It was a long drive home. My parents lived in Devon, in a glorious old house near Torquay. My father had bought it in 1962, when I was two years old, and he had been appointed QC. They had kept a flat in London as well, but Dolton had been our home. I remembered playing cricket on the lawn, and hide and seek in the long corridors and panelled rooms as a child.
I hadn’t been there for a while. For a long time my mother’s illness had kept her confined to London, and to the Harley Street doctors who were keeping her alive, but now all that was done, and last week she had called me herself to say that she was going home.
“Come home, darling,” she’d said. I had wanted to drive down the next day, but I was only 22 back then, with a dozen stupid and minor worries that kept me in London for nearly a week, while my mother - my mummy - got weaker and weaker.
Then my father called, and his voice was breaking on the phone.
“Please,” he’d said. “You need to come home. You really won’t have many more chances to say…” and his voice had trailed away. I hadn’t responded immediately, and so he continued. “She’s not got long. She’s been in good spirits since we got her home, but she’s rambling. Sometimes I don’t even think she knows quite what’s real and what isn’t anymore. Please come home.”
So I did.
Snow was falling, soft as kisses on my skin, when I clambered out of the car at Dolton. The sun had faded, and instead the sky was a deep velvet blue in the twilight, with stars gleaming like gemstones. It was a beautiful night, which seemed wrong. How could the world be so bright and so lovely at a time like this? Why wasn’t it raining? Why wasn’t the sky grey? That would have felt better, somehow.
My older brother, Edward, was already there. He was with my mother when I went upstairs. Mother was thin and drawn, with her poor bald head covered with a scarf, but she was conscious and she smiled at me when I came up.
“You made it, darling” she said. “I was just telling Edward that you’ll have to start decorating the house for Christmas. I don’t think I can do it myself this year.”
I smiled and nodded, eager to please.
“Of course we will,” I said. “We’ll make it a magical Christmas.”
My mother smiled, and there was something slightly odd about that smile. For a moment she seemed to be looking right through me.
“A magical Christmas?” she said. She looked directly at me, then, and smiled.“I think I would like some magic…”
And then she was silent. “I had a magical Christmas once,” she said. “It was a long time ago. And I suppose magic wasn’t the right word for it. Christmas happened, you see, in spite of the magic.”
I nodded, although I didn’t see at all. My mother smiled.
“I never really told you about that Christmas,” she said. “I’m ashamed to say that I forgot all about it. So many other things seemed important when I was young, and then after the accident…” and she was silent for a moment. “After the accident it was just too painful to remember.”
The accident I knew something about. My mother’s family had been killed in a train wreck, years before I had been born. She had had two brothers, and a sister, who had both died, along with their parents.
“I was angry, you know,” she said, and took my hand. “I couldn’t understand why any God would want me to go through that. I had to identify my little sister from the rings on her hand. That was all the police would show me. They kept the rest covered with a sheet, and told me that there was nothing to see. What God would do that?”
I realised that there were tears trickling down my mother’s cheeks now, and I squeezed her hand.
“Lucy was so pretty…” she said, and smiled slightly. “You know, you look just like she did when she was your age. I remember, she had one suitor who gave her a thousand forget-me-not flowers…”
Edward frowned slightly. “Lucy was a bit young for suitors, wasn’t she?” he said. “She was only seventeen when she died.”
My mother looked up at him and frowned slightly. “Lucy had suitors,” she said determinedly. “All the princes in those parts wanted her to be their queen…”
In the kitchen, while we were making tea, Edward said “Mother’s been like this for the last couple of days. I think she’s slipping into a dream world. You know that old picture up in her room? The Rossetti print?”
I nodded. “I bought her that,” I said, with some pride. “I found it in an old junk shop when I was fifteen, and bought it for mother for Christmas.”
Edward nodded.
“Well, last night she was looking at it, and said ‘Peter loved her so much. I didn’t understand at the time how very hard it must have been for him to leave her.”
“I asked her what she was talking about, and she said the picture reminded her of the girl her brother Peter wanted to marry.”
I stared at Edward, confused. “I don’t see what’s so strange about that.”
“Our uncle Peter never had a fiancée,” Edward said. “I checked with Dad. He was around when they all died. He went to the funerals. There was no girl there.”
I flicked a dish cloth at him. “You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “Maybe she was too upset to come. Maybe they broke up a while before the accident, and that’s why Mother’s talking about how he had to leave her. Our uncle was…what…in his early twenties when he died? I know it was the 1950s, but I’m sure people had girlfriends back then.”
Ed shrugged. “I guess so.”
I managed a wan smile. “I think I like knowing that Uncle Peter had someone before he died. And I like knowing that she looked like a Rossetti picture.”
Edward smiled. “I suppose so…” he said. “But she’s been saying other strange things. Like all that stuff about princes wanting to marry Aunt Lucy. I know she was just a schoolgirl when she died.”
“So what?” I said. “Maybe she’s remembering some game they played when they were children? Maybe she’s dreaming about what she wished Aunt Lucy could have had happen? Does it matter? If it makes Mother happy right now…” and my voice trailed away, because I didn’t know how to articulate it.
I sat up with Mummy (and I hadn’t called her that in years) that night, and helped her move when she woke up, in pain. As I carefully settled the cushions back around her, she smiled at me and said “you’re acting like my lady-in-waiting.”
I smiled. “I can be that,” I said. “Lady-in-Waiting to the Lady Susan Hastings.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not Lady Susan. Queen Susan…”
I kissed her forehead. “Queen Susan, then,” I said, and curtseyed awkwardly. She chuckled.
“I shouldn’t have forgotten,” she said, apropos of nothing. “I shouldn’t. But I was such a silly girl after I left school. You know, I barely passed my Higher Certificate. I hadn’t bothered to revise, because I was too busy sneaking out of school at the weekend to try and meet young men for tea. Then after school, I managed to get a little bit of a job as a typist, but I really spent all my time worrying about lipstick and parties and being liked.
“And I wanted to be the kind of girl that all the young men liked. I didn’t want to be like Lucy. Everyone thought she was a bit odd. She was always so un-groomed, and used to talk about the most astonishing things. Your father met her once, and she decided to rattle away about unicorns, of all things, and how different the Battle of Agincourt would have been if the French cavalry had just been seated on unicorns. Your father thought she was crazy.”
The thin tears were creeping down my mother’s face again, and I hastened to take her hand.
“Don’t cry, Mummy,” I said. “And you weren’t a silly girl. You were just normal. You were younger than I am now. Everyone’s silly when they are young.”
Her lip wobbled.
“But I forgot,” she said. “And they all remembered, and then they went away. I often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?” I asked.
My mother looked up at me with her eyes, which were still as bright as glass.
“Why, Narnia, of course,” she said. “I was a queen in Narnia. Just like Peter, and Edmund, and Lucy. Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia.”
She smiled at me.
I didn’t know what to say, but kept holding her hand.
“Darling,” she said. “I want to be moved. I do love this room,” and her eyes wandered to the Rossetti print. “But I need to be in the third spare room.”
I stared at her blankly.
“The third spare room?” I said.
My mother nodded firmly. “The third spare room,” she said. “It’ll make it easier. I don’t think I can walk very far, you see, and that’s where your father put the wardrobe.”
I didn’t quite know what to say. The third spare room was a rather large and draft ridden room at the back of the house that had been our play room when we were little. After I’d left for school, it had rather been abandoned, and slowly metamorphed into a dumping ground for any stray books, or pictures, or furniture that no one wanted to give away, but which didn’t have a place in the rest of the house. The wardrobe in question had been discovered by my mother at a local auction when I was in my teens, and brought home in triumph. It was a very large and ornately carved piece, with planking at the back which squeaked in a very peculiar fashion at random intervals. My father described it as a ‘late Victorian monstrosity’ and had relegated it to the third spare room with a vengeance.
“It was when I saw the wardrobe that I finally remembered it all,” my mother said, and smiled at me. “I couldn’t believe it. I was a grown woman, standing in the middle of this draughty great shed, and suddenly I was in tears. I kept remembered Lucy standing in front of it when she was just a little girl. She was just so insistent that this magical land she had found was real…”
“The wardrobe was in your house when you were a little girl?” I said, stupid and confused.
“No,” my mother said, and shook her head. “The wardrobe was here. Professor Kirke’s house. We stayed here during the war, you see…”
“Professor Kirke?” I said.
My mother nodded. “You never knew him. He died in the accident too. He was such a good friend to all of us.” She smiled. “Even though I had forgotten so much, I remembered that this house was a special place. It was why I persuaded your father to buy it when it came on the market.”
“So, you came here as a child?” I said.
“Yes. I came here with Peter, Edmund and Lucy. We were all terribly young and rather lost, I think. It was during the war…” and she sighed. “Then we stayed here for a while after we came back as well. It wasn’t easy for any of us. Poor Ed used to sit up worrying about the things he’d left undone. There was a case he had been working on that had been worrying him, and he wasn’t sure that anyone else would be able to follow the notes he’d been making on it.”
My mother sighed, her eyes locked in the past.
“I remember Lucy crying about the fact that we’d missed Cor and Aravis’ wedding. She was meant to be Aravis’ Chief Bridesmaid, and had been looking forward to it so much. I…”
And my mother faltered for a minute.
“I kept wondering what I’d done wrong. Why I’d been pushed out. God forgive me, but I wished I’d married Rabadash for a while. If I’d just married him, then I wouldn’t have been with the others when they went hunting the White Stag, and I’d have been able to stay.
“Of course, now I know how painful that would have been. It’s not nice, to be the one who is left behind…”
I leant forward and kissed her forehead, still not quite understanding what she was talking about.
“When we went back, I was so happy, but…”
The tears rose up again. “…but it wasn’t the same. So much of what I had loved, had died. All our friends were dead. We were never even able to find out where they had been buried, or what happened to them. Our home, everything we knew, was gone. In some ways, it was almost a relief to come home. I know Peter was terribly upset when Aslan told us that we couldn’t go back but I…I think I understood. And I didn’t want to go back for a long time.”
Her head fell back, and for a moment I was afraid she had died, but then I heard her breathing, ragged and laboured.
The next day I told my father that Mother had asked to be moved into the third spare room. He frowned, but agreed, and we spent the rest of the day dusting, and cleaning, and moving the nice bed from my old bedroom in there, and putting up all Mother’s favourite paintings on the wall.
Mother smiled contentedly when we had at last moved her, carefully lifting her into the wheelchair she now sat in, and then lifting her carefully out again.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, and gazed out of the window. “How long is it until Christmas?”
I went for a long walk in the woods that afternoon, as the light began to fade, and for the first time I cried. I cried for my beautiful glamorous mother, who was now haggard and ravaged by illness. I cried for my strong and confident father, who couldn’t tell me that it would be alright any more, and I cried for our family that seemed to be dying, along with my precious Mum.
That night, I sat with my mother again. She was weaker now, and her breathing seemed so very uncertain. She managed to talk a little, in a small and cracked voice.
“I think it was you, my darling, who brought me back to Narnia,” she said. “You and your brothers. You see, after Edward was born, I realised how little all the clothes, and parties and cocktails really mattered. They weren’t real. They were just paint and lights. My baby - this incredible little person that I had in my arms - that was real.”
She smiled and touched my hand with her crooked fingers.
“I love you all so much,” she said. “And I will miss you desperately.”
“We’re going to miss you too,” I said, and it was only when I tried to talk that I realised how big the lump in my throat had gotten. I could barely get the words past it. Mummy squeezed my hand, very gently.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know how hard it is to be the one who is left behind. You won’t be angry with me, will you?”
I shook my head.
“Angry with you?” I said. “How could I be angry with you, Mummy. I love you. You’re the best mother I could ever want.”
She smiled. “I was angry after they all went away,” she said. “I was angry for such a long time. It’s only now that I realise why they had to go.”
“You’re talking about your family?” I said. “Lucy, and Peter and Edmund, and your parents.”
“Not just them,” she said. “Our cousin, Eustace, and his great friend Jill Pole. Professor Kirke, and Miss Plummer, who was Professor Kirke’s neighbour and an old and dear friend to him. I felt so abandoned.”
She reached up and touched my face.
“The thing to remember, my precious baby girl, is that I love you. Keep remembering that, while we’re apart.”
I nodded. I couldn’t talk anymore.
“It isn’t for ever,” Mother said. “I hope it will be for a long time, because you’ve got a lot of things to do, but it isn’t forever.”
She looked up at another of her favourite pictures. It was a picture of a castle, by the sea. It was a simple little painting, done in watercolours and pencil. I think my oldest brother, Jack, had brought it back from a trip to St Ives.
“Look!” she whispered. “I can see the orchard that the moles built us,”
There was no orchard in the painting.
She looked at me once more and said “he isn’t a tame lion,” and smiled.
She seemed to sleep for a while after that, and in the small hours of the morning I went to bed myself.
We found my mother the next morning. She was on the floor, curled up to that old wardrobe. My father was incredibly upset, and thought that she might have fallen out of bed, and been unable to get back in without anyone to help her. He blamed himself for not being with her, but I don’t think that was what happened.
She was sitting on the floor, cross legged, like a little girl. The door to the wardrobe was open, and she was looking inside it, with her head resting against the other door. Her eyes were open, and there was a little smile on her face.
I don’t know what she saw as she died. I don’t think I ever will, but I don’t think she was scared. I don’t even think she was alone.
And that night, when I looked at the picture of the castle, I saw the outline of where an orchard had once been…
As a random note, I've never bought into the 'Susan doesn't get to go to Narnia because she grows up and discovers sex' line. First of all, I never read it that way. I always thought that Susan doesn't get to go to Narnia at the end of the Last Battle because she's stopped believing. She's stopped believing in things that are magical, or intangible, or not obviously real and material. Susan's ending is a warning against letting 'here' and 'now' and 'shiney stuff' become too important and all that there is to you. Furthermore, I never believed that it was a 'banned from Narnia forever' type ending. CS Lewis, in a letter, apparently said that he always hoped that Susan would find her way back to Narnia in the end.
That is what has been floating through my brain as I wrote.
As an additional, my timeline for the Chronicles of Narnia has the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe taking place in 1940, when Susan was about 13. Everything else, date-wise, is sort of based off that.
Finally, the pictures referred to in the text can be found here and here.
Return to Narnia
The drive home was relatively easy. It was a Sunday and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads. My battered old mini had had a few problems starting that morning, and had required a bit of TLC to coax the ignition into action, but now I was underway. Phil Collins was warbling on the radio, and the sun was shining brightly, giving the frost on the ground a kind of brittle beauty.
I hadn’t called home before I left London. I didn’t think I could bear to hear my father’s voice waver again. He had always been a rock before; calm and solid in the face of almost any crisis. But now my mother was dying, and my father was breaking apart as well.
It was a long drive home. My parents lived in Devon, in a glorious old house near Torquay. My father had bought it in 1962, when I was two years old, and he had been appointed QC. They had kept a flat in London as well, but Dolton had been our home. I remembered playing cricket on the lawn, and hide and seek in the long corridors and panelled rooms as a child.
I hadn’t been there for a while. For a long time my mother’s illness had kept her confined to London, and to the Harley Street doctors who were keeping her alive, but now all that was done, and last week she had called me herself to say that she was going home.
“Come home, darling,” she’d said. I had wanted to drive down the next day, but I was only 22 back then, with a dozen stupid and minor worries that kept me in London for nearly a week, while my mother - my mummy - got weaker and weaker.
Then my father called, and his voice was breaking on the phone.
“Please,” he’d said. “You need to come home. You really won’t have many more chances to say…” and his voice had trailed away. I hadn’t responded immediately, and so he continued. “She’s not got long. She’s been in good spirits since we got her home, but she’s rambling. Sometimes I don’t even think she knows quite what’s real and what isn’t anymore. Please come home.”
So I did.
Snow was falling, soft as kisses on my skin, when I clambered out of the car at Dolton. The sun had faded, and instead the sky was a deep velvet blue in the twilight, with stars gleaming like gemstones. It was a beautiful night, which seemed wrong. How could the world be so bright and so lovely at a time like this? Why wasn’t it raining? Why wasn’t the sky grey? That would have felt better, somehow.
My older brother, Edward, was already there. He was with my mother when I went upstairs. Mother was thin and drawn, with her poor bald head covered with a scarf, but she was conscious and she smiled at me when I came up.
“You made it, darling” she said. “I was just telling Edward that you’ll have to start decorating the house for Christmas. I don’t think I can do it myself this year.”
I smiled and nodded, eager to please.
“Of course we will,” I said. “We’ll make it a magical Christmas.”
My mother smiled, and there was something slightly odd about that smile. For a moment she seemed to be looking right through me.
“A magical Christmas?” she said. She looked directly at me, then, and smiled.“I think I would like some magic…”
And then she was silent. “I had a magical Christmas once,” she said. “It was a long time ago. And I suppose magic wasn’t the right word for it. Christmas happened, you see, in spite of the magic.”
I nodded, although I didn’t see at all. My mother smiled.
“I never really told you about that Christmas,” she said. “I’m ashamed to say that I forgot all about it. So many other things seemed important when I was young, and then after the accident…” and she was silent for a moment. “After the accident it was just too painful to remember.”
The accident I knew something about. My mother’s family had been killed in a train wreck, years before I had been born. She had had two brothers, and a sister, who had both died, along with their parents.
“I was angry, you know,” she said, and took my hand. “I couldn’t understand why any God would want me to go through that. I had to identify my little sister from the rings on her hand. That was all the police would show me. They kept the rest covered with a sheet, and told me that there was nothing to see. What God would do that?”
I realised that there were tears trickling down my mother’s cheeks now, and I squeezed her hand.
“Lucy was so pretty…” she said, and smiled slightly. “You know, you look just like she did when she was your age. I remember, she had one suitor who gave her a thousand forget-me-not flowers…”
Edward frowned slightly. “Lucy was a bit young for suitors, wasn’t she?” he said. “She was only seventeen when she died.”
My mother looked up at him and frowned slightly. “Lucy had suitors,” she said determinedly. “All the princes in those parts wanted her to be their queen…”
In the kitchen, while we were making tea, Edward said “Mother’s been like this for the last couple of days. I think she’s slipping into a dream world. You know that old picture up in her room? The Rossetti print?”
I nodded. “I bought her that,” I said, with some pride. “I found it in an old junk shop when I was fifteen, and bought it for mother for Christmas.”
Edward nodded.
“Well, last night she was looking at it, and said ‘Peter loved her so much. I didn’t understand at the time how very hard it must have been for him to leave her.”
“I asked her what she was talking about, and she said the picture reminded her of the girl her brother Peter wanted to marry.”
I stared at Edward, confused. “I don’t see what’s so strange about that.”
“Our uncle Peter never had a fiancée,” Edward said. “I checked with Dad. He was around when they all died. He went to the funerals. There was no girl there.”
I flicked a dish cloth at him. “You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “Maybe she was too upset to come. Maybe they broke up a while before the accident, and that’s why Mother’s talking about how he had to leave her. Our uncle was…what…in his early twenties when he died? I know it was the 1950s, but I’m sure people had girlfriends back then.”
Ed shrugged. “I guess so.”
I managed a wan smile. “I think I like knowing that Uncle Peter had someone before he died. And I like knowing that she looked like a Rossetti picture.”
Edward smiled. “I suppose so…” he said. “But she’s been saying other strange things. Like all that stuff about princes wanting to marry Aunt Lucy. I know she was just a schoolgirl when she died.”
“So what?” I said. “Maybe she’s remembering some game they played when they were children? Maybe she’s dreaming about what she wished Aunt Lucy could have had happen? Does it matter? If it makes Mother happy right now…” and my voice trailed away, because I didn’t know how to articulate it.
I sat up with Mummy (and I hadn’t called her that in years) that night, and helped her move when she woke up, in pain. As I carefully settled the cushions back around her, she smiled at me and said “you’re acting like my lady-in-waiting.”
I smiled. “I can be that,” I said. “Lady-in-Waiting to the Lady Susan Hastings.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not Lady Susan. Queen Susan…”
I kissed her forehead. “Queen Susan, then,” I said, and curtseyed awkwardly. She chuckled.
“I shouldn’t have forgotten,” she said, apropos of nothing. “I shouldn’t. But I was such a silly girl after I left school. You know, I barely passed my Higher Certificate. I hadn’t bothered to revise, because I was too busy sneaking out of school at the weekend to try and meet young men for tea. Then after school, I managed to get a little bit of a job as a typist, but I really spent all my time worrying about lipstick and parties and being liked.
“And I wanted to be the kind of girl that all the young men liked. I didn’t want to be like Lucy. Everyone thought she was a bit odd. She was always so un-groomed, and used to talk about the most astonishing things. Your father met her once, and she decided to rattle away about unicorns, of all things, and how different the Battle of Agincourt would have been if the French cavalry had just been seated on unicorns. Your father thought she was crazy.”
The thin tears were creeping down my mother’s face again, and I hastened to take her hand.
“Don’t cry, Mummy,” I said. “And you weren’t a silly girl. You were just normal. You were younger than I am now. Everyone’s silly when they are young.”
Her lip wobbled.
“But I forgot,” she said. “And they all remembered, and then they went away. I often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?” I asked.
My mother looked up at me with her eyes, which were still as bright as glass.
“Why, Narnia, of course,” she said. “I was a queen in Narnia. Just like Peter, and Edmund, and Lucy. Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia.”
She smiled at me.
I didn’t know what to say, but kept holding her hand.
“Darling,” she said. “I want to be moved. I do love this room,” and her eyes wandered to the Rossetti print. “But I need to be in the third spare room.”
I stared at her blankly.
“The third spare room?” I said.
My mother nodded firmly. “The third spare room,” she said. “It’ll make it easier. I don’t think I can walk very far, you see, and that’s where your father put the wardrobe.”
I didn’t quite know what to say. The third spare room was a rather large and draft ridden room at the back of the house that had been our play room when we were little. After I’d left for school, it had rather been abandoned, and slowly metamorphed into a dumping ground for any stray books, or pictures, or furniture that no one wanted to give away, but which didn’t have a place in the rest of the house. The wardrobe in question had been discovered by my mother at a local auction when I was in my teens, and brought home in triumph. It was a very large and ornately carved piece, with planking at the back which squeaked in a very peculiar fashion at random intervals. My father described it as a ‘late Victorian monstrosity’ and had relegated it to the third spare room with a vengeance.
“It was when I saw the wardrobe that I finally remembered it all,” my mother said, and smiled at me. “I couldn’t believe it. I was a grown woman, standing in the middle of this draughty great shed, and suddenly I was in tears. I kept remembered Lucy standing in front of it when she was just a little girl. She was just so insistent that this magical land she had found was real…”
“The wardrobe was in your house when you were a little girl?” I said, stupid and confused.
“No,” my mother said, and shook her head. “The wardrobe was here. Professor Kirke’s house. We stayed here during the war, you see…”
“Professor Kirke?” I said.
My mother nodded. “You never knew him. He died in the accident too. He was such a good friend to all of us.” She smiled. “Even though I had forgotten so much, I remembered that this house was a special place. It was why I persuaded your father to buy it when it came on the market.”
“So, you came here as a child?” I said.
“Yes. I came here with Peter, Edmund and Lucy. We were all terribly young and rather lost, I think. It was during the war…” and she sighed. “Then we stayed here for a while after we came back as well. It wasn’t easy for any of us. Poor Ed used to sit up worrying about the things he’d left undone. There was a case he had been working on that had been worrying him, and he wasn’t sure that anyone else would be able to follow the notes he’d been making on it.”
My mother sighed, her eyes locked in the past.
“I remember Lucy crying about the fact that we’d missed Cor and Aravis’ wedding. She was meant to be Aravis’ Chief Bridesmaid, and had been looking forward to it so much. I…”
And my mother faltered for a minute.
“I kept wondering what I’d done wrong. Why I’d been pushed out. God forgive me, but I wished I’d married Rabadash for a while. If I’d just married him, then I wouldn’t have been with the others when they went hunting the White Stag, and I’d have been able to stay.
“Of course, now I know how painful that would have been. It’s not nice, to be the one who is left behind…”
I leant forward and kissed her forehead, still not quite understanding what she was talking about.
“When we went back, I was so happy, but…”
The tears rose up again. “…but it wasn’t the same. So much of what I had loved, had died. All our friends were dead. We were never even able to find out where they had been buried, or what happened to them. Our home, everything we knew, was gone. In some ways, it was almost a relief to come home. I know Peter was terribly upset when Aslan told us that we couldn’t go back but I…I think I understood. And I didn’t want to go back for a long time.”
Her head fell back, and for a moment I was afraid she had died, but then I heard her breathing, ragged and laboured.
The next day I told my father that Mother had asked to be moved into the third spare room. He frowned, but agreed, and we spent the rest of the day dusting, and cleaning, and moving the nice bed from my old bedroom in there, and putting up all Mother’s favourite paintings on the wall.
Mother smiled contentedly when we had at last moved her, carefully lifting her into the wheelchair she now sat in, and then lifting her carefully out again.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, and gazed out of the window. “How long is it until Christmas?”
I went for a long walk in the woods that afternoon, as the light began to fade, and for the first time I cried. I cried for my beautiful glamorous mother, who was now haggard and ravaged by illness. I cried for my strong and confident father, who couldn’t tell me that it would be alright any more, and I cried for our family that seemed to be dying, along with my precious Mum.
That night, I sat with my mother again. She was weaker now, and her breathing seemed so very uncertain. She managed to talk a little, in a small and cracked voice.
“I think it was you, my darling, who brought me back to Narnia,” she said. “You and your brothers. You see, after Edward was born, I realised how little all the clothes, and parties and cocktails really mattered. They weren’t real. They were just paint and lights. My baby - this incredible little person that I had in my arms - that was real.”
She smiled and touched my hand with her crooked fingers.
“I love you all so much,” she said. “And I will miss you desperately.”
“We’re going to miss you too,” I said, and it was only when I tried to talk that I realised how big the lump in my throat had gotten. I could barely get the words past it. Mummy squeezed my hand, very gently.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know how hard it is to be the one who is left behind. You won’t be angry with me, will you?”
I shook my head.
“Angry with you?” I said. “How could I be angry with you, Mummy. I love you. You’re the best mother I could ever want.”
She smiled. “I was angry after they all went away,” she said. “I was angry for such a long time. It’s only now that I realise why they had to go.”
“You’re talking about your family?” I said. “Lucy, and Peter and Edmund, and your parents.”
“Not just them,” she said. “Our cousin, Eustace, and his great friend Jill Pole. Professor Kirke, and Miss Plummer, who was Professor Kirke’s neighbour and an old and dear friend to him. I felt so abandoned.”
She reached up and touched my face.
“The thing to remember, my precious baby girl, is that I love you. Keep remembering that, while we’re apart.”
I nodded. I couldn’t talk anymore.
“It isn’t for ever,” Mother said. “I hope it will be for a long time, because you’ve got a lot of things to do, but it isn’t forever.”
She looked up at another of her favourite pictures. It was a picture of a castle, by the sea. It was a simple little painting, done in watercolours and pencil. I think my oldest brother, Jack, had brought it back from a trip to St Ives.
“Look!” she whispered. “I can see the orchard that the moles built us,”
There was no orchard in the painting.
She looked at me once more and said “he isn’t a tame lion,” and smiled.
She seemed to sleep for a while after that, and in the small hours of the morning I went to bed myself.
We found my mother the next morning. She was on the floor, curled up to that old wardrobe. My father was incredibly upset, and thought that she might have fallen out of bed, and been unable to get back in without anyone to help her. He blamed himself for not being with her, but I don’t think that was what happened.
She was sitting on the floor, cross legged, like a little girl. The door to the wardrobe was open, and she was looking inside it, with her head resting against the other door. Her eyes were open, and there was a little smile on her face.
I don’t know what she saw as she died. I don’t think I ever will, but I don’t think she was scared. I don’t even think she was alone.
And that night, when I looked at the picture of the castle, I saw the outline of where an orchard had once been…