Oldie, his spectacles low on his nose, walked by a younger student, a cowering boy with greasy hair, and lifted his paper.
“You have nothing here,” he said in a voice that made the other boys scribble on their papers even if they had no idea of the answers.
The boy looked up. “I need help with that problem. I don’t—”
Oldie grabbed the boy by the ear, pulled him to the front of the class, and made him stand there and face the other boys. None of them would meet his gaze; he was as scared as Peter Rabbit being chased through Mr. McGregor’s garden.
Jack glanced about the room to see if anyone would help, but all the boys looked down.
“Turn your palms up. Now.” Oldie took a step toward a cane behind his desk, a thin rattan stick the tawny color of a cat, the end rounded like a shepherd’s hook.
The boy held up his palms. Jack was not entirely sure of what might come next, but knew it would be fierce and entirely unfair. This was a new terror.
Oldie lifted the cane from the green iron hook and brought it down with a thwack across the boy’s palms. He cried out and snatched his hands behind his back.
“Now sit down and do your work.” Oldie’s voice echoed about the room.
The boy hurried back to his seat and lifted his pencil.
That night Jack imagined a welt forming across the boy’s skin. Icicles formed on the windows like cage bars, and Jack told himself a story about a young boy who escaped a dungeon guarded by dragons.
The next day, as they filed in for breakfast, Jack’s eyes on the wood floor where dust gathered in the cracks, Warnie stepped up next to him. “Did you hand in your sums?”
Jack nodded. No one received breakfast without handing in their sums.
“Let me tell you a secret,” Warnie said. “If you do the first ones right they never check the rest. So get them right, then you don’t have to worry about it. You’ll have breakfast every morning.”
Jack nodded and hated math all the more for being the very requisite that decided whether he could have breakfast. He looked to his brother with unspoken gratitude and sat on the cold seat waiting for his porridge.
The term passed, and together they avoided Oldie in the hallways when they could, running from him if they saw him come near, moving quickly if he caught their eye. Jack and Warnie huddled with their reading club and did their work. They rose before 7:00 a.m. in a corner of the residence hall and washed with freezing cold water. They ate their parsnips and gray potatoes. They did the best they could until they returned to Little Lea and to altered lives.
Nine
The Dark and the Light
I finish the story and George stares at me with wide eyes. We sit facing each other in the fading light of his bedroom. George is still in the wardrobe, and I’m sitting on the pillow on the hard floor.
“Why does he tell you these sad things about his life?” George asks, climbing out of the wardrobe and into my lap.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I just write them down as I remember them best I can.”
“It must be because it has something to do with Narnia. But I don’t know exactly what,” George says.
“Perhaps, but I’m not sure, really, if even he knows. I think he just wants to give me something to bring home to you.”
“It’s more than that. You know, sister, the children in Narnia are away from their parents too, just as poor Jack was in boarding school. Maybe . . .”
“Padraig said the same thing and—”
“Padraig?”
I brush my hand through the air. “No one. But I don’t think Mr. Lewis wants us to do that, to assign the things of his life to the things of his story. I think, if I’m guessing right, he wants us to see that stories are all tangled together. Like physics theories that are true and contradictory at the same time.”
“Does that happen?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Like I can be brave and scared at the same time.” George stands up and stretches, and I rise also.
“Yes, like that.”
“What else did he tell you before you left?”
“When he finished I asked him what happened to Oldie and he told me . . .” I pause, because maybe this isn’t something George needs to know, but then I decide that truth is always the best. “Oldie ended up in an insane asylum. And I told Mr. Lewis it sounded like he right well should have been there all along. Then Mr. Lewis grinned and those eyes of his sparkled, and he said he jolly well should have been. I told him I hoped that wasn’t what all of his schooling had been like, because I love Oxford, and how horrible it would be if school was always awful for him. And he told me, George, he told me with his chin lifted in the air that it wasn’t all bad, because his next stories are about the Knock and Norse mythology.”
“What’s the Knock?”
“We’ll find out,” I say and brush his hair off his pale forehead. “But not now.”
With that, George climbs into bed with the bag that holds the sketchpad and pencils. He spills the colored pencils onto the bright quilt and lets out a sound of glee.
I watch him. The thing is, I want a miracle for George. I want something or someone like Aslan to prowl through the door and save us, save us from the sorrow and the pain and the absolute loneliness of it all.
But no one had saved young Jack.
When George starts drawing, I slip from the room, taking my notebook of Mr. Lewis’s stories with me, tucking it into my school bag. I make my way into the kitchen to find Mum sitting at the table, staring straight out the window. Concern has deepened the lines of her forehead.
When I touch her shoulder, she jumps before she lifts her gaze to me.
“Darling.”
“Mum.” I sit down next to her and she blows her nose into a handkerchief, crumples it into the palm of her hand. “Where’s Dad?” I ask.
“He comes home so late now. It’s hard for him to be here because he can’t fix things, and he’s a man who fixes things. He loves us so much, but he doesn’t know how . . .” She pauses with her hands knotted so tightly that I reach over to undo them, to loosen her grip on herself.
“Are you okay?” I ask, although it is most likely the stupidest question I can utter. Of course she isn’t.
“I don’t think you should read your brother any more of those stories.” She says this without inflection, in a cold way that makes me shiver.
“Why?”
“I heard you today. That was a scary story. There’s no reason George needs to know about a young boy losing his mother or going to a dreadful boarding school. That is just awful, and I want George to be happy, to hear good stories.”
“But it is a good story, because that same boy grows up to be the man who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s a good story I am telling George because Jack was brave, and he became the man who . . .” I don’t know how to articulate what I mean so I sit quietly for a minute.
We both do.
“Mum, all fairy tales have a bad part. They all have a scary part. George knows that. It helps him to know that.”
Mum listens and I forge ahead even though I don’t really know where I’m going, but the words are rising, nevertheless. “Mr. Lewis has been telling me stories to write down for my brother, but maybe, now that I look at it, they’re also stories for me. He doesn’t say what he means by them. He just tells little tales of his life, and when I leave, somehow I know more about the world and my own life. I don’t know quite how to explain it. He once said to me that he’d never wanted to grow up because his father made it look so dreary. Adulthood frightened him, but then there it was—thrust upon him.”