“Like when you finish a story and you wish you could read it like you’d never read it before. Like you want to read it for the first time again,” George says.
“I think so,” I say. I pause while our breaths synchronize. I ponder whether I want to tell George the next question I asked Mr. Lewis.
I decide I will.
“I also asked him what his favorite parts of the Norse myths were.”
“And?”
“He said ‘Northernness,’ and then he said ‘tragedy.’”
“Yes,” George said as if Mr. Lewis’s wisdom had reached out and beyond the countryside, past the trees and then over the train tracks, and landed smack in the middle of the common room at the Kilns. “Tragedy.”
Twelve
The Other Professor
George pulls at the blanket around his legs and looks to his sister. He wants to hear another story. He wants the stories to last forever.
Nothing does, of course.
Not even winter in Narnia. Even it was finally broken.
“Tell me the next one you brought home?” he says to her and she nods.
His sister can’t see what he sees, and she can’t hear what he hears, and that’s okay. Because she’s doing her best to turn facts into story, and he knows how to take it the rest of the way.
“Once upon a wardrobe,” Megs says. He grins and she continues, “Not very long ago.”
“And not very far away,” he says.
“Sixteen-year-old Jack Lewis arrived at a train station . . .”
The fire burns low in their cozy living room. George closes his eyes, then the pop of the fire turns into the click clack of a train arriving fast, smoke pouring from its stack, its brakes squealing into the Surrey station at the town of Great Bookham.
In the crisp September air, a crowd pushed and shoved to disembark the black train before the men in suits and the women in tight-waisted dresses waiting on the platform climbed the stairs into the car. A young man stepped off the train.
Jack was taller now and he carried a valise. His brown hair caught the wind of the train as it departed, leaving him looking around for a man he didn’t know and hadn’t ever met.
William Thompson Kirkpatrick would recognize Jack Lewis, or so Jack had been told, because he had been Jack’s father’s headmaster once a long time ago and, more recently, Warnie’s tutor before Warnie had set off for Sandhurst to train in the British army. Jack thought of his brother training for war. Over and over he dreamed of Warnie caught in a battle or stranded in a field. Jack worried for his brother and tried to imagine him slaying every dragon, defeating every giant, conquering every Fenrir-type wolf of Germany that he might cross.
Jack glanced around the station for the man Warnie called the Knock. He was weary and nervous, a combination that made his stomach queasy and gave him a deep ache for his mother, the pain like a savage wound that would never heal.
The platform was bustling with families and couples and children rushing along holding a parent’s hand. Across the way stood a tall man with white hair and a pocket watch that he kept checking as if he were the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Was this Kirkpatrick?
The man spotted Jack, then took long strides across the platform. As he drew closer, his features became clear. His face was thin and muscular, his nose sharp and his eyes alert as an eagle. To Jack, Mr. Kirkpatrick looked as old as Father Time. A mythological creature.
Jack was tired to death of cruel schoolmasters, and he hoped what his father had told him was true: that this man, Mr. Kirkpatrick, was sentimental.
“Mr. Clive Staples Lewis, I assume?” he said, holding out his hand.
“Yes, sir.”
After gathering Jack’s bags and trunks and books, they loaded into Mr. Kirkpatrick’s car and drove toward his home in the Surrey countryside, where Jack would live for the next few years. The landscape was a deep and emerald green, its rolling chalk downs, the heath grasses, the woodlands dotted with autumn golds and reds that made Jack think of home and Squirrel Nutkin and a biscuit tin with twigs and moss.
The silence in the car seemed to beg for words, and Jack blurted, “I didn’t expect it to look so wild.”
“Wild?”
“Yes.” Jack stared out the window at the thick clusters of alder and oak, mossy rocks and bushy slopes. “Yes, that’s what I do mean. It has a certain wildness about it that I didn’t expect.”
Mr. Kirkpatrick stared forward, his hands on the steering wheel, gripping it so tightly it seemed it might break off in his hand. His brow dropped as if Jack had said something insulting.
A sinking feeling, a nearly debilitating premonition formed by the present and also left over from the past, rolled over Jack. Had he said something wrong once again? Maybe tutors were always cruel and, until that faraway day when Jack finally finished school, this misery was the way it would be.
His new tutor spoke low and firm. “And what does that word mean, Jack? Wildness? And how did you come to use it?”
Jack thought for a moment, watching as the geography passed by, a landscape suggesting something more than just a place but also an emotion. “I don’t know, sir. It was just an opinion.”
“We don’t speak our opinions unless logic backs them up. What did you know of the Surrey countryside before you arrived, and what did you expect? Have you been educated in the flora and geography of Surrey to base your opinion on something other than what you expected?”
Jack’s head buzzed with responses, but not one of them sharp enough for this man’s flinty questions. Jack slumped in the seat. He would have to live with this man? With his pointed questions and inability to make small talk in a quiet car? The Knock, who now stared out the windshield, brought Jack to silence.
Jack’s hopes fell quiet too. There was no use talking about what he saw out the window or what wild meant to him, because he wasn’t sure himself. And above all, miles into the trip, Jack knew the old man was right. Nothing had turned out as Jack had expected, even the man himself whom Jack thought would be sappy and sentimental. So maybe Mr. Kirkpatrick was right when he told Jack, “You have no right to that opinion.”
Soon the car arrived at a cottage in the middle of the wildness that Jack had no right to have an opinion on. A short woman with brown hair pulled into a bun, her face round with bright red cheeks, as cheery as she was short, bustled out of the front door, waving and greeting Jack as if he were her long-lost son. She welcomed him into the warm home, fed him mutton stew with vegetables from the garden, then showed Jack to his room.
A room all to himself. His room. With a desk and a comfortable bed that had a view of the countryside and gardens. A room with soft blankets and a little wardrobe for his belongings. Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be all bad.
The house was cozy with a fireplace that dominated the living area. The wood piled outside would last a long autumn and winter. There was hot water and a bathroom to share, food and countryside, and most important, books were everywhere.
As he fell asleep that first night, he told himself this was not Wynyard nor Cherbourg nor Malvern. There were no sporting games or Bloods or cruel boys. And with that knowing, and the comforting thought of a vast library to explore, Jack fell asleep.
The next morning Jack began to keep a schedule that never changed in all the years he resided there. The strict schedule—their paces, as it were—set an example for Jack of what a perfect day might be like. The ideal day was set in his heart there in the house of Mr. Kirkpatrick, “a Bookham pattern,” as he came to call it.