They look at each other, and for the first time I catch Dad’s gaze. His warm brown eyes are wet with tears. He nods at me as if speaking will spill those tears. Together they walk out hand in hand. I reach into my canvas satchel and slip out my black notebook.
In this entry, my handwriting is frenetic and sideways. The details were numerous, and I’d wanted to get it all down before forgetting. The war. What happened to Mr. Lewis.
George speaks in a whisper. “Has Mr. Lewis said anything about the faun or the Witch or the lion? Where did—”
“Not a single word, my dearest.”
His face falls and lips tremble. I become furious at Mr. Lewis. Why couldn’t he just give me a straight-up answer? Again I think to make one up, to lie to George and tell him where each of these characters comes from. The Witch is Mr. Lewis’s aunt. The lion is from his favorite zoo. The faun is from Norse mythology. But George never abides by lies, even well-intentioned ones. Besides, I love him more than that.
“I will ask him again,” I tell George. “I promise. But for now, another story. Maybe you’ll see something of Narnia in it.”
“I like the stories,” he says. “Even the scary ones. I like to know that even Mr. Lewis, the man who wrote about the biggest bravery in the world, was once scared.”
“Yes, he was.”
Opening the notebook, I begin to read. The beeping of the hospital room’s machines become the background of the war, and the rat-a-tat-tat sounds of a ravaged French countryside.
Sixteen
The Dreaming Spires
Everyone seems more frightened than George of the hospital. He doesn’t mind it much. They put tiny tubes in his nose, and he can breathe so easily it’s like swimming in oxygen. But the visitors to George’s hospital room are distressed. As Megs sits next to him, her hands are shaking. Her cheeks too. George wants to tell her that it’s going to be okay because it is—even if everything turns out differently than she wants.
She opens her black notebook and wipes a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand. “This story,” she says with a false smile, “is about the Great War.” She looks up nervously. “Maybe we should wait on this one. I could reread my story on Norse mythology or the one about the Knock.”
“No, go on please,” he tells her. “It’s okay to tell me about the war. It’s probably what gave Mr. Lewis the idea for the battle in Narnia. Or perhaps it wasn’t the idea, but the”—he searches for the word—“the experience.”
Megs nods. “Mr. Lewis was about to turn nineteen.”
“So right after he left Surrey,” George says.
Megs smiles, her hands now steadier on the notebook. “Yes, but first he attends university.”
“Start right, Megs!” George orders. He wants to slide into the story with their shared words.
“Oh, yes!” She sits up straighter. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
“Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”
George pauses so she’ll smile, then says, “And not very far away . . .”
“Jack Lewis sat at a desk in Surrey, preparing for exams.”
Megs continues with her story, and George finds himself inside Professor Kirkpatrick’s Surrey home while Jack Lewis suffers over algebra equations.
*
Jack was determined to gain admission into Oxford. He’d studied under Professor Kirkpatrick’s scrutinizing discipline, and his eyelids burned as he’d studied day and night for admittance exams. As algebra was sure to be in the tests, he buckled down, practicing equations, pushing himself harder than he’d ever done before. Memories of Wynard School and cruel Oldie flooded Jack’s mind each time he’d sit down to do an equation. Yet he preserved in his studies. His education would not be dashed on the shores of his loathing for mathematics.
The day Jack headed from Surrey to Oxford to take the admittance exams, he thought of what Mr. Kirkpatrick had once told his father. “You might make a writer or a scholar out of him, but that’s about it.” This was all fine and well by Jack, but to be a scholar or a writer, he still had to pass the mathematics portion of the exam.
On the train ride to Oxford, Jack again read Phantastes, because by now he understood that all books worth loving were worth rereading over and over. Finally he arrived at Oxford station, the train exhaling black coal smoke as Jack stepped off. Of course he’d imagined Oxford in his mind. The fabled city a thousand years old; the medieval city of thirty-two colleges under one Oxford name.
Jack exited the station and ambled a few blocks, confused by the dullness of the city he entered. He’d heard so much about this regal place, about its beauty and ancient feel, and he was flooded with disappointment. Oxford was merely a row of shops, one after the other, stretching along a ribbon of asphalt, without much to write home about.
Jack had expected and desired to be awed. With confusion and an itching annoyance, he turned around to find his way to the college and there—behind him, not in front of him—was the city of Oxford.
He’d stepped out of the wrong side of the train station and walked into the town of Botley.
There is only one first view of Oxford, and it paused Jack’s heart. The city was a glorious cluster of dreaming spires and jagged towers, a skyline of medieval romance.
It felt like an echo of a song he’d heard but forgotten. This first impression of its beauty was forever engraved on his mind and in his heart.
He hoisted his pack with a lighter spirit and set his feet quickly to Oxford. He found the cobblestone streets and domed library, the brick and stone colleges, the fair greens of the parks, the book-stuffed bookshops and warm pubs. Jack found the twin rivers meeting the Thames, and where he imagined his new life was to begin. He ambled along Holywell Street to the corner of Mansfield Road to locate the Tudor single house where he would spend the night.
The next morning he muddled through the tests, his head bowed over the desk in the dusty exam rooms, his attention on the questions, not on dreams of a new life.
He finished the exams and boarded another train, then a ferry back to Ireland. Jack arrived home to Little Lea and walked through the door of his family home. He stood before his father and the truth burst out of him in an anxious confession. He was sure he’d failed the math portion of the exams. There was no doubt in his mind, and he didn’t want to waste any time on false hope of admittance.
With Warnie in Sandhurst with the British army, he didn’t even have his brother to complain to, or for companionship. He would run to his friend Arthur, tell him of the injustice of mathematics and his ruined life.
He would make new plans. His inability to figure and do equations had cost him the chance to attend the prestigious university. But there were other universities, to be sure.
Jack sulked through the holiday, his father’s disappointment like smoke clouding the house. He berated himself, even as he read Spenser and MacDonald. He walked the garden paths of his childhood, stared over the lough, despair following him. Why hadn’t he spent more time on equations? Why couldn’t his mind understand numbers when it could easily learn languages and higher concepts?
It was said that math was another language, and Jack had mastered many: Greek, Latin, German, and French. But how was Jack to be a writer or a scholar if he couldn’t gain admittance to university?