“When a girl walks across the green, a gentleman doesn’t take the time to button his coat or put on a scarf.”
“Padraig.” I say his name as he’d said mine and hope it has the same effect.
“Are you in a rush?” he asks.
“I am.” I nod toward the second floor. “I must meet Mr. Lewis. It would be rude to be late.”
“Yes, it would.” He leans closer, and the cold begins to bite his nose red. Folding his arms around himself, he rubs his hands up and down. “Did he tell you anything else? Have you heard more stories?”
“I have,” I say. “About the war.”
“You must tell me about it.”
My glee vanishes. I feel like I’m stealing the thunder and the lightning, all the goodness of the stories that are just for George and me. As if by sharing with Padraig I’m robbing my brother. My smile fails. I feel it.
“Are you okay, Megs?”
“I must go.”
“Then off with you,” he says but with a smile.
I try to grin back at him, but it feels shaky and false as I walk off, hurrying into the New Building and climbing the stone stairs and then reaching a door on the left. A sign hangs on it: Mr. C. S. Lewis—Tutor of English Literature.
The door is slightly ajar, and I peek inside and see him sitting at his desk with a pipe in his mouth and a nib pen in hand. He dips it into an inkwell and begins to write quickly. I hear him mumble the words he is writing out loud. He is whispering them into existence on the paper and through his pen. Something otherworldly is happening while he dips and writes and mumbles. I almost expect a faun to jump from beneath his desk or a witch to perch on the windowsill.
I don’t want to interrupt, but then he looks up, as if my gaze has distracted him. His smile is wide, and he sets his pen down. The room smells of tobacco smoke and sunshine, if sunshine has an aroma.
“Welcome, Miss Devonshire.”
I take a few steps and pause. “I don’t want to interrupt.”
“You were invited here. By me. Do come in.” He stands there in his carpet slippers wearing a welcoming grin. I think, for the first time, how he looks much like a jolly countryman instead of the learned man of letters and books he is.
“Thank you for having me,” I say. “I know you usually don’t have girl students in here.”
“Oh! On the contrary. I do tutor some young women.”
I lift my eyebrows at the lovely news, then gaze at the room. There are so many books they seem to have taken over, making it hard to focus on anything else. Heavy curtains cast shadows. Papers are scattered across his desk like fallen leaves. “Are you working on another Narnia book?”
“Oh yes.” He stands. “But just then I was answering a letter.”
“Oh?”
“I have a pen friend in America, a most fascinating woman named Joy Davidman.” He pauses with a smile that could warm the White Witch. “Her deep questions and curiosity remind me of yours.”
“Oh, I hope that is a compliment?”
“Indeed it is.”
I feel happy to have been compared to his pen friend in America. I want to keep chatting with him before he tells me another story. “How is the newest Narnia coming?”
“It is much harder than the others. I’m trying to write the prequel. You see”—he grins—“I am telling the story of the professor before he appears in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and you’ll learn his real name.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Digory Kirk.”
I nod and think about Professor Kirkpatrick but don’t say a word about it, like a treasure I save for George. “So you’re writing the first book second?”
“Oh, I am writing the first book fourth. I am going backward. It’s not as easy as all that.”
“When I read your story, you made it all look so easy. I couldn’t just sit down with a pen and make a whole new world.”
He laughs that beautiful laugh and says, “Well, I couldn’t sit down and solve a physics equation.” His balding pate glows with the sunlight falling into the room through the two windows facing west. “And meanwhile I’m working on an autobiography the publisher seems jolly keen to have from me.”
“An autobiography!” I say. “I will read that straight away.” I think for a moment whether to say the next thing on my tongue and then I do. “Seems like I’m getting an early performance.”
“Indeed.” He gives me what seems a secret smile. “They think I have salacious secrets I will finally tell. They are going to be truly disappointed.”
He motions for me to sit in a large green armchair and I do. In my mind I have a list of direct questions prepared, ones I think will let me return to George with all the answers. But in Mr. Lewis’s presence, these questions fall away.
We settle in, and I consider his huge wooden desk sitting in the middle of the room, piled high with papers and what appear to be an inordinate number of letters. There is no typewriter. A standing grandfather clock looms over the study, its numbered face elegant and large. The rug is threaded with red and green. On the wooden coat rack, a robe of red and black hangs with a fisherman’s cap on the top rung.
Mr. Lewis sits back in his chair and lights his pipe slowly, tapping down the tobacco as if he has all the time in the world. It’s obvious his pipe has been fashioned by hand from the deep brown brierroot and soon glows under the smoke that rises toward his eyes. He blinks. I break the silence.
“I read Phantastes,” I tell him.
“Oh, did you now? And what did you think, Miss Devonshire?”
“It was very enchanting, with all the fairies and the adventure. Honestly, I had a hard time stopping.” I pause and realize in that small space of time that he also knows I’ve read his book too. “Just as I did reading yours,” I add.
He bellows with laughter and leans forward, his cheeks ruddy and cheery, his rimless glasses falling lower on his nose. “You can love more than one book. It’s not like a husband. You also don’t have to feign loving both books.”
“I’m not pretending, sir.” I try to fix my hair, which is falling into my eyes, but then give up. It is unruly and will stay so. “I loved them both. I don’t know why I believed . . .” I pause, because I don’t know quite where I’m headed with the sentence, but he does.
“That fairy tales were only for children?”
“Yes.”
He settles back into his chair. “Now where were we in our stories for your brother?” He pauses. “For George?”
“The last story I told him was about the war. It made us both so very sad.” I think about telling Mr. Lewis that I wish we were, at long last, at the part of his story where he tells me exactly—word and literal word, like a math problem spread across the blackboard—where Narnia came from. This plus this equals that. This plus this equals the faun and the beavers and . . . the lion!
Instead, he nods and says, “Have I told you about the next war?”
“You went back?” I hope this isn’t true.
“No, Miss Devonshire. Warnie did, but no, I did not. What happened during the next war is that children, many of them, came to live with me during the Blitz.”