“Perhaps I was training myself to be a novelist.”
There is a large wooden desk at the far end of the room below the window, almost glowing with twilight, papers piled everywhere. “Is the original on that desk?” I ask. I’m thinking I want to tell George I saw the pages typed up or written in Mr. Lewis’s house.
“The original?” he asks.
“The original The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
“Oh, no, no. I don’t have that anymore. When I finish a piece of work I flip the pages over and start something else on the other side. After it’s all typed up, it’s gone.”
“Is that where you wrote it?” I ask Mr. Lewis.
“No. That was my mother’s desk. Mine is upstairs in my study.”
His eyes dim, and he looks at Warnie as if they are the only two people in all the world and their mother’s desk holds a secret I can’t know.
“I want to understand, Mr. Lewis. I want to understand how you can imagine something like that.”
“There is a difference between imagination and reason,” he says. “You want to understand with reason; I hear you. And I once believed they battled each other—imagination and reason—that they stood in sharp contrast one to the other.” He takes a draw of his pipe. “But that’s not why we are here right now, Miss Devonshire. Maybe that shall come to you later.”
I don’t understand what he means, but I nod anyway.
“Should we tell her about the little end room at Little Lea?” Mr. Lewis asks, turning to his brother. “Which does, by the by, look like the Kilns, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do.” Warnie sips his tea and nods. “And yes, tell her.”
Then Mr. Lewis, in his charming accent and thunderous voice, begins a tale of two brothers in an attic in Ireland. He tells me the story as the fire fades and night falls hard against the windows.
Four
The Little End Room
“I asked him,” I tell George as I rush into his room and sit on the wooden chair next to his bed. I drop my book bag and kiss his cheek before I take out the composition notebook with the marble-style cover I’d bought at Blackwell’s bookshop on the way home.
“Oh, Megs! You did? What did he say?” George sits up, and the energy in his voice takes away all doubt that I can make him happy with the notebook I hold.
“He’s the nicest man in the world. He talks . . . so precisely. I don’t know how to explain it. Like every word is exact and he means each one.”
George takes my hand. “Where did you talk with him? In a lecture hall?”
“I was hiding in the woods behind his house and his brother found me.”
George laughs and his smile fills his face; he throws off his covers to sit straight. “And?”
“The author and his brother live on a property that looks like Narnia slipped out of the book and into their back garden. Or”—I smile—“it slipped out of his land and into Narnia.”
“What did you ask him? What did he tell you?”
“Slow down, silly. I’ll tell you everything. I promise. He did answer me a bit but not quite like you’d think. He told me a couple stories and invited me back on Monday.”
“He didn’t answer?” George’s face falls and he slumps back to his pillow.
“Oh, he did. Just in his own way. With stories. He wouldn’t let me take notes like I do with my tutor, but instead told me to go back to my rooms and write it down as I remembered it. So this”—I hold up my notebook—“is how I remember it.”
George takes the notebook from my hands and flips through the pages I’d furiously written on with black ink, my handwriting jammed tightly from side to side and top to bottom. “I can’t read this very well. Your writing is . . . scrunchy.”
“I know. I wrote it so fast. I’ll read it to you.”
I take back the notebook and begin. While sleet pelts the windows, I read to George. “Outside Belfast, in County Down, a young—”
“Wait!” George presses his hand to mine. “That’s not how you start a story.”
“How do I start it?” I ask him, looking up from my words. “Do I say, ‘Once upon a time’？”
“If you want.” He seems incredulous at this boring start.
“How about . . .” I think for a breath or two. “How about, ‘Not long ago . . .’”
“And not far away,” he says.
“Or,” I say with a grin, “‘once upon a . . . wardrobe’！”
He smiles so buoyantly his cheeks rise to his ears. “Yes!” he says, his gaze wandering to the wardrobe across the room.
“Then here we go,” I say. “Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not far away, in County Down outside Belfast, a young Jack Lewis, only eight years old, same age as you, lived with his older brother, Warnie, who was eleven years old, his mother, Flora, and his father, Albert. There was a tutor and a nanny, Lizzie and Annie, and his grandfather Lewis also lived there. It was a full house.”
George interrupts again. “Who is Jack?”
“The author, Mr. Lewis.” I smile. “Clive Staples Lewis. I should have told you that. As a boy, he changed his name. He didn’t like Clive Staples. Instead, he named himself Jack. His mother called him Jacksie.”
George laughs, and the sound is as glorious as waves on rocks at Brighton Beach. “Jacksie? Like a baby?”
“I think it’s just a cute nickname. You know how mums are.”
He laughs and glances at the door in case Mum might be listening.
“Now let me tell it,” I say.
George nods and presses his lips in a smile.
“They lived in a house called Little Lea. It was a red-brick house on a hill looking over the green land, and on a clear day they could see the wild waters of Belfast Lough and the Antrim Mountains. In this house was an attic full of nooks and crannies and small spaces where Jack and Warnie would play. They could sit at the window and watch the ships in the bay, for their great-grandfather had been a shipbuilder and they were fascinated. During this time, the massive Titanic was being built in Belfast, right under their noses, but how could they have known its terrible fate?”
I pause and look to George. I’m not sure this is what he wants, but it is all I have, so I continue.
*
George listens to his sister, her voice telling him the facts, but his imagination breathes new life into the story. George listens and observes his sister’s beautiful face. She has more freckles on the left cheek than the right. There is a dimple low by the right side of her lip, and the curls of her hair are alive with her every move. Her smile takes some time but is always worth the wait.
Hours in bed have taught George how to find the soft edges of the facts and drop himself into the worlds he hears about or reads of. He closes his eyes, sets his mind’s eye on the words, and floats on them like a raft. Megs’s beloved voice continues, and George is transported to an attic with two young boys at a window seat in a place they called the little end room.
The brothers stare out at the emerald land and beyond to the whitecaps of a wild bay and the jagged edges of a mountain that rises into the clouds. Both of the Lewis boys have dark hair; they are quiet while watching the ships sail in and out of the harbor.