AN: I was chatting with Laura Andrews about a LB AU, and all of a sudden this was born. I wrote up a version of it all in one go, after midnight, two nights ago, and then WillowDryad helped me polish it and inspired the ending. She encouraged me to post it all in one go, but I'm stubborn (and the epilogue isn't quite behaving yet) so this is just the first half. I hope to post the end Tuesday, and I may be changing the title.
Yellow smog in London borrowed from A. Conan Doyle, annoying Professor behavior from Prof. Kirkpatrick, known as The Great Knock in Surprised by Joy, the back bedroom in Cambridge from Voyage of the Dawn Treader, much description borrowed or inspired by The Magician's Nephew, and mangled quote from the Twenty-Third Psalm.
The dog, on the other hand, is mine.
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul.
~ Psalm 23
The air in Cambridge that winter, the winter of 1949-50, was not tinged greeny-gold with sunshine through tree leaves. It was not the thick, choking yellow smog of Edmund's Sherlock Holmes stories. (She had given those books to Mr. Puffett, the schoolmaster, along with Peter's old copy of Virgil, the one that had been new until Professor Kirke bent back the covers and jotted notes on the pages.) Some days the sun shone with a wan yellowish light, but more often the clouds draped the sky and the light was thin and grey.
Once, Miss Pevensie had never worn black. War might have hung overhead, but she had always looked her best in made-over and let-down but carefully-tailored frocks. The pencil lines down the backs of her legs, carefully drawn to mimic stocking seams, were always straight, and her hair curled softly about her shoulders. It was patriotic, then, to look one's best, and if she sometimes stayed out late at the dances, "cutting a rug" with the other girls and the American GIs, she always slept well when she got home.
It is children who sleep well, knowing that there might be a dragon in the closet but St. George will guard them; that the bombs might buzz overhead but that Daddy would protect them. And Daddy had protected them. The bombs had missed their house all through the war. The children had grown up and finished school. Susan had gotten a pair of real nylon stockings and started to wear dark red lipstick when she went dancing. Then, without warning, in an explosion like a forgotten minefield years after after V-Day, all was wiped out. Her mother's pearls, her father's books, and Lucy's snub-tailed dog were left, but her whole family—her Rock, her Protector, her Light, and her dear father and beloved mother besides—all were gone. Who was there to look her best for? Life must go on. Life would go on, though draped in black. But she could no longer sleep.
The houses and most of the things she had sold or given away. A few things, with which she could not bear to part, she had hurried into a trunk. And then, garbed in one of the black dresses her mother had bought thirteen years earlier for the death of the King, followed mournfully by the dog, she went down to Cambridge and moved into Aunt Alberta's back bedroom, where there was plenty of fresh air—not warm and green and lively, nor dense and yellow and deadly, but chill and snowy-silent.
At night she woke gasping for breath, choked by tears. She would sit up, the bedclothes wrapped around her, and stare at the picture on the wall. If there had ever been magic in it, there was none now, though the eye in the dragon-prow followed her in the dark. The blue and green and purple of oil paint over gesso on a stretched canvas (she touched it once, to be certain) were faded and dusty, but when she turned away from it she would pull the blankets over her head to block out the dragon's eye. She could feel the cold tears trickling down the side of her face and pooling in her ear, and she could not get warm.
Aunt Alberta did not like the dog in the house. Sometimes, though half-ashamed of her childishness and telling herself it was too cold outside for the poor thing, Susan snuck it into her bedroom and coaxed it up on the bed. She clung to it until it whined and squirmed away to shake itself and lie carefully across her feet, and at last she fell into an exhausted and fretful sleep.
In the morning she brushed her limply dull hair and twisted it severely back. Aunt Alberta said she was losing weight. Susan said it was the slimming effect of black, but she dabbed a little of her old lipstick on her bloodless lips before walking to work, where she clicked cold metal keys to print efficient black letters on colorless paper.
Once, each day had been different, with its bustle of duties and small happinesses and meals where conversation flowed like wine. Now the days dropped one by one and all alike from the thread of fate, and if there had been wine in that teetotalling house it would have soured into vinegar.
At last a day came where the numbing monotony broke. The snow had melted, and the withered remains of the year's first flowers were bent under a steady drizzle of rain. Aunt Alberta was out and Uncle Harold in his study, and the dog looked so mournful that she wrapped him in a towel and smuggled him into her bedroom. It was a Saturday afternoon, with no work to occupy her mind.
At last she dragged the trunk of things from her family out (unconsciously sitting with her face toward the dragon-ship—she had never liked leaving monsters where they could sneak up on her) and went through it. There were Lucy's paintings and her recorder, the worn chess-set she had kept to remember the boys by. Father's diaries from the years before her birth, the pages filled with his close, neat hand; the copy of Newton's Principia that she would never read. And there was a smaller, cigar-sized box: she had never opened it but kept it untouched, not daring to see what had been taken from—the bodies.
The dog had scratched his towel into a corner and came to lay his head in her lap. She rubbed his ears absently as she opened the box. It wasn't much. A few bob. Half a crown. Lucy's tattered copy of Alice. A little cloth bag with a drawstring. And through her overwhelming grief there came a ray of curiosity. She loosened the drawstring to shake the contents into her hand.
The back bedroom disappeared with not even a wink from the dragon's eye and for a moment she saw nothing at all. Then she was moving rapidly upward, it seemed, and then she was scrambling out of a deep pool onto a grassy bank in a warm and very green forest. The dog, who had come with her, shook itself instinctively and sat on the bank. She stood there a moment, looking around. Here the light shone green and alive through the leaves, and the air was thick enough to breath. Here, no chill breeze sapped the air of its warmth. Here the stillness was not of death but of peace and quiet life. Here there were no grey cobblestones marring the green of the earth, no ice whitening the clear blue of the pools dotting the ground every few yards, between the reddy-brown trunks of trees. It seemed the first color she had seen in an age.
After she had looked a long time at the green of that wood, she looked down. She was wearing black. There was a dog drinking from the pool (she had a thought that it had come with her, but then she thought they had both been there in that greenness for always). It was black, too, but somehow it was a rich black, and seemed as alive as the verdant warmth all around. There was a little black bag in one of her hands, and a round yellow ring in the other. That was odd. She did not remember what they were for. She would put the ring in the bag so it would not be lost. She slid her hairpins out, too, and dropped them in, feeling a cold knot in her stomach loosen its somehow-forever-clenched grip as her hair fell out of its hard twist.
There. She would set the bag by the edge of the pool and take a drink. The water was fresh and cool and tasted better than anything. She washed her face and thought she was washing away a dim blackish-grey cloud of something—what, she did not try to remember. The dog had curled itself in the grass and closed its eyes. An old phrase shaped itself in her mind. Lie down . . . beside still waters. She would do as the dog had done.
The turf was soft and springy. It was warm, too, deliciously warm. She did not think she had ever been this warm. She could stay here forever. She closed her eyes. The light was golden through her eyelids, and she could feel the greenness around her, and with a sigh, she slept.
