A/N: My family moved out of my childhood home over the summer, and the wistful side of that experience sort of inspired this fic. It's been stewing in my word processor for a couple of months now, and I finally polished it up for publication.
I don't own The Chronicles of Narnia or anything herein—that distinction goes to the magnificent C. S. Lewis. Although I would love to hear your thoughts regardless!
"Maureen" is Mrs. Macready. It seemed reasonable to me that Digory would call her by her first name, so I gave her one.
None of the children come down to supper that evening. Maureen grouses about falsified bellyaches and the selfish whims of children, seeming entirely unmoved that she only has to cook for two, as she is accustomed, rather than six. (Ivy and Margaret and Betty, while they make themselves useful at their jobs, are incurable gossipers and gigglers all three, and do not take dinner with Mrs. Macready and the Professor—or his guests, on the occasions when they are actually present at the table.)
Digory doesn't go back to his study when the pointedly quiet affair is over, but takes a stroll around the house. There are many rooms he barely visits, but tonight he is compelled to enter them by a strange restlessness that tugs at his feet. Explore, the house seems to call to him, as if something has been awoken in its foundations, in some absent corner of its rambling girth. He feels as if he could, at any moment, slip through the wrong door and find a world he never expected.
He pauses a moment before turning each doorknob, caught between the nostalgic excitement of his boyhood adventure and the deep, wistful ache that comes of missing it.
He stands in thought especially long upon entering one room in particular. The adjunct library—smaller than he wanted, so he had built a library out of a spare room off his study—is a room free of dustcloths, as the floor-to-ceiling shelves, cramped as they are, had no space for sheets to be tossed over them. They stand now, a sad testament to the abandonment too much of the house has suffered.
Once, he'd thought he would bring up a family in this house—that the hallways would be full of laughter, that certain pretty, blunt-mouthed wife with golden hair would help him fill this old estate with children, and by extension, grandchildren—that this would be a house that kept its own youth with generations of adventures inside it.
But circumstances and human error conspired years ago to foil that dream. Now it is someone else's children who draw treasure maps and pitch cricket balls through windows and cram gangly bodies into the decorative suits of armor, who fingerprint the '"istorical artifacts" and drive Maureen up the wall with their city-shod feet and bottomless sense of wonder.
And now even they are silent.
Is it time or war that has been the true ravager of his beloved home?
His knees are beginning to ache from standing still for so long; it must be well past the end of dinner-time by now. He trudges back through the dusty hallways, seeing that some doors are open where they should not be, that footprints litter the floorboards where nobody else has lived for decades. There were a few days, he remembers, when the Pevensie children did behave like children after their arrival. It rained this morning, in fact—and English city children are less liable to muddy themselves in a downpour's glory than might a child brought up in it. Midnight isn't here yet, mutters the house,starlight blinking from between skewed curtains into his face. I still have some magic left in me. The end of the song hasn't died away yet.
That kind of magic, Digory muses, he cannot face again just yet. Tonight, he wants to sit in his study and pray that the war would end. Wish that it, and the Great War before it, had never come between him and the things he wanted most.
Despite all her grumbling and muttering about the "ungrateful little wretches," Digory sees Maureen making up a pot of cocoa for four. She doesn't try to force admission into their seclusion, only knocks and leaves the trays outside their rooms. Though they never hear a peep from the inhabitants, the mugs are summarily drained of their saccharine offering, and it is Peter whom Digory later spies slipping through the corridors to return the empty mugs to the kitchen.
Though the children do come down in the morning to take breakfast, it is clearly as guests who feel obligated to show their face despite being almost blue-faced from lack of sleep. They are grave. There is no other word for it; they all sit sober and straight and formal, as if someone they love dearly has just died and they are all adults who have to bear the weight while maintaining public dignity. They make no attempt at conversation, even with one another, and it is an uncomfortable party that passes the eggs in perfect silence and stares miserably at plates of fried ham as if the tender meat were cowpies. Maureen manages to look even more unenthusiastic about the children's presence than she has since they arrived.
After almost a half hour of the stifling gloom, Digory can't abide it. He gives Maureen a perfunctory thank-you for the meal, as usual, but excuses himself abruptly, retreating to the familiar oak blocks that make up his cluttered study.
Those children won't breathe a word of what's eating at them. Digory instinctively, in spite of their reticence, knows why. He can almost smell the Other air on them. Nobody could, or should, believe them—but even without hearing the story from their lips, he does.
He rings Polly. It's been more than four months since they've last talked—she's always so busy with the relief effort, and he, quietly doing his part in prayers three hundred miles away—but still, she's never surprised to hear from him.
"Well hello, old friend!" There is always cheer in her voice, and he smiles reflexively.
"Hello, Pols. How are you doing?"
"Oh, the usual. Well as can be expected. There's more coming in every day, but so many people are pulling together to help. We're living off providence these days."
They chatter about their very different lives for a minute or two, catching up, and then Digory says—
"My current houseguests are four children who staying here while their father's away in the RAF. Something odd's happened to them, and though they haven't said a word of it, I'll be damned if it wasn't—that Other Place."
Silence hangs on the other end of the line for a moment. Finally Polly says, very quietly, "The old wardrobe?"
"It's not hard to reach that conclusion," he says quietly. "They're explorers to the hilt, all four of them. One moment yesterday they're rushing about, making the Macready want to pull her hair out like children do, and then—it's like they're different people. Three-quarters of an hour Maureen says they were out of her sight, while there was a tour here, and then—" He breaks off, and sighs heavily. "They came down for breakfast this morning, and you'd have thought someone stole their children's souls and stuffed the soberest grown-ups you ever did see in their place. Even the way they walk is different, more confident and elegant than you see on many a grown man or woman."
There's a sigh on the other end of the line. "You're jealous, Digory."
"Pols—"
"Oh, I would be too, if I spent all my days in a grand great house like yours." She is smiling again, teasing gently. "You and all the magic in your blood, for all you never really believed those silly stories of your uncle's."
His grip tightened on the receiver. "But I believed in Narnia—I still do, more than I've ever believed in anything."
"How long do you think they were there?" A hint of wistfulness has crept into her tone.
"Longer than we were, that's for certain," says Digory, "or else they had a much harder time of it than we did. They're in mourning, Polly; they're not behaving like children who have had a favorite toy taken away, they're like…widows and widowers transplanted into the bodies of their own children. It's almost unbearable to watch. Even the silly servants are on edge around them."
"It's a good thing you have the great and terrible Macready to keep you grounded," joked Polly, distractably.
"Maureen is a jolly brick for that sort of thing," he conceded lightly. "That's why I keep her around."
Quiet hangs between them for a transitory minute, as they fade from the tiny peak of mirth back into the overarching sense of archaic sadness.
Polly's voice is subdued when she breaks the silence. "I'm sorry, Digs."
"I'm much too old to be jealous," he defends himself, but she is having none of it.
"You should ask them about it. It will only fester if you don't—in you and in them."
"You think they need reassurance that they'll come out of it all right?"
"Maybe. And maybe so do you."
He replies only with a thoughtful "Hmm." They chat for a bit longer before someone calls Polly away with news of some shrapnel-shattered collarbone or other, some poor bloke that needs the expert eyes and hands of Nurse Plummer to attend to them. She bids him a hasty but genuine "fare well!", and when he replaces the telephone in its cradle Digory can't help but feel terribly alone.
It's one more day in rainy England gone since the Incident Regarding the Wardrobe. He finds all the children reading in the main parlor. At least they're curled up like children, even if it isn't usual for them to be so very quiet.
The youngest is lying on a window seat with her feet propped against the wall, despite admonitions from her older sister, whose black braid is pinned up in a style Digory is quite sure isn't the current fashion in England. Edmund appears to be skilfully doodling in the margins of his book with a bit of charcoal; Digory opts not to reprimand him, as it appears to be an old maths workbook. Peter, seated directly opposite the doorway as if to leap to the room's defense at the first sign of any danger, looks up sharply from his own engrossment—is that a treatise on astrophysics?—as soon as Digory appears in the threshold.
The blond boy clears his throat, and the other three turn to stare. Lucy instantly moves to sit upright, settling into a demurely elegant pose as naturally as a swan alighting on a lake. Unnerved again, Digory attempts to stride into the room without hunching, feeling somehow as if he's a foreign spy trespassing on the enemy's war council. There's a loveseat open across from Peter and perpendicular to the other children, and he plants himself firmly. He clasps his hands over his knees to hide their sudden trembling.
"Professor," Susan greets him graciously, as if she's guessed what he wants to talk about and has been preparing for just such an encounter.
He nods in response, but can't bring himself to speak. He spent three hours last night pondering what to say to them, how to open the conversation, what to ask—but it was, he found, impossible to decide on a strict course of action. It was not merely a difficult subject to bring up, but an infinitely complex one.
If it was Narnia they visited...what was it like? Were Frank the cabdriver and his wife Nellie still reigning over a passel of Talking Beasts, or were his and Polly's friends long dead? Was Jadis still wandering the wastelands, living on her cruel ambition and the immortality of a stolen apple, or had she risen up and overthrown Aslan's elect? Was Digory himself forgotten in the memory of the Narnian people, or did he live painfully on in legend as The Boy Who Did It?
What did these children see in That Other Place to make them so very grim? So adult, so formal, so wondrous, so sad?
He finds that he desperately longs for news of Narnia, but he fears a thousand different possible repercussions. He is the responsible adult, and he doesn't dare risk harming the children, opening wounds better left cauterized by their transition back between worlds.
But then—he's the responsible adult, and he needs to know what has been going on in his own home, to the children he was given care of by a very brave and lonely mother. It is his responsibility to ensure they are as sound and whole as possible when they return home again.
You think they need reassurance that they'll come out of it all right?
Maybe. And maybe so do you.
He takes a deep breath, aware that the children are exchanging confusing and wary glances with one another as he sits calcified by indecision.
Narnia—visited twice in his lifetime, in his house. That cannot, God grant, be a coincidence.
"So," he says at last, "Mrs. Macready says you've been playing about in the old wardrobe."
Immediately four pairs of eyes snap to his: Lucy's shining, Edmund's wary, Susan's disbelieving, Peter's analytical.
"I suppose we have, sir," answers Peter after a deliberate, ponderous hesitation.
"Did you have—an adventure?" He stumbles over his choice of words, and he sees the razor-sharp glance that runs between the children like lightning through a gather of clouds when he does.
"In a manner of speaking…" says Peter, still too slowly.
"I don't think—you'd believe us," says Edmund, and Susan nods hastily, as if to cover up some secret by way of seamless commiseration.
"It's just a game we were playing. Children's games, Professor."
"We were bored, what with the rain—and all the strangers touring the house," Edmund finishes, like it's a tag-team relay of hide-the-otherworldly-adventure-from-the-grownup-who-will-smother-us. It apparently hasn't occurred to him that even his participation in this conversation acts as a beacon of hope to Digory: the boy he met a week ago was not so tightly knit with his brother and sisters, and would never have allowed himself to appear so.
But Lucy looks from one sibling to the next, the meticulous seriousness in her expression belying her Other age. "If the Professor wants to know, I think we can tell him," she chimes in—and that belies her eight-year-old heart.
There is one more long pause.
"Try me," said Digory, unable to hold back a grin. "And besides, I've noticed there are a few coats missing from that wardrobe in the spare room."