NOTE: So I wrote this at lunch after a night of pacing for my essay, constantly rotating The Weeknd's High For This, Tove Styrke's Snaren, and Rihanna's Consideration. It's a month away from uni exams, and these things happen.
Title from Tove Styrke's Snaren.
"You have been looking quite peaky lately, Miss Pevensie."
Susan looks up from plating slices of chocolate biscuit cake. Miss Alice Kingsleigh is leaning against an embroidered cushion, carefully packing her silver pipe with what she once told Susan are her special herbs. The tiniest pink flowers are engraved on the bowl of the pipe, almost as delicate as the single pearl resting on Miss Kingsleigh's aristocratic throat.
Week by week, Susan is slowly overcoming being cripplingly intimidated by Miss Kingsleigh.
Susan tried to give herself a vigorous talk, months ago, on the morning before she travelled to Miss Kingsleigh's estate. "You're an educated, independent woman," she told her reflection, in between careful swipes of her red lipstick. "You just got accepted to do a renowned businesswoman's finances." Susan stepped into her black heels and ran a trembling hand down her red pantsuit. "It's all right. You're all right."
Her first impression of Miss Kingsleigh is of a gossamer fabric, like the ones she draped around in her student room in America. Miss Kingsleigh wasn't wearing gossamer when she greeted Susan in the sitting room, but a practical blue cotton dress. Her pale blonde hair made Susan blink, as if it was the afternoon sun's reflection winking from deep beneath a pool. But what unsettled Susan was Miss Kingsleigh's pale blue eyes, looking at Susan with a smile but distant and wavering like a looking glass.
"Miss Pevensie, delighted to meet you," Miss Kingsleigh greeted, and shook Susan's hand. Her grip was firm. It was overwhelming, because it was the first time in England that Susan shook hands with a woman of forty years or older. "Tell me," Miss Kingsleigh continued, "is it true that you played no cricket in America?"
Now Susan feels quite at ease proffering to the older woman a crystal cake plate, heaped with a generous slice of chocolate biscuit cake. "It's nothing, Miss Kingsleigh," she says. "Just sleeping past my bed time."
Miss Kingsleigh sets down her pipe and the cake plate, and turns to the tea trolley to get the tea pot. "Night terrors, perhaps?"
"Something like that." Susan shifts on her seat. "It would've been my sister's birthday the other day."
Miss Kingsleigh pauses in pouring them tea, her eyes settling on Susan. "Oh, I am so sorry, my dear. You could have told me. I would have let you have the day off."
Susan chokes out a short, flat laugh. She doesn't know if that's acceptable in Miss Kingsleigh's polite company, but just touching on this subject makes her vision tunnel into choking grief and resentment. "That wouldn't be fair. I have – I had three siblings."
"My dear, I only have one American-educated finance lady," Miss Kingsleigh says, with a soft smile. "I do not trust men with my money, and hardly anyone else around here is as passionate about numbers as you are."
"That's – well. Thank you, Miss Kingsleigh." Susan takes a sip of her tea to recover a bit, and when she sets the cup on the saucer there is a faint red stain against the white china. Miss Kingsleigh doesn't put on powder nor lipstick, leaving her face bare and her pink lips a bit dry-looking. Susan is also slowly overcoming the mortification of leaving lipstick traces on all the eating things.
Susan fumbles wildly for a topic and says, "This cake is really delicious."
"It is, isn't it," Miss Kingsleigh says, looking quite gratified. "I always bake our cakes in this house, and prepare our tea."
"That's really great to hear. I thought – I guessed that you must really love cakes, Miss Kingsleigh."
"I do." Miss Kingsleigh laughs her usual laugh, airy and eerily amused. "You should always be careful of what you eat and drink."
Susan is used to Miss Kingsleigh giving strange advice. For this one, she can't quite figure out if it's Miss Kingsleigh's paranoia for being an heiress and an equally wealthy entrepreneur in her own right. Or maybe she'd seen things during the war that Susan has been too young and self-absorbed and removed-from-this-world to remember. Susan heard whispers from some of the staff that it's never certain when Miss Kingsleigh was born. She might have been around during the First World War as well, or even the Opium Wars. It should sound silly, a myth for a wealthy eccentric semi-recluse, because it always happens to wealthy eccentric semi-recluses. They might be vampires. They might have eaten people in the basement. They might have buried a clown alive in the cellar. They might have a secret in the attic. Just a normal oddity of a distraction in a recovering country.
It should sound silly, but Susan has been to Narnia. Susan grew up and ruled as a Queen for decades before she stumbled out of the wardrobe a child again. Then her body has to grow up again, running to keep up with her old mind.
"Are you quite certain you wouldn't want a wardrobe in your room?" Miss Kingsleigh asks. She wraps her lips around her pipe, turns her head to the side, and gently blows. Dense clouds of smoke cascades around her. Susan glances away, biting on her lip.
"I'm sure."
"Well, if you should think that you will have some other use for it, I had it moved to the room beside yours."
"I –" Susan swallows. Lucy walked down the corridor to another room. "Thank you, Miss Kingsleigh."
But Miss Kingsleigh's eyes are boring into her now, barely blinking behind the smoke. "You have gone pale, Miss Pevensie. Do tell me, would you happen to have a fear of wardrobes?"
Miss Kingsleigh talks the way she laughs, airy and vague, drifting like the constant cloud of languid smoke around her. It's not an imperious command, but Susan figures she should tell someone.
"I – I have dreams," Susan starts, and grips at the knees of her green pantsuit. Her wristwatch feels cold against her dampening skin. "I have dreams that I lost my siblings in a wardrobe. They felt almost real, the dreams. I was there with them at the start, but I got out of the wardrobe and I lost them."
"What is in the wardrobe?" Miss Kingsleigh asks, softly.
"Someplace. A kingdom."
"I see," Miss Kingsleigh murmurs. Susan wants to say, Do you, really but she is gripped by an odd fear of the answer. Before she can dwell on it, Miss Kingsleigh continues, "Well, why did you get out? Did you not like the kingdom?"
"I loved it." This, Susan can say with certainty. "But it cast me out for feeble, baffling reasons. Something like that isn't real to me. It's not real."
Miss Kingsleigh surveys Susan for several moments, peering at her over the cup with a disconcerting calmness. Susan picks up her fork and digs it in her cake, watching the silver cut through crumbs and cream, and pretends to be interested in her crystal cake plate as she chews.
Finally Miss Kingsleigh says, "As long as you know what is real, I find that you will be happier with whatever happens."
"I'm – I am happy." And Susan finds that true. She is doing something which she knows she is brilliant at, and it is reassuringly grounded in exact science. Every morning she wakes up and she has breakfast out in a sunlit patch of the garden, sipping strong coffee and eating rich butter as the scent of the hydrangeas wafts towards her. She goes to bed with the knowledge that her siblings must be happy someplace and with the reassurance of the United Nations that no bullets will tear through the United Kingdom any time soon. Susan is determined to be happy.
"That is lovely to hear," Miss Kingsleigh says. Her smile is kind, and it reaches the lines around her mouth and the vagueness in her eyes. "You know, there are times when we are hurled into strange places. Quite magical, strange places."
Susan does her best not to choke on her tea.
"Sometimes we could not understand what it is," Miss Kingsleigh continues. Smoke drifts out from her mouth, curling around her precise diction. "We could not understand why it happened, or how it happened." She lets out a short laugh. Susan does not know whether to smile or to remain solemn.
"But you know, my dear, I believe that when you emerge from the strange place you can appreciate that this one we have is as strange. But a very familiar sort of strange, isn't it?"
"Yes," Susan says, the answer to her earlier unasked question sending a chill down her spine: Miss Kingsleigh does know.
Miss Kingsleigh sets her pipe on a pink ashtray, and takes a sip of water. "Navigating this world becomes somewhat less daunting, I must say. You have stretched your limit. Redefined what is possible. Plenty of people, for example, doubted my business decisions. Impossible, they said. Delusional. Insane."
Susan keeps quiet as she turned over Miss Kingsleigh's words.
"You must think I am raving," Miss Kingsleigh says.
"Oh, no. Not at all. I just – those are wise words." Susan breaths in and looks at the other woman straight in the eye. "You seem to know really well what you're speaking of, Miss Kingsleigh. About strange places."
"Let us take a walk, shall we?" Miss Kingsleigh stands up and rings the bell for Catherine to come gather the cups and tea saucers and crystal cake plates and wheel the trolley away. "We can talk about strange places out in the fresh air."
Susan stands up as well and allows Miss Kingsleigh to glide out of the room before she strides briskly over to her purse.
Susan touches up her lipstick as she waits for Miss Kingsleigh to put on a hat. There are framed paintings of mushrooms and rabbits in the entrance hall, and in the corner where Susan is waiting, there is a small piece done in oil pastels: a girl with her back to the viewer, and she is clad in armour and weaponised with a sword, the white favour clutched in her other hand hints that she is a queen's knight. All of the pieces are maintained by a staff whose wages Susan regularly accounts for with the household costs.
Miss Kingsleigh comes out of a door, smiling faintly under her fashionable hat, and makes her way towards Susan. "Let us go, Miss Pevensie," she says, and offers Susan her arm.
And really, Susan thinks as her fingers clasp around immaculate blue silk, she should stop being intimidated by Miss Kingsleigh. She is great in what she does so she should not fear about being found inadequate and kicked off to wander around London. She's Susan and once, she ruled a country and led an army into a golden age.
The front door opens and they are suffused with warmth. Miss Kingsleigh says, "Oh, will you look at that. A spot of soggy sun. It is quite like magic," and Susan laughs.
She is going to be all right. For Susan, that's real enough.
fin