Maggie Dewhurst looked at her birthday present like a treasure. Every day Mummy and Daddy took her to the big park for a walk and then for a really nice dinner. There was nothing better than the way she lived now.
At least, so she thought until she turned four.
Now she gleamed brighter than the record in her hands. Her young provincial mind twirled with the lyrics she knew by heart. She forgot that she might listen to it later if indeed she needed to.
But she wouldn't need to.
Singing gaily to herself, Maggie beamed at passersby and skipped further up the path.
Further up and further in.
Mrs. Dewhurst blinked. "Darling, don't get too far ahead!" she called. "Mummy can't keep up!" And perhaps she could have if she tried, but she was tired.
George, her husband, squeezed her hand in his. "Magpie! We're leaving soon!"
Maggie trotted back and into her father's arms.
"Where to tonight, princess?" George asked, scooping her up onto his shoulders while his wife laughed all the while. A few years ago, the nickname made her wince. But she'd grown accustomed to it with time.
"Café! Daddy, please?"
"The café it is!"
Maggie's 'café' wasn't really just a café. It was called New Piccadilly Café by most and was Maggie's favorite place to go, especially after a walk in Hyde Park. Mr. and Mrs. Dewhurst had stopped by the house only to get her present and now went to aforementioned café.
Although they could afford the best, Susan found herself humbled by her daughter's taste. While she hadn't worked since the pregnancy, George had money and worked in stocks. In his downtime he took to writing—poetry, specifically, which he always called the 'sport of men with means' due to the fact that nobody could make a living of it. He'd spend hours at his desk, brow furrowed over what might have been money, but all too often was a struggle over word choice. Only a conversation with him could determine which it was.
Susan's husband was a hardworking man, no matter the task. Susan had always liked him, but it had taken George falling in love with her childhood home for her to fall in love with him. It had proved to her, once and for all, that he was different. That he was capable of loving Susan, not merely the once-popular Miss Pevensie.
As for the house, Susan couldn't really say that she didn't love it, even if she could never bring herself to say she did. In some book she'd read as a child it was said that a house wasn't a home until there'd been a marriage, birth, and death in it. Somehow she believed it. The house's wooden contours had indeed engraved behind all Pevensie eyes. No matter how silly it was to harbor feelings for an inanimate object, Susan had never been able to sell it in favor of procuring a more manageable flat in her twenties, which she supposed very telling. George had even insisted that they marry here, ten years ago. At first Susan had argued that it was utter nonsense but relented not too long afterward.
Her first and only child was born there, too. The labor was so quick that there was no time for hospitals, only for a doctor to be summoned to make sure things developed all right.
But there hadn't been a death in the house. There wouldn't be. Susan had seen quite enough of death, and the house was home enough to her anyhow.
Peter's room was the one she frequented. Sometimes she sat at his desk to think, sort through bills, or sometimes for no fathomable reason at all. He had kept a buckler hidden in his desk drawer, crammed so tightly at the back that Susan had never noticed it while he was alive. It was completely wooden with a few intricate designs in the center and at four outside points and a bar on the back for grip, and clearly it wouldn't hold against a sword so it must've been decorative. She had no idea where he could've gotten it and eventually concluded that he must have made it himself. Peter had also kept his fencing sword in his room, but Susan got rid of it after Maggie came.
Later she would hang his buckler on the wall, Susan kept deciding every time, but something always seemed to keep her from doing it. On one occasion Maggie had been feeling poorly. On another she found that they had no nails. She had gone and bought them, but George had simply been too tired to help her. She tried it herself and ended up hammering her index finger instead. That had led to a fight between her and her husband, and she hadn't attempted it since.
Of her siblings, Peter most wanted children. Lucy loved children, but she also relished her freedom. Edmund, similarly, was fond of his few hours of reflective solitude. So Susan closed her eyes and hoped that wherever her elder brother was, he had tiny others to keep him company—and hopefully a patient wife.
There was something special about continuing to live in the house she grew up in, learning in it, fighting in it, grieving in it, loving, hating, forgiving, bringing up children in it. It softened the passage of time. It also gave Susan the feeling that, despite the nonexistence of afterlife, her siblings could continue to watch her grow.
And god knows Susan has been wrong before.
For all she knew, there could've been an afterlife. It would probably resemble her favorite childhood dream, since faith was a childlike quality. Once upon a time she would've used the adjective with scorn. But true adulthood left no room for that. Childhood and adulthood were phases of life, neither to be feared more than the other. This she had learned from seeing both simultaneously, the first in her growing child and the latter in her remaining family. Harold and Alberta Scrubb, who had lived alone for years, quickly recognized such an existence as festering ground after their son's passing. The two had gone to America for a few months and didn't meet anybody there to their liking, feeling lonelier than ever by the time they returned in March of the following year. By which time they moved into Finchley nearer Susan with the intentions of 'keeping an eye on her.'
This hadn't been as terrible as it sounded according to Lucy and Edmund's accounts while they were living with them, before Eustace... before he stopped being a little beast.
The Scrubbs were not busybodies. They left their house only to go to work (they both did) and buy groceries. There was no going out for them. There were no good friends, no visits to neighbors besides the Dewhursts. Both were mutually displeased with the size and design of the house in which they now lived, and the complaining added a purpose back to their lives. They stayed in, the Dewhursts alternated between staying in and going out, and on the whole everybody minded his or her own business.
Susan had gone out on many occasions since then, but no longer to attend parties. She walked to the train station sometimes and sat there all day, or the neighborhood park, hearing rushes of songs… Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive, I'll Walk Alone, There'll Always Be An England, Sentimental Journey, Kalamazoo, Sing, Sing, Sing, The White Cliffs of Dover, In the Mood.
I'll Be Seeing You.
For at the neighborhood park, there had been a wishing well.
It had been destroyed during the war, but to this day she remembered it as if it were still there. After reading of its demise she'd avoided the park altogether, making it easier to do so.
Now that Maggie begged to be taken there every day, Susan hardly recognized the place. Twenty years had done something drastic to it. She didn't have to remember that there ever was a wishing well there, but she found herself wanting to. Needing to, just to have a visible starting point for her own human development. It had been a little painful, but far less so than Susan expected. Maggie's hand, right now twisted around hers with excitement, gave her confidence in change. Most of the time before, from the loss of childhood truths to the loss of family, she'd merely pretended, forcing the changes in her life to happen by pursuing them.
Not until a few nights ago, at the party of an old associate, did she realize just how far she'd had to push just to survive.
"Miss Susan Pevensie. From the older circles."
Susan turned her head and saw a male guest, maybe in his forties or early fifties, approaching her.
"I've always wondered where you've gone," he continued pleasantly.
"I've been here the whole time." Susan replied and couldn't help smiling at being missed.
"George Dewhurst," her husband shook the guest's hand. "I don't believe we met."
They began to talk, adding sound to the cloud of conversation surrounding them. Susan was wearing an old lavender dress she'd been bringing out less and less over the years. Perhaps it was the dress he remembered. Certainly she didn't recall meeting him—and Susan Pev... Dewhurst possessed quite a sharp memory. A party at Vera Bunker's house was not a place to meet people, anyway. Vera was no longer a young woman, and she kept old friends close without scurrying for new ones. The well-lit room shrank with gold- and silver-headed people wearing frills and wrinkles and wide smiles, people who didn't have to care about showing their yellowing teeth. They nattered comfortably as a well-known pianist murmured a tune across the keys.
Susan herself had met Vera very young, yet her wisdom, practicality, and dry humor got her into Vera's circle of friends. Although she wouldn't have admitted it at twenty-one, she'd always felt she had a better time among elders than she did at the cooler, youth-saturated salons. She'd invited Edmund to one of Vera's gatherings, in fact, thinking he too would be quite at home with the jovial, quiet intellectualism that prospered here. It reminded her of places she was sure she had been to, yet far beyond memory's reach. Maybe it was foolish to have asked him, but she'd thought he would be at least open-minded enough to consider it.
The memory didn't make her angry, or even wistful, as it did in days past. Susan moved to frown it away only to realize she'd learned that there was no use placing value judgment on such things. They'd gone their way, and she'd gone hers. Calling things bad or good seldom reflected any value inherent in those aforesaid things, but rather the way they felt about them. Susan had cried enough tears for anyone's lifetime. She could spend no more time hurling connotations onto loss, considering the words "accident," "wreck," or even "train" to be synonymous with "abomination." Questions swirling about God and the Problem of Evil have been in fashion ever since the Great War concluded. Yet evil was a human game, exaggerated and woefully over-applied if it even existed at all.
Susan felt a headache coming on. Even before she could turn to her husband to ask to leave, he squeezed her hand. "I'm glad to have met you," he said to the guest with a smile. "Susan and I must return home early to tuck our daughter in."
The guest looked momentarily surprised, then composed himself with a chuckle. "Ah, the life of parents," he said. "Good evening."
Susan snapped out of her reverie soon enough to return the farewell, and she and George moved to say their goodbyes to Vera. Usually Susan handled the dialogue at these gatherings. Sometimes George jumped in on the quieter days. He never brought attention to it, either, or demanded thanks afterwards. Another swarm of memories distracted her on cue, these featuring George.
Thee day she had met him, she'd just walked out of another party. Vera's, probably. Hers were the only ones she could stand immediately following the accident. It had been an angry day, and she had walked out to be able to simmer in private.
"I heard about your family," he'd said very abruptly a few yards behind her, startling her. "I'm very sorry for your loss."
Suddenly Susan hadn't been so angry anymore, and for lack of thanks, she'd offered him her hand.
He'd taken it.
They'd married eleven years after that. As Susan always told her siblings and lately herself, there was no hurt in being careful.
Susan wished she wished she remembered more, but try as she might for the contrary, she still thought it was perfectly adequate. The anger—then grief—had blotted most everything out. Anything more would have been false to the context and nauseatingly sentimental. After all, George had never bothered with introductory pleasantries, even back then. He, like her, preferred to get to the point.
Their love was simple amidst the despairing convolutedness of losing a family and England's long recovery from the war. Both had taken years to sort out. Having trudged through it, nothing was better to Susan than simplicity.
Immediately she checked that statement. It changed so often. A child would say there was nothing better than happiness: nothing considered quantitatively. To adolescents there was nothing better than better. And once the first heartbreak was reached, there was nothing better than a little bit of joy and constancy.
Children's memories were better, but adults were fuller in perception.
Susan hadn't picked up her brother's copy of On Liberty until her engagement, and only then after four nights of trying to figure things out by herself. It had been years since she had tackled such a read, and she found herself stumbling over every sentence for the first few hours. She considered giving up, and almost did, were it not for a passage that Edmund had underlined and explicated in the margins as a note to himself. It had surprised her since Edmund very seldom wrote in his books, preferring to leave the original pages pristine and write his observations instead on scraps of paper. But somehow after that she'd gotten through the book. And one fine day soon after that, she woke without her grief.
Oh, she'd still had her problems, and she'd missed her siblings just as much as ever. Now, however, she saw solutions much easier and hardly despaired over obstacles.
The war, strangely enough, had given her a freedom she could no longer recall. Yet that day, when her eyes had opened to a kiss of rain on her window, she had reclaimed it.
The Scrubbs had promised to visit on Maggie's birthday, and Alberta never missed an engagement. She'd instructed Harold to come, too, for appearance's sake if nothing else, only he had been more adamant about staying home today than usual. Perhaps he really was ill, as he'd said. Yet even now, at the neighborhood park with the Dewhursts, she could not bring herself to forget her jumpiness. Harold, like all men, was a baby when it came to illness. That noted, he was getting on in years.
"You shouldn't spoil her," she said, eyeing the dancing, laughing child with some anxiety.
"We have the means to make her happy," Susan replied with a ghost of a smile to her visage. "Why shouldn't we?"
"You used to be so sensible, Susan Pevensie."
At this she laughed—for it sounded sensible enough to her—and at her aunt's referral to her maiden name therein. Alberta Scrubb didn't approve of women changing their names after marriage and was somewhat peevish about changing her own. In Susan Pevensie, however, Alberta saw only what she liked and discarded the rest.
"It's been twenty years today since my Eustace died. Your siblings and parents, too."
"They gave me Maggie," said Susan. "I've always thought so." In her entire life, Susan never had a truer notion. Her daughter had been brought into the world exactly sixteen years after the accident happened.
"She is a little of all of them, isn't she?"
Better—none of them, Susan corrected in her head. It would have been so exclusive if it were how Aunt Alberta said—the child always having another person to be compared to. On the contrary, with everything that set little Maggie apart, they'd all delight at how wonderfully new she was. Peter loved optimism, Edmund loved novelty, and Lucy loved independence. And with the way Maggie wore headbands and tore away the ties from her straight black hair and ripped off her socks and shoes, hands raised and waving in revelation as she ardently sang prophesies of social change in the form of nursery rhymes and kid garble, Susan knew just how her child would grow. She preferred it. Later it would be at her own expense with free-spiritedness slammed against her inventor.
But she could relish it for now.
"Perhaps we shouldn't have taken her to Hyde Park last month," George had said with a little frown.
"Why not? We don't have a telly."
"You don't think she'll run away from home next time she hears word of a festival, do you?"
"Do be realistic."
Nobody in England knew what to call them, though there was whispered speculation that they were copycats of the American conscientious objectors. Hippies, or something.
George took only a few seconds to think this over, watching Maggie take off her shoes and pad ahead of them. "Well, she's our daughter, and I don't care what she wears." He turned away to hide his smile.
On the eve of Maggie's birthday, Susan had regaled her with the story of Eustace the Un-dragoned, one of the frequented topics at Friends of Narnia meetings where the others had assumed she wasn't listening. (Lucy, nonetheless, insisted upon telling the stories within earshot.)
Alberta, who had been present, showed her disapproval by leaving the room as Susan told the story. Soon afterward she tucked Maggie in and returned downstairs, expecting her aunt to have left hours ago. Upon seeing Alberta in the kitchen, doing dishes, Susan froze. Then the side of Susan's mouth quirked, giving way to a chuckle. Very seldom did people surprise her anymore, least of all her character of an aunt.
"You're stronger than most people give you credit for," Alberta said quietly without turning around. "Fragile, they used to call you. Beautiful and fragile."
"I know," said Susan.
"I always saw something else in you. Your siblings were... imaginative, to say the least," she continued carefully. "I never understood it, my sister and your father being levelheaded enough. But you never had your head in the clouds."
Again, she laughed, deeper in tone and tumult this time. "I used to think they were so wrong. Now I think that none of us was wrong. We just... dealt with hardships in different ways."
Susan's thoughts spiraled from there. What she did hadn't been evil, attending parties and disallowing herself to live in past stories. It was just a part of growing up. 'Anything can be taken from me, but never once these years have I lain prostrate and begged," she continued to herself. And sometimes, yes, she did think that the help she had had was barely sufficient, but she needn't have accepted more. For a grief so monumental, there was no more people could give.
"I thought so, too," Alberta said after several minutes. "Helen and I didn't talk much after we both were married. She disliked my husband, and I was determined to hate hers." She chortled, bewildering Susan. "After a few years of it I wasn't even angry anymore—just very sure I was right. And that since I was right, it wasn't my responsibility to make things right."
Susan walked forward and laid a hand on her shoulder, staring out of the window above the sink.
"Obviously mortality overrides pride," Alberta continued stiffly. "I know now that things just don't make sense a lot of the time because the world is so... absurd."
It was so, Susan knew. Everybody was less preoccupied with the loss of her siblings than they were with the loss of Susan Pevensie. Dealing with her own grief, it took Susan years to be surprised by it. By the time she came to her senses they'd all forgotten her, too.
"I focused on teaching Eustace everything he needed to know to survive and succeed in this world," Alberta said tightly, looking down at her hands. "Oh, I loved him, but I hid it. I hid it so long. I always thought there'd be time for it later, after he'd gotten himself a well-paying job. Harold and I never punished him, and I convinced myself that that was good compensation for affection." Her voice began to shake. "I was so unprepared when he started calling me 'Mother.'"
"I'm sure he knew," Susan replied vacantly. "Children know so much more than we think they do."
"That is true," Alberta blinked and recomposed herself. "I thought that having another child would be tantamount to replacing Eustace. By the time I wanted to... well, it was too late."
Susan turned to look again at Alberta, wondering when her own hair would turn gray.
At roughly the same time, Alberta turned to look at her. There were lines to her face that had always been there, and her posture was still ramrod straight—even for her age. In most ways she hadn't changed at all. But her eyes revealed more than they used to. Losing Eustace had made them that way. "Thank you for Maggie." She set down the dish she'd been cleaning. "Thank George too."
With that, she was gone.
Years ago, Susan was sure she was living in Hell. Now she was just as sure she wasn't, although she allowed for the possibility that some god had something to do with this.
If this was purgatory, though, it wasn't that bad.
Susan didn't much mind reminiscing, and memories of the party a few days ago and yesterday's conversation with Alberta still peppered her mind when she realized that she still needed to tuck Maggie in. And since it was Maggie's birthday, being late wouldn't do.
When she entered her daughter's room she found Maggie already in her bed, clutching her favorite stuffed animal dog. Susan's smile tightened with an older layer of memories.
Maggie held up the toy as soon as she noticed her mother's presence. "Auntie's!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, Aunt Lucy's," Susan affirmed quietly.
"What's she like?"
"She was…" Susan struggled for a word. "Lively. Beautiful." She paused. "Young. She died before she was supposed to."
"Oh," said Maggie, and she began to sing.
"Do you want me to get your record?"
"No. Sing to me."
Susan's eyes widened in surprise. She hadn't sung since George caught her at it six years ago.
"Please, Mummy? I'm four today."
Startling at the sound of her voice, she replied, "Yes, of course." With the airiness of discard, word upon word came out before she'd even known she'd memorized it:
Puff the Magic Dragon lived by the sea,
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.
Susan had spent the rest of her time at the Professor's reading Les Miserables. Just as the raids ended, Eponine had lain back with a little smile and said, 'And then, do you know, Monsieur, I believe I was a little in love with you,' and died.
It was the smile Maggie wore as she grew slacker in Susan's hold, as if of finality and permanence.
Only it couldn't be. Children didn't stay children.
She wiped a captive tear from the corner of her eye. The truth was, Susan loved those times of songs. She missed when the unfeasible made sense.
"Why'd you stop?"
She caught her thoughts and resumed, bracing herself.
Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail.
Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff's gigantic tail.
Noble kings and princes would bow whene'er they came.
Pirate ships would low'r their flags when Puff roared out his name.
That was as far as she got before Maggie's breathing evened out.
Susan gazed down at her, deep in thought. Children fell so quickly asleep. They had nothing to worry about.
A thousand yards within her, the voice continued.
A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.
Painted wings and giants' rings make way for other toys.
One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more.
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.
His head was bent in sorrow; green scales fell like rain.
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave,
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave.
After muttering the chorus twice more, Susan shut the door quietly behind her.
Maggie didn't know it was her birthday, only that she was four today.
She didn't know that once upon a time, Mummy would've killed herself on this date.
But all children grew up. Someday Maggie, too, would be in pain.
There were things about life Susan would never know, and there were things about Maggie's mind she'd never know without the ability to read her thoughts. Everyone faced trials differently, and no matter how close Susan held her daughter or hammered advice into her head, Maggie would ultimately have to find her own way to deal with them.
There were things about Susan's own mind that she would never know. She'd never be able to divine the day when her familial loss suddenly became bearable without any prior indication. And she'd never be able to understand, long before that, how the loss of a very imaginary land could yield a very real grief. Not only hers, but her siblings. Lucy and Peter especially had been upset with her.
A mad world, family, whatnot, all went back to the mind. It was, after all, the mind that perceived these cosmic logical fallacies, the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of magic travel. Susan didn't suppose that the "impossibility" denoted a "hidden" possibility, to humor the fact that it did happen—hypothetically, anyway. If the "hidden" possibility were the truest label, then anybody could have been drawn by Aslan's magic or stumbled through the Professor's wardrobe. While a refutation for the first would not be easy, the latter would be. Susan had seen with her own eyes the wardrobe's backing when Lucy brought her and Peter in to investigate. Then, the next time they'd been all in the wardrobe, the backing had been gone. In order for "hidden" possibility to qualify in this instance, the possibility would always have to be present: the wardrobe had to be passable to all people under the circumstances. In reality—or in her siblings' stories, she amended—the wardrobe hadn't even opened consistently for the four of them, the chosen! And surely those who built and used the wardrobe didn't go—they weren't prophesized to, and there would have been fairly sizeable signs if they'd been popping in and out of there all along. Missing people, strange behaviors, correcting a teacher at school...
There Susan's mind jarred. That she remembered. Not of having told it, but have having actually experienced it.
And even though it was in England, not Narnia—or a hypothetical land—it had been Narnia-induced. Susan remembered hurrying into Peter's dorm and arms wailing "Oh, I've done it this time, Pete. If only I were still a queen and so he'd have to actually listen to me."
Susan gasped at the realization.
Maybe now she didn't remember what it was like to be a queen. It would be impossible to do so, seeing as the whole thing was make believe.
But back then, she'd believed it. She had to remember being a queen to speak of the experience so fervently. The only possibility remaining was that she had spoken metaphorically, but Susan had never spoken metaphorically in her life.
Raising her hand to her temple, Susan knew, again, that that she very much didn't know her own mind. The mind perceived logical fallacies even when it was impossible that they could exist.
Perhaps it was not the impossible-appearing events that were false.
Perhaps it was the mind, instead.
The world was bigger than the mind, after all, holding so many truths that the mind could not possibly access all of them—at least, not yet.
Walking to her room and sinking into her bed, Susan forced her mind to blank so she could get to sleep. George turned over and laid a hand across her stomach, aiding the effort.
"Odd," she thought, and murmured it aloud to wipe the last vestiges of epiphany from her mind. She'd gotten the point, and it was too large a point to dwell on. Susan had finished grieving years ago. Now she had a family, and her family could not afford fortnight doldrums.
For time was precious. She'd learned it once, and with Alberta's slow movements and Harold's sudden forgetfulness, she was swiftly learning it again.
This time, she would not be unprepared. There was forever change, and there was consistent pain. And myriad times twined around them there was unbridled beauty in joy. Through the triumphs every hour, through a child and wrinkled relatives and through some graves' thick quilt of roses, her spirit rose as her feet stayed on the ground.
Many times it was the best of all possible worlds.
AN: Puff the Magic Dragon and Narnia go quite well together, do they not? I've had the first half of this lying around for about three years now and was recently inspired to finish it. For those who are wondering the book that asserted that a house wasn't a home until there'd been a birth, a marriage, and a death in it, it's Anne's House of Dreams of the Anne of Green Gables series. Been about ten years since I've read it, but I've always remembered that line. Speaking of which… R.I.P. Jonathan Crombie. Still reeling from that.
Also incorporated a brief allusion to Socrate's "true wisdom" (refraining from claiming to know what one doesn't) as articulated in Plato's Apology because color me gadfly. Everybody needs a little Socrates in his/her life.
Also, there are more mentions of Edmund in this than the other two siblings because I always pictured Susan as being the closest to Edmund and Peter being the closest to Lucy (and vice versa in both cases). So instead of attempting to balance it out with more Peter and Lucy anecdotes, I just left it the way it was.