In All Things
Can any good thing come from a boiler breaking down? Was there anyone else left in England who had seen Aslan?
A sequel to 'The Eighth Friend of Narnia' and 'Quid Est?' for those who don't mind theology with their fanfic!
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1.
Peggy is going to North Wales to visit her brother and his wife at the RAF base on Anglesey. Kath is going down to Cornwall to be a bridesmaid at her cousin's wedding. Susan waves her two flat-mates off, with many enquiries if they have packed enough warm sweaters and cardigans, since it is very cold this year, for almost Easter. They both assure her that they really have, and she smiles, remembering three other people who used to assure her that they really had got enough warm cloaks with them. Memory is bitter-sweet now, like good Belgian chocolate, not bitter. It used to be a castle she waved from; now it is a nice warm flat.
At least, it is a nice warm flat until the next morning, when Susan wakes up and the central heating boiler down in the basement doesn't. It is very cold this year, for almost Easter, and while memory may not be bitter, the temperature certainly is. She phones the landlord; she phones the repairman. Neither of them can do anything about it until after Easter.
That didn't used to happen when it was a castle. And even wearing every warm sweater she has in the flat (not every one Susan possesses, for Peggy and Kath have borrowed the two best ones) will not keep her going until "sometime after Easter … mebbe the week after."
The only option is to find somewhere else to stay until then. Susan stands in the basement and stares at the lifeless boiler with a sinking feeling. She'd come down to have another try at lighting it in the hope that maybe, just maybe, if she poked hard enough and prayed hard enough, it might, just might wake up after all. It didn't. It sits there, as lifeless and unpleasant and – un-Narnian! – as Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold's house in Cambridge. And that is going to be where she will have to spend Easter.
There isn't anybody else to ask. She hasn't anybody else, in this world at least. There are a batch of Pevensie cousins out in Hong Kong – and Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold.
For one moment, as she dials, Susan imagines if Miss Plummer, just Miss Plummer, had survived the train crash. Aunt Polly would have been delighted to have her stay. They would have drunk endless cups of tea and swapped even more endless memories of riding and swimming and beautiful dresses – Susan's from Narnia, Aunt Polly's from the equally vanished world of the Kirke estate.
Then Aunt Alberta answers briskly and efficiently, and Susan is back in the world where boilers break down and repairmen don't come and the only things to be found at the back of wardrobes are moth-balls and old coat hangers.
2.
It is Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold's boiler which is the last straw. Like everything else in this house, it is efficient and hygienic and, given that it runs on coal not oil, presumably vegetarian. It also wakes briskly and efficiently an hour before Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold, to heat just enough water for three people to wash with. It is a concession to how very cold the weather is, for just before Easter, that it is currently allowed to heat the house for that hour, before Aunt Alberta goes round and opens all the windows to let in plenty of nice healthy cold air.
Susan has no problem with all of this – at least, not any unendurable problem with rationed wash water and constant healthy cold drafts. The problem, the last straw, is that the boiler wakes loudly and efficiently just under the spare bedroom, waking her loudly and more efficiently than any alarm clock ever could. It is no fun to listen to somebody else's boiler working, when your own boiler has condemned you to an Easter in exile.
Easter does not feature very strongly in the house in Cambridge. Not in the glorious, joyful, "mounds of hot cross buns, and overflowing vases of daffodils, and dozens of painted eggs," way Susan likes Easter to be these days. Hot cross buns are unhealthy and cut flowers are unhygienic and eggs, though vegetarian, are to be taken in moderation. Great squidgy Simnel cakes, with their cannibalistic habit of browning and then eating the marzipan apostles off the top, don't even get a look in. There is no new life and great rejoicing in it, in Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold's house. That might be understandable, given that their only son was killed in a railway accident. But there is no great sadness either, just a sort of hygienic austerity.
Eustace's room has been turned into a second spare bedroom, his books and beetle collections packed away. He still features as two large photographs in the sitting room: one from when he was still an insufferable little prig; and one "after," although Aunt Alberta doesn't like this one as much. She says he looks 'commonplace' in it. Susan likes it, likes the way he had just caught the eye of the camera when it went off and so forever looks out with a slightly shy, boy-ish smile to greet whoever walks into the Scrubbs' sitting room.
The only other change Eustace's death has wrought in the house has also to do with a picture. In the back spare bedroom, the painting of the ship which Aunt Alberta only kept because it had been a wedding present from somebody she didn't want to offend has been taken down. Eustace, Aunt Alberta explained, was too fond of it for them to be happy with it remaining up. The photograph of the New York skyline Susan and Mother and Father brought back as a present from America has been neatly framed and hung to cover the faded patch on the wall. Susan wishes almost any other picture had been put up. Her mistake with New York, and its nylons and lipstick and inventions, over Narnia is one she has both acknowledged and dealt with, but that doesn't mean she wants to lie in bed and look at the evidence of it. The wedding present painting had been such a very Narnian ship, even if you didn't know it had once been a portal to Narnia itself.
So, she cannot lie in bed and look at a Narnian ship, only New York's skyline. And between this and the boiler, Susan suddenly decides she's had enough, at the very start of the day. She will get up and go for a nice long walk, and hopefully find somewhere quiet to sit and read her Bible. Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold are a bit uncertain about this new feature of their surviving niece. That she will want to go to church on Easter Sunday is commonplace but acceptable; that she might want to sit around reading a Book which is definitely not vegetarian or republican or pacifist or teetotal appears to be unsettling, given the way both Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold get up and make fresh cups of tea at frequent intervals if Susan tries to read in the sitting room. So Susan tries in the spare bedroom, instead; but that causes Aunt Alberta to knock on the door every five minutes to ask if she's all right and if the window's open properly for the fresh air.
Yes, there is always fresh air. But the atmosphere is entirely stuffy. Perhaps, Susan reflects, as she pulls on an extra warm cardigan, that is why Eustace didn't stay. Perhaps he needed the clearer air of Narnia to grow and thrive. Of course, she concedes as she writes quickly on the telephone pad 'Gone for a walk back soon Susan', her own times are in the same Everlasting Hands. Which means there is, really, some purpose behind this austere and awkward visit, even if she can't see it. That's reassuring in theory. It doesn't make it feel any less like she's escaping as she shuts the front door and hurries away down the drive.
3.
What Susan wants to find is the river. Not the bit in town, where it's all hemmed in with buildings and bridges. Naiads are only in Narnia, she knows – but the River Cam looks so much like the Great River at Beruna before Bacchus demolished the bridge that Susan can't look at it without picturing weeping water spirits. Yet somewhere, according to the photos in books; somewhere not very far from Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold's house, according to the maps, the river flows between gentle college gardens and tidy banks and sloping green lawns where Naiads could dance – and one bit of the Backs is a public park.
If only she could find it.
She tries this road. She tries that road. She looks for a signpost, but there aren't any. Then she looks for somebody to ask: a postman, a milkman, a delivery boy, anybody. They are as absent as signposts at quarter to seven on a cold March morning. Finally, she finds somebody. Another girl, a student to judge by the green and white striped college scarf wound about her neck. The girl doesn't look particularly approachable, with her hands stuffed deep into her coat pockets and a defiantly sulky sort of expression on her face as far as it shows between scarf wound up high and beret pulled down low – but Susan is getting a little desperate, so she asks anyway.
"Please, can you tell me the way to the river?"
The girl pauses at Susan's question – and then she stops. That sounds like a obsolete, double description, but the two are very different actions. At the first, the girl barely glanced at Susan – but then she stares, hard, straight into her face with odd intensity. As if she's met Susan before and is trying to place her.
Susan tries, in return, but nobody she ever knew at school fits the bill, and she's pretty certain she knows nobody else in Cambridge apart from Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold. She's just about to say 'Have we met?' – but then the girl shrugs, somewhat fiercely, and waves one hand along the street.
"I'm just going there myself."
It's not quite an invitation, but there's something in the way it's flung out which makes Susan feel that it would be if, were some unknown hindrance removed, it could. So she falls into step with a smile in place of a 'Thank you' and they go together down the road. The girl walks too fast for any conversation, but she keeps looking at Susan in that strange, puzzled way; just a quick glance and away, again and again. Between this and the brisk pace, it's a surprise to Susan when they turn round a corner, through a gate, and there's the river.
The girl extracts her hands from her pockets again and gestures at the river. "It's too late to see the rowing teams this morning. They go through early."
Susan smiles and shakes her head. "I was just wanting to watch the river, not the boats. Sit somewhere quietly."
This gets a jerk of the head. "Bench over there."
It's a dismissal if ever there was one; but there's still something in the way the girl looks, that makes Susan try again. "I've rather disturbed your walk-"
"I was only coming to look at the river." Again, dismissive, this time with a shrug; but again, she doesn't go. As Susan steps towards the bench, the girl sort of drifts along beside her, coming to a halt standing between the bench and the river. Then she punches her hands back into her coat pockets so hard Susan wonders how the seams haven't given out.
Susan sits and pats the bench beside her. "Won't you have a seat and we can talk? I should have introduced myself, really. I'm Susan Pevensie. I'm visiting from London; well, staying with my aunt and uncle while my flat boiler's broken down."
"Edith Jackle," says the girl, dull and automatic. She raises one shoulder to make the end of the striped college scarf flap slightly. "Girton."
Susan's name obviously doesn't mean anything to her. Perhaps it was just surprise that anyone would want to go to the river at this hour of the morning, which made her look at Susan that oddly. Or maybe she'd just imagined it.
"You're clever, then," she says, with a nod at the scarf, trying to find some common ground to continue conversation on.
"Oh, yes. I'm clever."
Taken in many ways, that's one of the most arrogant statements Susan's ever heard outside Calormen, but it isn't said in any of those ways. There's such self-loathing in it, especially the last word, that Susan looks at this Edith Jackle with some concern. "I do wish you'd sit," she says as warmly as she can. "You look like you're about to rush down the bank and throw yourself in the river, standing there."
Edith Jackle turns and looks at the river. "I think about it sometimes," she says matter-of-factly. "But I happen to know there's a point in life, somewhere, even if I can't find it. So it seems a shame to quit. Like Going Down without getting your degree."
Susan blinks, for she hadn't meant it quite that literally. "A point in life?!"
Edith's face creases into a sneer of heavy sarcasm. "A decimal one... No! No!" she adds quickly. "I just say that. Forget it! Forget it!" She shakes her head fiercely and looks back at the river. "Tchah!" Susan hesitates, but Edith ploughs on, words and broken sentences slopping out like water from an over-filled bucket. "Point? What point? Nobody cares! You know? Nobody cares! You look, and look, and the answer's Be Good and Work Hard and Be Clever – and nobody's bothered that it leads nowhere! They don't want to know where the river goes; they don't mind that all the being good and working hard and being clever's meaningless!"
"Or," she goes on, a little more calmly, "there are the other ones; the ones who don't say Be Good. They say, join us! Anything Goes! And then you find yourself, putting in the second half of your school days on suspended sentence for tagging after a bunch of bullies and juvenile psychopaths. You're good, then," she says, raising her eyebrows. "Very, very good. Especially when your mother and step-father can't afford to send you anywhere else. You tread really really carefully and everybody says how nice and how good and how sensible; and eventually you get out of school and you're clever and you get into Cambridge – and still nothing's changed!"
Edith paces along the length of the bench and swings round to face Susan again. "Nothing changes! You can be good, good, good; and you're still just the same. It doesn't make any difference! It's all meaningless! So I come down here! And watch the river. And hate myself!"
She takes another abrupt march along the bench. "I shouldn't be throwing all this lot at you. You wanted to look at the river in peace and quiet. It never does any good, anyway. To tell someone. They can never help. Half the time they tell you there isn't help. That this is all there is. But there –They're wrong!"
Edith drags one hand out of her pocket and wags a finger against the invisible spectre of 'They', then turns it almost accusingly at Susan. "There was a girl at school! She had a point to life! You could see it – she was good, but that wasn't what made her happy – it was like she was happy, inside, and that made her good! She used to sort of glow, behind her eyes – after that day. Like there was all this brightness bottled up inside. And she never hit back … once we were the other way round..."
This last point makes no sense, but it seems in some way to deflate Edith back into sullen dullness. She stares at the river for a minute, while Susan stares at her and tries to think what to say. Then Edith looks up again. "She died," she says simply and harshly. "Died, before I could ever ask her. Ask her what she found beyond the wall. You looked like her," Edith ploughs on as Susan gulps for some reply. "When you asked me for the river. As if you knew something that really mattered in life."
She shrugs, another fierce lift and fall, and laughs the sour mirthless laugh. "I'm imagining it. That's what everybody would say if I told them. If I told them all I knew, they'd say I was mad."
There's a tense silence, and then Edith folds her arms and shifts to face Susan front on. "What would you say?" she demands. "What would you say if I told you, on the truth of the existence of Girton College, if nothing else, that I had seen a wall torn down, and a bright grassy slope beyond it where there ought to have been dull moorland, and a great lion lying in between, and three people in shining clothes with shining faces rushing down against the gang of bullies I belonged to, and one of them was Pole?"
What would you say? For a moment, Susan says nothing. Far away and long ago, in the past before the train crash, Lucy's voice, sad and frustrated, is saying 'Well anyway, Eustace says his school's much nicer now, and they've expelled most of the bullies and changed the Head' and her own voice, abstracted and indifferent while applying mascara, as far as Susan can remember now, is answering 'I'm sure that's very nice for Eustace and this Jill Pole girl...' It's only a surname, but it's too much to be a co-incidence – if co-incidences, unlike luck, really do exist.
So she says nothing. She simply stares at the girl – the girl who has seen Aslan and Narnia through a garden wall. She can only think the one thing, the one, amazing thing:
There is someone else left in this world who has seen Aslan.
"You think I'm mad."
The other person in this world who has seen Aslan snaps out the words, and Susan snaps out of her trance-like astonishment and grabs after her as Edith plunges sharply away. "No! No! No-no-no!" Susan shakes her head, shakes Edith's arm, anything to stop her going before she, Susan, can manage to sort out enough words to explain. "I don't think you're mad at all!" she stammers out. "I think you've seen Aslan!"
Now it's Edith's turn to look as if she thinks Susan might be mad.
"Not mad!" Susan repeats, not quite sure which one of them she's applying it to. "Not at all – it's just – I hadn't realised that my boiler breaking down could be so literally to some purpose." This doesn't seem to have reassured her companion as to Susan's sanity, but she has at least stopped trying to walk off, and so Susan gently lets go of her arm and sits down on the bench again and smiles at Edith as graciously and reassuringly as ever Queen Susan the Gentle did to nervous Dryad saplings and lost Talking Squirrel kittens.
"Please don't think I'm mad. I can explain – about Pole – and the Lion – and there being a point in life. I mean – " Susan realises she's being as incoherent as Edith was before, but taking a deep, meant to be calming, breath doesn't seem to do anything to restore her fragmentary sentences. "I can tell you – generally, or – since you've seen Aslan already – I suppose – it's rather amazing – but I can tell you – all of it."
Susan is not sure just how long they stand there, neither speaking. But then, in a tone that sits down like a child at Susan's feet, even though she actually remains standing, Edith says "All of it!"
All of it, both worlds of it, takes quite a while. She is far exceeding the 'back soon' scribbled on the telephone pad, but Susan can't stop, can't leave those hungry, despairing eyes that look so like her own in the mirror just after the train crash. They don't shift from her face once, all through the history of Narnia. Susan learned story-telling in Narnia; refined and polished it in those months in Tashbaan; and she is glad of it now, as she recounts the impossible tale of a world within a wardrobe that leads, in the end, to how a Lion may be lying in a broken down wall between England and some Brighter Place, and how you may find His Name here.
Susan digs the bible out of her coat pocket at this point of the explanation. It's the first time in ages that Edith even moves, albeit only to blink, but after that she stops staring at Susan. She stares at the book instead. Slowly, slowly, but all too fast for her, as she turns the pages to this verse and that, a cold and nasty truth creeps over Susan. Edith is going to ask for this book.
No – she is not. Not if she is anything as much like Susan after the train-crash as she looks right now, for Susan herself would have done anything other than ask for a bible at the time. But she needed it, and this and that odd chance brought it to her and pressed it on her until she read it and found what she needed to know – and now this Edith Jackle needs it – and the odd chance of Susan's broken down boiler has brought it to her. If Susan can give it up.
Give it up? She keeps on talking, explaining, but Susan's fingers quite unconsciously hold the pages a little tighter as they turn them, at the thought. It is hers – but it is not hers. It is Peter's: thumbed and marked and well-read, with pages that fall open at certain places as though her brother stood behind her and opened it to share things with her as he could no longer do in person. And it has all Peter's titles written in the inside cover, as though he had put them away there for safe keeping while he was in England and didn't need them for the moment.
Peter, High King above all Kings in Narnia, Emperor of the Lone Islands and Lord of Cair Paravel, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Lion...
But she knows those off by heart. And if anything is going to convince this anxious, uncertain soul before her that all of it – both worlds of it – is true, it might well be those.
"...like Augustine, tolle lege. So I did." Susan holds out the book. "Have a look yourself."
Edith reaches out for it, and then stops. "But it's yours."
Susan shakes her head. "I've got another one." She has, though not here in Cambridge, and it's not hers either. It's Lucy's, and it doesn't have any titles written in it. On the inside cover, Lucy has at some point scribbled 'Courage, dear heart'. It obviously meant something to Lucy, but sadly doesn't to Susan, so it's not quite the same to her as Peter's. But Peter's is what she has now – and Peter's is what Edith Jackle needs now. Susan holds it out further. "Please do."
Slowly, slowly, Edith looks at Susan and looks at the book, and then takes it, almost snatches it, as if she's afraid somebody might see her. She licks her lips twice before she grinds out, rather gruffly, "Thank you."
It doesn't sound like something she says any too often.
Susan shakes her head back, and manages to smile, keeping her eyes firmly up and away from that familiar tome in a stranger's hands. "Don't thank me. Just read it." It's not Peter. She hasn't really given Peter away. Only a book she can get a thousand copies of – and never replace all that one copy means. She smiles at Edith again. There's nothing more to say, and nothing more to do. Only to leave it – and Edith – between the Lion's Paws, as Peter himself used to say.
She says goodbye and gets no answer and doesn't dare look back all the way to Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold's house.
4.
The electric doorbell on Aunt Alberta's front door has a heartless, strident trill – and it blasts the quiet of Easter Monday afternoon in the Scrubb household with even more efficiency than usual. Someone – whoever is at the door – must have practically leaned on it. Susan's letter to Peggy gets a nasty startled blot right in the middle; Uncle Harold's Bank Holiday newspaper goes everywhere; even Aunt Alberta's tea jumps into the saucer.
Aunt Alberta gets up at this, and goes to answer the door. She comes back to say it's someone for Susan.
It is – and for one moment, Susan thinks it is Lucy. Then reality and the green-and-white striped college scarf sink in; but the face on the doorstep still in no way resembles the sullen features of Edith Jackle. She looks almost exactly like Lucy did after an encounter with Aslan. Never mind a brightness behind her eyes, her whole face is alight.
"I read it!" Edith cries, without further introduction, and presses the bible, Peter's bible, firmly back into Susan's hands. "All of it! And I went and got a copy from the bookshop this morning, 'cause I couldn't explain the, er, you know – to the other girls in the halls of res! So you can have it back! I know you wanted it, really!"
"Er- oh." The obvious question about whether Edith found anything of relevance in the book doesn't need asking, so brightly does she shine – and Susan can hear her mind stalling audibly in the face of it. Finally, she stammers out: "All of it?"
"We are clever at Girton," says Edith in happy dismissal of the feat of reading a thick book of thin paper and small print in so few days flat. "And besides, I didn't know how long you were staying here, for me to get it back to you."
Ah, yes. That's the other question, and Susan clutches at it before it, too, whirls away in confusion at this sudden, sudden change. Conversion is a big word, but it seems small compared to the change in Edith Jackle. "How did you know I was here?"
"You don't stop knowing how to follow people, just 'cause you stop doing it. You haven't forgotten how to be a queen," Edith tacks on defensively. "I followed you back the other day. You – care about that book. That's – how I could see how real it was. Narnia, I mean. Not a make-believe or a fable."
She pauses, and then the faintest trace of the other morning's Edith creeps back in an uncertain tone. "I know – I know it doesn't matter, here. And I know you – and the others – are special – cause you've been there, and are kings and queens and all. But – do you think, if one's seen Aslan – even just His back – for real – do you – do you think one could count as an adopted Narnian?"
Can there be such a thing as an adopted Narnian?
"I think," says Susan, reaching for her coat and hat, as this conversation sounds like it is going to need a long walk somewhere that is not the stuffy, hygienic atmosphere of Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold's house. "I think the point is that belonging to Him here, we are all adopted Narnians, you know."
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A/N: For everyone who wanted there to be more for Edith Jackle :)
Now, the plot bunnies have left-over marzipan from the Simnel cake, but you must find TWO verses: one in the title and one in the summary!
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