Notes: I'm afraid this isn't a fixit; largely trying to fit in with C S Lewis. I'm not even trying to make a point, or argue with anything. A huge amount of this is taken directly from Lewis's A Grief Observed. The poems are all by G K Chesterton. (But there is some hope, as always.)
***
So Like Fear
Beneath this single sorrow the globe of moon and sphere
Turns to a single jewel, so bright and brittle and dear
That I dread lest God should drop it, to be dashed into stars below.
(The Pessimist)
*
There was music playing downstairs. She could hear crackly snatches of the radio drifting upwards as people moved about the house.
Susan contemplated lipstick. She had a choice and after all the years of making do and coupons, that was a luxury. She still was not sure which shade.
As she paused, she heard the back door slam, knocking the kitchen door ajar and the muffled voice of the newsreader floated in. She moved to the wardrobe to pull the dress out, because, of course, that was the sensible thing to do, instead of sitting idly at the small wooden dressing table, looking at first one and then the other.
She reached in for the dress and frowned slightly. It was a thing she didn't care to pursue, but sometimes opening a wardrobe door gave her the oddest shivery feeling, not something the prosaic Susan welcomed.
As she shut the door, she noticed that the house seemed to have fallen quiet, not the usual state of affairs here. She could hear a conversation taking place in the hallway. Susan moved to the door, sensing that something had happened.
"Susan!" called Jane's mother, Mrs Albury. "Susan, dear, are you there?"
*
They all sat around the kitchen table, discussing what should be done. Susan only listened.
"Look," said Mr Albury. "There's no sense making a song and dance about it, not if we don't know which train it was."
Susan got to her feet. "Mother left it all written down for me. I'll go and look."
She heard them talking in whispers behind her, but she closed her mind to it.
*
"Even so," said Mrs Albury when she returned with Mother's note. "Ten to one someone's made a mistake or they've made it out to be worse than it seems."
Jane's little brother, Felix, was staring at her open mouthed, his face smeared with jam. "Were all your family really on that train?"
"Shh, Felix, you horror," hissed Jane. "I'm sure they will turn up safe and sound, Susan."
Mr Albury reached for his pipe and then replaced it in its rack. "There must be someone we can ask. The neighbours have got a telephone. We could ask them to ring the hospital. That'd be the thing, wouldn't it?"
"I suppose," said Mrs Albury. "You go off, then, and come back as soon as you can and put Miss Pevensie out of her misery."
*
Put her out of her misery. That was a strange phrase to use to herald the news; the impossible truth that cut her off from the rest of the world at one fatal stroke.
Susan shut the door of the guest room behind her once they finally let her go. Jane was going to the party she'd been preparing for. She had insisted. The last thing she wanted was someone hanging around and being sorry for her while wishing they were elsewhere. Mrs Albury would leave her alone.
"Let her be," she heard her say to her husband. "There's nothing we can do, poor soul. Let her go and cry it out."
She couldn't. She felt entirely numb, as if nothing were quite real or she were not. She sat back down at the dressing table and told herself that they were all gone, but it was too large to take in at once.
Susan saw the innocent lipstick still lying on the dressing table, open. She stared at it for a long moment and then threw it in the waste paper basket with trembling hands and broke into sobs.
*
Crying can only last so long. Even the worst agony passes, in some ways all too quickly. Susan woke later, fully clothed, on her bed. She could hear Jane on the stairwell with Alice, talking in whispers.
"How terrible," said Alice. "How awful Is it really true? All of them?"
Jane's voice was quieter still as she passed into the other room with her sister. (Her sister.) "I know it's rotten of me, but this is going to ruin everything. I had so much planned and it's such a bore."
"Yes, it is rotten of you," said Alice in no uncertain terms. She heard that before the door closed, but she understood what her so-called friend meant. There was nothing anyone could do to help, not really. There was nothing to say, only embarrassment and innocent words that would stab like a knife, flustering the unfortunate speaker. Who would want to know her now?
She felt as though an impossible weight was pressing down on her and there was the oddest feeling of unreality or waiting - maybe to hear that it wasn't true; yes, it was all a cruel joke. She trembled again as she remembered the policeman who had come eventually and his awkwardness, seeming to fill the kitchen, wanting to be able to give her something happier than his world-shattering news. All he could say was that it must have been quick - happened in an instant. They would never have known.
She was the one left with the pain and she wasn't sure that was any comfort at all. She never knew grief felt so like fear.
***
What's Wrong With the World?
I woke; the skies were empty of the eagle,
And empty of the vulture all the abyss:
And something in the yawning silence cried
Giants and gods were dying in new dawns
(The Monster)
*
Days followed. Days of hideous tasks, hurtful and dull, undreamt of by the Susan who had arrived at the Alburys', determined to allow herself some fun for once, no Peter there to disapprove. No Mother, no Father. Now she had that forever and she wanted nothing less.
Identifying the bodies, accompanied by reluctant officials - whoever they were, they blurred into a mass of unidentified, concerned faces - who wanted nothing less than to be showing a young woman such things. All of them apologetic. "I'm so sorry, miss. Is there anything we can do?"
All her friends were suddenly strangers, uncertain of themselves: Did they say anything or not say something? Which was worse? And so they asked her how she was feeling, a line that became ever more meaningless.
Her aunt helped with the funeral, but she had to stand there and shake hands with relatives and acquaintances, one after another, everything grey around her.
That night she looked up at the stars and tried to understand that if she could search them all, she would nowhere find their voices, their faces. And she had lost far more than that. She had lost her mother; but she had also had lost the Susan who eagerly ran to help her, to try and be like her - perhaps a little too much, too soon; her father and her father's 'Sue' who teased her for being sensible and for the times she wasn't.
*
Slowly, as the truth began to sink in, memories fell and settled on her like snow-flakes.
*
In the watery morning sunlight, her familiar room looked wrong, as if something was out of place or missing. Her little dressing-table was worn, scratches clearly visibly and her things set out on it seemed like museum exhibits, not something she used daily.
And when, she wondered, had it all grown so very faded and shabby?
*
Life goes on. So her aunt had said. Her aunt always did say such things. Susan went on, but she wasn't sure that her life did, not yet.
During the day, she did her work, she responded when she was spoken to and she put a brave face on it. (Her aunt said that, too.) In the middle of the night she begged a God who wasn't listening to bring them back, breathed out maddened midnight promises.
The agony subsided into a dull ache - a boredom tinged with nausea - and still grief felt like fear, an eternal waiting game. Was this really how the world was? And still she was waiting: now the joke must be over, now at least one of them would return.
That night she sat in the wardrobe and dreamed there really had been another time and place, once, where they had all grown up together, kings and queens in their own kingdom.
*
Funny how easy it was, even in the middle of the wrongness, to think of the things that happened, the things she did and the few things she read, Oh, I must tell Lucy or Mother; I must show this to Peter and then to remember with a fresh stab; her thoughts were arrows without targets. Through habit she fitted the arrow to the string and then must lay the bow aside as useless.
Once there had been roads and now there were cul-de-sacs.
*
But she told herself, all this was only natural (so everyone said) and that, in time, she would recover and things would feel as they used to before, or something like it.
She helped her aunt to tidy out the house. (She made it in her head a task to be done and nothing more, but sometimes it wouldn't stay that way.) Her aunt watched her at times and, softening, told her to have a rest or to fetch her something, even to go out with a friend who called. She didn't understand.
There were things that were harder than others. Each loss was as gaping as it could be, but Susan, who had all younger childhood been part of an entity known as Peter-and-Susan could tentatively own to herself, hurt as it did, that the world no longer contained an Edmund and Time and Space owned any more to a Lucy, she hesitated to try and understand that neither was there a Peter.
She wondered about what might have happened if she had gone with them, as they had asked, but she frowned over it. If they had gone together, she not believing and they believing, would there still have been this awful Traffic Regulation - you, miss, this way; they the other? Separation, still. And separation was only another word for death.
Someone had said, trying to be kind, so she had not snapped (not her aunt, this time), that they would live on in her memory. How could they? Her images of them seemed as flat and unreal and dead as her family had been real and unexpected once. The past was gone, she knew that and what she had left - corpses, memories, ghosts - were three more words for death.
*
In the darkness, it felt more possible to believe odd things, good as well as bad. Susan closed her eyes. She had wanted other things, ordinary things. She had wanted not to be laughed at (oh, those queer Pevensie kids and their secret world).
Bad enough even to go to church in this day and age, although one could smile and shrug that off as duty, but another world? Even to speak in whispers of magic, of fantastic creatures, of battles and talking animals had been a crushing embarrassment.
It wasn't as if she had wanted to hide from it forever it, or deny it entirely, but she had wanted - no, that was too weak a word - she had craved normality.
She had a horrible feeling that was exactly what she had been given. No deep magic, only forever ordinary shabbiness.
*
Waking, there was sunlight again and as she dressed, she was haunted, not by ghosts, but a feeling that dogged her; the sense of a presence not so far away, almost enough to make her turn around and ask who was there. She didn't. There was no one, of course.
*
The hells of young grief returned when she thought them over, the next night. She had grown used to a dull weariness that carried her into heavy sleep, but tonight it returned, all the bitter resentment, fluttering in the stomach and wallowing in tears.
Later, she told herself with firmness, it was time to stop this. It was no use to lie here and be maudlin, no matter how dreadful things were.
*
Then she dreamt, oddly, of another, briefer night of sorrow, one that had ended in a joyous morning that almost broke her heart more than the grieving. And the feel of a rough mane under a fingers, the unique scent that went with it.
Lucy, beside her, laughed aloud.
She woke, her heart beating, as if it had been stopped and only now started again.
And the fear went on; this time nearer to panic. What had she done? What had she thrown away for moments of pleasures that seemed worse than pointless now? To avoid the effort, not to be painted in colours of shame by the world.
*
Still, there was Death. Death is and what is, matters. It has consequences and they are irrevocable and irreversible.
***
Every Penny in the World
Stare at me now: for in the night I broke
The bubble of a great world's jest, and woke
Laughing with laughter such as shakes the stars.
(The End of Fear)
*
What did she believe? It had been a question of interest - or a passionate argument, depending on who she spoke to. Now it was everything. Did life go on? Yes, or no - a casual game she had been playing, teasing her family with her distance from it all. Now she found that innocent game, which she had started out on with the lightest of stakes - counters and sixpences - had risen to higher stakes. Riding on the outcome went every penny she had in the world.
*
She walked into the church, feeling more as if she were a criminal walking away from the scene of the crime that a soul in search of some sort of guidance.
Susan sat down on a pew and prayed to a God who seemed as much made of stone as did the walls around her.
What had she expected? she asked herself.
*
"Miss," the verger said eventually. "I need to lock the church."
It was only as she left and took a last look, empty of hope that she glanced up at the sunlight still coming through one of the stained glass windows and realised that she had, blind in her grieving, been sitting in a rainbow.
*
"This is no use at all," she told herself. She simply must find other things to do rather than wallow in emotion. There was a practical, sensible side to Susan, and so there always had been, always would be.
Maybe it was only this bright morning, but she lifted her head and when she walked downstairs, she thought how tired her aunt was looking and what an effort it must have been for her to leave her own tasks behind to help her niece with this. She might talk in platitudes but she hadn't grumbled. She moved across to her.
She must have seen something changed in her, for when she reached her, she put a hand on her arm and said, "Susan," as touched as if she had spoken her concern aloud.
*
Still she questioned on which side she staked everything: belief or unbelief. (She had been a queen once and once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia.)
Did she dare believe it again? They all had, once, but it was impossible, and therefore it must be imagined. The world didn't work like that.
No, the world was shabby and grey and prosaic and empty of the people she loved. Some part of her, underneath the very human unhappiness, still hung on to those imaginings. But was it only a dream or did she only dream she believed?
Silly, Susan told herself, the echo of long ago words hanging over her. Either a thing is real, or it isn't. She sat down on the kitchen step, surveying the small town garden, nothing like the glorious grounds at the professor's house in the War. And nothing again like having a whole new world in the wardrobe, a whole realm to call their own.
"Misery is sending me mad," she said aloud. She decided she almost liked the idea. Madness was an explanation for it all without blame and she certainly had cause enough to be mad now. And it ran in families. She laughed and thought of a lion.
*
What did grow, underneath all of this, as the first hurt passed, was that she increasingly felt that she was not alone, after all. Somehow there was someone there in the silence and maybe they had not answered because she was asking nonsense questions; because death was unknowable, not because the sky was built of stone. (How many hours in a mile? Is yellow a circle or a square?)
*
And in the night, she woke again, not to a nightmare this time, but to a meeting of minds that she never spoke of aloud, knowing that it truly would sound like madness to anyone else, but it was the sanest thing that had happened so far; a happily prosaic matter of fact encounter, not these endless emotions. As if Peter had sat next to her there and there was laughter in the darkness as they asked together how could she be so slow to see things?
*
She had been wrong, she realised. The road ahead had not become culs-de-sac. It was a road, still and she could sit here by the side and carry on waiting, or she could get up and walk along it, though it was going to rocky and hard, lonelier than she had expected and she would probably fall time and again. But she had made her choice and it was not necessarily a sin. She had in consequence this path to walk rather than another, that was all. These things happened. (So her aunt said.)
The fear had broken and now that she stepped out of her passionate grief, those she had been missing seemed closer than she could have dreamed. And sometimes the laughter that lightened the darkness sounded like the roar of a lion.
Somewhere, she thought with faint surprise, she could hear music playing.
***