Welcome to the story! Author's Notes on the bottom.
Sleet and rain drenched Purser Street in a particularly violent display of London spring weather. The narrow lane of slanting townhouses was a cobblestoned nightmare for drivers, and the city was thinking of tearing it up for repairs that did not need to be made. The inhabitants of Purser Street hardly had a mind to argue either side because quite frankly, most of them were elderly and those who were not lived on the ends of the block. It was a rare thing to catch an automobile cruising over the bumpy road.
There was a car this day though: a blue car winding its perilous way to Number 49 Purser. It was a sight to behold and to listen to on that street, a car filled with yammering children and noisy tapes. After a carefully executed parking, the driver stepped out of the car. She was a woman in her late thirties with short, curly black hair and an elegant face. Two boys and a little girl poured out of the car after her; and she stooped down to reemerge with a fussy toddler that played with his plush teddy.
"Peter, get your sister. Arana, stick tight with Peter and don't you go wandering off, Cole. Let's get out of this awful downpour and into your grandmother's house. Off with you now."
The family took hands and ran across the wet street with much splashing and crying out and laughing. The woman sounded the knocker loudly.
"Mother! It's me! I've brought the kids for a visit!" There was no sound but the rain until the footsteps from inside were quite near. Then the latch turned as the shmack of an opening deadbolt unlocked the door. A woman's lined face peered around the slender gap, showing one bright eye.
"Lucy? Is that you?"
"Yes, Mother. And Peter and Cole and Arana and little Edmund."
"I'm not that little, Mum," grumbled the toddler fussily.
The door swung inward. The owner of the house stood in a dressing gown and slippers, her white hair carefully coiffed and her left hand on her walking cane.
"We're wet, Grandma!" piped up Arana from under a damp curtain of her golden curls.
"Yes, you are dear. Here, Mother, take the children," said Lucy, handing off Edmund. "I'm going to bring in your hosepipe in. It's raining buckets out here." The elderly woman nodded graciously.
"Thank you, Lucy."
In a matter of minutes, Lucy was drying off on the cozy sofa inside her mother's small, tidy sitting room as the children laboriously hung up their slickers and took off their galoshes. The elderly lady had fixed tea on her pink china set for herself and her daughter. The children trooped into the sitting room, where their grandmother was sitting in an old, softly-padded rocking chair.
"Grandma Susan," said Peter very politely, "May me and Cole and Arana and Edmund go upstairs to the playroom?" Susan's wrinkled face broke into the smallest of smiles.
"Playroom? You may go to the spare bedroom, if that's what you mean. And yes, you may open the trunk." Peter's face split into a grin.
"Thank you, Grandma!" The children ran off towards the oak stairs, climbing them as fast as their skinny legs would allow. Lucy smiled after her children.
"You know they do love your old things, Mother."
"It's because you encourage it, Lucy," she answered severely. Lucy sighed. Her mother's voice was as wispy as her hair, and yet she could still command attention like an empress. "I know you tell them all of those old faerie tales. Filling their heads with rubbish."
"Come now, Mother," said Lucy, sipping her tea from the delicate china and holding both saucer and tea cup for warmth. She was wrapped in a fluffy terrycloth towel and her hair had not quite stopped dripping. "Surely you don't forget that it was you yourself who first told them to me. You just pretend that it's all rubbish. I know (even you refuse to believe it or let yourself believe it) that you do really care for all those dear old stories. And now my children care for them too. Even Jack will put down the paper when I start telling them."
"And how is your husband these days?" asked Susan primly, clutching a knitted shawl around her narrow shoulders. Lucy smiled warmly and her voice glowed with pride.
"He's doing brilliantly. His colleague at work was involved in some hooky enterprises with a rival company, and now Jack's in charge of the department. He's got twelve people reporting to him from three offices."
"That's lovely, Lucy." Susan's voice was far-off, as were her eyes. This was Susan's new norm now: a faraway glance as bottomless as an ocean and as flat and scratchy as sandpaper. Lucy had noticed the change in her mother ever since she and her sisters had left home, and her father had passed on. Susan was mostly a citizen in her own private country.
"Mother, are you even listening?"
"Of course. What a rude question," said Susan absentmindedly. "More tea?"
"Yes, please. Mother, what were you possibly daydreaming about? I know you certainly weren't living in this world," teased Lucy.
"Utter nonsense from you, as usual," Susan answered sternly. "I never daydream. I just thought I had…heard something."
"Like what?"
"Trumpets, dear. At a distance."
Lucy laughed. Her mother was so perfectly serious, so positively unwavering, that Lucy shook her head.
"I do sometimes think that you call Narnia and Archenland and all those wonderful places home. You always made Jill, Polly, and me pry those stories out of you, but you always sparkled when you told them to us. Each stolen bedtime tale was a new adventure."
"Perhaps you care too much about those stories, just like your children are too chuffed with playing my old phonograph records and wearing my old hats and clothes, and your grandfather's things. You are just like your Aunt Lucy," said Susan, "and she was never a practical child."
"Then it's a good thing that you gave me her name," replied Lucy evenly. "I have no wishes to be anymore practical than I have to be. And you, Mother, with all of those marvelous tales in your head and no sense to tell them all at every opportunity! You could keep even Parliament quiet, if you chose! Every fictional battle is a real battle with you for what it takes to wring them out!"
"Lucy, we've spoken of this before," said Susan tiredly. "Rest assured that I did not make up these stories. Don't you remember that—"
"Yes, yes, that it was Professor Kirke who told them to you," interrupted Lucy. "And Miss Plummer too, those friends who were in that tragic accident. But you scorned those stories when we were younger. Every now and then though, well, you know that Jill and I would call it the 'light of Narnia' in your eyes. You only allowed yourself those faerie pleasures in moderation, and I never could understand why."
"Because I wanted you to grow up like a lady," said Susan, exasperated. "Now you've gone and named your children (my grandchildren!) after those—those characters!"
"Mother, I had told you that I would name my boys after Uncle Peter and Uncle Edmund. I knew that if you had boys, you would have done the same in a heartbeat."
"You did not have an uncle Cole or an aunt Arana," replied Susan unsympathetically. Lucy grinned with a smile that Susan had seen on her own little sister's face so many years before.
"My favorite tale was of Queen Aravis and King Cor. It is dreadfully difficult to come up with a name even close to those. Arana and a name similar to one of the nobility of Archenland suited me just fine."
"Harumph!" grumbled Susan. "I suppose that's why Jill chose the name Digory for her first boy, but also Frank and Helen for the next babies?"
"She couldn't very well give 'Eustace' as anything but a middle name," replied Lucy cheerfully. "Digory doesn't much care for it anyway. And don't forget Polly's girls."
"How could I, when she actually named her daughters Pomona and Cornelia?"
"She was always partial to your stories of King Caspian, and Cornelia isn't, er, quite so bad. Besides, Pomona was the wood goddess from your story of the four nameless rulers who took Narnia into the golden age—"
"I remember," snapped Susan irritably. "Lucy, you've lived your life in this world of nonsense! And now Arana (who looks so much like your aunt), and Peter and Cole and Edmund are going about with all of this foolishness in their heads, wasting their childhoods pretending to be Caspian and Tumnus and all of those things! Why won't you all live in the present, for a change?" The ardor of her passionate question drained Susan, and she tightened her shawl around her shoulders.
"I am going to fetch some ginger biscuits for us from the pantry." With much creaking and much dignity, Susan rose from her rocker and made her slow, upright way to the kitchen.
Lucy sighed again and sipped her tea. She looked around her mother's sitting room. Everywhere there were hesternal artifacts such as embroidered pillows and hand-spun furniture covers and carved wooden boxes. These were of the older times, when Susan had been younger and Dad had been alive. Lucy remembered her father: a tall, handsome man with a booming laugh whose lungs had crumbled only a few months ago. Susan would fondly tell her children of their romance, which was a nice, normal love story with neither dwarves nor Dryads. Her mother had been a beautiful young woman that had a head full of glossy hair and confidence to the brim. Dad had jokingly christened Susan his "Queenie" because of her imperious and graceful manner, a name which Lucy noted that her mother was always quite strange about.
There were still photographs on every wall: of Susan as a little girl, as a married woman, as a mother. There were pictures of Lucy's childhood and family vacations. There were even three photographs (older than the rest) of those people whose deaths had changed so much in Susan. One was a photo of a family of six plus a little girl and boy, smiling and waving on a summer holiday. Another was of a white-haired gentleman sitting pensively at a great desk of books and papers. The final showed a smiling lady riding a horse. Susan Pevensie-Lewis was the last of her family now that Great-Aunt Alberta had finally lost her battle with cancer. Lucy knew that her mother's life had not always been an easy one.
When the girls had been much younger, Susan had tried to impress upon them fashion, etiquette, and honor. They were useful but hard-learned lessons, and when she felt that she had been too hard on her girls Susan would tell them brief stories about a magical land. A glimpse of Narnia lore here, and a flash of Calormene customs there, and in this way Lucy, Jill, and Polly were really weaned on a country where beasts could talk and merpeople would sing. Meanwhile, ever-practical Susan eventually became the sort of woman who tried to keep her good looks for as long as possible, even when her husband had told her she'd be just as beautiful if she danced with a paper sack over her head in her old bathrobe. Lucy smiled; she had loved her father very much, just as he had loved her mother's tales of adventure. They all had.
"I can't imagine what mischief those children of yours have got up to in that spare room," was Susan's way of greeting her daughter as she took a seat once more with a plate of ginger cookies for the table.
"I suppose a lot of trouble can be got up to in a room as nice as that."
"Yes…"
"Mother, you're ignoring me again."
"I am not, Lucy. You're just imagining things."
"That excuse won't last forever."
"Neither will I," whispered Susan with a voice like a shadow. She looked into her daughter's eyes. "You know that, Lucy. I've felt so cold lately." Lucy was feeling very odd.
"Mother—" She stopped. Why fight it? Susan could be as obstinate as a brick wall. Then an idea formed in Lucy's mind.
"I think that Peter would like it very much if you called him and the others down here," she said softly.
"To what purpose?"
"To tell them a story. A good, long story."
"Lucy, I—" Then Susan stopped. She was as faraway as ever. Her head was cocked, ever so slightly, as if she was trying to smell the faintest fragrance. Or hear a delicious strand of music. Lucy could not believe how her mother's health had deteriorated, and she would have told her so if not for the queerest thing.
There was still a vile mixture of sleet and rain outside, and up until now there had been a certain matching chill in the home that Susan could ill afford to heat. Lucy could not feel that chill now, nor could she feel the fluid warmth of the English tea on her lips or the temperature of the saucer in her hand. These things all paled in comparison to a glorious, golden sensation—like a breath of a loved one—that warmed Lucy down to her very toes and came from a strange sort of…puff to the back of her neck. It was as strong and as powerful as a call on the wind or the glow of a bonfire, so much that Lucy actually bolted to her feet and whirled around. But there was no one behind her, not even a draught from a cracked window, and she knew that the old radiator humming along in the corner had retained no burst of genius in its mechanisms that would have produced such a feeling. She slowly took her seat, not shaken or scared, but far more peaceful than she had been in a long time. As long as it had been since she had last heard stories of Aslan and Narnia from her mother.
Lucy was amazed. For the smallest instant, like the flash of silver upon a blade, there was such a spark of light and wisdom, and such laughter, in Susan's eyes that Lucy wished to hug and kiss and dance with her all at once.
"Yes, Lucy. I'll tell your children the old stories." This seemed to be all that anyone needed to say. In a few moments, Peter, Arana, Cole, and Edmund were all seated on the fluffy rug. Arana wore a selection of Susan's old Sunday clothes: strings of faux pearls and a large hat with ribbons. The boys were all in the jackets and ties of Lucy's father. Lucy sat on the floor as well, with Arana and Cole pressed against each side and Edmund on her knee sucking solemnly on his fist.
"Once upon a time," began Queen Susan the Gentle "there was a Lion, there was a Witch, and there was a magic Wardrobe…"
Rain pounded the windows outside as Lucy and her children sat spellbound at the feet of the storyteller.
This is just a one shot that was very dear to me. I had to get it out of my system and write something (however small!) about my favorite books of all time. I hope that the movie encourages more people to read the novels. Thank you for reading this story, and please share your thoughts!