Professor Kirke stirred the coals thoughtfully and absentmindedly placed a pine log either side of the glowing pile.
"Why does she always say that?" he muttered to himself as he grabbed a handful of twigs and began laying them on the hot coals one at a time.
He had no intention of asking her to marry him of course. They were both too set in their ways for that. He LIKED being able to have a bit of clutter around the place and he knew from his visits to the city that she was a meticulous house keeper.
Besides, she kept that atrocious cat who kept tripping him up whenever he tried to cross the room.

...not that he had anything against animals that is. [He had made quite point of learning all he could of zoology in his youth, doing his first thesis on anatomical variations between the larynx of various species and the human with particular focus on vocalisation.

Polly was the one female, other than Mother of course, he could trust in those days to not get him all tongue tied. When girls heard about his mansion in the country and his father's flourishing company they got rather frightening: making eyes at him and sauntering over, hips swaying, like the milk cow when she saw him measuring out chicken feed. Some of them had seemed quite rational up until that point, but only Polly had retained her rationality once she saw the farmlet and house. After that fiasco with Amanda and Betty falling in the duck pond when their rivalry came to blows, he had stopped taking girls home for visits when they begged him.

In fact he rather avoided girls altogether.
"There, that's better" The Professor shoveled a dozen coals on the eager flames and placed a third log across the top of the fire so the sparking flames licked around it on their journey up the chimney.

Before returning to his chair, he picked up a pile of student papers from his desk and shuffled through them, checking they had all been marked. He slid them into a large envelope, which he sealed, addressed and franked with an ink pad he drew from the top drawer of his desk.

As he returned the stamps and pad to the over stuffed drawer, moving the contents around a little to make room, a smooth granite rock caught his eye deep in the back of the drawer. He smiled and pulled it out.
"My old Paperweight." He took it with him to the arm chair and traced the letters scratched clumsily in the surface with his forefinger.

Polly Plummer

and

Digory Kirke

friends 4 evr

It had taken them all afternoon to scratch those letters in the hard surface the summer they turned thirteen. Polly hadn't approved of his shorthand on the last two words, but they were running out of space as well as stamina by that point so he had insisted...

The late afternoon sun had long ago evaporated the water droplets from their skin and for the past two hours they had been taking turns with Digory's swiss army knife to scrape their names indelibly into the rock.

"If you let me have another go I am sure I can make it fit" Polly said. "I can get my writing much smaller than yours."

"... and neater too." she added after the knife slipped again almost slashing his leg.

Digory glared at her until she looked away.
"Here you go then." he said, willing to capitulate once he had made his displeasure known.

It was Polly's neat hand writing that had written the "...ends 4 evr'"in tiny letters below their names.
The two of them spent the rest of the waning afternoon speculating about how long 4 evr would be, and what might lie between.
Polly's ambition was to be a mother of a dozen children. She would take them to live in Scotland in an old castle with secret passage ways and a dungeon so they could keep wild animals as pets.

They had had a good laugh because when she confessed her plan of cleaning out the moat to be used for swimming races, Digory had suggested the addition of crocodiles to give them extra speed. Polly stared quizzically at her friend, a smile on her lips, as she meditatively sucked the moisture from a wet strand of hair.
"I know what you will become, Digory, -A great explorer. You have such an appetite for knowledge there is no way you could satisfy it within the fours coasts of Britain."
Digory, got a far away look in his eye. "Yes well... I have always wanted to go to India. Dad brought home so many stories of the people, their customs, animals, foods, beautiful jungle plants and domed buildings...

I really want to see them for myself."

Polly stretched her legs lazily and rolled over so she could look at him better.
"I know" she said. "I can see it in your eyes when he brings us home trinkets the natives have made. You get a kind of..." She searched for the right word, "greedy look in your eye."

Seeing the indignant words about to spring from His lips, she amended it, "... hungry, I suppose. Not greedy."
"I should think NOT" Digory spluttered self righteously. "Some cheek you have calling ME greedy when YOU went and scoffed most of the cumin toffee while I was looking at my Jade cup!"

"Well I did offer it to you three times and you didn't even answer"she retorted.
They both sat and fumed for a minute until Polly broke the silence.
"Don't you see, that just proves my point. You were so absorbed in the relics that you had thought for nothing else. Not even your favourite cumin toffee."
"Yeah," He answered, putting aside his grudge as easily as it had been taken up. "I couldn't help wondering about the person who carved it for Shah Jahan, more than EIGHT CENTURIES ago. They didn't even know our country existed then...

It's kind of sad in a way."

"How so?" Polly asked.
"Well, they were a proud autonomous people -well MANY peoples really, if you consider each caste as a separate people group- minding their own business, completely unaware of the existence of us, as were we, unaware of them. Then suddenly, their lives were turned upside down and now they are part of the Great British Empire whether they like it or not. Their great dynasties are ended for good.
I just think that is a bit sad."

"I don't agree." Stated Polly decidedly as she sat up and grabbed a towel, scrubbing at her tangled and almost dry hair.

"The British Empire is the best thing that happened to them. Who else was going to teach them how to act civilised and stop eating people and wear clothes and stuff like that, if we didn't?"

Digory, snorted with laughter and didn't stop even when she started hitting him with her towel. Finally she threatened to push him off the rock they were on if he did not shut up and tell her what was so funny.

"The Indians have never eaten people! They wear clothes just as we do, except when bathing of course. They are also one of the oldest civilisations in the world with their own system of government and religion. They had rules to govern 'civilised' society while our ancestors were wrestling each other to death in the fens. Just because their culture is different to ours, doesn't mean it isn't civilised" He had sobered by the end of this speech as he saw the curiousity in her eyes.
"You are right. I do want to explore and learn about other cultures and peoples, but do you know what I want to know even more than that?"

"No, do tell."
He hesitated for a moment, looking frankly at his friend, assessing her probable reaction.
"I want to know if there is any people in the world with a creation story involving a Lion singing the world into being." he finally said quietly.

"Oh"
Both of them were silent for so long that it wasn't until the summer sun slipped behind the tree tops that Polly stood up, shaking out her towel, and scrambled back down the side of the rock to the riverbank below.
"Your Mum is going to be mad at us if we're late for tea again, Digory."
"No she's not." Digory retorted, clambering to his feet and following to where Polly stood pulling on her shorts and top over her bathers. "Mother never gets mad at anything"
"Okay, 'worried' then. Race you back to the house" she snatched up their towels and clambored up the bank.

"Don't forget the food things." she yelled over her shoulder.
Digory sighed and took his time, gathering their cups and the empty pie dish into the basket.
To be completely honest, he was content with his own company right now.
Narnia was never far from his thoughts but it was rare that they spoke about it even when they were alone. Polly never denied him when he had the impulse to put his thoughts into words, but he could tell it didn't fill her mind with questions and longings the way it did his.

Digory thought back over the decade and a half of searching until he finally found Aslan in our world.

"Ironic isn't it. All that expense and travel and Polly found it before I did, right here in England." He chuckled to himself, and reached for his pouch, hesitated, then put it back in his pocket, picking up the small bible on his side table instead.
"Actually, Polly is right, I do smoke too much" he said, caressing the leather cover with his long fingers. It was plain black, shabby around the edges from being stuffed in his jacket pocket, and the gilding on the pages was all but gone. There were copious notes in the margins and some of the pages had been taped back in, as the binding had given way in places. It smelt of peppermints and tobacco and it was his most Treasured possession: worth more than any of the rare and exotic tomes which graced the shelves of his study,
Indeed more valuable, than the whole Kirke estate and Kirke enterprises put together. He mused to himself.

The Professor reverently, lovingly, turned familiar pages to his favourite verse.

"Behold, You shall seek me and find me when you seek for me with all of your heart."
He sat back in his chair and let his mind wander, once again, to some of the places his feet had trod on that great search to find Aslan in this world.