It is three days before Christmas, and even as I’d spent the previous night in my own bed at home, telling myself not to bother Mr. Lewis again, that Mum needs my help preparing for Christmas dinner while Dad works extra hours to get the Christmas orders in at market, and that George knows I’ve reached the end of Mr. Lewis’s stories, I arrive uninvited at the Kilns with a written list in my pocket. I stand in front of the green door, waiting for someone to answer my knock. I still have questions.
I must ask now or never.
Mrs. Rounder, her hair still askew, opens the door and wipes her hands on her apron.
“Miss Devonshire! So happy you’ve returned. You know, we’ve been getting the most annoying visitors. People who think that if they come here they will find a knight in shining armor or the White Witch. They arrive just knocking at our door as if this wasn’t a private home. But the brothers will be happy to see you!”
The aroma of sage and rosemary fills the hallway as I enter. Something’s cooking.
“Mr. Lewis is in the common room. Go on in,” she says.
I slip off my coat and hang it on the peg by the door before entering the common room. There, before the bright fire, sit Mr. Lewis and Warnie, right as can be. Each has a book in his hand and a cup of tea at his side. Looking up, both beam smiles at me.
“Hallo!” Mr. Lewis says. “Have a seat. What a surprise. We didn’t expect you today.”
“I know.” I stumble as I walk in, suddenly self-conscious. It was rude to just show up. They might have had holiday guests. I dig into my satchel and pull out my notebook. “I don’t want to bother, but I have a list of questions. They are for George, so forgive me for the bother.”
“Oh, these questions are from George?” Mr. Lewis taps his pipe against the edge of his chair and ash falls to the carpet. “Are you sure they aren’t for you?”
“No!” My defensiveness flares and then sinks under his warm gaze, beneath Warnie’s laugh. “Well, maybe a little.”
Mr. Lewis sets down a G. K. Chesterton book and grows serious. “What else would you like to know? Is there something you don’t understand?”
“I do want to understand. And I still can’t answer when George asks, ‘Where did the lion come from? The faun? The lamppost and the names of the children?’ So now I ask you, Mr. Lewis, are they real in this world at all?”
“I don’t fully know,” he says. Mr. Lewis’s voice is quiet but sincere. Maybe I have disappointed him by not seeing what needs seeing in the stories he’s told me.
“But how can you not know? It is you who wrote it.”
“Miss Devonshire, I had hoped to show you, and show George, how our lives unfold in so many different ways. How our individual stories become part of something much bigger. But I see now that you need more.”
“I only need more because I want to tell George where it all came from.”
“Here is the thing, Miss Devonshire: you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they write their books. When the story is finished, he has forgotten a good deal of what writing it was like.”
“How on earth can you not know about a book that you wrote?”
“I shall end our litany of stories with the place I usually start when asked about Narnia. My story all began with a picture. One day when I was sixteen years old, I imagined a faun with an umbrella carrying packages in a snowy wood. Then, on another day when I was in my forties, I decided to write the story that went with the picture. But even then, I didn’t write so much of it. Not until two years ago.”
I nod, feeling something opening up, a cloud cover breaking under blue skies.
“Meanwhile,” he said, “I’d been having dreams about lions, and I’d read my friend Charles Williams’s book—you heard me mention him, another one of the Inklings. He’s gone now.” Mr. Lewis closes his eyes and grief runs past; I feel it.
Warnie pipes up as if to fill in the spots where Mr. Lewis is faltering. “Charles’s book was called The Place of the Lion.”
Mr. Lewis nods. “But who is to say where the idea of Aslan arrived in my own story?”
My heart beats fast and I lean closer. “Aslan is George’s favorite. He draws that lion everywhere—picture after picture of him.” I pause before I tell Mr. Lewis that he is in the pictures too. I am not entirely sure how he will take this, so I keep it to myself. “Who is he? Who is Aslan?”
Mr. Lewis looks to Warnie, then to me. “Who is Aslan?” he asks. “He is the King of Beasts. Son-of-the-Emperor-Over-the-Sea. King above all High Kings. The Great Lion. High King of the Woods.”
“Oh, Mr. Lewis, I know all of that. But who is he really?”
“That is who he is.”
“Is he . . . God?” I ask outright the question I’ve been thinking. This is what I want to tell George: Aslan is God; all is well. There is a place where things are made right and good again. There is hope.
“That is the question I get all the time. What I did when crafting this tale, Miss Devonshire, was to suppose that there was another world, and God entered it in a different way than He did here on earth. And so there you have Aslan. It’s a supposal, if you will.”
“A supposal. What’s that?”
“Something supposed, an idea of another world. And if there was this other world, how would God show Himself?”
I smile. “Or herself. And who is the Witch?” I ask, hurtling through my prepared list as quickly as possible, not wanting him to stop answering, believing I am at last finding my way to the missing puzzle piece.
“She may be any number of things.”
Warnie laughs at this answer. Even though he remains otherwise silent, he seems to be enjoying this conversation, like a show.
I toss out an idea. “Is she Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen?”
Mr. Lewis lifts only his right brow. “Or, Miss Devonshire, is she Circe from Homer’s Odyssey?” He leans forward. “Who knows? But don’t we all know the White Witch? Must she be someone in particular? We can try and find the source, but we are all born knowing the Witch, aren’t we?”
“Yes. We are.” I think about the disease that has ravaged my brother’s heart, making it weak. His illness is the White Witch. War is the White Witch. Cruelty is the White Witch. I take a breath. “There are so many things in your novel, Mr. Lewis. And then I’ve listened and I’ve written down the stories you tell me as best I can in my notebook, and I’ve read fairy tales and George MacDonald. I see, of course, that there is Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology in your Narnia story. There are British fairy tales, Irish folklore, and . . . even Father Christmas.”
His laugh bellows across the room so loudly that outside I spy a flock of birds loosening from their branches and flying away with their black wings. “Yes, indeed,” he says. “That is what my friend Tollers doesn’t like.”
I sink inside, drop my chin into my scarf. “So there isn’t one answer for each question.”
“There rarely is, Miss Devonshire.”
“I wish there were.” I look up. “And the character Lucy, she’s named after someone because I see that name in the front of your book.”
“Yes. My godchild is named Lucy. She is the daughter of my dear friend, Owen Barfield, an author and poet, a fellow Inkling. When I started the book, she was four years old. Now she is fourteen.” He shakes his head.
He is quiet for so long that I think perhaps he’s done talking, that I have finally, finally outdone my welcome. Then he speaks. “Megs,” he says, calling me by my first name for the first time. “We rearrange elements that God has provided. Writing a book is much less like creating than it is like planting a garden—we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream that works, so to speak, its own way.”
“In its own way?” I repeat.
“Do you know Psalm 19?” he asks.
I think for a breath and then another, moving myself backward through my memory to catechism days. “The one about the heavens or the sky showing God’s handiwork?”
“Yes. The cosmos reveals God’s handiwork.”
“So you’re saying maybe stories are the same? That they reveal . . . God’s handiwork?” I think for a better word. “Or truth? They reveal some kind of truth about the universe? That’s what physics is all about.”
“Yes, that is partly what I am saying. Megs, stars are made of dust and nitrogen; they are balls of gas and hydrogen. But that isn’t what a star is; it’s only what it is made of.”
“I . . . hear you,” I say and think about how this is the phrase young Jack Lewis wanted to hear from Mr. Kirkpatrick. “I hear you.”
I don’t want to say I understand, because I don’t.
Not yet. Not fully.
“Did you want your book to have a spiritual message?” I ask. “To really say that . . .” I falter.
“I continue to hear this idea, that I have set out to write a Christian allegory, but it is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Like I said, everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. And archetypes,” he says. “You know about those?”
“I do,” I say. “Carl Jung. I learned in secondary school how there are . . . what? Twelve types, I think. And they each show a kind of person or trait. Is it that each one represents a universal pattern of human nature? Or . . . I can’t really have any kind of intelligent conversation about it. Which is the only kind I would like to have with you. I would be mortified to be considered daft.”
“You, Megs, are far from daft. But yes, archetypes are patterns. They are there in Narnia.” He glances at the notebook on my lap, open to the end with only a few pages remaining. “I do believe your notebook might be full, and it’s time for you, my dear, to live and tell your own stories.”
Tears fill my chest like a balloon. I don’t want this to end, whatever this is. I need to continue bringing stories to George. It seems they are keeping him alive.
“I don’t know if I shall be back,” I say, feeling overwhelmed. “It feels as if we are done.”
“You may visit anytime, Megs.”
“This has felt . . .” I stumble and forge through my thoughts for the right word. “This feels important.”
“Megs, every human interaction is eternally important.” He smiles, and I swear those eyes that usually twinkle are swimming with tears.