George’s room shimmers with eventide light, pink and buttery yellow, and he sits quietly in his bed with his eyes closed. He is so still; I think maybe he’s fallen asleep. I am finished with the first story, telling it as best I know how, and it looks like I’ve bored him, put him to sleep. Maybe all he’d wanted was a simple answer; maybe I should have just made it up and told him about the fake box of ideas. He’d never know the difference. After I’d left Mr. Lewis, there was just so much to remember, and I’d rushed all the way through this first story.
I press my hand on my brother’s and squeeze. “George?”
“I heard every word. I’m here. I saw it all.”
My heart constricts with the knowledge that he feels like he has to say he’s still in the room, still with me. Tears prick the base of my throat, and I swallow them. His eyes open and he gives me a sad smile. “What happened when Warnie came back from school? Did he still love Boxen or did he grow up and not . . . ?”
“He still loved it; he didn’t outgrow it just because he went off to school! They worked on that land for years and years.”
“Well, you left out that part of the story.”
“I thought you were asleep, silly boy.”
“No! How could I possibly sleep in the middle of a story? I was just . . . in the story. Which isn’t sleep at all but something brighter and . . .”
“In the story?”
“Yes. Don’t you do the same?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“When I read a story or you tell me one, I can go into them.”
“Oh?” I say.
“So what happened when Warnie came home?”
“Well, close your eyes if you please.” I laugh and cover his eyes with my hand.
* * *
George leans back, and there he is again with nine-year-old Jack waiting for his brother to come home for holiday.
Jack sat in the attic staring past the rolling hills and farther, to Belfast Lough’s dark blue water. Flat, low clouds filled the much lighter sky, a faded sea.
On the road that was hidden by high trees, a black carriage carried Jack’s father, Albert, down to the docks to retrieve Warnie. In the house, in the rooms and hallways, the grown-ups bustled about. Mother in the kitchen, fussing about the grand meal for Warnie’s return. Their nanny, Lizzie, fluffing the sheets high in the air like the sails of a ship as she prepared Warnie’s room. Annie sweeping the front hallway of the brown mud Jack had tracked in after running through the garden. And his grandfather Lewis, who lived in an upstairs bedroom all to himself, sitting in a chair in the library, clucking and fussing over the news. Grandfather didn’t rush about like the others. He was slow and quiet, a presence of love in the house.
They all waited for Warnie, with Jack the most expectant. While Warnie was away, there’d still been school lessons for Jack—the mathematics he hated, the reading he loved, Latin, Greek, and history. And in between, he’d continued creating the world of Boxen.
Now staring out the window, Jack noticed a ferry had arrived in the lough, squat and low, its broad decks peppered with people. One of those people was surely his brother, but Jack couldn’t see that far. He waved from the window as if Warnie could feel his greeting.
Within the hour, Warnie and Jack were in the attic, reunited and standing in the little end room.
“You’re here at last!” Jack could not contain his enthusiasm.
Warnie stood tall, still in his school uniform starched and straight as the wall even after all that travel. “I am so happy to be home.” He beamed a smile.
“Tell me everything,” Jack said. “I want to know everything.”
“The headmaster—” Warnie looked keenly at Jack, intense. “His name is Capron, but he’s called Oldie. He reads our letters before they are mailed so I can’t say everything I want to say. But I don’t want to talk about school right now. I want to talk about Boxen. Your letter said that King Bunny has been captured!” Warnie loosened the top button of his uniform and sat down.
“I rescued him!” Solemn words poured out of Jack. “I wrote so many stories for us: ‘The King’s Ring,’ ‘Manx Against Manx,’ ‘The Locked Door,’ ‘Living Races of Mouseland,’ and ‘The Relief of Murry.’”
“Oh, that’s so wonderful. I want to see them immediately.”
“I even wrote a play called The King’s Ring with Icthus-Oress, who is the son of a dead butcher and a singer. And these.” Jack pointed to new drawings where mice carried swords and donned top hats. Toads wore three-piece suits.
Warnie reached for the piles of drawings and notebooks and Jack watched him, aware that Warnie was slightly different. Not in any essential way, but something in his eyes had shifted, a hardness that softened with the talk of Boxen.
“Do you not like Wynyard?” Jack asked, wondering if this might be the cause of the change that made Jack feel as if there was something about his brother he didn’t know.
Warnie gave a sad type of smile. “I like cricket and being outdoors but—”
“Then I would hate it,” Jack said. “You know I can’t play those kinds of games.” Jack held up his thumbs. “I am too clumsy by far.”
“Father says it’s only because we’re missing a joint in our thumbs, not because we’re clumsy.” Warnie picked up a drawing of Puddiphat. “And because of that, you are so clever at all of this. Mother would agree that God gives us what we need.”
Jack stared at his brother spouting his parents’ words and for a moment, a terrifying moment, he believed he had lost his brother to Wynyard and adulthood.
But then Warnie smiled and crouched down. “How shall Pig Land fare in the next battle?”
Before Jack could answer, Annie’s voice rose up the stairs. “Dinner is ready, boys!”
The brothers jumped up, leaving Pig Land and Boxen and Puddiphat to await their return.
* * *
I stop. George opens one eye to verify that I have closed my notebook.
“Oh, Megs! Is that it? Is that all they said? What did the two brothers say or do with you after that? What did the professor say?”
“Well, firstly, George, he isn’t a professor—not like the professor in his book. Mr. Lewis is the tutor of English literature but not a professor, so I just call him Mr. Lewis. You could call him a don or tutor or fellow, but . . .”
George looks at me, bored with such facts, so I keep going. “Anyway, after they were done telling me that story, Warnie bolted from the common room as if his tail were on fire, and he returned with their drawings from that time.” I lean forward. “George, they were amazing! I saw a bunny riding a bike and a toad in a three-piece suit. Mr. Lewis had drawn them all as a child. Your age. He said he longed to make things.”
“Do you think that was the start of Narnia?” George asks quietly as if afraid to know the truth.
“Neither of them can say.” I shrug.
“And Mr. Lewis’s unusual thumbs,” George says. “Imagine if they hadn’t been created that way.” He pauses, and I imagine he thinks about his own heart being created differently from others. “What if Mr. Lewis’s thumbs had been perfect?”
“I don’t know,” I tell George. “What if he had been better built with a hardy constitution and had never been done in with colds? Would he have started to draw and make up stories in the sunlit hallways and dusty little end room while he was stuck inside? Maybe not. Maybe he would have been outside with the other boys playing and running, and he’d never have created Animal-Land and then Boxen. I’m not sure if a missing joint in a thumb can be said to have started something that turned into Narnia, but I find it interesting, and so does Mr. Lewis.”
“Did you get to read any of it? Of Boxen?”
I shake my head. “Mr. Lewis says he seldom rereads any of his work, but he did say he will sometimes pick up the old notebooks and drawings and glance at them, marvel at the land they created together when they were young. He told me that when their father died, he and Warnie returned to Little Lea and buried their attic toys in the garden. But they saved some of the drawings. Even later, when Jack was twenty-eight years old, he said he wrote an encyclopedia to explain all of Boxen.”
George grew solemn. He gazed out the window and asked, “Was that all they told you?”
“I have one more story, but I think we’ll save it for after dinner. Remember, they found me lurking like a proper crook on their property. It’s incredible they told me anything at all. But they invited me back on Monday. Remember, little brother,” I say, ruffling his curls, “it’s close to exams. I can’t just mooch about with Mr. Lewis all day. I have to study, and he has to teach and lecture and mark exams.”
“I know,” George says softly. “Out there, the world is a very busy place. But you have one more story?”
I kiss his cheek. “Right before the next story, Mr. Lewis told me this, so I’ll tell you: ‘And then everything changed.’”
“Well, isn’t that a brilliant way to keep you hanging on?” George laughs, and the sound brings Mum into the room with a tray carrying three teacups and one pot with yellow flowers sprinkled about the edges. Her hair is longer this season, graying at the edge by her ear and chestnut everywhere else. Mum is too young, only forty years old, to be showing the signs of age. The skin under her eyes casts a purplish shade, and I wonder when she last truly slept for more than a few hours. But her sweet smile belies all fatigue, and her musical voice fills George’s room with cheer. Dad is so very in love with her, and each time she walks into a room, I know why. She possesses a light that everyone can see.
“What is so funny?” she asks as she sets the tray beside the medicine bottles on George’s little desk. It should be covered in schoolbooks and notes, but that’s not George’s life.
“Mr. Lewis. He left Megs hanging on so she would come back to his house. I’m going to get more stories.”
Mum looks to me with a stern expression that tells me I best be careful not to lead my little brother down the trail of lies.
“They’re true stories,” I say as I pour the tea into my cup and think about the very strong tea at the Kilns. “I asked Mr. Lewis and his brother exactly what George told me to ask, and while he didn’t quite answer me in the way I want, he told me two stories to bring home and said there are more for us.”
Mum shakes her head. “Don’t waste the poor man’s time. Or yours. Narnia came from his imagination and that just must be that. It is a beautiful story to keep George occupied, but we mustn’t hound a busy man.”
George leans back and flattens against his pillow. “No, Mum. That is not just that. That is too simple an answer.”
“Well, my darling boy, sometimes the simplest answers are the correct answers.”
“There’s more to it. I know it,” he says so forcefully that it brings on a coughing storm. These fits come upon him with such ferocity that Mum and I rush to either side of him and bang on his back until it subsides. He relaxes again, but his fingertips have turned a berry shade of blue and his lips seem to almost disappear without their color.
“Megs,” he says insistently, “did Mr. Lewis say if it was hard to make up the lands? If it was difficult to imagine Boxen? Or Narnia? Because . . . don’t you see? He was my age when he wrote about King Bunny. He was my age when he created an entirely new world built of the bits and pieces of this world, while he was sick too!”
“He didn’t say.” I look to Mum, but she is busy watching George for signs of distress. “He just told me all about Boxen and the house where they lived in Ireland, which sounds glorious.” I pause and lean closer. “Boxen isn’t as famous as Narnia, that’s for certain. Hardly anyone knows about it now. But he told me that when a story bubbles up, it’s ‘like a lion pawing to get out.’”
George nods. “I know. That lion is everywhere.”
While I don’t know what he means, I try to explain what I mean. “Here is all I can tell you: From the very beginning, Mr. Lewis wrote of other lands from his imagination. Maybe all of these kingdoms came from the same place—wherever that place is—Boxen and Animal-Land and Narnia. I don’t know, but I do know that Mr. Lewis said something like this about imagination.” I stop and think back; I don’t want to misquote him. “‘Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’”
“Oh,” George says with a short breath. “Wouldn’t it be grand if ink could cure me?”
Mum draws a sharp breath. “I don’t think that is what he meant, son. I believe—”
“I know what he meant, Mum. He meant the ills of the soul, and he is right.” George looks to me. “Megs, when you go back to university, will you get me some paper and colored pencils like Jack’s? When you come back, will you bring me notebooks? If Mr. Lewis can write at that same age, surely I can too.” He smiles and I nod, because words will bring tears, and that won’t help either of us. “Is there anything else to tell me, Megs? Just one more thing before the next story?”
I think hard, going back to that warm common room at the Kilns and what Mr. Lewis told me about making things up. I open my notebook and read a note I’d made. “He did tell me this: ‘Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.’” I look to George. “I think he said it better than that, but that is what I was left with. I remember that sentence as clear as if he rang a bell. ‘Imagination is the way to find meaning . . .’”
George nods and closes his eyes with a satisfied smile, as if I have told him something he already knew but forgot.
I look to Mum, and she motions for me to walk into the kitchen with her.
Dad is still at work in town, running the local market, most likely busy as can be with the Royal Worcester Porcelain factory just letting out its evening shift, but he’ll be home soon. This is the routine; they follow it without fail. My parents have formed the grooves of their life over the seventeen years since I was born, and they are as sturdy as the tracks that carry my train to and from Oxford.
Horrible questions speed through my head: What will Mum and Dad do when George is gone? How will their daily lives and schedules change? Sorrow floods me, and a sound rises from my throat as we reach the brick-floored kitchen and the warm, green AGA stove.
“Darling?” Mum turns to me with a question on her face. “Are you all right?” She sets the tea tray on the thick oak worktable. Something bubbles an iron pot on the stove, a stew, most likely lamb from its rich aroma.
“No, I am not all right. There must be something I can do besides tell my brother stories. There must be. What do the doctors say now?”
“The same as they’ve always said, Megs. There is nothing to be done but what we’re doing. The trip to London didn’t give us any new information, and the journey and the tests only wore him out further. It’s too much to understand, I know. But we must.”
“Mum, there is science. It is 1950, and there are huge advances. There must be an answer.”
“Yes, you’d think there would be, wouldn’t you? The antibiotics have helped us until now, but . . .” Her voice carries the weariness of years. The burden rounds her shoulders and grays her hair. Why am I making it worse by prodding at her?
The crunch of gravel causes us both to look up and out the kitchen window. Dad rides up the walkway on his bike. His dark hair is askew and his cheeks are ruddy with the wind of winter. “Why doesn’t he just take the car?” I ask.
“He’s afraid we’ll need it while he’s gone.” Mum’s voice fades with all she won’t say about emergencies and a quick getaway to hospital. “Now put on a smile and greet your dad. No talk of stories and wardrobes and mythical creatures. Do you hear me?”
I nod and yet I know, deeply know, that there will still be talk of such things, because it is the talk George desires most.