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Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.
*
The phone rang.
It rang for such a long time that it roused Crowley from his sleep, eventually causing him to crawl down the wall and pick up his mobile.
“Mwhat?” he grumbled, dearly hoping that the angel had a very good explanation for why he was calling again. Unless it was already July and he’d overslept…
“What if there’s an ‘if’?” Aziraphale asked, voice somewhat slurred. “An ‘if’ that we don’t know about? A — a conditional clause to — to things? What if that’s what ineffability is? What if we accidentally do the thing we’re not supposed to? What if we look the winged horse in the mouth and ruin everything?”
Crowley, still half-asleep and barely conscious, was unable to translate these questions into something he could comprehend, or even anything vaguely adjacent to comprehensible. The angel blithely carried on.
“Or — or what if God just gets bored? What if She stops creating daisies or grass or telling the sun to rise and just… drops the cosmos with a crash? What if-”
The words pinged around Crowley’s mind, like a metallic ball in a pinball machine, eventually hitting the right spot and causing him to pinch the bridge of his nose in what might as well have been physical pain. There was no way he could have this discussion over the phone.
“Hang on,” he muttered, took a deep breath, and dived down the phone line. Self-isolation be damned.
He emerged in the bookshop still in his pyjamas, and for a moment just silently surveyed the scene. There somehow seemed to be even more books than usual, added to which were a great many cakes, as well as a great many plates upon which rested a great many crumbs.
There was also an angel on a sofa, with several empty bottles of Courvoisier beside him.
And — on the nearest pile of books — an open tome that made Crowley sigh deeply.
“Have you been reading Orthodoxy?”
Aziraphale looked as guilty as it was possible to look whilst also being drunk and attempting nonchalance. Which is fairly.
“I… might have had a glance…”
“Angel. Chesterton was a terrific guy and we shan’t see his like again, but we do not grapple with Orthodoxy, remember?”
Aziraphale did something that was most definitely a pout.
“But he glimpsed the truth, I can’t just-”
“Aziraphale.” Crowley dragged a hand across his face, then knelt down by the sofa. “Look at me.”
Those big blue eyes fastened on him with unerring focus, and Crowley began to worry that he might be in danger. Of what, he wasn’t exactly sure, but definitely something.
Aziraphale pointed at him, a finger poking at Crowley’s chest.
“You. You were the nurse. ‘The solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition.’ An’ you taught the boy the truth. Twas the wrong boy, but it was still the truth.”
Crowley resisted the impulse to hit his head against something hard, instead trying his best to shake the cobwebs of sleep out of his brain.
“We both did. But all children know the truth. Most of them just forget when they grow up.”
Aziraphale nodded slowly.
“We all live in Elfland. But we broke the Law. So what happens now?”
Crowley looked at his angel for a long time, then snapped his fingers and a crate of wine appeared.
“The definition of a law is something that can be broken. C’mon, budge up angel. I need to be more drunk before I discuss this.”
Aziraphale managed to move, if not easily (too much cake, as well as too much cognac) and Crowley crawled onto the sofa, opened a bottle, then miracled a wine glass and filled it.
“Fine. Let’s do this thing. Let’s hoard the hills and appreciate our cosy little cosmos, and make sure not to overlook Matterhorn in the confusion.”
There was something in the glint in Aziraphale’s eyes that made him think he might have been played, but he couldn’t quite work out how.
Instead he smiled and launched into a thorough commentary on Chesterton’s ideas. Knowing in his heart that the man had been right, and that this, right here, was what he — they — had saved, to be stored and held sacred.
*
And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck.