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“I’m going to meet Edith in the park,” Lucy said, and her mother smiled absently and kissed the crown of her head.
“Mind the time, though, darling, don’t be out late,” her mother said, and Lucy smiled and nodded and pretended not to feel a deep well of guilt open up in her chest.
…
Edith wasn’t Lucy’s age really. This bothered Lucy not for the fact of it so much as for the fact that, in the months that she’d been meeting Edith in the park to feed the birds, she had so far allowed her parents and siblings to think that Edith was. Lucy Pevensie was, in general, a very honest person, and this meant that her family’s assumptions about Edith, and the fact that Lucy knew about them without having yet corrected them, constituted the nearest thing Lucy had told to a lie since her mother had asked her what her favorite thing about staying with Professor Kirke during the war years had been, and Lucy had told her, “The wood.”
This hadn’t been a lie, not a true one, either, but Lucy had known that her mother had thought Lucy meant the woods and thickets and tumbledown wild places around the edges of the grounds of the Professor’s house. And Lucy had loved those places, but the woods she had loved best, which were introduced to her by the Professor’s strange, rambling old house, were the woods of Narnia, the secret country that Lucy and her brothers and sister had ruled over for years one afternoon, before returning back to exactly the moment they had left.
Lucy hadn’t told her mother about this, however, and while it wasn’t actually a lie, the omission hurt, a long, ever-present ache that was related to, rather than different from, the way Lucy still missed Narnia.
Edith thought Lucy was a lovely young girl, but Lucy had seen Edith speak in the same way to the young women who worked in the shop near the park where Edith bought bread to feed the birds, and she thought they were lovely young girls, too. They were as old as Lucy would have been if she’d stepped out of the wardrobe back from Narnia as grown as she had been at the time, and so the knowledge that Edith would have looked at Lucy as a bright young thing with so much ahead of her no matter which of Lucy’s ages she wore offered a strange sort of comfort.
“These cabbies,” Edith exclaimed as she made her way over to the park bench where she and Lucy liked to meet. “It isn’t safe. They drive like they don’t know a body can be hurt. When I was a girl, cabbies drove hansoms and if the cabbie wasn’t paying attention, at least you could count on the horse to notice before running you down.”
Lucy had never known a London with more than the occasional horse in its streets, but she thought she would have liked to very much. “I suppose cars are faster,” Lucy allowed dubiously, reaching her hand out for a piece of bread to feed to the sparrows and pigeons who had started to gather already, before Lucy even had anything to give to them, just out of familiarity with what it meant for Lucy to sit on this bench and wait for Edith.
It made Lucy sad, a little, to think that her school holidays would be over in a few weeks, and that the birds would continue to gather here, to look for her and wait for her, because they’d grown used to her since she had been home, and they didn’t know anything about the calendar.
“Faster!” Edith scoffed. “As if anything in this forsaken city needs to go faster,” and with this remark, she settled onto the bench beside Lucy.
“Will you explain to them?” Lucy asked, a little later, bread all gone and light getting low, as she readied herself to return home. “When I can’t come anymore, when I’m back at school. Let them know it isn’t that I wouldn’t want to.”
“Them?” Edith asked, and Lucy gestured at the birds, feeling a little foolish, and a little lucky for once that she seemed young enough to Edith that a request like this might not seem so odd.
“I know it’s -- silly,” Lucy said, or tried to say, but it didn’t feel silly at all, not really, and for a moment she felt as if she were choking on all of the things she couldn’t say.
“Oh, dear,” Edith said, reaching into her handbag to draw out a handkerchief. “It’s not silly at all. I’ll miss you, too -- Lucy, dear, don’t cry.”
The week before the start of term, they were all going to visit the Professor. Miss Plummer would be there, and Eustace, and perhaps even the girl from his school who went with him the last time. Lucy’s brothers and sister, too. All the friends of Narnia in one place, and she thought they would all know enough to mean it when they said it wasn’t silly that Lucy didn’t like to think of the birds missing her when she had no way to explain to them why she was leaving.
Just a few more weeks until that visit, and then Lucy would be able to tell the truth all the time, to everyone she spoke to. Just a little longer.
…
The sky was right in the midst of changing color by the time Lucy got home that evening, but at least she wasn’t the last one to arrive at the table. As Lucy approached the front gate, Edmund appeared, making his way at a loping, half-scramble of a run that slowed as she saw him catch sight of her, like he was having the same thought.
Well, Lucy thought, waiting for him at the first step, they could be the last one home together, anyway.
Only, when Edmund reached her, instead of continuing up the steps with her, he threw himself into a graceless heap on the stair. From up close, she could see a long ladder of skinned knee extending down his shin, a smear of dirt on his face, a slight stiffness around what looked like a swollen lip. So he’d been out at the rugby pitch again.
“Good day, Lu?” he asked, looking up at her, and after a moment, she sighed and sat down beside him. Susan would say that it wasn’t very ladylike, the way Lucy settled herself out on the stair like this, but then perhaps Susan didn’t have to know. The light in the sky was dimming into dreamy pinks and purples that reminded Lucy of another sky.
Edmund must have been thinking it, too, because after a moment he said, “If we were in Narnia, we’d share a pipe just now.”
It was true, and for a moment Lucy missed the lazy, rich scent of Narnian tobacco enough to make her dizzy. “You could,” she reminded him. “No one would think a thing of it.”
Edmund shook his head. “It wouldn’t be the same,” he said, and of course he was right, but Lucy thought maybe the closeness would be worth it, just the same. “Anyway,” he went on, smiling at her sidelong, a little stiff-faced around his swollen lip, “Only the Professor can carry off a pipe. It would be cigarettes for me, unless I wanted to be almost as odd-looking as you would be.”
“Well,” Lucy said, caught up enough in the idea to feel a little reckless with it. “Why not? Isn’t it better to do something true because we want to, rather than something that looks right so no one will wonder? These are our lives.”
Edmund laughed, a little, and it should have hurt, Lucy thought -- her seriousness punctured by his making fun. Only that thought was an old one, a mental echo from when they’d been children, before they’d grown up together past all that. When Ed laughed now, after all they’d been through together, Lucy felt -- the old Narnian memory, back up on the shelf shone through. When Edmund laughed now, after he’d made the biggest mistake Lucy thought he would ever make, and Aslan had died for him, and he’d lived the next decade and a half trying to be worth it, she was always just glad he still wanted to.
“I’m not sure I care as much as all that about having a smoke, Lu,” Edmund said. “It’s no good for rugger, anyway.” Then, after a moment, when Lucy’s face didn’t change. “You should, though, if you miss it that much. I’m sure the Professor would lend you a pipe.”
Lucy shook her head, because she didn’t care as much as all that about the smoking, either. She missed it because it was Narnian , but doing it here wouldn’t take her back to Narnia, it would only give her new things to miss.
Instead of saying any of that, she focused in on the earlier part of his statement. “Why do you like it? Rugby,” she asked, both to change the subject and because she’d been wondering since he’d come home for the holidays this time around with a team jersey and a set of bruises to match it.
Edmund shrugged, and for a moment, Lucy didn’t think he was going to answer. “I’m good at it,” he said, finally.
That didn’t seem like a good enough reason to do much of anything to Lucy, but she and Edmund had always been a little different from one another that way, anyway.
“It’s, there’s something--” he said, after a moment, lowering his voice. The next words he said made it very clear why he wouldn’t want anyone walking past to hear. “It’s like -- do you remember, in battle?”
Lucy nodded, because she did -- she remembered riding out on her own dear warhorse, Oceanus, who had been as bold and as daring as Lucy herself, sun shining on her mail coat, bow cocked and ready to cover her soldiers’ attack.
“Not the fighting, not once it had started and you could feel how awful it all was that anyone had to get hurt like that, but the beginning. How we all moved together, and we knew that, whatever befell us, we would stand by one another and protect our home, and that these were the right things to do, and everything felt all bright and burning inside your chest.”
It was the longest speech Lucy had heard Edmund make in a while. And yes, she remembered that.
“It’s like that?” she asked, and she tried not to sound as dubious as she felt. Because rugby, because sport -- it was a game . What Edmund was talking about, it might have happened in another life, but it was more real and true than anything Lucy could think of which had happened in this one so far.
But Edmund looked up, and there was something strained in his face. “Not really,” he said, wellspring of eloquence apparently all dried up. “No, it’s not really like that at all. But he said we had to look for him in our world, now. And I suppose I’m looking.”
…
Edmund was quiet, these days. He hadn’t used to be, not back when they were children, and not even back in Narnia. He’d been a little more serious than Lucy, certainly, but that hadn’t been hard to do -- Lucy had felt, during that time, like all of the blood in her veins was swimming with starlight, like her feet hadn’t known how not to dance.
It was different, back here, these days. All the little girls at school wanted to play at dancing in the schoolyard, but they counted out the beat and took such measured steps, for all the world as if they were the ones who had already lived a whole lifetime to adulthood, and not Lucy. It wasn’t a kind of dancing Lucy felt drawn to.
Instead, he was quiet like he had been back on the Dawn Treader, in Narnia the last time. Only, Lucy knew why he’d been so quiet then.
“It wasn’t for us,” Edmund had said to Lucy, and as he’d said it, she’d known it to be true. “Caspian didn’t need us, Narnia didn’t need us, hell, even Reep didn’t need us, he’d have reached what he was seeking even if we’d never come. And it wasn’t that he needed us to learn something,” and this time, as he’d said it, Lucy had heard how there was only one he that Edmund could mean, and that that he was the great Lion, Aslan, who had told them that they must seek him in their own country, now, as if Narnia was not their own country more surely than England ever could be. “That was what it was for Eustace, but not for us, not this time.”
“So why do you think that he did it?” Lucy had asked Edmund, and then she’d waited, patient, while he’d bit his lip before answering.
It wasn’t, Lucy had thought, that he didn’t know what to say, or that he didn’t have an answer. She thought that maybe instead it was an answer that felt too private to say out loud, even to Lucy.
“I think it was a gift,” he’d said, finally, staring down at Aunt Alberta’s ugly, spare room bedspread in the room where Lucy had been staying. “I think it was a goodbye present. For you, probably, mostly,” and he’d had a crooked little smile on his face here, “But for me, too, a bit,” and then, returning to the subject as she’d raised it, how quiet he’d been in that, their last time in Narnia, “I was trying to enjoy it. To remember it.”
Lucy didn’t think she could ever forget it -- not their magical weeks aboard the Dawn Treader, and not their last time in Narnia, when they’d saved it for the true Narnians, and for Caspian. But then, she would have thought that she couldn’t forget their first time there, either, when they had lived in their castle at Cair Paravel for years and years. Those years, she thought, should have felt more real to her than anything that happened after, but sometimes it felt like her memories of that time were a golden ripple of lifetime that was all wound onto a bobbin like thread. She could tug at the end, and send it all spooling out, tangling around her feet in a lovely, glowing mess, but most of the time she kept those memories wrapped up neatly somewhere she could keep an eye on them.
Still, when Lucy thought of those bright, wild days aboard ship, she could see them as clearly as the series of picture postcards Susan sent them back from America in the days after they returned to England, and she could see what Edmund meant -- they were something to keep, something that might have to last Lucy a very long time. When Aslan had said that they must find him in their own world, Lucy had felt a kind of peace, and a queer kind of hope, because surely, if it were possible to find Aslan back in her own world, the -- wonder, the magic, the sense that the world was just a bit more real when she was near him -- that must live there, too. And if anyone could find it, surely it would be Lucy.
But here, back in her own world, with Aunt Alberta clucking disapprovingly and half-term homework still to do, and Eustace wondering and quiet and unsure of the world around him in a way which only having touched magic for the first time could account for, Lucy felt at a loss for where to seek him out.
Most people, Lucy thought, never got to go to Narnia at all. Surely that was true, or it wouldn’t be such a secret place. Most people never got to go to Narnia at all, and Lucy would be a queen there forever, even if she never went back. But what did it mean to be queen of a place which might as well not exist for her anymore?
…
“I’ve been out feeding the birds,” Lucy told Edmund, perhaps because she didn’t want to talk about seeking Aslan in this world, and perhaps -- perhaps because she did.
“Have you?” Edmund asked, doing something complicated with his eyebrows.
“Sparrows always look like they’re about to talk back.”
“Cheeky bastards,” Edmund said, and Lucy looked over at him and saw him, for a moment, older, like he wouldn’t look for years, out in the courtyard at Cair Paravel, head inclined thoughtfully, listening, as a flock of little brown birds fluttered around him like a cloud.
“Still,” he said, “Beats having to go looking for you at the cathedral,” because yes, that was the more obvious place to be looking for what they’d lost, wasn’t it? Lucy shook her head.
“I won’t make you come looking for me,” she said, because that much, at least, she could promise him. If nothing else, while they were looking for what they needed to find, they could do it together, or at least near enough that none of them would wander off or lose their way.
Edmund shot a long, searching look at her, before knocking gently against her side, a jostling reminder of his nearness. In front of them, the sun slipped a little further down the horizon.