Chapter Text
Once, there was a young woman named Gillian Alice Pole, and she could read a compass; light a fire using matches, flint and tinder, or a magnifying glass; and memorize entire pages of Shakespeare, though she didn’t do it for pleasure. She hadn’t always been able to do these things, but when she was younger she had gone on a series of very strange adventures, and at the end of them, she had decided that, whatever happened next, she was going to be ready for it. She was never going to be caught so unprepared again.
Of course, none of these skills turned out to be of any use at all when Jill finally admitted to herself something that she’d suspected for a while, approximately two and a half months after she and Eustace Clarence Scrubb had made what she was starting to think may have been a very big mistake.
…
“The thing of it is, Scrubb,” Jill said, and as she said it, she was very sure she was braced and ready for the part she had to tell to him next. The second the words were out of her mouth, however, she knew they were wrong.
The trouble was, Jill and Eustace Scrubb had gone to school together. Before Narnia, before writing each other letters on holidays, before Narnia again, before the backpacking trip they’d taken together with Scrubb’s cousin Lucy before the beginning of university, Jill had sat a few rows ahead of Scrubb in maths at Experiment House because ‘p’ came earlier in the alphabet than ’s.’ And the trouble with that was that, at school, it would have seemed awfully intimate to call Scrubb by his first name. But then, what Jill was about to tell him was also awfully intimate, too. She took a breath and tried again.
“Eustace,” she said, “I have something to tell you.”
Scrubb blinked at her, bemused. “Is somebody dying?” he asked.
“What?” she asked him, thrown from her carefully rehearsed speech.
“Or rather,” he said, brows furrowing as he thought it through, “I don’t know who you’d break the news to me about. Are you dying?”
Jill let out what she was afraid sounded like a slightly hysterical giggle. “Not exactly.”
“Well, what, then?” Scrubb asked, and he sounded angry like that because he didn’t know what was going on, and he hated not knowing what was going on. Jill knew this, but it didn’t help, which was to say, didn’t stop her from getting irritated and agitated right along with him.
“Well,” she burst out, because she knew both of them, and she knew if she didn’t burst out, they’d only get side-tracked and start bickering, and then when they finally got back around to the original point, she’d be annoyed and snappish. “Well, for a start, I think I’m pregnant.”
After that, there was a long moment of silence.
“You’re what ?” Eustace asked, in a tone of voice Jill could only read as appalled.
She opened her mouth to say something snotty about how surely Scrubb must have learned where babies came from by now. But then, to her own complete and utter mortification, instead, she burst into tears.
…
It was running into Archie that had done it.
Archie was a boy, a man, a — fellow, maybe. It was all very confusing, being all grown-up now. Jill had no questions about the fact that she seemed to be an adult these days, but so many of the fellows of her own age that she met still felt too much like boys , while saying so felt a bit too much like letting them off the hook.
In any case, Archie was someone who had been Jill’s — something. If Jill’s mother had known about him, she would have described him as Jill’s beau. Actually, if Jill’s mother had known about him she would have squawked and grumbled and insisted on Jill’s bringing him ‘round for tea, and asked him about his prospects for after university, which was one of several reasons that Jill’s mother had not been told about him and, with any luck, never would be.
One of the other reasons was that, even at the time, Jill hadn’t been entirely sure how she felt about Archie, if she even really liked him. He had asked her, though, and he had been in her courses, those last few years of courses, so they were certain to have something to talk about, and he’d had the kind of eyes that some of the sillier girls Jill had grown up with might have described as being the color of mist on water, and when he’d asked Jill if she’d wanted to see a film with him, she hadn’t said no.
It hadn’t lasted long.
Jill and Eustace had run into him on the quad, and the way he’d smiled at her a little meanly and said, “Same old, same old, Jill?” with a hard glance at Scrubb had put her back up.
She’d wanted to say something about their research, about the lab that both she and Scrubb had a fellowship at, because the field already seemed to basically accept them as a package deal, and the possibility of their getting an article published, and—
But really, she knew that boasting about her burgeoning success both wouldn’t actually make her feel any better in the end, and would only let Archie know he’d gotten under her skin. And really, she did actually know better than to think that it was their work together that Archie had been jealous of, anyway.
“Really,” Eustace had said, later, after they’d walked away. “You ought to have known better when you heard his name was Archie .”
“Oh should I?” Jill had snapped. “Should I have known that, Eustace Clarence Scrubb?”
“Well it’s not like I’m the alternative, though, is it?” Scrubb had asked, and the trouble was—
“Well,” Jill had said, although she’d known even as she said it, that she was going to regret it. Arguing with Scrubb was like that, though. A person could have all the good intentions in the world, but then he’d say something that wasn’t even infuriating so much as just needling , and you’d find yourself blurting out any weapon you had to hand. “Well actually, he seemed to think you were,” and it was something that she’d intended to take to her grave, that her — not- beau — had broken things off because he was jealous and strange about Scrubb, but there it was, out in the open for both of them to have a look at.
“Oh,” Scrubb had said, finally. And then, “D’you want to go get pissed?”
…
Jill wasn’t an easy crier, or a quiet one — she wasn’t dainty or elegant like Susan Pevensie, or strange and otherworldly like Lucy, or so tough and — and dignified , really, like Polly Plummer, that even if she were crying it probably looked like she couldn’t be hurt. No, when Jill cried, it always felt a little bit like she might be sick, and she couldn’t stop it until she was cried out, so instead of trying, she covered her face with her hands and willed Scrubb to go away .
He didn’t, of course. Not doing the things people wanted him to do was one of the greatest joys of Scrubb’s life, and when Jill was on the right side of it, she often thought that this was actually very funny, really. Today was not one of those times, however. As Jill was busy trying not to leak fluids from her face all over her sleeves, making awful, abortive little snorting, half-sob sounds, she registered, just barely, the rustle of Eustace pushing his chair away from the table and standing. However, instead of going off and leaving Jill to her misery, as she silently begged him to, he made his way around to the other side of the table, and slid onto the bench where she was sitting, right beside her.
He put a hesitant hand on her shoulder and then, awkwardly, patted her, a bit like he might pat a dog. Not in the way a dog might like to be patted — Jill had seen Scrubb interact with dogs, and he hadn’t a notion how to deal with them — but the way he might, specifically — as if she were a mysterious being he’d never quite gotten the knack of being around, but he wanted to show willing so no one would laugh at him. Jill braced herself to hear him say, “There, there,” or something else meaningless and awful.
Instead, he cleared his throat, and then, in a long, drawling accent which came to neither of them naturally, he said, “I know exactly what you mean,” and “The baby’s sure to come out with two heads, I shouldn’t wonder. Or perhaps no heads at all, which might be worse.”
Startled, Jill choked out a laugh. Which wasn’t actually helpful to the whole crying situation, but surely it must have gone on long enough by now, anyway. Jill swiped furiously beneath her eyes, then cast about wildly, looking for something besides her sleeve to blow her nose on. Quietly, Scrubb passed her a crumpled pocket handkerchief. She blew her nose on it noisily, then offered it back.
“No, no — you keep it,” Scrubb protested, this time in his regular voice, gone just a little agitated at the thought of having to touch the snotty scrap of fabric, no sign of Puddleglum left in his tone. Jill giggled again, a little helplessly, and balled the handkerchief in her fist.
“Well,” Scrubb said, finally, after a long moment. “I suppose we ought to get married, then.”
“What?” Jill asked — not an actual objection so much as a blind-sided exclamation of shock. Just like Scrubb to skip at least six steps ahead while Jill was still busy crying her eyes out.
“You know,” Scrubb said, shifting in his seat uneasily, “It’s what you do, isn’t it? Decent thing. Peter’d take me out back and shoot me if I didn’t. And he’d be right to, probably.”
That sounded a little dramatic to Jill. Not that she objected, exactly — which was why she was surprised to hear herself snap, “You might try asking, first.”
Scrubb snorted. Jill thought if he hadn’t been startled, he might not have — he wasn’t usually quite so much of a stinker as that these days — but she also wasn’t in the mood to be charitable, so instead of graciously ignoring him, she jabbed him with her elbow. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“What do you want me to do?” He asked her. “Get down on one knee?” he said it like it was the most absurd thing he’d ever heard, and it was true that, when Jill tried to picture what that might look like, the image she conjured up made her want to break into another wild giggle.
“Maybe,” she said instead. “What would you say if I did want that?” and it occurred to her that she was playing a dangerous game, here — she was leaving an opening for Scrubb to say something awful, something unforgivable, something like, what other choice do you have? , and then she’d have to hate him forever, and also not marry him, which she still wasn’t sure she wanted to do, but she certainly didn’t want to be pride-bound not to at exactly this point in time.
It would have been very like Scrubb, in fact, to say something quick and glib and thoughtless and awful, and then regret it later, when Jill was already too proud and stubborn and hurt to want to forgive him. It would have been just like him to say exactly the wrong thing, but maybe he had picked up on the precariousness of the moment, because, instead, he just said, “Well, do it, probably,” and braced his hands on his thighs like he were about to push himself to his feet, stand, and then kneel in front of her.
“Oh, don’t,” Jill said, grabbing his arm to stop him before he did something ridiculous, like try to be romantic.
“You sure?” he asked her, voice strangely earnest and intent. “I would, you know. I will, if you want me to.”
“You want to marry me?” Jill asked him, because this seemed like an important point to clarify. She didn’t know what she would do, or what he would, if he didn’t want to, not with the fix they were in, but she did know that she wanted to know, for real, before anything else happened, whether he actually wanted to, or whether he was just willing to grit his teeth and do it because it was the right thing .
“I—I think so,” Scrubb said, and while Jill might have hoped for a greater sense of certainty in his tone, a part of her was reassured that he sounds as lost and thrown as she had felt, in the last handful of weeks. “We’re a good team, you and me.”
…
It hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea at the time, but then, ‘the time’ had been approximately three and a half hours after Scrubb had suggested that they get spectacularly drunk, and in the interim, they’d succeeded in that goal wildly.
Scrubb had suggested that they go to the pub, and they had, for the first drink, but Jill had had no real interest in making a spectacle of herself in public, so after that they’d gone back in. Jill’s room near the college was in a perfectly nice rooming house with perfectly sensible — “ Draconian ,” Scrubb always interjected, but then, his mother had modern ideas so Jill usually waved this stricture off — perfectly sensible rules about gentlemen visitors. These rules about covered the places in the house where men were allowed to be (only the front parlor), the things it was respectable to offer them to eat or drink (mostly only tea, although a daring biscuit or two occasionally found their way into the cupboard under the side-board), and how late they were allowed to stay (generally not after dark, unless Jill made a very persuasive argument about how much revising they had to do before a class).
Scrubb, on the other hand, had a rickety little flat at the top of a stair out behind a line of shops not too far from the college, and no one really noticed how or when anyone came or went from them. Jill had only been a handful of times, and at that moment, halfway through a breathless kiss, Jill had been reminded of why.
“It’s not that I don’t know that you’re sensible,” Jill’s mother had said once, “But the best way to prove it is not to put yourself into situations where it’s so easy not to be,” and Oh, Jill could understand that now, because if they weren’t safe and tucked away in Eustace’s little room, none of this would be a question. Because she felt a little wild, fey, like she were running after bullies with a sword, or darting towards the edge of a very tall cliff. She felt, in essence, as if she were doing something dangerous , which was fair on the one hand, because, well, she supposed she rather was. But, on the other, this was Scrubb , not some dashing pirate from a very silly novel, or even the very tall head boy from back at school with the golden swoop of hair above one brow, whom Jill had never once admitted to anyone that she’d been a little smitten with.
It was Scrubb, and so, for one thing, nothing she could do with him was really able to feel very dangerous. His hands rested rather politely over Jill’s upper-arms, so light that she could barely even feel the weight of them over her sweater. So she’d pulled back and she’d said to him, “See?” because she’d been right, it was silly. This was Scrubb, and Archie had been a fool to think there could possibly be anything — anything passionate , about what she felt for him.
Only, he didn’t pull his hands back from their demure resting places just below her shoulders, and he didn’t look away from her mouth, and he didn’t laugh, not as she’d half-expected him to. Instead he just said, “Right,” in a kind of dazed way, and Jill had felt a surge of something powerful.
“There’s nothing in it,” she told him, but she could feel the way she was saying it like a test, only something she meant if he agreed with it, maybe.
“Nothing,” he’d said, one hand creeping up to the side of her neck, touch tentative enough that she could shrug it off if she liked. Instead, she ducked her head a little to meet him, encouraging, as he went on. “It’d be absurd, wouldn’t it? You and me?”
“Ridiculous,” Jill told him, swaying nearer.
…
“We’re a good team, you and me,” Scrubb said, and it was certainly true in the lab, at least these days. They hadn’t always worked as well together on their other adventures, but it had been a long time since that first time in Narnia, and it had all worked out well enough in the end, anyway.
“Yes,” Jill agreed, “But like that?”
“Maybe,” Scrubb said, and Jill might have said, before today, that she knew all of his moods — if there was one thing that Eustace Clarence Scrubb was not, it was mysterious. But there was something she couldn’t quite read in his tone, and when she turned to meet his eyes, he was smiling a very un-Eustace-like half-smile. “Never know until we try, will we?”
And maybe it was that — the fact that he wasn’t trying to act like he knew more than she did, for once, or the fact that he had a look on his face that she’d never seen before, and she found herself liking the idea that there was more that she didn’t know about him to find. Or maybe it was just that he was still asking , and asking nicely, at that, and that he still hadn’t pointed out how few other options she had for what to do about all of this. Because that was the moment when Jill looked at Eustace and said, “Yes, alright, I’ll marry you.
…
Because Jill wasn’t the kind of young woman who got swept up in things. But she supposed you could say that she got swept up in the moment that night.
“We really shouldn’t,” Scrubb had said, stripped down to his pants and crossing his arms self-consciously over the fishbelly-white skin he’d just revealed and then, apparently, immediately regretted.
“Why?” Jill’s mouth had asked, without really taking the time to consult with the rest of her, a lot of which rather agreed. “Are you scared?”
“You won’t get me that easily,” Eustace had said, but he’d uncrossed his arms, just the same. Jill reached down to toy with the open button of her blouse.
“It’s just one time,” Jill had said, and there had been plenty of time, in that moment, to make another choice, and live another life. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
In one sense, Jill had found out the answer to that question a few weeks later. In another, she rather thought she wouldn’t know one way or another for a good many years to come.