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narniaexchange2008-12-07 01:20 am
nfe-gremlin.livejournal.com) wrote in narniaexchange2008-12-07 01:20 am
Entry tags:
Fic: What is Forgotten and What is Not
Title: What Is Forgotten and What Is Not
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
athousandwinds
Recipient:penguingeek
Rating: 12
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: All the books
Summary: Edmund is waiting to grow up.
Original Prompt that we sent you: "Peter/Edmund: In the white room with black curtains from "White Room" by Cream. White as purity vs. black as impurity. You can use the entire song as inspiration if you want."
1941
“I left my torch in Narnia,” Edmund said, annoyed less because he’d lost a torch than because he’d gained a falsetto. He swallowed once or twice, trying to regain the deeper tones he’d had a moment before.
“Train’s here,” said Lucy, on the lookout. She hopped down from the bench and tried pulling on her trunk, but it wouldn’t budge for a nine year old. Peter summoned a porter.
The train rattled uneasily beneath them as they tried to find their seats. Edmund, unsure of where his limbs were, stumbled and fell against Peter, who grabbed him with less grace than enthusiasm.
“You’ll get used to it,” Peter said reassuringly. Edmund, who’d spent a year getting used to – everything – said nothing.
---
After they came home from Narnia the second time, Edmund spent a lot of time in his dorm, and Peter in his, staring up at the ceiling.
White ceilings are boring, Lucy wrote to Edmund. When I have my own house, I’m going to paint pictures on all of the ceilings. Mr and Mrs Beaver in the drawing room and Bacchus in the dining room and Aslan in my bedroom.
Edmund wrote back, Don’t do that.
Lucy replied, No. Aslan’s too important. Which wasn’t what Edmund had meant, but sometimes Lucy was only ten.
Peter was in the OTC, so all in all he spent less time alone than Edmund did. Edmund belonged to only a few desultory societies: the Inklings, the Mathematics Club, debates which were never anything controversial and rarely even so much as interesting. The last had gained for him a mixed popularity: on the one hand he was a good debater; on the other, he was a good debater.
“You should join the OTC,” Peter said once, when their paths crossed accidentally. “It’d be good for you.”
“Good for who?” Edmund enquired. Peter might have said, Bugger you, but then Edmund might have laughed.
“I could actually see you once in a while, if you did,” he said.
“How attractive you make it sound,” Edmund said.
Peter didn’t mention it again.
1942
“Peter! Sue!”
Lucy leapt on them like a miniature lioness on the hunt, and Peter caught her, all three of them laughing. “I haven’t seen you in ages! How was America? What was it like? Did you play tennis a lot? How was Professor Kirke?” This last was to Peter, delivered as casually as she could, which wasn’t very. Lucy had many good qualities: she did not number a talent for guile among them.
“He sends his best regards,” Peter said gravely.
“America was wonderful,” Susan added rather more warmly, and Lucy linked arms with her and strolled back towards their trunks, where Edmund was sitting.
“Peter,” he said.
“Ed,” Peter said, nodding. Lucy spared them a concerned glance, but Edmund shook his head at her and she subsided.
The pavement slabs were grey, and comforting in a strange way. Any trace of pattern or unevenness had long been worn smooth by the tread of shoes. Easily twenty thousand people passed over it every day, scuffing as they went. They could be doing anything, one couldn’t tell anything about them, uniform in plain black overcoats and hats. One could never tell anything from the way someone looked.
“Ed,” Peter was saying. Edmund looked up into his worried face.
“You never wrote,” he said.
Peter didn’t look guilty. “I was working,” he said. “And that kid Eustace might have read them, it’s the sort of thing he’d do.”
“He’s a decent sort, actually,” Edmund said. “After Narnia, anyway. I told you about that.”
“I got your letter.”
“Pity you didn’t read it, apparently.” Edmund pretended to stretch and yawn, and then actually did stretch and yawn. It was a hot day, especially for September, and he felt like a great cat in the sun. And then he remembered, and sat up abruptly. “Lucy and I can’t go back, either.”
“So it was just the – the growing up.”
“Yes.” Edmund’s voice cracked; embarrassed, he coughed and looked away, staring into the mouth of the station. “Train’s coming.”
---
“Why are you out here?” Peter asked. Edmund shrugged and rolled over to look at him, leaves crunching beneath his body. It was a very large pond they had at school. If you half-closed your eyes and let yourself remember, it was almost like seeing the sea.
“Because no one else is.”
Peter sighed, too tired for this. “Would you like me to go away?”
“No,” said Edmund unexpectedly. He sat up, patting the ground beside him. It was chilly but dry, and Peter sat down.
“Last term, you didn’t want to see me.”
“The term before that you didn’t want to see me,” Edmund returned.
“Oh, so you were just being a brat.”
“‘Oh, so you were just being a brat’,” Edmund mimicked. “But I don’t blame you. Do you remember why they called me ‘the Just’?”
“You were a very good king,” Peter said.
“I was a very good judge; because I never wanted to pass judgment at all. So unfair, you know.”
Peter tried to speak, but there was dust in his throat. He tried again. “What we did – ”
“We did nothing,” Edmund said swiftly.
“Ed – ”
“I’m twenty-six years old,” said Edmund. “Or, at least, I am in my head, but it’s confusing sometimes. The point is that you don’t have to make things clear to me. What we did was – difficult to explain to people who weren’t there. And I don’t care to any more than you do, I might add.”
He was silent for a long moment.
“We were different people in Narnia,” he said, like he was setting words in cold stone. “That’s all there is to it.”
“Ed,” said Peter. Edmund picked up his book.
“I’m going back up to school.”
1943
“Do you think we’ll ever get back to Narnia?” Lucy asked, her voice very quiet. It was a drab day, if not raining, the kind of day that drained the energy out of you.
“Never,” said Edmund, matter-of-fact. Peter scowled at him over Lucy’s drooping head.
“Maybe, Lu,” he said, squeezing her arm.
“Train,” said Susan, sounding relieved.
Once on the train, she slipped off to find a friend who was getting on at Luton, and Edmund said, “I don’t know if I want to go back.”
“Ed.” Lucy looked aghast, and Edmund almost repented.
“Sorry, Lu,” he said eventually. Peter, sitting next to him, was still tense against his side.
---
Edmund remembered a great deal about Narnia, or at least more than Susan seemed to. He wondered if that was growing up, if that was what Aslan had wanted. He’d always been very bad at knowing what Aslan wanted.
The most vivid thing he remembered was this: one evening in the dead of winter, Peter had flopped onto his bed drunk, and changed everything.
“Susan’s goin’ to marry him,” he’d said, curling up into a ball of alcohol-soaked misery. “Sue’s goin’ to get married and leave us.”
“She won’t leave,” Edmund had said. He’d been sober all night, watching the Calormenes. They wanted Susan to marry Rabadash even less than the Narnians did, if that were possible. Edmund had tasted her food himself, just in case, although the Calormenes were unlikely to be so foolish.
“She will,” Peter said with perfect certainty. “Ed, don’t leave.” He rolled over so that he was half-lying on Edmund, staring down into his face. “If you leave I can’ look after y’.”
“You don’t have to look after me,” Edmund said, trying to push him off. “You’re heavy.”
“Do, though,” said Peter, resisting him with surprising force of will for a drunken man. “What’ll they say ‘f I come home without – ”
“You were thinking of going back?” Edmund said, blinking. “You know how?”
“No, but what if I do,” Peter said insistently.
“I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you,” said Edmund. Peter leant over him, more serious than Edmund had ever seen him. His breath reeked, and Edmund was about to tell him so, when Peter planted his mouth over his.
And after that, there didn’t seem much to say.
1944
“I’m beginning to hate this place,” Edmund said gloomily.
“I hate trains,” Susan said, equally gloomily.
“I don’t mind trains,” Edmund said, “but stations smell.”
In his defence, he felt, there had been a cancellation – and then another – and another – and what with everything, they’d been sitting on the station bench for two hours. It was not his happiest moment.
“Narnia always smelt nice,” Lucy said wistfully. There was an awkward pause, and Susan, not hearing, walked to the end of the platform to see if she could spy the train.
“Well, not really,” Edmund said. “I mean, there was a lot of dung.”
“I like dung,” Lucy said, sounding cross. “You’re as bad as Susan, Ed.”
“And what do you mean by that?” Edmund demanded. Peter put a restraining arm across them both, but he batted it away.
“Why don’t you want to go back, Ed?” she asked, angry and plaintive and commanding all at once. But Edmund outranked her, at least in England, where being grown-up was a good thing.
“It’s none of your business,” he said, and was never more relieved in his life to see Susan coming down the platform. “And the train’s coming. Pull your socks up, Lu.”
Hyper-aware, he knew Peter was looking at him and frowning. So he smiled at Lucy instead, and pretended not to care when she marched past him without a glance.
---
One day in the Christmas holidays, Susan came to talk to Edmund.
“Did Peter put you up to this?” he asked first, and when she said “No”, he replied, “I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t be an ass, Ed,” she said, exasperated. “He’s worried about you. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m not worried about me,” said Edmund.
“Lucy is.” This was Susan’s trump card. Edmund wouldn’t look her in the eye; he pressed his cheek instead to the cold glass of the window and stared down at the gravelled drive below. The car had just purred in; the doors were opening and slamming. Peter got out, with their father on the other side. There was a long time when all Edmund could see was the fog of his own breath, but still he did not speak.
“It’s hard, isn’t it, Sue,” he said eventually, “to be in the wrong body.”
He knew, rather than saw, that Susan relaxed immediately. “Yes,” she said. “All those things you’re not supposed to think about.”
“I’m not really fourteen,” he said.
“I’m not really sixteen,” she said. “And there are so many things I can’t do.”
Edmund nodded, and let her squeeze his hand.
“Do you think it helps, to remember?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Edmund, not elaborating. Susan let his fingers go and stood up, leaning slightly against the wall for support.
“It hurts so much sometimes that I think it isn’t real. That one day I’ll wake up and this life will have been a dream. Or that Narnia was. I don’t know which is better, do you?” She turned towards him slightly, almost appealing.
“Yes,” said Edmund. Susan wrapped her arms about herself and tried not to shiver. It was chilly, even for December.
“You’re right, of course. I’ll not talk about it any more. Mother needs me.” They’d neither of them heard her call, but Edmund said nothing as she left. In retrospect, he thought, he probably should have.
1945
“Is Sue not coming to see us off? She said she would.”
Lucy was drumming her heels on the grey pavement and didn’t reply for a moment. Then she said, “Oh, I don’t know! I haven’t spoken to her in weeks.”
Edmund, about to correct this cross dismissal (because “Pass the salt” certainly counted as speaking), thought better of it, and patted her shoulder without comment.
“Peter won’t be here,” he said after a pause. “He’s going from Paddington.”
“Susan’s not going from anywhere,” Lucy said, with a hint of peevishness in her tone. “She just doesn’t want to be here.”
“You wouldn’t go to school if you didn’t have to, either,” Edmund said tiredly. “And why should she come and see us off? It’s not as if she has to.”
“It would be nice,” Lucy insisted.
“She said to give you her best wishes,” said a voice from behind them. Peter was smiling, caught with the light behind him. “I had some time before my train goes, so I thought I’d say goodbye.”
“Morning,” Edmund said, and looked away from the sun.
---
At fifteen, Edmund knew a thing or two:
The English master kept a photograph of Veronica Lake in his desk. Half his classmates kept one under their pillows.
Edmund knew why, too.
Wetherall and Major-Jones liked third-formers to fag for them best, because third-formers hated it the most. First-formers expected it, second-formers were resigned to it, and fourth-formers flat out wouldn’t do it, but third-formers were at that awkward stage in between authority and submission. (Edmund fagged once, before Narnia. Not any more.)
The Head Boy didn’t like it when people gamble in the common room. He thought it should be kept to the privacy of one’s own study, or at least so Edmund could only suppose.
The geography master kept a photograph of Alan Ladd in his desk. Half his classmates kept one under their pillows.
Edmund knew why, too.
He knew why his mother sighed and his father made a slight grimace whenever Sir Paul Latham, former MP, was mentioned in some small paragraph tucked away in the middle of the newspaper. He knew why three boys in fifth form had been expelled last year. He knew why Peter sometimes looked at him, and why sometimes he wouldn’t. Sometimes Peter couldn’t.
Knowing this didn’t make it hurt any less.
1946
“Do you think you’ll be Head Boy in Upper Sixth?” Lucy asked. Edmund shrugged.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be.” Once a King in Narnia, after all. Somehow a small gilt-plated badge didn’t compare.
“You should be,” Lucy said loyally. Edmund gave her a half-hug with one arm.
“Train’s coming, Lu.”
The train was old, with yellow upholstery and a clanking engine. Every time it halted at a station, there was a horrid jerk and you were thrown forward; Lucy almost banged her chin on the seat in front. There was a horrifying screech of steam and the train jolted into motion. Under the cover of the noise, Lucy whispered, “Do you still not want to go home?”
“Do you have a way?” Edmund asked sotto voce, but Lucy shook her head.
It was strange and a little sad, Edmund thought, that while Peter’s idea of home had been England, Lucy’s was Narnia. Both had seemed impossible, when they said it, and yet they had gone on believing in it, without reason or even hope. Peter had been a good – well, a Magnificent – King, and Lucy was doing well at school, but some part of them had always been thinking of far away places. Peter had had a responsibility to their parents. Edmund wondered what responsibility Lucy worried about – or, at least, which particular one.
“Eustace got to go back,” Lucy whispered. “He took that girl Jill with him.”
“Eustace is younger than us,” Edmund said. “So is she.”
“Not that much younger,” Lucy muttered. “But would you, Edmund? If you could?”
Edmund closed his eyes and he heard Lucy sigh in exasperation. It wasn’t until the train finally stopped at her station and he felt her rise that he answered.
“I want to be where you and Peter and Susan are,” he said, his voice so quiet that Lucy could barely hear him. “Is that all right?”
Lucy smiled at him when she left.
---
It really hadn’t been much. Nothing worth bothering the girls with – just something that happened occasionally, when one or both of them was drunk. And it had only been for a few months, too, after Susan met Rabadash and before the White Stag.
Nothing much at all. Edmund slept in the White Room, far away from the others in the east wing, where you could stand in the window and keep a lookout as good as one from the battlements. Peter would find him, after victory celebrations – always victory celebrations – and kiss him, often clumsily, and dirty the white sheets with his sweat.
It hadn’t been anything real. And once, Peter had whispered, “Don’t you ever want to go home?”
Edmund had been silent, because there were so many things one could do in Narnia but not at home.
1947
“You weren’t Head Boy after all,” Lucy said, sounding disappointed. Edmund grinned at her over his sandwiches.
“Only Deputy. Sorry,” seeming not very sorry at all.
“You could have tried,” Lucy said. “And don’t eat your sandwiches now, you’ll have none left by lunchtime.”
“But I won’t be hungry any more, then.”
“Boys,” said Lucy, resigned. There were still twenty minutes before their train was due to leave, so she trotted off to the toilet. Edmund spent the time by wasting it, strolling up and down the platform with an air of complete indifference to the world. He knew Peter was there before he even turned to look.
“I had some spare time before my train left,” said Peter in a pleasant attempt at social fiction. Edmund fished out his ABC and made a great show of checking train times. “ – All right, yes. There’s a later one I can get, though, and even if I miss that then Holbrook will run me down in his bus.”
“You don’t have to go through this whole rigmarole just to come and see me and Lucy off, you know,” Edmund said. “That’s entirely in your own head.”
“Perhaps.” Peter shoved a hand through his hair. “Ed, I – ”
“Peter!” Lucy threw her arms around him from behind. “Why did you come to see us off?”
“I wanted to,” Peter said, hugging her back. “And make fun of Ed, too. Not Head Boy, Ed?”
Edmund cleared his throat. “Deputy’s what I’m best at,” he said, and tried not to imbue the sentence with too much meaning. His voice had deepened, these last few years, and it was difficult.
“You could do it if you wanted to,” Peter said, and Edmund smiled involuntarily.
“But I don’t want to,” he said, and stepped on the train, still smiling.
---
Despite the “Deputy” part of his title, people still came to Edmund rather than Jameson with their problems. Which was par for the course, frankly, and the main reason why he had been named “the Just”; Jameson cut an impressive but intimidating figure – possibly even a magnificent one, or at least he tried to play it off as such – but Edmund was far more approachable.
“You’re not so bad, Pevensie,” said Jameson, alone with him in the study at night. He got up to find a book and passed his hand over Edmund’s hair as he went; an affectionate gesture and a new one. At least, from Jameson.
Lying on the bed in the dorm in the middle of the day – “I hope you locked that door, Pevensie.” “Of course I did, what do you take me for?” – lazily tasting mouths and so on; it was a pleasant experience, far better than with Peter, and yet –
“It’s not that you’re a bad sort, Pevensie, far from it – ”
“ – I’m just not your sort. I understand, I suppose.”
Three weeks later, Jameson was caught with another boy – presumably more his sort, which apparently included boys not as quick-thinking as Edmund – and thrown out of school. Edmund, prepared for a black mark on his perfect white record, was instead given a shinier badge and expected to polish it.
Peter wrote to congratulate him. Edmund didn’t reply.
1948
Peter met him at the station, like he always tried to do, and led him outside to a battered black Austin.
“It’s not mine, honestly,” he said, sounding rather rueful. “I borrowed it from Holbrook, said I’d pay for the fuel out of my ration-book.”
Edmund stared out of the window while Peter concentrated on driving – he did it well, for all that he wasn’t used to it, but that was Peter all over – and thought about going home. It was getting dark.
“And here we are,” Peter said as they parked outside a very average-looking house. “I’m in digs with Holbrook; it’s all right so far.”
“You get along, then.”
“So-so. He’s a good friend. And the house isn’t – I mean, it’s not – ” Peter paused. “It’s not Cair Paravel,” he said, “but there’re worse places.”
It was a prefab – not Cair Paravel by any means, but it was sturdy enough. The walls were painted a bland white and the blackout curtains were still pinned across the windows.
“Couldn’t you be bothered to take them down?” Edmund enquired.
“No,” Peter said good-naturedly. “I don’t know how to make new ones.”
“There’s got to be someone in Oxford who knows how to use a sewing machine,” Edmund said tartly.
“They wouldn’t be right, anyway.” Peter held the door open for him and they clumped up the stairs side by side. Edmund had missed this.
“They’re not tapestries,” he said, a plan shifting in the back of his mind as they entered Peter’s room. “Do you mind?”
“Mind what?”
“Not going back.” Edmund chose his words carefully. “When we were there, you kept thinking about going home.”
“I had responsibilities at home,” Peter said, frowning. “What if – what if one of you had died, and we’d gone home and had to explain it? I thought they’d be worried about us.”
“I see,” Edmund said, and smiled. “That was all?”
“Yes,” said Peter, and Edmund turned away from him, went to the bedroom door and locked it. The blackout curtains were nailed to the window frame, but it was all grey in the darkness. No one could possibly see in.
“You don’t, any more,” he said.
“I know,” said Peter.
1949
“Do you really think this will work?” Jill asked curiously, gazing with a jaundiced eye upon the package in Edmund’s pocket.
“I hope it will,” Edmund said dryly. “Otherwise I can’t help.”
“It will, if Narnia needs us,” Peter said.
“I hope you’re right,” said Edmund, looking up at him with a crooked smile. Genuine, for once.
“I know he is,” Lucy said, with perfect faith.
“The train is coming,” said Professor Kirke briskly. “Best get on.”
“If we’re separated,” Peter said, ostensibly to the whole group, but his eyes were on Edmund, “remember – good luck.”
“And to you, too,” Edmund said.
---
In the last week before term finished, Edmund had been lying on a classmate’s sofa when he let out a long sigh.
“Ready to go home, Pevensie?” asked Grainger.
“You know,” said Edmund. “I think I am.”
Author:
athousandwinds Recipient:
penguingeekRating: 12
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: All the books
Summary: Edmund is waiting to grow up.
Original Prompt that we sent you: "Peter/Edmund: In the white room with black curtains from "White Room" by Cream. White as purity vs. black as impurity. You can use the entire song as inspiration if you want."
1941
“I left my torch in Narnia,” Edmund said, annoyed less because he’d lost a torch than because he’d gained a falsetto. He swallowed once or twice, trying to regain the deeper tones he’d had a moment before.
“Train’s here,” said Lucy, on the lookout. She hopped down from the bench and tried pulling on her trunk, but it wouldn’t budge for a nine year old. Peter summoned a porter.
The train rattled uneasily beneath them as they tried to find their seats. Edmund, unsure of where his limbs were, stumbled and fell against Peter, who grabbed him with less grace than enthusiasm.
“You’ll get used to it,” Peter said reassuringly. Edmund, who’d spent a year getting used to – everything – said nothing.
After they came home from Narnia the second time, Edmund spent a lot of time in his dorm, and Peter in his, staring up at the ceiling.
White ceilings are boring, Lucy wrote to Edmund. When I have my own house, I’m going to paint pictures on all of the ceilings. Mr and Mrs Beaver in the drawing room and Bacchus in the dining room and Aslan in my bedroom.
Edmund wrote back, Don’t do that.
Lucy replied, No. Aslan’s too important. Which wasn’t what Edmund had meant, but sometimes Lucy was only ten.
Peter was in the OTC, so all in all he spent less time alone than Edmund did. Edmund belonged to only a few desultory societies: the Inklings, the Mathematics Club, debates which were never anything controversial and rarely even so much as interesting. The last had gained for him a mixed popularity: on the one hand he was a good debater; on the other, he was a good debater.
“You should join the OTC,” Peter said once, when their paths crossed accidentally. “It’d be good for you.”
“Good for who?” Edmund enquired. Peter might have said, Bugger you, but then Edmund might have laughed.
“I could actually see you once in a while, if you did,” he said.
“How attractive you make it sound,” Edmund said.
Peter didn’t mention it again.
1942
“Peter! Sue!”
Lucy leapt on them like a miniature lioness on the hunt, and Peter caught her, all three of them laughing. “I haven’t seen you in ages! How was America? What was it like? Did you play tennis a lot? How was Professor Kirke?” This last was to Peter, delivered as casually as she could, which wasn’t very. Lucy had many good qualities: she did not number a talent for guile among them.
“He sends his best regards,” Peter said gravely.
“America was wonderful,” Susan added rather more warmly, and Lucy linked arms with her and strolled back towards their trunks, where Edmund was sitting.
“Peter,” he said.
“Ed,” Peter said, nodding. Lucy spared them a concerned glance, but Edmund shook his head at her and she subsided.
The pavement slabs were grey, and comforting in a strange way. Any trace of pattern or unevenness had long been worn smooth by the tread of shoes. Easily twenty thousand people passed over it every day, scuffing as they went. They could be doing anything, one couldn’t tell anything about them, uniform in plain black overcoats and hats. One could never tell anything from the way someone looked.
“Ed,” Peter was saying. Edmund looked up into his worried face.
“You never wrote,” he said.
Peter didn’t look guilty. “I was working,” he said. “And that kid Eustace might have read them, it’s the sort of thing he’d do.”
“He’s a decent sort, actually,” Edmund said. “After Narnia, anyway. I told you about that.”
“I got your letter.”
“Pity you didn’t read it, apparently.” Edmund pretended to stretch and yawn, and then actually did stretch and yawn. It was a hot day, especially for September, and he felt like a great cat in the sun. And then he remembered, and sat up abruptly. “Lucy and I can’t go back, either.”
“So it was just the – the growing up.”
“Yes.” Edmund’s voice cracked; embarrassed, he coughed and looked away, staring into the mouth of the station. “Train’s coming.”
“Why are you out here?” Peter asked. Edmund shrugged and rolled over to look at him, leaves crunching beneath his body. It was a very large pond they had at school. If you half-closed your eyes and let yourself remember, it was almost like seeing the sea.
“Because no one else is.”
Peter sighed, too tired for this. “Would you like me to go away?”
“No,” said Edmund unexpectedly. He sat up, patting the ground beside him. It was chilly but dry, and Peter sat down.
“Last term, you didn’t want to see me.”
“The term before that you didn’t want to see me,” Edmund returned.
“Oh, so you were just being a brat.”
“‘Oh, so you were just being a brat’,” Edmund mimicked. “But I don’t blame you. Do you remember why they called me ‘the Just’?”
“You were a very good king,” Peter said.
“I was a very good judge; because I never wanted to pass judgment at all. So unfair, you know.”
Peter tried to speak, but there was dust in his throat. He tried again. “What we did – ”
“We did nothing,” Edmund said swiftly.
“Ed – ”
“I’m twenty-six years old,” said Edmund. “Or, at least, I am in my head, but it’s confusing sometimes. The point is that you don’t have to make things clear to me. What we did was – difficult to explain to people who weren’t there. And I don’t care to any more than you do, I might add.”
He was silent for a long moment.
“We were different people in Narnia,” he said, like he was setting words in cold stone. “That’s all there is to it.”
“Ed,” said Peter. Edmund picked up his book.
“I’m going back up to school.”
1943
“Do you think we’ll ever get back to Narnia?” Lucy asked, her voice very quiet. It was a drab day, if not raining, the kind of day that drained the energy out of you.
“Never,” said Edmund, matter-of-fact. Peter scowled at him over Lucy’s drooping head.
“Maybe, Lu,” he said, squeezing her arm.
“Train,” said Susan, sounding relieved.
Once on the train, she slipped off to find a friend who was getting on at Luton, and Edmund said, “I don’t know if I want to go back.”
“Ed.” Lucy looked aghast, and Edmund almost repented.
“Sorry, Lu,” he said eventually. Peter, sitting next to him, was still tense against his side.
Edmund remembered a great deal about Narnia, or at least more than Susan seemed to. He wondered if that was growing up, if that was what Aslan had wanted. He’d always been very bad at knowing what Aslan wanted.
The most vivid thing he remembered was this: one evening in the dead of winter, Peter had flopped onto his bed drunk, and changed everything.
“Susan’s goin’ to marry him,” he’d said, curling up into a ball of alcohol-soaked misery. “Sue’s goin’ to get married and leave us.”
“She won’t leave,” Edmund had said. He’d been sober all night, watching the Calormenes. They wanted Susan to marry Rabadash even less than the Narnians did, if that were possible. Edmund had tasted her food himself, just in case, although the Calormenes were unlikely to be so foolish.
“She will,” Peter said with perfect certainty. “Ed, don’t leave.” He rolled over so that he was half-lying on Edmund, staring down into his face. “If you leave I can’ look after y’.”
“You don’t have to look after me,” Edmund said, trying to push him off. “You’re heavy.”
“Do, though,” said Peter, resisting him with surprising force of will for a drunken man. “What’ll they say ‘f I come home without – ”
“You were thinking of going back?” Edmund said, blinking. “You know how?”
“No, but what if I do,” Peter said insistently.
“I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you,” said Edmund. Peter leant over him, more serious than Edmund had ever seen him. His breath reeked, and Edmund was about to tell him so, when Peter planted his mouth over his.
And after that, there didn’t seem much to say.
1944
“I’m beginning to hate this place,” Edmund said gloomily.
“I hate trains,” Susan said, equally gloomily.
“I don’t mind trains,” Edmund said, “but stations smell.”
In his defence, he felt, there had been a cancellation – and then another – and another – and what with everything, they’d been sitting on the station bench for two hours. It was not his happiest moment.
“Narnia always smelt nice,” Lucy said wistfully. There was an awkward pause, and Susan, not hearing, walked to the end of the platform to see if she could spy the train.
“Well, not really,” Edmund said. “I mean, there was a lot of dung.”
“I like dung,” Lucy said, sounding cross. “You’re as bad as Susan, Ed.”
“And what do you mean by that?” Edmund demanded. Peter put a restraining arm across them both, but he batted it away.
“Why don’t you want to go back, Ed?” she asked, angry and plaintive and commanding all at once. But Edmund outranked her, at least in England, where being grown-up was a good thing.
“It’s none of your business,” he said, and was never more relieved in his life to see Susan coming down the platform. “And the train’s coming. Pull your socks up, Lu.”
Hyper-aware, he knew Peter was looking at him and frowning. So he smiled at Lucy instead, and pretended not to care when she marched past him without a glance.
One day in the Christmas holidays, Susan came to talk to Edmund.
“Did Peter put you up to this?” he asked first, and when she said “No”, he replied, “I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t be an ass, Ed,” she said, exasperated. “He’s worried about you. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m not worried about me,” said Edmund.
“Lucy is.” This was Susan’s trump card. Edmund wouldn’t look her in the eye; he pressed his cheek instead to the cold glass of the window and stared down at the gravelled drive below. The car had just purred in; the doors were opening and slamming. Peter got out, with their father on the other side. There was a long time when all Edmund could see was the fog of his own breath, but still he did not speak.
“It’s hard, isn’t it, Sue,” he said eventually, “to be in the wrong body.”
He knew, rather than saw, that Susan relaxed immediately. “Yes,” she said. “All those things you’re not supposed to think about.”
“I’m not really fourteen,” he said.
“I’m not really sixteen,” she said. “And there are so many things I can’t do.”
Edmund nodded, and let her squeeze his hand.
“Do you think it helps, to remember?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Edmund, not elaborating. Susan let his fingers go and stood up, leaning slightly against the wall for support.
“It hurts so much sometimes that I think it isn’t real. That one day I’ll wake up and this life will have been a dream. Or that Narnia was. I don’t know which is better, do you?” She turned towards him slightly, almost appealing.
“Yes,” said Edmund. Susan wrapped her arms about herself and tried not to shiver. It was chilly, even for December.
“You’re right, of course. I’ll not talk about it any more. Mother needs me.” They’d neither of them heard her call, but Edmund said nothing as she left. In retrospect, he thought, he probably should have.
1945
“Is Sue not coming to see us off? She said she would.”
Lucy was drumming her heels on the grey pavement and didn’t reply for a moment. Then she said, “Oh, I don’t know! I haven’t spoken to her in weeks.”
Edmund, about to correct this cross dismissal (because “Pass the salt” certainly counted as speaking), thought better of it, and patted her shoulder without comment.
“Peter won’t be here,” he said after a pause. “He’s going from Paddington.”
“Susan’s not going from anywhere,” Lucy said, with a hint of peevishness in her tone. “She just doesn’t want to be here.”
“You wouldn’t go to school if you didn’t have to, either,” Edmund said tiredly. “And why should she come and see us off? It’s not as if she has to.”
“It would be nice,” Lucy insisted.
“She said to give you her best wishes,” said a voice from behind them. Peter was smiling, caught with the light behind him. “I had some time before my train goes, so I thought I’d say goodbye.”
“Morning,” Edmund said, and looked away from the sun.
At fifteen, Edmund knew a thing or two:
The English master kept a photograph of Veronica Lake in his desk. Half his classmates kept one under their pillows.
Edmund knew why, too.
Wetherall and Major-Jones liked third-formers to fag for them best, because third-formers hated it the most. First-formers expected it, second-formers were resigned to it, and fourth-formers flat out wouldn’t do it, but third-formers were at that awkward stage in between authority and submission. (Edmund fagged once, before Narnia. Not any more.)
The Head Boy didn’t like it when people gamble in the common room. He thought it should be kept to the privacy of one’s own study, or at least so Edmund could only suppose.
The geography master kept a photograph of Alan Ladd in his desk. Half his classmates kept one under their pillows.
Edmund knew why, too.
He knew why his mother sighed and his father made a slight grimace whenever Sir Paul Latham, former MP, was mentioned in some small paragraph tucked away in the middle of the newspaper. He knew why three boys in fifth form had been expelled last year. He knew why Peter sometimes looked at him, and why sometimes he wouldn’t. Sometimes Peter couldn’t.
Knowing this didn’t make it hurt any less.
1946
“Do you think you’ll be Head Boy in Upper Sixth?” Lucy asked. Edmund shrugged.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be.” Once a King in Narnia, after all. Somehow a small gilt-plated badge didn’t compare.
“You should be,” Lucy said loyally. Edmund gave her a half-hug with one arm.
“Train’s coming, Lu.”
The train was old, with yellow upholstery and a clanking engine. Every time it halted at a station, there was a horrid jerk and you were thrown forward; Lucy almost banged her chin on the seat in front. There was a horrifying screech of steam and the train jolted into motion. Under the cover of the noise, Lucy whispered, “Do you still not want to go home?”
“Do you have a way?” Edmund asked sotto voce, but Lucy shook her head.
It was strange and a little sad, Edmund thought, that while Peter’s idea of home had been England, Lucy’s was Narnia. Both had seemed impossible, when they said it, and yet they had gone on believing in it, without reason or even hope. Peter had been a good – well, a Magnificent – King, and Lucy was doing well at school, but some part of them had always been thinking of far away places. Peter had had a responsibility to their parents. Edmund wondered what responsibility Lucy worried about – or, at least, which particular one.
“Eustace got to go back,” Lucy whispered. “He took that girl Jill with him.”
“Eustace is younger than us,” Edmund said. “So is she.”
“Not that much younger,” Lucy muttered. “But would you, Edmund? If you could?”
Edmund closed his eyes and he heard Lucy sigh in exasperation. It wasn’t until the train finally stopped at her station and he felt her rise that he answered.
“I want to be where you and Peter and Susan are,” he said, his voice so quiet that Lucy could barely hear him. “Is that all right?”
Lucy smiled at him when she left.
It really hadn’t been much. Nothing worth bothering the girls with – just something that happened occasionally, when one or both of them was drunk. And it had only been for a few months, too, after Susan met Rabadash and before the White Stag.
Nothing much at all. Edmund slept in the White Room, far away from the others in the east wing, where you could stand in the window and keep a lookout as good as one from the battlements. Peter would find him, after victory celebrations – always victory celebrations – and kiss him, often clumsily, and dirty the white sheets with his sweat.
It hadn’t been anything real. And once, Peter had whispered, “Don’t you ever want to go home?”
Edmund had been silent, because there were so many things one could do in Narnia but not at home.
1947
“You weren’t Head Boy after all,” Lucy said, sounding disappointed. Edmund grinned at her over his sandwiches.
“Only Deputy. Sorry,” seeming not very sorry at all.
“You could have tried,” Lucy said. “And don’t eat your sandwiches now, you’ll have none left by lunchtime.”
“But I won’t be hungry any more, then.”
“Boys,” said Lucy, resigned. There were still twenty minutes before their train was due to leave, so she trotted off to the toilet. Edmund spent the time by wasting it, strolling up and down the platform with an air of complete indifference to the world. He knew Peter was there before he even turned to look.
“I had some spare time before my train left,” said Peter in a pleasant attempt at social fiction. Edmund fished out his ABC and made a great show of checking train times. “ – All right, yes. There’s a later one I can get, though, and even if I miss that then Holbrook will run me down in his bus.”
“You don’t have to go through this whole rigmarole just to come and see me and Lucy off, you know,” Edmund said. “That’s entirely in your own head.”
“Perhaps.” Peter shoved a hand through his hair. “Ed, I – ”
“Peter!” Lucy threw her arms around him from behind. “Why did you come to see us off?”
“I wanted to,” Peter said, hugging her back. “And make fun of Ed, too. Not Head Boy, Ed?”
Edmund cleared his throat. “Deputy’s what I’m best at,” he said, and tried not to imbue the sentence with too much meaning. His voice had deepened, these last few years, and it was difficult.
“You could do it if you wanted to,” Peter said, and Edmund smiled involuntarily.
“But I don’t want to,” he said, and stepped on the train, still smiling.
Despite the “Deputy” part of his title, people still came to Edmund rather than Jameson with their problems. Which was par for the course, frankly, and the main reason why he had been named “the Just”; Jameson cut an impressive but intimidating figure – possibly even a magnificent one, or at least he tried to play it off as such – but Edmund was far more approachable.
“You’re not so bad, Pevensie,” said Jameson, alone with him in the study at night. He got up to find a book and passed his hand over Edmund’s hair as he went; an affectionate gesture and a new one. At least, from Jameson.
Lying on the bed in the dorm in the middle of the day – “I hope you locked that door, Pevensie.” “Of course I did, what do you take me for?” – lazily tasting mouths and so on; it was a pleasant experience, far better than with Peter, and yet –
“It’s not that you’re a bad sort, Pevensie, far from it – ”
“ – I’m just not your sort. I understand, I suppose.”
Three weeks later, Jameson was caught with another boy – presumably more his sort, which apparently included boys not as quick-thinking as Edmund – and thrown out of school. Edmund, prepared for a black mark on his perfect white record, was instead given a shinier badge and expected to polish it.
Peter wrote to congratulate him. Edmund didn’t reply.
1948
Peter met him at the station, like he always tried to do, and led him outside to a battered black Austin.
“It’s not mine, honestly,” he said, sounding rather rueful. “I borrowed it from Holbrook, said I’d pay for the fuel out of my ration-book.”
Edmund stared out of the window while Peter concentrated on driving – he did it well, for all that he wasn’t used to it, but that was Peter all over – and thought about going home. It was getting dark.
“And here we are,” Peter said as they parked outside a very average-looking house. “I’m in digs with Holbrook; it’s all right so far.”
“You get along, then.”
“So-so. He’s a good friend. And the house isn’t – I mean, it’s not – ” Peter paused. “It’s not Cair Paravel,” he said, “but there’re worse places.”
It was a prefab – not Cair Paravel by any means, but it was sturdy enough. The walls were painted a bland white and the blackout curtains were still pinned across the windows.
“Couldn’t you be bothered to take them down?” Edmund enquired.
“No,” Peter said good-naturedly. “I don’t know how to make new ones.”
“There’s got to be someone in Oxford who knows how to use a sewing machine,” Edmund said tartly.
“They wouldn’t be right, anyway.” Peter held the door open for him and they clumped up the stairs side by side. Edmund had missed this.
“They’re not tapestries,” he said, a plan shifting in the back of his mind as they entered Peter’s room. “Do you mind?”
“Mind what?”
“Not going back.” Edmund chose his words carefully. “When we were there, you kept thinking about going home.”
“I had responsibilities at home,” Peter said, frowning. “What if – what if one of you had died, and we’d gone home and had to explain it? I thought they’d be worried about us.”
“I see,” Edmund said, and smiled. “That was all?”
“Yes,” said Peter, and Edmund turned away from him, went to the bedroom door and locked it. The blackout curtains were nailed to the window frame, but it was all grey in the darkness. No one could possibly see in.
“You don’t, any more,” he said.
“I know,” said Peter.
1949
“Do you really think this will work?” Jill asked curiously, gazing with a jaundiced eye upon the package in Edmund’s pocket.
“I hope it will,” Edmund said dryly. “Otherwise I can’t help.”
“It will, if Narnia needs us,” Peter said.
“I hope you’re right,” said Edmund, looking up at him with a crooked smile. Genuine, for once.
“I know he is,” Lucy said, with perfect faith.
“The train is coming,” said Professor Kirke briskly. “Best get on.”
“If we’re separated,” Peter said, ostensibly to the whole group, but his eyes were on Edmund, “remember – good luck.”
“And to you, too,” Edmund said.
In the last week before term finished, Edmund had been lying on a classmate’s sofa when he let out a long sigh.
“Ready to go home, Pevensie?” asked Grainger.
“You know,” said Edmund. “I think I am.”
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THANK YOU so much for this. ♥
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