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Susan had years to dissect what happened in an instant one day when she was twenty-one—or thirty-six. (She also had years to remember that decade-and-a-half she’d once denied, after grief sheared off her hair and sliced lines in her face; after her bubbly personality boiled clean away.)
The names of the dead appeared in all the newspapers. The gutter press wrested photos from a broken Aunt Alberta, and their eyes followed Susan whenever she left her flat. How could she forget? The names were appended to parliamentary questions on train braking systems, documented in Hansard, read out at the official enquiry, repeated in reports and books, discussed in documentaries, misspelled on the memorial website, edit-warred over in the Wikipedia article. There was even an ugly memorial at Slough station with the names around the base: Kirke… an entire line of Pevensies—Plummer—Pole… Scrubb... All the Friends of Narnia – except her – slaughtered by a single speeding train? It could be no coincidence. Aslan’s claws had ripped them away to Narnia, all seven of them, leaving her to go on alone.
It wasn’t till she was eighty (ninety-five) – watching Doctor Who with her littlest granddaughter, drying the kid’s tears as fire rained down on Pompeii with the hanky she still always kept in her pocket – that Susan began to wonder about causality. What if the crash were one of those fixed points round which the universe bent, to which even gods must bow? Perhaps Aslan was a parsimonious lion, making the best of an unlucky roll of the dice. Perhaps the Pevensies had been chosen to fall through a wardrobe and defeat a witch, not because they were wise or brave or faithful, but because they happened to be standing on platform three, waiting for the 9:45 from Paddington. Perhaps the other forty-two names on that hateful list had once been kings and queens of somewhere else. Perhaps Susan was the eighth of seven, crowned Queen of Narnia by mistake?
No! Susan had read The Dark is Rising with her youngest daughter, decades ago, and watched the film with her grandchildren when it came out on DVD. How did that rhyme go? When the Dark comes rising, eight shall turn it back. Seven will return and one go alone. Once a Queen of Narnia, always a Queen of Narnia. The lion, my lion, would come back for her one day.
24 October 2017