The Last Door

“One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

My grandmother lives in a house without doors.  I used to think that was normal, when I was little – that all grandmothers lived in windy, draughty houses with the doors missing from all the rooms and wardrobes. 

  Inside her house, there are long hallways and empty rooms, around which the wind whistles and blows and whispers.  The doorways are gaps, like the places left behind when teeth fall out.  There are still hinges in the frames, and as a child I used to play with them, opening and shutting them as though they were tiny, shiny little doors themselves.  I liked the firm little click they made when you pushed them shut with a finger.  The cupboards and wardrobes are also doorless, so you can see in to the clothes kept swinging on hangers inside.  There is never much in the wardrobes, so you can easily see their wooden backs.  They did not make for particularly good hiding places.

  Granny Susie is not a normal grandmother in a lot of ways.  She doesn’t bake, or put up on her fridge the pictures you laboriously made with finger-paints.  She isn’t physically affectionate, though she is gentle in her own way.  She is tall and thin, with long grey hair she wears wound into a bun.  My mum told me once that her hair is so long it falls to her feet.

  We didn’t visit often when I was a child, because my father didn’t like Granny Susie.  He called her a ‘mad old bat’ and was grumpy and silent when we did make one of our infrequent trips to her house.  He’d wear two jumpers and a scarf indoors, and make pointed comments about how cold and draughty the house was.  Mum’s lips would get tighter and tighter, and they’d have a raging argument in the car on the way home.  I hated this part of our visits. 

  I loved, however, seeing Granny Susie.  There’s something about adults who are utterly indifferent to other adults that is enormously appealing to a child.  She spent much more time talking to me than she did my parents, and she spoke to me just as you would an equal.  She made me feel I was the most important person in the world.  In that way, she was the perfect grandmother.

  There is only one door in her house, the front door, and even that is permanently wedged open with a brick.  During our visits, my mother and Granny Susie would have regular arguments over the door being open all the time, mum pointing out that murderers and thieves and WHO KNEW WHAT ELSE could walk right in whenever they pleased.  Granny Susie, in her turn, would point out that she’d lived like that for years and had never had a problem.  Her house, in fact, was so remote that murderers and thieves were in generally short supply, and she was far safer than we were in the city, where such people abounded.  At this point in the argument my mother would throw up her hands and give up, Granny Susie would sniff and drink her black tea, and my dad would put on another scarf. 

  Granny Susie lives mostly in the kitchen, which is the only room in the house that is anything like warm.  She has a big old Aga that hums with heat, and my favourite seat in the house is the straight-backed chair that sits in a little alcove beside the stove.  My dad usually took that seat, though.

  The kitchen is scrupulously clean, and, like the rest of the house, there are no paintings or photographs on the walls.  There are two shelves of books, old, boring looking tomes with dusty titles like ‘Hermeneutics of Religious Devotion’, and ‘On Belief in the Later Middle Ages’.  They don’t have any pictures. 

  The kitchen window looks out on the foothill of the mountain known as ‘the Caer’ – ‘the fortress’ in Welsh.  It is tall and forbidding, and doesn’t invite an afternoon’s scramble up to the peak, like the mountain (really just a hill) that I live near in Edinburgh does. 

  It took hours and hours for us to drive to Granny Susie’s.  These drives were long and boring, because although I always took a stock of suitable paperbacks for such a journey (the Famous Five and the Secret Seven, mostly – I was a sucker for adventure), we usually made the trip overnight.  I would try to read in the snatches of light provided by streetlights, and even this unsatisfying gobbling sentence by sentence was preferable to the achingly long distances through the country, where there were no streetlights.  The headlights of passing cars went by too fast to even read a word at a time (though I did try).  Eventually, I would fall into an uncomfortable, lolling-headed sleep, to be woken by the crunch of gravel as we finally pulled into Granny Susie’s drive. 

  Once, we took the train.  Dad had hurt his back trying to move some furniture and said he couldn’t drive the whole way.  The train was amazing – I could walk up and down the aisles, ladies came past regularly with carts filled with cans of fizzy juice and biscuits that sufficient whining procured, and there were lights so I could read as much as I wanted – but I was sworn to absolute secrecy by mum and dad.  A rare united front, they told me in no uncertain terms that I was never to tell Granny Susie that we’d come by train.  Why, I’d asked.  Never mind why, I was told.  It’ll upset her.  So just don’t. 

  I didn’t tell her, but it was still my fault she found out.  I’d been curled up on the second-best chair in the house (a winged armchair in the living room, facing the window with its back to the empty doorway) deep in my latest Enid Blyton.  So I didn’t hear Granny Susie come in the room, and I didn’t hear her footsteps stop abruptly when she saw what was in my hands, and I only barely heard her when she spoke.  Without looking up from my page, I said, “What, Granny Susie?” in kind of an irritable way.  I didn’t like being disturbed when I was reading. 

  “What,” she said, “Is that?”  I glanced over at her.  She was looking at my hands. 

  “It’s my book,” I said. 

  “No,” she said.  “Not your book.  That.”  And she pointed, to the fingers of my right hand, between which was resting the bright orange train ticket I’d been using as a bookmark. 

  That was a horrible visit.  Granny Susie, usually so calm and controlled, shouting at my mother in the next room, saying, “But you promised.  You promised to never,” over and over again, and my mother trying desperately to reason with her.  My dad tried to help at first, talking in a smooth, aggressively reasonable sort of voice, the kind you use with people who are threatening to fling themselves off the roof of a building, but when that didn’t work he gave up and went and lay on the back seat of Granny Susie’s ancient car with the heater running full blast.  I went and sat in one of the doorless wardrobes, my head buffeted by swinging coats, my fingers pressed in my ears and my book lying abandoned by the chair in the front room. 

  Later, much later, my mum came to find me.  The sun had travelled across the walls and floor, and extinguished itself past the window so that the room was dark.  I heard my mum’s footsteps (she walked more softly than Granny Susie or dad), then her knees clicking as she squatted down.  “Oof,” she said.  “Better not let Granny catch you in here.  Come on.” 

  I wiped at long-dry eyes as I stood.  “I’m sorry,” I said miserably. 

  “Oh, it’s not your fault,” said mum.  She put an arm around my shoulders.  “It’s not anyone’s fault, really.”  She told me, then, how Granny Susie’s entire family – parents, two brothers, one sister and a cousin – had died in a train crash when she was only twenty-one.

  “What, all of them?  All at once?”

  “All of them.  All at once,” my mother confirmed.  I thought about how sad Granny Susie must have been, how awful it must be to be alone in the world like that. 

  “And that’s the reason she doesn’t like us going on trains?”

  Mum sighed.  “It’s the reason for a lot of things, Cee-Cee.”  I’d known that I was named for my grandmother’s sister, but I hadn’t known what had happened to her.  “Granny was a bit of a socialite when she was young, but the accident…well, it changed her.”

  We had to take the train home, of course.  The first thing mum did when we arrived was to find a payphone and call my grandmother.  “Mum?” she said into the receiver, her knuckles white around its black plastic.  “That’s us home.  We’re all safe.”

  She listened, then hung the phone back on its hook.  She saw my look, and shrugged.  Dad was gesturing red-faced from the taxi rank.

  When I was older, around sixteen, I started going to visit Granny Susie by myself.  I couldn’t drive, and of course I couldn’t take the train, so I got a couple of long-haul buses to get from Edinburgh to Swansea, then a local bus to the stop nearest her house, then walked the last mile or so.  I liked these journeys – I took crisps, juice, a supply of paperbacks and a little torch to read them with when it got dark – and I felt like an adventurer, setting off out into the world with only what I carried on my back.

  Granny Susie was, I think, always glad to see me.  I’d arrive on the second day of school holidays, generally damp and crumpled from my long journey, and she’d have made up a bed for me in one of the less chillier rooms, and there would be tea and scones ready and waiting for me in the kitchen.  She’d pile the scones with jam and cream – the only indulgence I really remember her having – and we’d talk and talk in the warmth of the kitchen.

  I went through a religious phase, when I was about nineteen, and I remember it being the only thing I’d ever told her that she openly disapproved of.  Granny Susie had looked down into her black tea, and said, “Don’t trust Gods, Lucy.  They want all of your heart and none of your mind, and you have a fine mind.”  It was the only time I can remember that she used my proper name. 

  She’d told me I had a fine mind before.  I had been little, maybe six or seven, and I was reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches for the umpteenth time.  She’d asked me what I was reading, and I’d launched into a detailed summation of the plot.  About halfway through, when I’d got to the bit where the boys are turned into mice by the terrifying, gruesome crowd of bald, crowing witches, she stopped me. 

  “You know that it’s not real, don’t you Cee-Cee?”  Cee-Cee was the nickname she had given me, and which the rest of my family ultimately adopted. 

  “Of course, granny,” I said.  “It’s just in the book.”

  “That’s right,” she said.  She had a strange, faraway look in her eyes.  “It’s important to know the difference between reality and funny games.”

  “I know when it’s just playing,” I said, uncomfortable.  She looked at me, and the distance in her eyes receded.  She smiled at me, gentle.

  “Of course you do,” she said.  “You have a fine mind.”

  It was Granny Susie who encouraged me to go to university to study Philosophy, which dad had hooted at and mum had worried about.  So, you’re going to spend four years thinking, dad had snorted.  What kind of job could you get with a degree in Philosophy, mum had worried.  But Granny Susie had told me not to worry about jobs, and that to spend four years thinking was a fine use for a mind like mine. 

  As I became wrapped up in life at university, I visited less and less.  I did still get down to her once or twice a year, sometimes driving, now I had my licence and the occasional use of mum’s car, sometimes going by plane if there was a cheap flight, sometimes, even, going by rail.  I was always careful to rip up and throw away my ticket as soon as I got off the train, though. 

  One New Year, when I’d broken up with the latest boyfriend and didn’t, therefore, feel like going to the party where he and all our mutual friends would be, I decamped to Granny Susie’s house in Wales, at the foot of the Caer mountain.  I felt like being in a fortress, even if it was a draughty and empty fortress for the most part.  I remember running my finger over the spines of the books in her kitchen while she busied herself at the stove.  My finger stopped on one I hadn’t noticed before, one which didn’t seem to belong to the other dry volumes.  It was called ‘Possible Impossibilities’, by a Professor Digory Kirke, and on the lower end of the spine was an embossed silver apple.  “What’s this one?” I asked.

  She turned, wiping her hands on a tea towel.  Slowly, she reached out and took the book from me.  Her fingers trailed down the cover, stroked the closed page edges, paused on the letters of the author’s name. 

  “I lived with him, for a while,” she said, almost inaudibly. 

  “The Professor?” I asked.  “When did you live with him?”

  “When I was just a girl.  About – oh, twelve?”  She sat at the table, still gripping the book.  I sat too, hardly daring to breathe.  She never spoke about her life, never told me anything of herself as a child.  I felt like a hunter, spying a faun in the far reaches of the forest.  If I was silent and still, perhaps it would come close enough that I could bring it down with my bow and arrow.  But if I moved or spoke at the wrong time, it would startle and flee. 

  “My brothers and sister and I were sent to live with him, because of the war.  He lived in a great old house in the country, and he had this awful grumpy housekeeper we used to hide from.” 

  “Where did you hide?” I asked. 

  “In the wardrobe,” she said distantly.  She stood up and replaced the book on the shelf, and I sensed the subject was closed. 

  She’s ill, now.  A neighbour, concerned that he hadn’t seen her make her usual walk to the nearest village’s little general store for a couple of mornings, went to her house and let himself in the – of course – open front door.  She was in the kitchen, lying next to the Aga, which probably saved her.  If she’d fallen in another part of the house, the cold might have been enough to finish her off over the two nights and two days she had lain there, cursing the stool which had shifted – she said – under her foot as she stepped on it to reach a high shelf. 

  I went to see her in hospital, with mum.  It was hard because she was confused and didn’t seem to know quite who mum and I were.  She thought mum’s name was Jill, and although she called me Lucy we realised after a while that she thought I was her long-dead little sister.  She asked where our brothers were (“Where’s Peter, Lucy?  Where’s Ed?”), and I told her that I was an only child.  She shook her head and said, “What a wonderful memory you have!  Fancy you still playing those funny games you used to play when we were children.”  She smiled when she said it, but looked angry, almost. 

  I had begun my PhD, but I applied to the university for compassionate leave and have spent the last two weeks here, visiting all the hours the hospital will allow and staying along the road in an Airbnb in the hours that they won’t.  Granny is in a room on her own, and I’ve made the nurses promise to keep the door open.  They can see it makes her calmer, so they do. 

  Her hand is paper-thin, and when I hold it I feel like I’m holding air.  She is so frail, now.  She asks me over and over if the door to the wardrobe is closed, and I assure her that it isn’t.  There is no wardrobe in her room.  The hospital chaplain, a kind-eyed Imam, came in this morning to ask if she needed any spiritual comfort.  Granny Susie, enjoying a brief lucid period, fixed him with a sharp eye and told him she had no need of comfort from any god.  Then she got confused again, because she told me once he had left not to let any more ‘Calormen’ in.  It sounds like an old racist term, which isn’t like her. 

  It’s dark outside, and the nurses will soon be in to shoo me away.  Granny Susie is dozing, and I am reading my book.  It’s Plato’s The Republic – I’m supposed to be teaching it later this semester.  There is movement, and I look up to see Granny Susie trying to sit up.  I help her, and hold a glass of water to her lips.  She nods at my book, sinking back onto her pillows.  She says something about caves.

  “The Allegory of the Cave, granny?” 

  “Mm.”  She seems with it.  “You believe it?” 

  I settle back in my chair.  This is like the conversations we used to have around her kitchen table, and I wish I could pull this familiar moment around myself like a blanket.  “I think it perfectly describes the process of growing up,” I say.  She raises an eyebrow, so I continue.  “When we’re young, the world around us is limited to our immediate experience and understanding.  As we age, our world expands and we see that things we previously believed to be the truth, to be reality, are not as we had perceived.”

  Granny Susie nods.  “That’s what I’ve always been afraid of,” she whispers. 

  “Afraid of?”

  Her fingers grasp at the bedcovers.  “Suppose that a reality you had grown out of was, in fact, real,” she says.  “Suppose that all this,” she gestures with a weak hand, “Is a shadow within a shadow?  Suppose we live in the Shadowlands?”

  “This is real, granny,” I say, taking her hand.  She is pale, shaking. 

  “I wish that were true,” she whispers.  I have to bend my head to hear her.  “I wish that were true, but I know that when I die I’ll be taken to his country.”

  “Whose country, granny?”

  She turned away from me and said something that sounded like he’s lying, or maybe it was the lion.  But neither made any sense.

  ”I’ve tried so hard to stay away from him,” she continued in a dull whisper, “though I desperately – desperately – want to see them all again.  But I can’t go, you see.  I’m not suited.  Nylons, lipstick and invitations.  So who knows where he’ll send me?” 

  I have no idea how to comfort her.  “You’re not going anywhere,” I say. 

  A tear trembles, falls from her eye.  “I was on that train,” she says.  “I was supposed to be on it.  Lucy said it was my last chance to go with them.  He’d come in a dream and told her what they had to do.  But I got off at the station before, when they weren’t looking.  I couldn’t take the risk.  Who wants to go to a God that doesn’t want them?  He was so terrible when he was angry…”

  Her voice fails, and she closes her eyes.  In a moment she is asleep.  I watch her, troubled.  I don’t know why she thinks God is angry with her – because she cheated death on that train? – but how terrifying it must be to face your mortality when you believe that a great and terrible God is waiting for you on the other side. 

  Later, I am back in my little Airbnb, holding the silent mobile I have just finished using to tell my mum that granny has passed away.  The last few hours are a blur of hospital corridors, kind but busy nurses, and incomprehensible forms.  The last door, finally, has closed behind Granny Susie, and I will never be able to ask her why she thought God was angry with her.  I will never know what she thought she had done. 

  I do know what I hope, if not what I believe.  I hope that, if there is some kind of life after death, it is like a gripping adventure story that you live in forever.  That goes on endlessly, with only fun and excitement, and no cruel and angry gods, and in which every chapter is better than the one before.