30.14 - Jill Pole

[psocoptera]

Jill Pole never turns thirty.

Time flows differently in Aslan's country, but there is a day when she spies Helen the first Queen of Narnia and Mrs. Pevensie in the shade of a spreading oak.

Some of the tasks of the Great Work in the true Narnia are splendid and heroic; some are strange: the two women are catching acorns as they fall, cupping them in their hands and bearing them tenderly to a basket.

Jill can hear them as they work: "My Peter had the most darling toes," Mrs. Pevensie is saying. "Every morning he would kick his little feet..."

"My Tommy sang these little songs," Helen says. "When he thought I couldn't see him, Frank would stop and listen with a look of such wonder..."

"Charles looked at me that way sometimes," Mrs. Pevensie admits. "Like someone watching the dryads dance," and she gives a little curtsey to the great oak.

Jill has drawn closer, and Helen sees her as she turns to catch the next acorn. "Hello, dear," she says, and Jill bobs reflexively. "... is there something you wanted?" she adds, when Jill does not speak.

"I never loved a man," Jill says.

"Like the old world to this one, it is just a shadow of the greater Love," Mrs. Pevensie says, waving her hand to encompass the Land and its Lion.

"I killed in battle," Jill says, "But never bore a child; I crossed the Sunless Sea but never knew congress between man and woman."

"Do you think that Eustace - "

"No!" says Jill, "He was and ever is my journey-mate and comrade-in-arms, but I love him as a companion, not as a husband."

"Just as you are twelve and twenty here, I think you may be thirty with need," Helen says thoughtfully. "Perhaps this is a part of your Work."

So Jill goes and walks among the young men who did not go gently, and there is one who does not dare approach her but tracks her passage like he is watching the Phoenix cross the sky. He is forever nineteen, with wistful eyes for the years he did not know, so she stays with him a time and they age together, and they walk among the flower-fields where the babies who've gone on ahead wait for their parents to catch up (and love to be cuddled while they wait), and Jill dandles and cossets a wild wee thing who screeches and tumbles and kisses her stickily. She tells her stories of Narnia-that-was and the Gardens further in, and when she is done she goes back to Helen and Mrs. Pevensie under the oak tree.

"Well, my dear," Mrs. Pevensie asks kindly, "Did you learn what you needed to learn?"

"I see the Universal in the specific more clearly now," Jill says, "And the specific in the Universal."

"And he had the most elegant long fingers," she adds, and the women giggle, and Jill lifts her gaze and cups her hands and starts catching acorns.