Susan Anna Pevensie
No one else could have picked out the tremor in those graceful loops of ink, but she did. He did.
His hand, as he took the pen, was warm, and she caught his whisper as he bent down: "See there, you are an artist. What do I keep telling you?"
She smiled, just a little.
He signed and dated, and she leaned into his hip, grateful, throat aching as she wrapped her fingers tighter around the bouquet in her lap. Five white lilies, and two red roses, and forget-me-nots all around.
They would drive out to the cemetery afterward. Fred had been the one to suggest it, to let her know it was alright, even natural, to remember the dead on a day celebrating new life.
She looked up, sat straighter as he laid down the pen and made room for the witnesses to step in.
Fredrick Maxmillian Pilkington
She let herself smile at the dreadful, smudged left-handed signature. "No, that's what tells me you're the artist, dear."
"I suppose I'll have to choose which name to put on the paintings," he said thoughtfully. "Ah, Pilkington for the bad ones, Pevensie for the good ones, I suppose."
And when her eyes filled up with tears, she felt his arm around her shoulders, and his kiss in her hair, and she closed her eyes, thinking I don't deserve him. I don't deserve him at all. How did he ever come to choose me?
She was so uncertain about things, so careful and guarded and prickly. She had very nearly driven him away twice. But he had come back, he had stayed in her life, and now he was choosing to be in it for the rest of it.
As long as we both shall live.
Susan closed her eyes as their lips found each other, let the tears spill down her cheeks.
I don't think I deserve it, she was saying in her heart. But I choose you back. I choose you too.
The tears didn't show in the pictures, only her standing there in Mother's old wedding dress, clutching her flowers, and Fred in his old uniform, arms around her waist, resting his chin on her head.
*
Susan, from the Hebrew Shoshana/Shoshan, meaning lotus flower or lily, also suggestive of purity and beauty. The name of Dr. Susan Crocker, a pioneering physician. The name of Susan B. Anthony an American suffragist. The name of Susan Hiscock, MBE, who crewed with her husband aboard their sailing ship.
A name, before it's explosion of popularity c. 1930, characterized by several poets, societal reformers, physicians, journalists, and freethinkers.
*
It was his suggestion, taking her name on the end of his.
"Look, I've got five older brothers, Lord knows there's enough Pilkingtons in the world. We aren't rich, we aren't titled, honestly, I'm not sure my parents would even notice if I went and became a Communist. They won't mind. I'd be honoured to carry on the Pevensie name, and no mistake."
Susan had thought of her father, how she'd brushed him off, ignored his advice, called him old and 'stuck in tradition'. She hadn't said anything mean when she'd left for America, but she certainly hadn't said anything kind or particularly loving.
She'd come back after the accident, come back to England with one suitcase and a hatbox, and never even considered leaving again.
How could she leave when all that had really mattered was here? Here but gone. All gone to ghosts, holes in the fabric of her reality, in the space of an empty armchair, a silent kitchen, rumpled sheets on a bed, unfinished letters, overdue library books.
Fred had been the first real, solid thing in her life After.
And she couldn't help thinking how her father would like him. All this time, and she still cared what he thought, wished he could have been there to walk her down a church aisle– She tried not to think too hard about that.
"Fredrick Maxmillian Pilkington Pevensie. That's as posh a name as my mother could possibly wish for." Fred had taken her hand, let his grin fade down to a soft smile. "But only if it's alright with you, love."
To her knowledge, Peter had been quite comfortable as a bachelor, but Ed had been close to engaged (she'd found the ring in his sock drawer); they would both have been wonderful fathers, both would have liked Fred.
She'd wiped her cheeks. "Sorry, I keep thinking I'll stop crying one of these days."
"Doesn't have to be today," he'd said, passing over a hanky.
"I think they'd be honoured," she said at last. "To have it be you. My family name—it's something I share with them, and... I'd be happy to keep it."
"Then keep it you shall."
*
Anna, Latin form of the Hebrew Hannah, meaning favoured one or one shown grace. The name of a prophetess and attendant at the dedication of Jesus who is called Christ in Jerusalem.
"And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all that looked for redemption in Jerusalem."
An elderly widow, a faithful worshiper of God in His temple, great in fasting and prayer, one of the first evangelists.
*
The taxi pulled away from the cemetery as the sun set into a bank of rising cloud, and Susan knew that rain was on its way.
But the rain was just as important to the spring as the sunshine, she thought, and shuffled over on the seat to curl into Fred's side.
He patted her knee, left his hand there, warm and heavy. Real. Solid. For all his dreaming artist eyes, Fred was solid, certain, strong enough to hold her on the difficult days, of which there were always more than she wanted.
The ring on her finger was its own kind of heavy, permanent, binding, and she needed that, needed a promise, needed something to quash the fears that choked her in the night.
They took a taxi home on their wedding night, home to the house she'd sworn she couldn't stay in, found she couldn't sell, and so compromised by working two jobs, and hardly ever being there.
Home to the old house she'd grown up in, rebuilt from the bombings, adapted and weathered and haunted by the empty places of people gone.
It had gotten better since Fred. She'd changed things, deliberately, a curtain here and a painting there, opened up the crates and jumbled everybody's books together on the shelves.
As they climbed the steps, she saw the lamp glowed in the front window, with another light shining back in the kitchen, and smiled, thanking Coraline in her heart. Her friend would no doubt be ducking out the back door that very moment, scampering across the back garden, and shimmying through the hedge, as if she were a girl of sixteen, and not a woman of thirty. There would be something warm in the oven, and the kettle waiting on the stove, and two places laid.
"Well, Mrs. Pevensie." Fred put his hand on the doorknob, drew her close against his side. "Shall we?"
Shall we go in? Shall we go into the home that is everything that came before, but is ours now too to make new? Shall we start something? Shall we continue? Shall we come home together?
She stood on her toes, and kissed him with a tremoring smile. "Yes, Mr. Pevensie. With pleasure."
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