The Car Ride to Sevenoaks was a Flashback

Susan opened the letter from Europe. It included a beautiful snapshot of some Italian town she had seen in a National Geographic of some Readers' Digest. "Narni". It included a longish letter from Edmund, about Eustace obviously, which she saved for later. It included a picture and a poem by Eustace.

The picture was people in ugly wide white shirts without buttoning, some of them shrieking, some looked like drunk, some ... Bedlam, according to description. Though Eustace had added -ia to it.

"What's the point about that?"

She read the poem, it was a limerick, though it did not quite rhyme.

Some children played games about Narnia,

Got gradually balmier and balmier.

Pete, Su, Ed and Lu,

How little they knew,

They would soon play their games in Bedlamia

"How horrible! What a pest!"

Later she had made research, on a very amateur level, about madness. And about why people got to be labelled as mad.

And she had decided that whatever madness they had been getting into would not get her into Bedlamia, nor Lucy if she could stop it.

And just last year she could still feel the sting of reproach in Lucy's eyes, after, arranging a meeting with a therapist, she had caused her to spend a week in ... Tavistock Institute.

She was too ashamed to cry about it during the journey.

And it was just a month after Lucy had painted the name Mary on the little boat of hers, the one that saved her from the rapist wannabee, the one she had called "Splendour Hyaline".

What would happen now?

Well, one thing was for sure, therapy would end. If she had been right to listen to the therapist saying it was a very lively imagination taking place through mutual support, or wrong, at least she had been wrong to do as he had told her.

She looked out of the window for the rest of the road to Sevenoaks.

Wonder what happened to Eustace? She had lost contact with him, though he had become so much nicer to the others, after she had tried to thank him for the warning.