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Frank and Helen are some of the few people recorded to have entered Narnia and stayed permanently. That being said, most people return to England the exact moment that they left, and most other people don't stay permanently until they're actually killed in England (e.g. Prof. Kirke, who dies in a train accident).

That being said, what happens to them in England? Did they simply disappear?

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Did they simply disappear?

That seems like the only possible answer, yes.

  • If you go to Narnia and spend an amount X of time there before returning to our world, then some amount Y of time will have passed here, where the relationship between X and Y is never made quite clear except that Y << X. This is because, for whatever reason, time passes more quickly - often much more quickly - in Narnia than in our world.
  • If you go to Narnia and never return to our world, then ... well, you never return to our world. If you never leave Narnia, you'll never reappear in our world. So yes, they simply disappeared.

The only other possibility is that after many years in Narnia, when they were old and their descendants were ready to rule, they might have returned to our world, perhaps returning to their original ages like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But why would they want to do so? Who'd give up being the benevolent ruler of a happy kingdom of talking animals for a life of drudgery as a cab driver in stinking 19th-century London? Husband and wife and all their children were in Narnia; they might have left behind some friends and relatives in England, but by that time they'd surely built a new life for themselves in Narnia which they were happy enough with not to want to leave it.

Why did nobody notice their disappearance? Well, it was a pretty crazy night all round in London, with the mad witch knocking policemen senseless and so on. If the cab driver disappeared, it might have been assumed that she'd killed him; and the police would probably be much less concerned about his disappearance than that of the violent and dangerous woman. As for Helen, we're not even shown the place where she was taken from. It might have been a source of worry and bother for a while, for their friends and neighbours if nobody else, but nobody cared much about the poor folk of 19th-century London, and a couple more or less wouldn't really concern the authorities.

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If you read the last book, The Last Battle, it mentions, as you go into the 'real' Narnia, also called Aslan's Country, you can see the past characters, depending on how far back from the past they were. It states, how Frank and Helen were in the Garden of the Phoenix:

these two were King Frank and Queen Helen from whom all the most ancient Kings of Narnia and Archenland are descended. And Tirian felt as you would feel if you were brought before Adam and Eve in all their glory.

So, the conclusion I draw is that they, after dying, went into the deeper, real Narnia.

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  • Ah, good point. If they'd ever gone back to our world, then they would have been in our "Aslan's Country" (like the Pevensies' parents) rather than the Narnian one.
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Sep 29, 2017 at 14:21
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    Hmm, or maybe not, actually. The Seven Friends of Narnia all died in the train accident in our world, but they still found themselves in the Narnian heaven after death. Frank and Helen were certainly friends of Narnia, so the same could have happened to them.
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Sep 29, 2017 at 14:22

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