The Magician’s Land (22 page)

I remember Fiona telling Martin to stop, he would break it, and Helen defending him—Helen never tired of scolding the rest of her siblings, but she worshipped Martin, and he could do no wrong in her eyes. I didn’t think it mattered either way, as Maude rarely visited this part of the house. If the clock stopped running it would be years before she discovered it, at which point she would decide that it had been that way all along. She was a careless woman.

Jane said nothing. She rarely spoke unless someone questioned her directly, and sometimes not even then.

Once he had the cabinet open Martin began repeating “bloody hell” under his breath. Even Helen shushed him when he swore, which he had been doing a great deal ever since our father went to France—the year was 1915, if I haven’t mentioned it, and father was a lieutenant in the Artists Rifles, a regiment that, its whimsical designation notwithstanding, was about to embark on a tour of the most brutal battlefields the Great War had to offer. I had wandered a little way down the hall to examine an interesting spiderweb in an
angle of the ceiling, but upon hearing Martin I came back. I believe I was hoping that he and Helen might have a row.

The clock was a monster, its flat brass dial so richly studded with circles and hands and curious symbols that it looked like a cross scowly face. Martin dragged over a stool, the better to study it eye to eye, as it were. Cool, damp air breathed from inside its cabinet as it would from the mouth of a cave. As we watched the clock whirred to life and chimed the hour: nine o’clock at night.

Little Jane yawned. Martin stared at the clock furiously, meeting its crooked gaze, mussing his own hair without noticing it, as he did when something vexed him.

He hopped down.

“Bloody hell,” he said. “Rupes, take a look inside. What do you see?”

I obediently bent my head to look into the cabinet, and Martin pinned my arms and attempted to shove me inside. It was his idea of a joke. He was always shouldering me into closets and down stairs. There was nothing sinister in it, we were just bored to sobs.

“Leave off, Martin,” Fiona said, but without much conviction.

We tussled; the clock wobbled dangerously; he was stronger, but leverage was on my side, and eventually I got my shoulders jammed in the opening in such a way as to make further progress impossible. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different had he succeeded. But as it was he saw there was no more fun to be had, and he let me up. I was red-faced and breathing hard, my collar popped up on one side. He swaggered away in a circle to show that he hadn’t really meant it.

“Really, have a look,” he said. “There’s no works inside. No pendulum. What makes it go?”

No one was much intrigued by this mystery. Jane picked at a bit of peeling wallpaper. Fiona leaned against a wall and rolled her eyes at
boys.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll get in myself.”

Martin was determined to get some comic material out of this empty clock, one way or the other. As the eldest I think he felt
responsible for entertaining us. He began stuffing himself into the clock’s wooden body. I don’t think he expected to succeed—his shoulders were filling out even then—and I remember his curious frown when he reached an arm in and couldn’t find the back. He ducked whole upper body inside. It looked like stage magic, one of Houdini’s trapdoor boxes.

I saw him hesitate, but only for a moment. He put one foot in, then the other, then he was gone. We all looked at each other. Fiona, irritated at the idea that a trick was being played on her, put her head in next. Only seven and small for her age, she barely had to duck. She disappeared inside too.

Helen and I stared.

“Jane,” I called, for she was still busy fooling with the wallpaper. It seems impossible to me now, but she can only have been five years old. “Jane.”

She came trotting over, incurious.

“Where’s Fi?” she said. It was a lengthy soliloquy by her standards.

At that moment first Martin and then Fiona came spilling back out of the clock, Martin spitting mad, Fiona in something like a blissful daze. The first thing I noticed, even before their clothes, was that they both looked suntanned and fit, and their hair had grown by an inch. They smelled like fresh grass.

Time runs differently in Fillory. To them, a month had passed. Just like that Martin and Fiona had had their first adventure there, which Christopher Plover would later write about in
The World in the Walls
. That was the beginning of everything for us Chatwin children, and it was the end of everything for us too.

Much of what follows has already been described by Christopher Plover in
Fillory and Further
, his beloved series of novels for children, and ably enough too as far as it goes. I don’t take issue with his work. I’ve made my peace with it. But as you will see his story was not the whole story.

One difference I must insist upon, before and above all else, is that what Plover naively presented as fiction was, apart from some details, entirely true. Fillory was not a figment of our imaginations, or his, or anyone else’s. It was another world, and we traveled to and from it, and we spent a good part of our childhoods there. It was very real.

Rupert had stopped and traced and retraced these last letters—
very real—
over and over again, until the paper had begun to shed little shreds of itself, as if it couldn’t support the full weight of the meaning he wanted it to carry, the burden he wished to unload onto it. And onto Plum.

At first Plum couldn’t have put her finger on what exactly it was that was freaking her out about this story. But that was it: she’d expected Rupert’s memoir to be a typical upperish-crust jolly-hockey-sticks account of an English boyhood, enlivened by a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Fillory series. But it was dawning on her that Rupert
was going to persist with the joke. He was going to stick to his story, and the story was that Fillory was real.

Maybe this was the Chatwin legacy: full-on insanity. There was madness in the family. Plum put a finger on the wounded paper and felt its roughness. She wanted to heal it.

But she couldn’t. She could only keep reading.

It is difficult to write those words, knowing that they will not be believed. If I were in your place I wouldn’t believe them. I would stop reading. But they are the truth, and I can’t write anything else. I am not a madman, and I am not a liar. I swear it on everything I hold sacred. I suppose I ought to say that it is God’s truth, and it is. But perhaps not the god you are thinking of.

After Martin and Fiona went into Fillory through the grandfather clock, I went through with Helen, and that is how all the events described in
The Girl Who Told Time
came to pass, more or less—a lifetime’s worth of adventures, all of which happened in the space of five minutes in a dusty back hallway of an old house during the first war. By then Jane was awake and alert again, so all five of us went through together.

Already I can see you shaking your head: no, you’ve got it wrong, they always went by twos. Well damn you and damn Plover too. We often went together, all of us. Why wouldn’t we have?

The truth is, there were many adventures we never told Christopher Plover about, and many more that for his own reasons he didn’t see fit to include in the books. I suppose they must not have fit neatly into the plot. I can’t help but feel that I myself was somewhat slighted in
Fillory and Further
. It’s petty of me to say it, but I do say it. I stood vigil at the gates of Whitespire during the Long Evening. I claimed the Sword of Six, and then broke it on the peak of Mount Merriweather. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading Plover.

I was perhaps not a pretty young man. I wasn’t as appealing as Martin. I didn’t make good material, as they say in the literary business. But I suppose if he didn’t write about me at my best, he
didn’t write about me at my worst either. He never knew the worst. None of them did, except Martin.

Regardless, all of our lives split that night. They became double. A more alert guardian than Aunt Maude would have noticed the change—the whispered colloquies, the tanned faces and uncut hair, the extra half-inch or so of height we would gain during an especially long trip to Fillory. But she didn’t notice. People are very determined to see only what they can explain.

Anyone who has led a secret life—spies, criminals, fugitives, adulterers—knows that a façade is not an easy thing to maintain, and some people are better at it than others. I, as it turned out, had something of a gift for lying to adults; I sometimes wonder if I was left out of certain expeditions simply because I could be relied on to cover for the others. I don’t know how many times I found myself forced to invent stories—outlandish but far more mundane than the reality—to explain why one sibling or another hadn’t turned up for Mass or lessons or tea.

We were always scrambling to change in and out of our Fillorian things before they could be discovered. Our feats of arms often left us covered with scratches and bruises that had to be accounted for too. Martin’s shin was split wide open once by an arrow, hunting bandits near Corian’s Land, and he spent a month in Fillory convalescing.

Perhaps the greatest indignity was having to pretend that we didn’t know things that we’d learned in Fillory. I still remember falling over laughing watching Fiona, the great huntress of the Queenswood, laying it on thick at the archery range, getting tangled up and finally sitting down on her bum trying to string a bendy little schoolgirl’s bow.

We gave that up, in the end. Jane just didn’t care enough to dissemble, and one day she simply galloped away from her riding class, hallooing wildly in centaur as she cleared the stone wall at the end of the meadow and disappeared into the forest. After that we all stopped caring. Let people be amazed, if they absolutely must.

Very often, when the way to Fillory was closed to us, and we had exhausted the limited possibilities of Aunt Maude, her house, her
library, her staff and the grounds, we crossed the road and picked our way through the trees and through a gap in the hedge to Mr. Plover’s house. I know now that he cannot have been over forty, but we thought of him as a very old man because his hair was already grey. I think he was quite terrified of us at first—he had no children himself and was not much used to their company. And as children went we were very childish indeed. At that time in our lives Martin was the closest thing we had to a parent, and although he did his best he was still only twelve. We were loud and obstreperous and very nearly feral.

Even on the first day we invaded Plover’s house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they’re too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely. We exploited it. Unwilling to throw us out, incapable of entertaining us properly, unable to think of anything else to do, he offered us tea, though it wasn’t yet three in the afternoon.

It was an inauspicious start. We threw our crusts and dueled with our spoons and tittered and whispered and asked rude questions as we ate—but we did eat, for it was a very good tea, with nice biscuits and homemade marmalade. Plover can’t have enjoyed himself much, but he was wealthy and unmarried and had already retired from business, and he must have been nearly as bored in the country as we were. So we all soldiered on.

In most respects the occasion was very unsuccessful, and we couldn’t have guessed at the time that it would be the first of many. I realize now that we, all five of us, must have been very angry children: angry at the absence of our parents, angry at the presence of louche, neglectful Aunt Maude and her many suitors, angry at the war, angry at God, angry at our own strangeness and seeming irrelevance. But people are slow to recognize anger in little children, and children never recognize it in themselves, so it comes out in other ways.

Whatever the reason, we competed to see who could push the boundaries of propriety the furthest. It was Fiona who won that contest—and I recall her doing it triumphantly, with an almost sensual pleasure—by mentioning Fillory.

This was a transgression not only of earthly rules but of Fillorian ones. The disrespect was not toward Mr. Plover, who was merely baffled, but toward Ember and Umber, who had sworn us to secrecy. Up until that moment none of the five of us had ever said the word “Fillory” within earshot of an adult. We weren’t even positively certain that we could. Would the rams’ magic reach across the void between worlds and seal our lips?

It would not. There was silence at the table. Fiona froze, alive and trembling with delight at her victory, and with terror at her sin. Had she gone too far? Nobody knew. We waited for the thunderclap of retribution.

“Fillory?” asked Mr. Plover innocently, in his flat Chicago tones. He seemed happy to have found a question to ask us. “What on Earth is that?”

“Oh,” Martin said airily, as if the admission cost him nothing, “it’s not on Earth at all. It’s a place we go to sometimes. We found it inside a clock.”

And after that the boundary was breached, and the walls crumbled, and we all rushed ahead, the stories tumbling out one after the other, none of us wanting to be left behind.

—

It really was too funny, Plover listening away and, after a while, making notes on some loose paper. He was wide-eyed at the treasure trove of childish whimsy he’d stumbled on—he must have fancied himself a latter-day Charles Kingsley, the Charles Dodgson
de nos jours
. He would never ask about it right away, instead he would work his way around to it circuitously—he would chat and nod and observe the niceties, but always the moment arrived when he would reach for a notebook, which he never seemed to be without, hoist one leg over the other, lean forward and say, in his queer accent, neither American nor English, “And what’s the latest from Fillory, huh?”

But it made a difference to us, being able to tell someone, anyone, even a no-one like Plover. It made Fillory more real to us, and less of a game. Now we at least had an audience.

Sometimes we really would make it up, laughing hysterically to think what Sir Hotspots or the Stump King would have thought of our tales of birds made out of leaves and giants who ate clouds. What rot! Helen was particularly bad at that game: she could only ever think of stories about hedgehogs. Sea-hedgehogs, were-hedgehogs, a Hedgehog of Fire. Hedgehogs were the sole extravagance of which her imagination was capable.

But Plover took it all in, indiscriminately. The only stories he balked at were the ones about the mammoth, velveteen Cozy Horse, and those were actually true. Eventually we prevailed on him to write them down too, if only because we couldn’t bear the thought of the poor thing’s feelings being hurt.

Looking back on it now I can see more clearly the strain we were under, continually negotiating between two realities, one where we were treated as kings and queens, one where we were invisible, inconvenient children. The shock of those sudden elevations and demotions would have given anybody fits.

Plover has the stories divided up very neatly into five different volumes, but the reality wasn’t anything like that tidy or simple. Plover conveniently has us going to Fillory only during the summer hols—except the once, in
The Girl Who Told Time
—but really we went there all year round. It was never our decision, not after that first night, we went whenever it suited Fillory to summon us. We never knew when the door would open, summer or winter, day or night. Sometimes months would pass without a portal opening, and we would start to wonder if it was all over, this grand hallucination, and it was as if one of our senses had gone dead. We would grow increasingly snappish, turning on each other, everybody blaming someone else for having ruined it, for having offended Ember or Umber or broken one or other of Their laws, thereby queering the deal for the rest of us.

Sometimes, during these long lulls, I would start to suspect the others of sneaking off to Fillory behind my back without telling me. I imagined them freezing me out of the game.

And then with no warning it would all start again as if it had never stopped. On some otherwise nondescript afternoon, devoid of
hope or interest of any kind, Fiona or Helen would come rushing into the nursery wearing a formal gown we’d never seen before, color in her cheeks, hair in outlandish court braids, shouting “guess where I’ve been!” And we would know it wasn’t over after all.

It was feast or famine. One year, I think it must have been 1918, it seemed as if we spent half the summer in Fillory. It even became unnerving. You’d go to the closet for a clean shirt and you’d find yourself staring through it at one of those beautiful lumpy Fillorian meadows, or one of its curving shell beaches, or into the still heart of a forest at night. To my knowledge none of us ever refused; I don’t know if we even could have. Once or twice it was a genuine nuisance—you’d be about to go into town with nanny, you’d have been given a shilling for sweets, and the groom had promised you a turn with the good grey mare after, and you’d bend down to look under the bed for your other boot, and before you knew it you were picking yourself up off the floor of Castle Whitespire. And by the time you got back—three weeks later for you, five minutes later for everyone else—you’d have lost the money and forgotten what you’d been doing in the first place, and everyone would be cross with you for keeping them waiting.

That summer it was as if Fillory was hungry for us, reaching out and grabbing us greedily whenever it could. It was an insatiable lover. I remember riding into town on our bicycles and seeing a little whirlwind of leaves wandering in our direction. All Martin had time to say was “bloody—!” before it was on him. It whirled him away, and Helen too, off to the other side.

That was the adventure of the Hog Knight, which I don’t know whether Plover records or not. I’ve forgotten now, it all runs together, and here in Africa I haven’t got the books with me. I do remember that the bicycles never came back. Even Aunt Maude was cross about that.

—

In some ways Fillory drew us together, but in many ways too it pushed us apart. We got into terrible disagreements over silly things. Fiona told us once that Umber had taken her on a special trip, just for her, to the Far Side of the World. He showed her a wonderful
garden, where all the thoughts and feelings that had ever been thought and felt existed in the form of plants, blooming and green as they passed through people’s minds and lived in their hearts, and then drying up and turning brown and crisp as they passed out of mind, sometimes to bloom again in another season, sometimes gone forever.