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.
It was a lovely story, and it must have been true, Fiona couldn’t have made it up. She didn’t have that sort of imagination. But it left a sour taste in my mouth. Why her and not us? And not me?
Privately we argued about Ember and Umber. If we believed in Them, and we certainly did, then was it not blasphemous to go to church in the real world, and mouth prayers to God, who had after all never showed us a secret magic garden, or a castle all our own, or even so much as a single pegasus? Or did each world have its own God or gods, and one should simply worship the God of whatever world one happened to be in? Or were all the gods one God, really? Different aspects of each other?
Nonsense, Jane said, she’d never heard such rot. We had furious, hissing quarrels about this, and in the end we splintered into the Ramsians, as we called those who worshipped only the rams Ember and Umber, namely Martin and Helen and Jane, and the more pragmatic Anyone-ists, namely myself and Fiona, who prayed to the twin rams in Fillory and God in the real world.
After that Helen was always finding reasons not to go to church. Jane, who had the zeal of the martyr, would go on purpose and cause the most awful scenes with her laughing and have to be removed.
Martin was simply staunch and grim, wherever we were. Of us all I think he may have loved Fillory the most, but it was a fierce, angry, watchful love, forever alert to the possibility of betrayal. I don’t mean to defend Martin, but I do think I understand him. When our parents left it was Martin, more than anyone else, who filled the void in our lives. He was the one who picked us up when we fell, and sang us lullabies at night. But who filled the void for Martin? It can only have been Fillory. And she was a fickle, capricious parent.
One thing we did not argue about was why, among all the children in the world, we had been given the gift of Fillory. Why us and no others? Why did Ember and Umber and all the rest of the Fillorians show us such special favor, when in our own world we were just ordinary people? I believe that I alone among us five was troubled by this. To the extent that I, at the age of ten, had a soul, the question gnawed at it. A mistake had been made, I was sure, a real blunder, because I knew that I was not strong or clever or even particularly good. I knew I didn’t deserve Fillory.
And when the truth finally came out, and the hoax collapsed, the punishment would be terrible indeed, and our suffering would be hot and sharp, in proportion to the blessings that had been showered on us.
—
I didn’t even notice about Martin until he told me. We were at school, St. Austol’s in Fowey, and he took me with him on a long freezing tramp around the Upper Meadow, a frosted, rotted rugby pitch where one went to exchange confidences and discuss matters of consequence.
I was grateful to be asked. Martin was my senior by two years, and older boys didn’t generally acknowledge younger siblings at St. Austol’s. We were halfway around the track before he spoke.
“D’you know, Rupes,” he said, “it’s been three months since I last went over?”
We called it that: going over. He didn’t have to say where. He spoke with an elaborate casualness that I’d learned to recognize as a warning sign from him.
“As long as that?”
“Yes, as long as that! It was you and Fiona in August, then Helen and Fiona, then Jane and Fiona, then Helen and bloody you again two weeks ago. Where does that leave me?”
“On Earth, I suppose.” I hadn’t meant to be smart.
“That’s right, on bloody Earth! I’m bloody well stuck here! Do you know, I’ve taken to cramming myself into cubbies and closets and I don’t know what else just on the off chance I’ll find a way through? Whenever I see a squirrel I take off running after it, in case it might be a magic one on its way to Fillory. The other boys think I’m mad, but I don’t care. I’d do anything to get out of here.”
“Come on, Mart,” I said. “You know how these things are. It’ll come around to you again.”
“Did the rams say anything about me? I’m out of favor, aren’t I?”
“Honestly, they haven’t! Half the time I can’t understand what They mean anyway, but I’m sure They haven’t said anything about you. I would’ve told you.”
“But you’ll ask Them, won’t you? When you see Them?”
“Course I will, Mart. Course I will.”
“I have to do something.”
He kicked at a heavy black lump like a shrunken head that might once have been a cricket ball.
“But look,” I said. “I know how you feel, I hate it when I’m not asked. But it’s not as bad here as all that, is it? I mean, Fillory isn’t everything.”
“But it is.” He stopped walking and looked me in the eye. “It is everything. What else is there? This? Earth?” He picked up the dead cricket ball and threw it as hard as he could. “Listen: will you come and get me?”
He grabbed my arm—he was pleading with me.
“You know sometimes it comes on slowly. Like that time it was you and Jane, and it was just patterns in the wallpaper at first, you said. Took you ten minutes to go all the way through. You could come get me when it starts. We’ll go together, like back in the old days.”
“I’ll try, Mart. I really will.” But we both knew that wasn’t how it worked. Ember and Umber decided who came, and that was that. “You were the first one in. You started it all. You found the way. We both know you’ll go again, it’s only a question of when. You’re the High King!”
“I’m the High King,” he repeated unhappily.
At the time I believed it, mostly. I was ten, and he was twelve, but the gap between us had always seemed wider. I looked up to Martin. I literally couldn’t imagine myself having something he did not, doing something he could not.