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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 ca over, incurious

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

At thatback out of the clock, Martin spittingI noticed, even before their clothes, was that they both looked suntanned and fit, and their hair had grown by an inch They srass

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

CHAPTER 17

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 froinations, or his, or anyone else’s It was another world, and we traveled to and froood 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 thehe wanted it to carry, the burden he wished to unload onto it And onto Plum

At first Pluer 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 theon 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 er 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 the But they are the truth, and I can’t write anything else I a 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 fivethe first war By then Jane ake 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 alent by twos Well daether, 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 hted in Fillory and Further It’s petty of ates 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 fro Plover

I was perhaps not a pretty young ood 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 becauardian 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 ould 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, criitives, 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 so 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 kno many times I found myself forced to invent stories—outlandish but faror another hadn’t turned up for Mass or lessons or tea

We were always scras 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

Perhaps the greatest indignity was having to pretend that we didn’t know things that we’d learned in Fillory I still rereat huntress of the Queenswood, laying it on thick at the archery range, getting tangled up and finally sitting down on her buirl’s bow

We gave that up, in the end Jane just didn’t care enough to disse 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 kno that he cannot have been over forty, but we thought of hirey 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 ere very childish indeed At that ti 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