by Lev Grossman
“What if it has dirty parts in it. Like intimate confessions, that sort of thing.”
“One way to find out.”
She nodded, resigned, but still she let the book lie in her lap. It felt heavy, too heavy to lift. She was at a crossroads, but the kind that had no signs at it. She wondered what could possibly be inside the book that people should have died for it; she was assuming that Lionel had done away with Pushkar too. She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn’t looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.
But she could feel Quentin practically panting with excitement at her elbow—whatta dork. Always the eager beaver. Suddenly a wave of physical and emotional exhaustion just steamrolled over her, and Plum did want to be reading something, anything at all, rather than sitting in this empty train station lobby staring at the cinder block walls. She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else.
She was ready to sink, really sink, to the black, airless bottom of where this all began.
“OK,” she said. “Bottoms up.”
“Skoal.”
That made her wish she had a real drink instead of this shitty coffee. She opened the book.
From the first page it was evident that Great-Grampa Rupert had had literary aspirations, and that he’d undertaken this project with some actual seriousness of purpose, because he’d arranged the page like a formal title page. He wrote with a fountain pen, the blue ink faded now from midnight blue to midday, but still elegant, a diligent schoolboy’s handwriting. The pages weren’t ruled for prose, they were set up for columns of numbers, but Rupert had filled them with letters instead.
Plum’s heart went out to the guy. Probably he was having a midlife crisis, and this was the novel or memoir or whatever that he just had to get out of him. This was how he was going to make his mark, have his say, show the world he wasn’t like the others. (But if that was true why lock it in a case?)
With great ceremony, in the deliberate hand of a man who genuinely believed he was making a new beginning for himself, a clean breast of things, Rupert had written and then crossed out two possible titles:
THE FRIENDS OF FILLORY
and then
OF CLOCKS AND KINGS
before he settled for good and all on:
THE DOOR IN THE PAGE
My Life in Two Worlds
By Rupert Chatwin
“Good call,” Quentin said.
“I think he nailed it.”
“Third time’s the charm.”
She turned the page. The next one began:
We all thought Martin would get into trouble one day and in the end he did. It just wasn’t the sort of trouble we were expecting.
Evidently Rupert was happy with that first line, but then not with what came next, because the rest of the page was ripped out, leaving the sentences alone on their own orphaned strip of paper, a single accusing finger. The next page was gone too—in fact there was a thick chunk of stubs where somebody, presumably Rupert, had ripped out four or five pages at once.
Plum realized she wasn’t as eager to go on as she thought she would be. She’d kind of forgotten that her great-grandfather was a real person, and his brothers and sisters too. They’d lived real lives. They’d had real hopes and dreams and secrets, and none of it had worked out the way they wanted it to. They’d felt like the heroes of their own stories, just like she felt like the hero of hers, but that was no guarantee that everything would work out. Or anything.
After that false start Rupert wrote quickly, fluidly, with minimal punctuation and only occasional corrections. Plum got the impression he’d never even reread it after he started writing.
It was at one of Aunt Maude’s parties that it happened for the first time. She often entertained in those days, in a lavish style that some people thought was not entirely in line with the sacrifices that we all, as loyal subjects of the King, were expected to make on behalf of the war effort.
I suppose hers was a glamorous life, but it never seemed so to us. We all know what it is to be a child, to be innocent, to understand nothing. We understood nothing, the five of us. Not anything. But we watched everything.
We watched the hired musicians fuss with their instruments, rosin their bows and empty their spit valves into wineglasses. We watched the ladies wince at their uncomfortable shoes and the men tug at their uncomfortable collars. We saw the faces of the servants assume a practiced blankness the moment before they entered a crowded room. We stole canapés off the trays, and loose change from the coats of the guests.
But talk of the war bored us, and flirtatious chatter bored us just as much, and none of the guests cared about anything else. The scene may or may not have been glittering, as such parties are always described, but either way it was wasted on us. The only ones who paid any attention to us were the interchangeable young men who passed through the house in an endless parade, and they did so only to try to gain favor with Aunt Maude.
Their efforts were misguided—an interest in children was not a quality Aunt Maude prized. In her eyes it only made them weak and sentimental.
An hour or so after the first guests arrived the dancing would begin, and Aunt would drape her long limbs and eventually her entire upper body across the back of the piano, to either the consternation or the delight of the pianist, depending on who was playing. Our various bedtimes would come and go, but nobody put us to bed. Eventually we Chatwin children would retreat, yawning and fractious, to the back halls and upper stories of Dockery House, as it was known, though Aunt Maude didn’t like the name—she thought it sounded fussy and Victorian. Which it did, which is precisely why we children liked it.
It was on one such occasion that Martin began playing with an old grandfather clock that he found standing by itself in a back hallway. He was mechanically minded and could never resist a chance to tinker with something complicated and valuable.
As the other boy in the family I suppose I might have been expected to share his enthusiasm, but I did not. I wasn’t one of those keen children with well-defined, clearly articulated interests—I had very few enthusiasms at all apart from books. I was no good at games, or music, or drawing, or figures. I don’t wonder that Martin, as I later found out, thought I was weak, like those young men who were always wooing Aunt Maude. But it was in the nature of the calamity that followed that it took the strong and spared the weak.
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 we
re. 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.
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 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.
