“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.