The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(31)
She didn’t like to be partisan about it, but it was way better than that poky cottage the Physical Kids got stuck with. When they had parties the whole place could be made to twinkle and float up into the air a little ways, like a fairy castle, connected to the ground by only a rickety, railing-less staircase which people were always falling off of drunk onto the soft grass below. It reminded her of the floating castle at the end of The Phantom Tollbooth. Hell yes, it was Disney. Disney FTW!
Once in a while people would ask Plum what the hell kind of an adolescence she’d had that she arrived at Brakebills so cocked, locked and ready to rock. She told them the truth, which was that she’d grown up on an island near Seattle, in comfortable surroundings, the daughter of a mixed marriage: one magician, one non.
She was an only child, and they’d had high standards for Plum, Daddy especially—he was the magician of the couple. As the one basket they’d managed to weave, she had to hold all their eggs, so they’d home-schooled her, and once her talent for magic revealed itself they’d made damn sure she made good on it. Daddy sat with her and made her practice her languages and her exercises, and she’d made very good indeed. True, she’d never been to prom, or played a competitive sport that you couldn’t play sitting down and in complete silence, but you don’t make a magic omelet without breaking some magic eggs.
That was the truth. And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her family asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.
She could have gone on to say even more, which was that magic ran in her family, sort of, that it was something of a tradition, but she never did. People tended to be a bit funny about it, and actually Plum felt a bit funny about it too, so she kept it to herself. It wasn’t hard, because she’d lived most of her life in America and had not even a trace of an English accent, and it was on her mother’s side so Chatwin wasn’t even her last name.
It was her mother’s name though: she was the daughter of Rupert Chatwin’s only son, and that made Plum, as far as she knew, the last living direct descendant of the famous Chatwins of the Fillory books. No one else in that generation had managed to reproduce, so she was the heir to whatever Chatwins were heir to (though as she was not slow to point out she wasn’t a Chatwin at all but a Purchas, Plum Polson Purchas, Chatwin wasn’t even her middle name). And as a matter of fact there had been a sum of money, royalties that Plover had graciously set aside for the children who’d made his fortune. (His second fortune; he’d been rich already when he started writing about Fillory.) Rupert had used his share to buy a big house in the countryside outside Penzance, which he barely ever left, until the army called him up to die in World War II.
Plum had seen pictures of it, one of those houses that always gets referred to as a pile, a big Georgian pile. It had a name, but she’d forgotten it. Her mother had grown up there, but she didn’t talk much about her childhood—a drafty, echoing place was how she described it. Not a place to be a kid in. The floor was littered with falls of plaster from the crumbling moldings, and Plum’s mother spent winter afternoons huddled up on the stairs by a huge heating duct, big enough for her to have crawled into if the entrance hadn’t been covered by a knotted-wrought-iron grate, and letting the lukewarm air wash weakly over her.
When she grew up Plum’s mother left her heritage behind. Her Chatwin ancestors struck her as dangerously melancholy and fanciful, and she sold the house and its contents and moved to America to become a publicist for Microsoft. She met Plum’s dad at a charity ball, and it wasn’t till they were well into their courtship that he revealed to her what he really did in all his spare time. Once Mom got over the shock of a lifetime, they went ahead and got married anyway and had Plum, and they were a happy magical nuclear family.
You couldn’t talk about the Fillory stuff at Brakebills. Everybody loved Fillory. It was their most precious childhood fantasy, they used to run around their backyards or basement rec rooms or whatever they ran around in pretending they were Martin Chatwin, boy-hero of a magical world of green fields and talking animals where they would attain total and complete self-actualization. And Plum got that, totally and completely. It was their fantasy, and it was perfect and innocent and true, at least in the way that such things were true. She would never try to take that away from them.
And literally everybody at Brakebills grew up on Fillory. The place was one big five-year Fillory convention.
But Plum, through whose very veins the mighty blood of the Chatwins flowed, did not grow up on Fillory. They didn’t even have the books; Plum had only read the first one, The World in the Walls, and that was on the sly, in snatches, at the public library. Plum’s parents didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and they didn’t read Christopher Plover.
Plum didn’t mind. Once you found out that magic was real, fictional wonderlands were pretty small change by comparison. So she quietly opted out of a public life as the last scion of the Chatwin line. She could do without the fuss: being the living incarnation of the most innocent, ardent childhood fantasies of pretty much everybody you met was not actually a gift from the gods.