Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  Actually, he hadn’t even looked at the bathroom, once he’d used his box. But up here you’d have thought he was snaking through a minefield: Everything was suspicious, everything was dangerous, or it could be. When we came to the two rooms Julian wouldn’t go into that first day, Mister Cat stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t make a sound, he didn’t lash his tail, nothing like that. He just sat down on his haunches and looked at me.

  “What?” I said again. “What, boggarts? What is going on?” I bent to pick him up, but he backed off and sprinted away from me down the corridor, and there wasn’t anything to do but follow him. I walked along after him, passing one closed oak door after another—all we’d done with the whole east wing in six months was to clear it out a bit, except for Tony setting up his studio there—and even today no one really uses the rooms on the second floor for anything. You could, there’s nothing wrong with them now. We just mostly don’t.

  Mister Cat had turned a corner ahead of me, and I caught up with him at what I first thought was another door and then realized was a stairway, boarded up like the one in the west wing. We still hadn’t been up to the third floor, none of us, though you could get through pretty easily—here, all it would have taken was a squat and a shove. Not that I was about to, not unless I had to chase after Mister Cat, but he wasn’t going anywhere either. He was crouching at the foot of the stair, his whole body tight as a barbed-wire fence, his eyes wide and wild as I’d never seen them. I didn’t try to pick him up—I just kept saying, “What? What in the world is it with you?”

  I couldn’t see anything past the boards on the stair. I couldn’t sense whatever he was smelling or hearing, or taking in through his whiskers or his tail. There wasn’t a thing to do but shut up and wait, like Dr. Watson.

  And then he was Mister Cat again, Ultimate Cool, sitting up to give himself a fast facial and a good scratch. Then he turned and I got The Look, the one that says—unmistakable, no question— “Well, you’re deaf, dumb, blind, and funny looking, but we’ll make do.” When I knelt down, he jumped straight to my shoulder, which is how I used to carry him when he was a kitten. He’s been way too big for that for years, but he won’t give it up, even though he always skids and slides around up there and has to grab on so hard that I can’t pull him off. But this time he balanced perfectly, hardly digging in at all, and purring right into my ear so loud that I could feel it in my teeth as we walked back. Some days I really do know exactly what’s on his black furry mind. This wasn’t one of them.

  Sally came into my room that night, which was nice, because we hadn’t had much time by ourselves for weeks, what with school and the farm, and me being with Meena a lot. She smiled when she saw Mister Cat asleep on my bed. She said, “So. All is forgiven? ”

  “I guess,” I said. I wasn’t handing her any blank check like that, even if it was like what Meena said about keeping score. Sally sat down near my feet and petted Mister Cat, who couldn’t take the trouble to open his eyes. She asked if he’d been outside yet, and I said, no, he’d had quite enough excitement checking out the Manor. I didn’t mean to, but I wound up telling her the whole thing about the way he’d been in certain parts of the house, and what had happened at the third-floor stair in the east wing. I didn’t care how loony it all sounded. Sally listened without interrupting or saying anything. She looked tired—not bad, just tired.

  “Well,” she said when I finished. “This is a very old house, Jenny, and I haven’t a clue about whatever’s gone on in it over three hundred years. And cats do seem to sense things we don’t, and nothing your big guy does would surprise me, anyway. So who knows?”

  “Meena thinks the house really is haunted,” I said. “She says they have them all over the place in India. No biggie.”

  Sally shook her head. “I don’t do ghosts. Although I had a very strange harpsichord once, before you were born…” But she stopped herself and shook her head again. “No. No ghosts. Brownies, gnomes, fairies at the bottom of my garden… Did you see the kitchen this morning?”

  I’d seen it. Like woodchucks had been slamdancing in the pantry. I told her about Meena’s poltergeist, but she sighed and shrugged, and said it was probably altogether different in India. Then she asked, all of a sudden, “Baby, are you liking Evan any better? As a stepfather, I mean.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never not liked him,” I said, which was perfectly true. The only thing I really disliked about Evan was that I didn’t dislike him; because if somebody wrecks and devastates your entire life, he ought to at least have the decency to be a fullout, David Copperfield-style, vicious rat bastard, not a skinny Limey farmer who liked to play the guitar. “He’s all right. As a stepfather.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Sally said. She put her hand on my cheek. “He likes you a lot, you know. Admires you, in fact, though I can’t think why.” I didn’t say anything. Sally sighed. “This is turning into a tough gig, Jenny. It’s going to be a much harder, longer job than Evan estimated, reclaiming this relic of a farm. But he’ll get it done. Of course, you may be pushing our wheelchairs by then, but it’ll be done. And somewhere along in there, we may even have found the time to sneak off for a honeymoon. Right now, as far as I can see, from here to senility we’re just going to be digging holes and tearing things down.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And the piano?” Sally looked at me. I said, “You haven’t touched the piano since we got here. I know you haven’t, because it’s way out of tune, you’ll have to get somebody from Dorchester or wherever. Unless you’re just going to let the boggarts have it—hey, it’s your piano.” I hadn’t realized I was really upset about her not playing the piano until I got started. Mister Cat finally opened his eyes, yawned, and walked up the bed to see if I was being uncool again. He always knows.

  Sally didn’t get mad, though. She leaned forward and put her arms around me. Sometimes it used to make me prickly when she did that, and I’d turn into a bag of knees and elbows, but right then it felt good. I curled against her, with Mister Cat burrowed down against my stomach, so the three of us were comfortable and quiet together. I about fell asleep.

  I think I was asleep when Sally said, “Jenny? Meena really said she saw a poltergeist?”

  “Lil girl,” I mumbled. “Felsorry.”

  “Because there’s some evidence that there actually might be such things. Something to do with—what?—emanations from somebody else who might have lived here once. Lord, one minute it’s The Twilight Zone, and the next minute you can get doctorates in it. Who knows anything for sure anymore?” She stroked my hair, but I felt it as far away as her voice sounded.

  I think I said, “Nemnations, boogers,” but I didn’t hear myself. Just Mister Cat purring in his sleep, all night.

  Nine

  It’s a good thing Mister Cat liked Julian. I don’t think Julian could have stood it otherwise.

  Mister Cat doesn’t like a lot of people. He tolerates just about everyone, but it’s not the same thing, and Julian would have known. But Mister Cat pushed his head into Julian’s face, and did his paws-around-the-neck thing, and actually let Julian drape him around his shoulders, as I’d said he would. I’ve never seen him let anyone do that—I was just saying it to make Julian shut up, and hoping he’d forget. Mister Cat shows off sometimes.

  He wasn’t anything like that with Tony—polite but formal, that was about it. But what he really liked to do was sit in the doorway of Tony’s practice room and watch him dance. It didn’t matter if Tony was only doing stretches, or walking around thinking—Mister Cat was perfectly happy to sit there and watch him at it. Tony would close the door when he noticed him, but then the room would get stuffy and he’d have to open it again, and Mister Cat would be back like a shot. Absolutely, totally, utterly fascinated.

  Tony wasn’t. It went almost the same way every time—he’d come marching up to me and say something like, “Jenny, is it too much to ask for you to keep that animal away from my studio?”

  “He’s n
ot doing anything,” I’d say. “He just loves the way you dance. I’d think you’d be flattered.”

  “Well, I’m not. I don’t like being watched. It makes me nervous.”

  I’d say, “Interesting career you’re likely to have,” and Tony would get furious and stamp away, yelling, “I mean by cats! I don’t dance for cats!” And I really would try harder to make sure Mister Cat stayed outside or in my room during the day. But I already knew it wouldn’t work. New York or Dorset, Mister Cat goes where he wants to go, and all I’ve ever been able to do is trail along after him. Which is why everything that happened happened, any way you look at it. If Mister Cat hadn’t been so captivated by Tony’s dancing, I don’t know if I’d ever have met Tamsin. Meena thinks it was fated, but I don’t know. You’ll see. Any minute now.

  Mister Cat took his own time about exploring his new outdoors. Cars and construction, manholes and dogs and crazies he knew about, but he’d never seen a cow or a chicken or a hay-baler in his life, and he found out fast why foxes are different from city dogs. (Albert was no problem—Albert didn’t notice anything that wasn’t a sheep.) But unlike me, he didn’t waste one minute bitching and moaning and carrying on. I watched him prowling a little farther from the Manor every day, getting used to the whole idea of grass and dirt, sniffing everything and then sitting back and thinking about it. No hurry. He hung out in the dairy a lot, and he climbed trees after squirrels as though he’d been doing it all his life—I only had to help him get down once. The second day out, he was already peeing on things and rubbing against them, to mark them with his own smell. I should have done that.

  By the time he’d been in residence a couple of months—say late April or early May—he knew everything there was to know about Stourhead Farm. He didn’t like all of it, either. He might wander all day, but he mostly stayed in at night, though I left my window open for him when the nights started getting warmer. And when he did go out, he’d always wake me up coming back, which he practically never did in New York. Not just by digging down under my blankets and getting as close in as he could, but he kept talking—that sound he makes that isn’t a meow and certainly isn’t a purr, or even that questioning prrrp? that cats do. It’s a rough, really urgent kind of sound—not loud, but specific, that’s the only word I can think of. He only makes it when he’s telling me something important that he already knows I won’t understand. I will later on, but never in time.

  So. Early May, and Sally had actually gotten the piano tuned, and even turned up a couple of pupils—sisters, I remember—in Dorchester. She told me that the money wasn’t anything much, “But I need to be teaching again,just a little, just so the farm won’t swallow me up. That’s the one thing I’m afraid of.” She asked me if I felt like coming along for company. “Lydia’s not much more than a beginner, but Sarah’s going to be good. You could listen, or you could go wander and meet me at the car.”

  I wandered. Dorchester’s the county seat of Dorset, but it’s still a town, not a real city. But it’s not a Merrye Englande theme park either, even with the bungalows and developments and trailer camps surrounding it. I wandered down High East Street—the main drag, where Sally dropped me off—to where it becomes High West Street and there’s a statue of Thomas Hardy, and I passed red and whitewashed brick houses and pubs, and a church that he could have walked out of yesterday. Narrow side streets, long thin windows with heavy old shutters, doors no higher than the top of my head, flowers absolutely blazing in back gardens, on windowsills. There were a bunch of people taking pictures of the Hardy statue and the County Museum—Tony calls them the Eustacia Vye groupies. They show up with the warm weather, crowding the Hardy Room in the Museum, where they’ve got everything the poor man ever owned, from his chair and his writing desk to his violin. I bought a couple of postcards for Marta and Jake there.

  Then I went into a shop and bought a pasty—a little meat pie— and a ginger beer, and ate walking down to look at the River Frome. I got lost, of course, which is really hard to do in Dorchester, and by the time I found my way back to the car Sally was already there, waiting for me. In New York she’d have been scared out of her mind by now—here in Dorchester she was reading an opera score. Dorset really suited her. England suited her. It made me feel lonely suddenly, which I hadn’t felt at all, walking alone.

  She drove us out of Dorchester a different way than we’d come in, to show me the chestnut trees flowering along the Walks, and on the way home she took a detour around a hill and a couple of farms to look at pear trees and apple blossoms. That got me, too— she knew detours, she knew shortcuts, she’d been learning all kinds of things I didn’t know anything about. She’d been becoming less my mother and more Sally every minute since we’d been here, and I hadn’t even realized it. I’m not sure if that made me feel more lonely or not. Just more confused, probably.

  I do remember that she asked me, not working up to it the way she usually does, but right out, “Jenny, is it better for you? Being here, I mean?”

  This is another one of the hard spots to write. It was getting some better, and I knew it—not just because of Mister Cat, but because of Meena and Julian, and Mrs. Abbott, our Form Tutor, and because my room was starting to look the way I wanted it, and maybe the English climate really was doing something for my skin. And because I could think better, lying on my back on the downland, watching the butterflies. Everything was always clearer on the downs.

  But I couldn’t tell Sally. I couldn’t, and it’s no good blaming her, whoever I was then. It was me, all right, and damned if I was going to give up the least little advantage of having my mother feel guilty about me being miserable. Because things might be all right just then, but who knew when I might need that edge again? The way I saw it, Sally was the only one ever likely to care what I thought of her, and I wasn’t letting her all the way off the hook until I had to. Meena’s going to be so ashamed of me, but there, I’ve got it down. That’s how it was.

  I said, “I’m managing all right.” Flat, no expression, one way or the other—God, I can hear myself right now! But Sally knows me, I always forget how well. She said, “And exactly what does that mean?”

  “It means I’m managing. It means I’m okay, don’t worry about me, I’m doing just fine. Okay?”

  “Not okay,” Sally said, which she’d never have done back home. “Jenny, I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but I almost like it better when you’re throwing fits, bouncing off the walls. Now you’re biding your time about something, and I want you to understand that whatever it is, it’s not going to happen. However things turn out with the farm, we are not going back to New York. Get it out of your head, baby. This is it, this is our home and our family, and if you’re not happy about it, I’m very sorry. Me, I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. I think you could be, too.” She grinned at me suddenly, a real sidelong flasher that I’d seen on Marta, but never on my own mother. “I’ll tell you, I think you even are at times—happy—when I’m not looking. Am I right?”

  I didn’t answer, and I didn’t say a word the rest of the way back to Stourhead Farm. When we got home, I boiled out of the car and went to find Mister Cat, because I wanted to sit outside with him somewhere and do some major brooding. But he wasn’t in the dairy or asleep in my room, so I headed for the east wing and Tony’s studio. I was afraid that had to be it, and it was, and I got there just in time to scoop him up as Tony slung him out the door. I yelled, and Tony yelled back, “Well, I told you what I’d do, I told you, Jenny!” And he banged the door shut, and Mister Cat wriggled out of my arms—I thought the door slam had scared him, because he scratched me hard with a back foot, which he never does. He was down and gone before I even opened my mouth to call.

  I caught up with him at the foot of the old stairway. He was just sliding between a couple of loose boards—and ahead of him, through the gap, I saw something flashing up the stairs. It looked gray in the dim light, or maybe gray-blue, and it ran on four feet, not making a so
und, and it wasn’t a rat or a mouse or any animal like that, I could tell that much. Whatever it was, I didn’t want Mister Cat going after it, not for a minute. I grabbed, but you might as well grab rain as Mister Cat. He was gone, he was right behind the gray-blue thing, and it halfway turned to meet him, and then I couldn’t see them anymore. I thought I heard Mister Cat make that prrrp? sound once—after that, nothing.

  For one wild moment I was tugging and yanking at those boards, to widen the space so I could get through. Then I stopped, because I wasn’t Mister Cat, and I was not going up those dark stairs by myself. With Meena or Tony, okay—even with Julian, I might have done it. Not alone.

  For a while I sat there waiting for him, but that got old, so I gave up and started walking away, looking back every ten seconds or so to see if he was following me. He usually does, once he realizes I’m really going, pouncing and darting ahead of me to make it look like his own idea. Not this time. I waited in my room until Evan called me to help Tony set the table for dinner, but Mister Cat didn’t show; and he wasn’t around for the rest of the evening, either. I wasn’t going to worry about him—in New York he’d have been out all night with the Siamese Hussy—so I cleaned up in the kitchen by myself, and I helped Julian with his geography homework, and he helped me with my maths—he is a whiz, just like he told me when we met—and I talked to Meena on the phone for a little, and went to bed early.

  I woke up right before Mister Cat came into my room. I’d left the door a little way open, besides the window, so maybe there was a draft moving something. I sat up fast, groping around for my bedside lamp, thinking boggarts and pookas and Hedley Kows. But when I felt Mister Cat in my room, I didn’t bother with the light, not then. I said, “You rotten, miserable cat, you scared the hell out of me! You get your butt on up here right now!”