Peter Beagle - Tamsin

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 sound, 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!”

I slapped the bed hard, and a moment later I felt him landing, heavy and light at the same time, down by my ankles. But instead of walking up to me, the way he always does, he went prrrp ?, and in another moment something else landed on the bed. And I can’t describe this properly, because there wasn’t any weight to it—not a thump, not a rustle, not the smallest stir of the blankets. But there was something beside Mister Cat on my bed, and I almost knocked the lamp over turning it on. And the only reason I didn’t scream the whole damn Manor down was that I couldn’t get my breath. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get my breath again.