Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Neither of us slept that night, not me and not Mister Cat. He knew a lot better than I what he’d been challenging, and now he crept under the blankets with me and snuggled into my armpit, and stayed there. But every time I looked at him, his eyes were open, and all night he kept moaning really softly to himself, no matter how much I petted him and told him what a hero he was. He only stopped doing it after Miss Sophia Brown showed up toward morning—she just appeared , popping into sight like a silent movie projected on a bedsheet. I almost jumped out of bed when she got under the covers, too, and curled herself right next to Mister Cat. But I didn’t, and that’s the way the three of us stayed until the first cocks went at it before dawn. I remembered a snatch of an old, old ballad Evan sings with Sally sometimes:

I don’t know what a channering worm is, or what it’s chiding about, but the song’s about ghosts. Miss Sophia Brown stood up and stretched herself, just like a real cat, and she gave Mister Cat’s nose one quick lick and disappeared. And I fell straight off to sleep, and got a good five or ten minutes before Julian barged in to tell me it was stupid canteloupes for breakfast (Julian hates fruit), and he wanted to go visit Albert and the sheep afterward. There are days, even now, when I’m quite proud of myself for letting Julian live. Because there were options.

We started school again sharp at the beginning of September, and we landed running. The English don’t believe in easing you back into the classroom—I had all I could do just to keep halfway even with people who must have been studying all summer. The boys were pretty much in the same mess: Tony hadn’t done a thing but dance, and Julian had mostly been doing very weird experiments and reading Asterix comic books in French. As for me, there’s not much to say. I was ready for something that fall, but it wasn’t Sherborne Girls.

As the billy-blind had advised me, I kept away from Penelope Whidbey, and grabbed a seat by the window in Spanish class. (Yes, my grades did go up—not a lot, but some.) When anyone asked me how I’d spent the summer, I’d roll my eyes and sigh, and do my best to look too expensively debauched for words. It didn’t work worth a damn—everyone knew I didn’t have a boyfriend—but I liked doing it anyway, just because I’d never have dared to try it at Gaynor. Meena said it embarrassed her, but it made her laugh, too. Which was good, because Chris Herridge was gone, and they hadn’t even been able to get together for a decent farewell scene. She hardly spoke in class, and hardly ate at all, and she stopped making any sound when she cried, which bothered me more than anything else, I don’t know why. So then I started clowning around, especially at school, doing and saying every silly thing I could think of to get her at least to smile. I got called for it a lot, until Meena made me stop. But it did help—after that, sometimes, I could just look at her across a classroom and she’d giggle a little. So that was something.

The Dorset rains were even worse that fall than they’d been the year before. They actually started before harvest was quite over, which meant we were all helping out in the fields—Sally cancelling her piano lessons, the boys and me right after school, and Evan and the hands going nonstop, dawn to dark, getting in as much of the crop as we could. It was muddy and cold and endless, and miserable, and I broke all my nails, but I still did as much work as Tony and Julian. Then we went and helped with the Colfoxes’ harvest. They had a bigger farm, but not as many workers, and they lost more than we did.

I’ve never been that tired. It got so just lifting my feet to get from one field to another—one row to another—felt like way more trouble than just standing still in the rain forever. I didn’t catch cold, like Tony, or pull a muscle in my back, like Evan. What I did was, I stopped thinking. I stopped thinking about everything except slogging along this row, cutting things off stalks, scooping sodden blue-black things up from the mud, wiping rain out of my eyes, moving on to that row. I learned more about Thomas Hardy that harvest than I ever learned in any literature class. A lot of his people stop thinking, too.

One of the things I didn’t think about was Tamsin—Tamsin and the night world she’d introduced me to. No, that’s not true. Sometimes, when I was most worn out, it was really easy to see myself being one of the people who’d have worked for Roger Willoughby, and all the Willoughbys after him: trudging their hills, plowing their fields, talking old Dorset, having children, losing half of them at birth, living on bread and cheese and beer, and whatever they could glean after the harvest; getting through one winter like this after another the best way they could—and still somehow feeling like part of the Willoughby family. It confused me—I didn’t know if Tamsin was to blame for the way they lived, just for being a Willoughby, or whether she’d never had any more choice than any of them.

I worked until we’d saved what we could from the rains, and then I had to catch up with my schoolwork, which took until practically Christmas. Either way, it was weeks before I went back to that secret room that Roger Willoughby had built to hide his chaplains in.

I saw the Pooka twice. He was different each time: Once he was a little red fox in the shadow of a tree, watching as Tony and I were trying to salvage a few scrawny ears of corn from the muck; and the second time he was a deer stepping as elegantly as Mister Cat along a row of soggy cabbages, nibbling here, noshing there. Tamsin was right—you couldn’t mistake the eyes, even at a distance. And when he looked straight at me he knew me, just as Tamsin had said he would. He didn’t speak, or come toward me, or do anything that a fox or a deer wouldn’t have done, but it was him. I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t thrilled either. I was too damn tired.

Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown went on being an item, though nobody knew that except me. Nobody else ever saw them together. Some nights I’d have no cat in my room, because he was out somewhere in the wind and rain, carrying on with her; some nights I’d have them both piled together on the quilt, and I’d just lie there watching them sleep, the live cat and the ghost, and Julian’s gorilla. At least Miss Sophia Brown looked asleep, but of course I’ll never know. Tamsin never exactly slept, I know that, but she did doze now and then, in a sort of way. She tried to explain it to me once.

“Jenny, have you known it ever, that zone between aware and asleep when dreams float through you—or you through them—as though you and they were of the same substance? Beyond control, beyond words to name them, yet there’s an exchange, a penetration, for all one knows them to be baseless phantoms. So with me, often, as I wait by my window. And is what I see truly what is ? or are these visions of what has been? what might be? I can never tell.”

She was sitting on the edge of my bed when she said that. I’d felt her there, as deeply as I was sleeping—the way I always felt Miss Sophia Brown—and I opened my eyes to see her petting the cats. They purred and stretched under her hands the way cats do when anybody, an ordinary person, strokes them. Everything’s different with cats.

Tamsin gave a sort of half-embarrassed laugh, nothing like the way she usually laughed. She said, “In fair truth, Jenny, you and your Mister Cat are my touchstone, my Pole Star, my ground bass of existence. But for you two, I’d have no notion at all of which way lay reality, happed round as I am in my dreams and my neardreams. This is why I came seeking you tonight.”