Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  The Lovells had to be impressed, but I didn’t, not if I put my mind to it. I didn’t see a whole lot of Evan during those early months at Stourhead, except at dinner in the Arctic Circle, because he’d be out all day every day, and I’d mostly be with Sally, trying to deal with the Manor, which kept being torn up and put back together and torn up again—more or less how I was feeling then. I wasn’t a lot of fun for Sally, but I was some use anyway, I’ll say that for myself. I helped clean up after the wiring and plumbing finally got done, and Tony and I swept and dusted and scoured out all the rooms on the first floor and most of the ones on the second. We didn’t say ten words to each other all that time, but we worked well together. I even thought for a hot minute about telling him about the voices in my bathroom, but I didn’t. Today I would, Tony, if you ever read this far.

  And if I wasn’t working, I was being dragged all over the farm by Julian—half the time I’d wake up with him tugging at my foot, going, “Oh, come on, Jenny, do, let’s go exploring!” Only exploring, to Julian, could mean climbing around on some old rusty hulk of farm machinery, trying to figure out how it must have worked, or it could just as easily mean getting me to chase him through this dark little hillside oak forest that he started right away calling the Hundred-Acre Wood, like the one in Winnie-the-Pooh. We all call it that now. And sometimes he’d want to search for the room with that dark third-floor window. He bugged Evan so much about it that Evan finally dug out the oldest plans of the house—they have to be kept vacuum-sealed behind plastic, because they’ll crumble right away if they’re exposed to air. Julian and I counted the windows in those drawings over and over again, but there was always one missing. Evan said it happened.

  Sometimes we’d hike up and down across the fields—Dorset is all up and down—to the stretch of heathland that I guess was always too bumpy for even Roger Willoughby to plough up. I’m glad nobody ever farmed it, because it feels good to look at, rolling away softly toward the skinny two-lane road that’s the north boundary of Stourhead Farm. Julian would run off to check out the flock of sheep that the Lovells still kept on the downs, and try to play with Albert, the collie, and I’d flop onto the turf and stare up at fluffy clouds like glops of whipped butter, and not think about anything. Except maybe the butterflies. I never in my life saw so many different kinds of butterflies as they have on the downs. They’ll land on your face if you lie very quiet.

  I still don’t know why Julian took to me from the beginning, at Heathrow. He’s the only person in my life who’s ever walked right up to me like that. I mean, even Jake and Marta took awhile, and Meena wasn’t sure she’d ever like me, that first term. But that ten-year-old English kid in his school uniform coat… Day One. There was one time, exploring, when he just had to jump from rock to rock across a stream we found running through a sort of little hollow—what they call a coombe here—because that’s in Winnie-the-Pooh, too, and of course he fell in and I had to get him out. Not that it was so deep—he could have waded across—but he caught his foot under something, and he twisted it trying to get loose, and I got soaked through hauling him to the bank. He went around for days telling everyone how I’d saved him from a watery grave. First I thought he was doing it to get up Tony’s nose, but then I realized he meant it. He was so proud of me, and so proud of himself for being saved. Julian.

  He did something for me once, something he’ll forget way before I do. It was the day Sally and I went to Goshawk Farm Cattery to see Mister Cat for the first time. I’d been agitating about it from the moment we hit Stourhead, but there was too much to do right away, and Evan needed the car every day. Finally Sally and the wheels were free at the same time, and she drove me to Dorchester, which is where Goshawk Farm is, right on the outskirts. It was a really nasty, windy day, raining on and off, the beginning of Dorset autumn.

  Mister Cat wouldn’t speak to me. He knew me, all right, but he wouldn’t look at me. I’d expected him to be in a wire cage, like the one he’d traveled in, only bigger, but it was more like a cat motel room, with things to scratch and climb on, and dangling things to jump at for exercise, with its own outdoor run for good weather. And he wasn’t going hungry—his coat was the glossiest I’d ever seen it, and he’d put on a little weight. But he couldn’t even be bothered to make that evil warning noise at me again. He just turned his back and curled around himself, and closed his eyes.

  Sally tried to help. All the way back to the farm she told me one story after another about people she knew who’d had to put their pets in quarantine, and how some of the animals felt so lonely and angry that they wouldn’t come to their owners when it was time to pick them up. But of course they all forgave them in time, and Mister Cat would forgive me, too. Fairy tales, like the ones she told me when I was little, and all her stories had happy endings.

  When we got back, it was near dark. Evan had dinner waiting, but I just went to my room and lay on my bed. I didn’t cry—I told you, I don’t do that much. It wasn’t like being mad at Sally on West Eighty-third Street, which you could sort of enjoy all the time you were feeling miserable. This hurt, it hurt my stomach, and no matter which way I turned, it kept on hurting. My throat got so swollen and tight, I might as well have been crying, only I couldn’t. I just lay there.

  I wasn’t asleep when Julian came into the room—by then I was sure I’d never want to eat or sleep or talk to anybody again. He pushed the door open very slowly—I could feel the hall light on my eyes, but I kept them shut tight. It doesn’t matter how quietly you try to move in my room, the way the floor squeaks, but Julian seemed to wait minutes, hours, between each step, until he was by the bed. I heard this froggy little whisper, “Jenny? Are you really, really sleeping?”

  I didn’t answer. A moment later, Julian put something down beside me, right on my pillow, brushing my face. It smelled pretty funky—not bad, just old, and somehow familiar, too. I heard Julian squeaking back to the door, and the door squeaking shut again. I didn’t turn the light on, but after a while I reached out for whatever he’d left on the pillow. The moment I touched it, I knew. That damn one-eyed, beat-up stuffed gorilla he’s had practically all his life—slept with, chewed on, probably peed on, too, more than likely. Trust Julian—every other kid has a bedtime bear, but Julian’s got a gorilla named Elvis. I grabbed that thing, and I shoved my face hard into its stinky, sticky fur, and I cried my eyes out until I fell asleep.

  So that’s how Julian got to be my baby brother. The last thing in the world I needed right then, but that was it.

  It’s noisy in the country, in a strange way. You hear more sounds, just because of the stillness, especially at night. Instead of tuning out, the way you absolutely have to do in New York, you start tuning in, whether you want to or not. I don’t mean just the geese going over, and the frogs and crickets and so on, and the cocks just as likely to start crowing at two in the morning. I got so I could hear a well pump cutting off and on and off, out beyond the dairy. Some frosty nights I’d even hear twigs snapping in the thickets, and that would be the deer foraging, eating the tree bark. And when you hear a cold, clear, sharp sort of yelp, with almost a metallic shrill to it, that’s not a dog, that’s a fox. It’s always a little sudden and scary, that sound, even when you know what it is.

  The Manor makes noises, too, the way all old houses do, settling in the ground—“working,” that’s what they say here. I’ve always thought it sounds like the little grunts and mumbles and sighs somebody makes getting comfortable in bed after a hard day. Even the West Eighty-third Street apartment made those, so that wasn’t anything to be edgy about, most nights.

  But every now and then. Just every now and then, from the first night, I’d hear something that didn’t fit. Not so much the patter of little feet, or little snickery voices (you can always tell yourself it’s mice running and squeaking), and not ghosts wailing or dragging chains around—no Halloween stuff like that. A sound like rushing water, in the air right above my bed. A sound that might have been somebody
sweeping a floor, back and forth, over and over, in the middle of the night. A whisper so low I couldn’t make out one word. But that was the one that always woke me up; that was the one I was scared of hearing when I went to bed. I’d have asked Julian if he ever heard anything, but I didn’t want him to get scared, so I didn’t.

  There were smells, too—that cold vanilla the electrician smelled in the Arctic Circle, and a dark-toast one almost like Mister Cat. And just once in a real while I’d think I saw those same huge golden eyes from the dream outside my window. Only I couldn’t ever be sure whether I was awake or dreaming when I saw those. They didn’t frighten me, for some reason—I always wanted to go toward them—so maybe that was dreaming. I still don’t know, even today.

  There was one sound that everybody knew about, not just me— a sound that used to bring Julian flying into my room whenever we heard it. It usually had to be a really fierce night, with thunder and lightning, rain smashing into you like hailstones, wind shaking the house, stripping and snapping the trees—I mean, the works. Then you’d hear them, high over the storm, the hounds baying and the horses screaming—and people laughing, too, these terrible, hungry yells of laughter. That’s what always got Julian, that laughter. He’d shut his eyes and cover his ears and burrow his head into me, hard, so it really hurt sometimes.

  Evan would tell us it was just the wild geese calling to each other, the same as ever, only the wind was distorting their cries. He’d say, “Every country in Europe has that same legend—the Wild Hunt, the Wish-Hounds, the Chasse Gayere, the Sluagh— huntsmen and their dogs chasing after the souls of the dead. It’s the geese, all of it—nothing but the wild geese, the wild weather, and a little wild imagination.” And Julian would nod and be cool, but he’d spend the rest of the night in my room, and it was always nice to have the company. Because both of us knew what geese sounded like.

  The Lovells gave Evan a totally free hand with the farm, as far as reconstruction went. They told him he could start from scratch—tear down everything except the Manor, if he wanted. He must have hired just about everybody in Sherborne and all the little nearby towns that he hadn’t already hired to work on the house—men, women, some who didn’t look much older than me or Tony. All the sheds and outhouses went first off, and all the tools and equipment got stored in one barn while they were demolishing the other. Then Evan started on the fences— he must have replaced every single post and every strand of wire on the whole seven hundred acres. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was walking the fields, making notes and mumbling to himself and scooping up dirt. Sally did the best she could with his hands every night, but all that fall and winter they looked like ground meat.

  Anyway, it was all just like the way it was when we were packing up on West Eighty-third, with everything half done, and nothing the same from day to day, and everybody knowing what was going on except me. And in the middle of all that, we started school in Sherborne.

  I’ve been putting off talking about that first year of English school. It’s not that it was so awful—I had way worse times at Gaynor when I started there. It’s more that now absolutely everything in the world was out of balance at the same time, completely unfamiliar, from the food and the talk and the way people drove, to the house I was living in and the sounds I heard at night. The Sherborne Boys’ school was new for Tony and Julian, too, but at least they knew the basics, they didn’t have to think about how to be every step they took. If I’d met Meena right off, it might have been a lot different. If I’d had Mister Cat—but I didn’t… worse than didn’t. Okay, it was pretty awful, at the beginning. But so was I.

  They do wear uniforms at the Sherborne School for Girls. It’s not a bad uniform—navy-blue blazers, plaid kilt skirts, gray pullovers or white blouses—and there’s more leeway about what you can wear as you go up through the forms, until you get to the Sixth Form, where you’re practically God and you don’t wear uniforms at all. But I was in the Third Form, down in the miserable middle of the pack and stuck with that blue blazer for centuries to come. Putting it on every morning, I felt years younger—a whole life younger—than I had in Gaynor Junior High. It was bad enough being the age I was, but I’d been getting almost used to it; now it felt like I was back being a sticky, whiny, scabby-kneed little girl all over again, and I hated it. I used to practically undress on the bus going home.

  That was another thing, the bus. I’ve already said I don’t make friends easily, and being a day girl didn’t help either. There are about four hundred students at Sherborne Girls, and all of them were boarding at the school, living in one or another of the eight houses there, except maybe twenty who went home every day, like me. So I missed out on that bonding experience, too: The thing that happens when people spend months living and eating and studying, and being together all the time. You don’t work up that kind of school spirit on a bus—anyway, I don’t. We were all assigned to the different houses, just like real boarders, but it wasn’t the same thing.

  Meena Chari was a day girl, too, but I didn’t notice her much on the bus. She wasn’t one of the ones who came to sit next to me and ask me about life in the States, and did I ever see this or that band, this or that movie star. They tried me out one after another, for a while, but they all gave up pretty quickly. Which was too bad, because some of them were nice, and they never really spoke to me again, ever. My loss, I know that.

  Sherborne Girls sits on forty acres of green hill at the western outskirts of town, and it looks like a real manor—just this side of a palace, even—with its two wings spreading out from a central tower. Evan calls places like those “stately piles,” but all I can say is that it impressed the hell out of me that first day, and I was not planning to be impressed. It still does.

  The work was so much tougher than Gaynor, I don’t even want to go into it. I’d always gotten pretty good grades at Gaynor (which is different from being a good student, and I knew it then); but this was a different world, no comparison at all. Third form, and they had me taking stuff I wouldn’t have had to deal with until high school—and half of it would have been elective then. English literature, maths, world history, British history, three different science classes, a language (I took Spanish because of Marta) —and we’re not even talking about Games or Information Technology. I was over my head, out of my league, and practically paralyzed that whole first term. And it didn’t help a bit to know what my education was costing Evan and Sally. Tony and Julian both had partial scholarships at the boys’ school—not me. Nobody ever said a word about it.

  And everyone was so damn terminally sweet, you could scream. New girls each have an older girl—she’s called your “shadow”—to go around with you for a while and help you get used to the way things are done at Sherborne. My shadow was named Barbara, and even now, writing this, I wish I could think of one single nice thing I ever did for her or said to her. The best I can come up with is that I hardly talked at all while she was showing me where my form room would be—like a homeroom at Gaynor—and introducing me to my teachers, and to everyone in the house I was assigned to. She and all of them kept telling me that my being a day girl didn’t matter, that I was still going to be a real part of the house, fully involved in all the social activities, always invited to stay for dinner after classes—only I’d miss the bus, and Sally would have to come and get me—never a moment of feeling like an outsider. They meant it, too. I always knew they meant it.

  And if I was a sulky, silent mess in school, I was worse at home. I dragged my feet, helped out exactly as much as I absolutely had to, and bitched every waking moment, when I wasn’t brooding and moping. I really try not to remember things I said to people in those days—to Evan especially—because they make me cringe in my skin. I was sort of halfway decent to Julian, because somehow he wouldn’t let me be any other way, but to everyone else… no, that’s enough about that. I said I wouldn’t lie in my own book, and I’m not lying, but that’s enough.

  No, there’s one thing that I
do like to remember, something that happened just before Christmas. That was an even edgier time than usual, with Sally and me being Jewish, the boys being used to trees and stockings and carols, and Evan being really nervous. Of course I let them all know that I didn’t want anything to do with killing a tree for Jesus, and I made a thing out of stomping off to find the menorah Grandma Paula’d given to Sally before we left. Julian tagged along with me. I’d given up telling him not to by then.

  Actually, he was the one who dug out the menorah, down at the bottom of a box in the second-floor room where Sally stashed all the stuff she was planning to deal with on the very first weekend after hell froze over. It’s at least a hundred years old, and it’s silver, though you couldn’t have told that at first sight, tarnished and scratched as it was. But I showed Julian the silversmith’s mark on the base, and told him how my great-grandparents used to hide the menorah in the barn when the soldiers came through town. “In the cow’s stall,” I said, “under half a ton of cowshit. Even the Cossacks weren’t about to rummage through that.” Julian loved it. Two of the candleholders were bent to the side, and I said that was because the cow had stepped on them. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

  Julian wanted to know how the menorah worked, so I sent him downstairs to get some candles while I tried to polish it up a bit. We had all kinds of candles all over the place back then, because of the power failing every ten minutes. The ones Julian got back with didn’t quite fit, but I made them fit, and I told him about Chanukah—about the Syrians and the Maccabees, and the one last little cup of consecrated oil for the new temple altar in Jerusalem burning miraculously for eight days, until somebody finally showed up with fresh oil. It’s a good story, and while I was telling it, I almost forgot that I was pissed at everyone in the world.