Tamsin

Six

So far, the hard part about writing a book isn’t telling what happened, even if it happened a long time ago—it’s trying to call back, not just the way you felt about the thing that happened, but the entire person who felt that way. Writing about the early days at Stourhead Farm is like that.

After six years, Stourhead’s just ordinary, I guess that’s the only word. When I’m here I can wake up in the morning and look out my bedroom window, and if there’s an old floppy cow named Lady Caroline Lamb looking back in at me, that’s as ordinary as the sound of Evan’s old floppy Jeep on the far side of Spaniards Hill, or the way the air around the kitchen well sort of trembles, because of the electricity from the pump. As usual as Tony dancing between the cabbage rows, when he’s not off touring somewhere, practicing his entrechats or whatever in the South Barn with Mister Cat and a bunch of chickens for an audience. Natural as hearing Julian, who’s the only one of us home now, bugging Eflie John or William or Seth to let him drive the baler. Ordinary as not feeling Tamsin anywhere in the house, ever again, when I wake.

But I can’t get to Tamsin yet, although that’s really all I want to write about. Meena says I absolutely have to describe what Stourhead Farm was like when Evan and Sally took it over, and the trouble they had bringing it back to being a working farm, the way it is now, and especially how everything was for me back then, being snatched right out of New York and plopped down on this raggedy ruin of a Dorset estate. And she’s right, I know that—that’s what you do when you’re writing a book. But it’s hard.

First off, it was a ruin, Stourhead—even a West Eighty-third Street child could see that. Not that I knew what a real farm was supposed to look like, except you had to have cows. But I didn’t need to notice that half the fences were caved in like old people’s mouths, or that the two barns and all the little sheds and coops and pens were dark and soft looking, as though they’d been rained on for years, and that what wasn’t rotting was rusting, from the plows and harrows and stuff like that to the well casings and even the wheelbarrows. All I had to do was watch Evan’s face, seeing his eyes going back and forth between Sally and those crumbly barns, between the boys and the scrawny chickens scratching around their feet, between me—still sitting in the car when everyone else had gotten out—and the house, “the Manor,” people around here still call it. I just looked at his face, and I knew he was feeling like pure pounded shit, and I was glad.

You see, he hadn’t really thought about anything but the soil. Evan’s like that. He can scoop up a handful of earth and sniff at it, even taste it, and tell you what it’ll grow and what it won’t, and what it just might grow if you add this or that or something else to it. And he’s always right, always—the same way some people can tell you where to dig for water or what the weather’s going to be tomorrow, that’s how Evan is with dirt. But it hadn’t ever occurred to him how it would be for his boys, for Sally and me, to be living right on that dirt, in a falling-down house at the end of the world. All that planning and dreaming with Sally, and it just hadn’t come up.

Sally was good. I didn’t know to be proud of her then, but I am now, when I think of her standing and staring across a rutty dirt road and a stretch of baby-barf-colored dead grass at the house that had looked so great in the Polaroids. I couldn’t see her face, but she said in this perfectly daily voice, “Come on, Jenny, let’s go. We’re home.”

Everybody carried a couple of suitcases or boxes, because you couldn’t drive right up to the house back then. You can now, of course—it took Evan a year to find the original carriageway about two feet down, under three centuries’ worth of guck—but I’ll always remember the lot of us, heads down, nobody saying a word, just schlepping our stuff across that dirt road toward that old, old house that didn’t want us. I remember Sally shifting a duffel bag to carry it under her right arm, so that she could reach out with her left hand to take hold of Evan’s arm. The way he looked down at her I’m really not a total idiot. I knew damn well, even then, that Norris hadn’t ever looked at her like that.

And I remember the windows. There were so many of them—round and long and square and pointy—and because the sun was slanting down behind us, all those windows were blazing up as though the house was full of fire, you couldn’t look straight at it. There was one small, sharp window on the third floor that didn’t reflect the sun at all. It looked absolutely black, surrounded by all those others, like a hole in the sky, with the darkness of space showing through.

Julian was walking really slowly, hanging back more and more, until Sally looked around for him and let Evan go on ahead so she could take Julian’s hand. Then I wished I was a scared little English kid wearing a dumb school cap whom she didn’t even know a week ago, and then I got mad at myself for feeling like that. So I grabbed his other hand and just marched on up to the house. To the Manor.

For a farmhouse, it’s enormous, the biggest house I’m ever likely to live in, the biggest house in this part of Dorset, and when it was built in 1671, it was the biggest in the whole county. But Dorset’s never run to mansions, even in the towns—it’s always been farms and villages, like in Hardy’s books, and Stourhead was always a farm, from the beginning. So compared with some of those humongous old piles they run tour buses out to, the Manor is a studio apartment. But compared to it, my cousin Barbara’s house in Riverdale, that she was so snotty-proud about, is a broom closet in a Motel Six. I hope she reads this.

I’ve already said I don’t know how to describe rooms and interior decoration, and the same definitely goes for houses. The Manor has been built and rebuilt and burned down once—I think only once—and then it was rebuilt again and added to and added to, until nothing exactly fits with anything, which is just how the English like it. Anyway, the house has three floors, with a sort of east wing and a sort of west wing, and then there’s what everybody still calls the Arctic Circle, the central section, where you come in. Tony was the one who started calling it that, the Arctic Circle, because that part of the house is on the original stone foundation, and you can’t ever get it really warm, even today. But when we moved in, that was the only part of the house that worked, with running water and some electricity, and a cooking range the size of a pool table. I can still see us all clumped together there, hanging on to our bags and stuff, everybody trying to think of something cheery to say. Everybody except me, I mean.

Sally finally managed it. She said, “Well, a gas range, that’s great! I’d much rather cook over gas.” And Evan gave her this incredibly, unbelievably mournful look and said, “Actually, love, it’s a wood stove. I’ll show you how to work it, it’s not that hard.” And after that, nobody said anything for the next year and a half.

Finally Julian announced in that creaky little voice of his, “Well, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m going exploring.” And before anybody could grab him, he was out of there, his chunky new school shoes rattling on the oak floors. (That’s one thing about the Manor, it’s got fantastic floors—they’re so old and hard, even the termites break their teeth on them. When this house dissolves, those floors will still be hanging in the air.)

Tony said, “I’ll get him,” and Evan said tiredly, “No, he’s right, let’s look around this museum. There’s supposed to be a caretaker here somewhere, but I think the boggarts got him.” So we all went trooping after Julian, with our footsteps echoing up stairs and down corridors, in and out of one room after another, with the boys already fussing over who was going to sleep where. They’d always had to share a bedroom; there was no way in the world they could deal with that kind of abundance. Nice word.

I couldn’t take any of it in myself. I’d never in my life been in a house like this one. Farm or no, you could have dropped our old apartment into some of those rooms without raising dust or knocking over a plant stand. And then there were some no bigger than bathrooms, narrow as coffins, which is what they really looked like. Evan said those were for the servants. First useful thing I learned about the seventeenth century.

What else is important to put in about the first time I saw the Manor? The smell, of course, I should have done that right at the start. Not just because the house was so old, but because of the way the different families running the farm had been letting it go to hell for the last hundred years or so. So you had the old smell, which is one thing, and you also had that dark, dead-cold mousey smell of the layers of neglect, no getting away from either of them wherever you went. Six years of cleaning, six years of repairing and replacing, scraping and painting, digging away at those layers, and some days I can still taste them, both of those smells.

We didn’t get above the second floor that day because the third was closed off then, which everybody thought was just as well. It was, too, and not just because we were all absolutely worn out by that time. But all I’m going to say about the third floor right now is when Julian was home on his last holiday, he found a whole new room we’d never seen, a little tiny chamber like a lady’s dressing room, tucked away behind a door about as wide as an ironing board. There were a couple of semisecret passages, too, but they didn’t go anywhere. The third floor’s like that.

It made me think of Tamsin, when Julian found that room, because that was how

No, I’m scratching that out, that has to wait. I’m still talking about that first day. We brought all the other stuff in from the car and dumped it in the front parlor, which Sally’s got looking great now, but which was just bare and gray then, with nothing on the floor but a dirty rag rug and a beat-up harmonium in a far corner. Evan broke up a junky old table and got a fire going, but it didn’t help much, because the ceiling’s way too high. He stood up from the fireplace with his back to us, and took a really long breath before he turned around. “Well, my legions,” he said. “Doesn’t look much of a bargain, does it?”

Tony said, “It’s not so bad,” and Julian said, “It’s big,” at the same time. Sally just laughed. She said, “Darling, it needs work, I knew that. I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t need work.”

“The farm doesn’t,” Evan said, “not so much.” Then he laughed himself and said, “Well, yes, it does, it needs a deal of work, but I can handle that. It’s this house. I knew it was going to be hard for a bit, but I didn’t quite realize how hard. I want to say I’m sorry, everybody.” Then he looked straight at me and added, “Especially to you, Jenny. You didn’t need this on top of all the rest of it. I’m very sorry.”

So, of course, now everybody was looking at me. I could have killed Evan, and at the same time I felt guilty and horrible, because he was really trying to be nice. Sally put her arm around me and she said, “Jenny’s all right.”

Tony said, “We’re all all right. We none of us thought it was going to be a dizzy round of pleasure.” And Julian growled, “It’ll be like camping out. I love camping out.” So now I had to say something, but the best I could manage was, “Well, I don’t care, I wasn’t expecting… and I just let it trail off there. The absolute best I could do then.

“All right, then,” Evan said. “What’s for dinner?”

Because there wasn’t any Chinese fast-food place around the corner—there wasn’t any corner—and the nearest grocery would have been back in Sherborne, which is the nearest real town, which we’d passed through when I was asleep. But we did all right with the leftovers from the car, and after that we worked out who’d sleep where for now, and which bathrooms were usable—Evan got the boiler going, so there was hot water anyway, even if it was exactly the color of New York sidewalks. And then everybody went to bed early. Because there wasn’t anything else to do.

Tony and Julian were downstairs, trading rooms every five minutes. I was on the second floor, in the room right next to Sally and Evan’s. The way I was feeling, I was really hoping they’d put me in one of those mean little servant garrets, so I could catch TB or something. This one smelled major mildewy, like all the others, and the lightbulbs were so dusty you could tell they’d been dead for years. But it had ceilings so high I couldn’t see them in the darkness, and big windows for Mister Cat to come and go by—once we finally got them open—and the bed was all right, once I got some West Eighty-third Street sheets on it. It was a brass four-poster, but the canopy was just rags, and I pulled them all off.

I could hear Sally and Evan talking softly, even though I was really trying not to, I really didn’t want to hear them being private. Evan was saying, “I don’t think money’s going to be the problem. The Lovells are in this for the long haul—they’ll lay out whatever it takes to bring the farm back to life. I’m not at all bothered about that.”

“But it’s all going to take twice as long as you thought,” Sally said. “Because of the house. That’s the bother, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t get used to the way she sounded, talking to him—not like my goofy New York single-mom Sally, more like an older person, so thoughtful and mature it always made me feel strange. Evan laughed a little and said, “Well, it’s my fault, I should have stashed you lot back in London with Charlie, and come down here alone, until I got things put shipshape. I knew that, damn it. I just wanted you with me.”

I heard them kissing then, and I curled up tight and pulled that cold, floppy pillow over my ears. I didn’t expect to sleep at all, but I did, straight through, and I had one weird dream after another, all of them full of people I didn’t know. Sometime in the night Sally sat by me on the bed for a while, unless that was a dream, too. I should have asked her then, but I wasn’t about to, and now she can’t remember. But I think she did.

Okay. The first months were solid nightmare, and it’s no good my pretending they weren’t. And I was a big part of the nightmare, maybe the biggest, I know that. I’m not going to go on and on about it, I’m just going to say that I was absolutely miserable, and I spread it around, and if everybody else at Stourhead wasn’t absolutely miserable, too, it wasn’t my fault. I did the very best I could.

But I had help. There was the house itself, to begin with. If I ever knew a house that truly did not want to be lived in, it was the Manor back when we arrived. I don’t just mean stuff like that sidewalk-colored water coming out in smelly burps, or the wood stove smoking up the kitchen every time Sally tried to cook something, or the weird way the electricity was hooked up, so you could turn on the light in my bathroom and blow every fuse in the west wing. Or the Horror Of The Septic Tank, which I am not going to describe, ever. That’s not what I mean.

Since that last sentence, I’ve been sitting here for half an hour, figuring how to explain how all of us were always tripping and falling over nothing at least once a day, as though those beautiful old floors absolutely hated the feet that walked on them. I’m talking about the way you could hear ugly little murmurs in the two chimneys, even when there wasn’t any wind, and the way some corners just ate up light, just stayed cold and shadowy forever, never mind how many lamps you plugged in. And I’m talking about the quick, scratchy footsteps everybody heard right above the Arctic Circle, one time or another, and nobody wanted to mention; and about that east-wing window that wouldn’t reflect the sunlight. We couldn’t even find the room it belonged to, that’s how the Manor was.

Julian was wildly excited about all this at the beginning. He ran around saying, “It’s a haunted house, how splendid—I’ll be the only boy at school living in a real haunted house!” But there were a couple of rooms on the second floor that Julian absolutely would not go into, from the first day. Everybody else did—there didn’t seem anything weird or scary about these two at least—but Julian just stopped right at the door, like I’ve seen Mister Cat do sometimes, and nobody could get him to take another step. He kept mumbling, “It feels funny, I don’t like it.” When Evan tried to talk him into going in, he cried. When Tony teased him about it, Julian hit him. Of course he says he doesn’t remember any of that now.

Oh, there was a caretaker, by the way—I forgot to put that in. His name was Wilf, he looked exactly like the Pillsbury Doughboy in weird rubber overalls and hip boots, and he wandered up from the cellar the first morning we were there, totally and permanently hungover. He had a shuffly, wincing style of walking, as though his head were made of glass, just about to roll off his shoulders and shatter into a million bits. He was supposed to be there just for a couple of weeks, to show Evan where things were around the house and the farm, but he hung on after that, and you couldn’t ever quite get rid of him. Evan fired him once or twice a week, but he didn’t pay any attention.

Evan and Sally worked like crazy people. Evan got rid of the wood stove as soon as he could find someone to haul it away, and we actually did sort of live on pizza and takeout from Sherborne until the Lovells—the family who own Stourhead Farm—put in a new electric range. Which meant replacing all the wiring in the whole Arctic Circle, but they never hassled Evan about that. Besides the electricity, they paid to have the plumbing redone—so between one thing and another the house was a total ruin for months, with tools and torn-out boards all over everywhere, and nests of wires hanging out of the walls, and the men Evan hired to help him tramping around growling at each other, scattering pipe ashes on the floors and taking tea breaks every ten minutes. They mostly had ponytails and big thick yellow mustaches, and I never could tell them apart.

They also quit a lot. Most of the time it was over ordinary stuff like the pay or the hours or the tea breaks, but not always. One guy quit because his tools kept disappearing on him, and I think he tried to sue the Lovells about it. And there was one who just didn’t show up for work one morning, and he never did come back for his tools. Later on, he wrote Evan and Sally a letter, trying to explain, but it was mixed up and misspelled, and full of ramblings about sad voices, and music he couldn’t hear, and about “puddles of cold air,” and something like invisible fur brushing his neck all the time. There were a couple of others who talked about the voices and the cold air, too, and a man who said he kept smelling vanilla the whole time he was rewiring the Arctic Circle, and it made him so nervous he had to stop. Evan said most of them drank, and just kept hiring new ones.

Tony said, “Maybe we really do have a boggart,” but he said it out of range of Julian’s feet. The two of them are going to hate this, because it makes them seem as though they were fighting all the time, but back then they were. Julian was always the person who started hitting and kicking and crying, but Tony usually had it coming, one way or the other. That’s the way I remember it, anyhow.

“Well, it just might be,” Evan said. The weirder the question, the more seriously he answers it; that’s another way Evan is. “There’s certainly something playing tricks in the kitchen lately, and if it isn’t you two—”

“It’s not, it’s not!” Julian rumbled, and Tony said quickly, “Well, I just took a couple of the chocolate biscuits, but I didn’t knock all those bottles down—”

“And I didn’t, didn’t, didn’t draw those pictures in the flour!” Julian was shaking his head so hard it actually made me dizzy to look at him. “And I didn’t throw the eggs around, and I didn’t make the horrible mess under the sink, and the fridge wasn’t my fault—”

Evan sighed. “I wish I could blame that on a boggart.” We’d already had two different refrigerators put in by then, and neither one could keep stuff cold for more than a day. There wasn’t a thing wrong with them—each time all the food went bad, Evan had an old man come down from Salisbury, but all he could ever figure was that the electricity was screwed up some way. Which didn’t make any sense, with the new wiring; but the last time he came, the Salisbury man rubbed a finger alongside his nose and closed one eye (I’d read about people doing that, but I’d never actually seen it), and told Evan, “There’s some houses, ones that was here before the electric, they don’t like the electric. They’ll be fighting it, squeezing at it, trying to choke it off all the time. It’s fighting the electric, this house, that’s what’s happening.” Evan called somebody else the next time, but it didn’t make much difference.

Me, I was flat out hoping for a dozen boggarts, and fifty pookas, and a whole herd of Hedley Kows, and all those other creatures Evan had told us about on the drive down. Anything that would make it absolutely impossible for us to stay on at Stourhead, anything that would force us at least back to London, even if we couldn’t go home to New York—was for it all the way, no matter how messy or how scary. Anyway, I was for it until the thing that happened in my bathroom.

Sally used to tell me that the English air would do wonders for my skin and, besides, my skin wasn’t nearly as horrible as I thought it was. All I knew was I’d been sprouting torrid new English zits from Heathrow on, and I was developing a hunchy slouch, the way tall girls get, from sneaking past mirrors. Except one, the mirror in my bathroom, where every night and every morning I’d face off with my face one more time. I try any damn thing anybody said might work—all kinds of ointments and soaps and masks, stuff that made my skin tight and flaky, stuff that smelled like rotten eggs, other stuff that was supposed to soothe your skin, only when it dried on you it hurt… I don’t like talking about that time. It was years ago, but it comes right back.

Anyway. I was leaning in close to the mirror, doing exactly what Sally always said not to do, which was squeezing a thing on my forehead which was forever boiling up in the exact same place. (Meena says that it was probably my third eye trying to get me to pay attention, but what it looked like was a zit about the size of an M&M. A bright red one.) Once I got it open, I was going to clean it out with alcohol, and I didn’t care if it burned. I hoped it would burn—then maybe the damn thing would get the idea and leave me alone. And then I heard the voices.

Not words, mind you. I didn’t hear real words, just two voices, one of them squeaky as a Munchkin, the other one a bit deeper, definitely slower—still shrill, mind you, but with an explaining sort of tone, like Tony whispering to Julian about what was happening in a movie. He was really patient with Julian that way, even in those days when he was calling him a boggart.

I swung around, but I couldn’t see anything. It was a small bathroom, no shower even, and no hiding place except in the shadows behind the old lion-foot tub. That’s where the voices were coming from.

I took just a step toward the tub, and I said, “Who are you?” And if that sounds brave or anything, you can hang that notion up right now. I wasn’t afraid of anyone who spoke in tiny squeaks and could hide behind a bathtub. What I was afraid of was that if I wasn’t really careful I was going to start understanding them, because I was almost making words out already. And that was the last thing I wanted, to understand squeaky voices behind the tub.

They went silent for a minute when I spoke, and then they started up again, both of them, sounding excited now. I could have screamed—I felt a scream working its way up through my chest—but that would have brought everybody in, and I didn’t want Sally to know I’d been digging at zits. Probably sounds incredibly dumb, but there you are, that was me. I took another couple of steps, and I stamped my foot down really hard, so my toothbrush rattled in the glass. “I can see you,” I said. “You might as well come out of there. Come on, I’m not going to hurt you.” I threw that in because my voice was shaky, and I didn’t want them to think I was scared.

What that got me was a flood of giggles. Not squeaks, not talk, and not real giggles, either. Nasty little titters, the kind you’re supposed to hear off to one side when you’re walking down the hall. I know those. In school I never let it get me, but then—in that old bathroom, in that strange, smelly old house, with them, whoever they were, spying on me picking my face, and snickering about it, I just lost it, that’s all. I ran at the tub, stamping and kicking out like Julian when Tony’d been teasing him one time too many. It’s a good thing there wasn’t anybody there, or I’d have trampled them flat, I didn’t care if they were Santa’s elves. But they were gone. I heard feet skittering off somewhere in a corner, but no voices, except for Sally in the hall, calling to know if I was all right. I said I was.

That night I lay awake for hours, wishing more than ever that Mister Cat was with me, snoring on my stomach, and I tried to stay cool and decide whether I was going crazy, which I’d always almost expected, or whether there really were boggarts running around in my bathroom. Crazy was comforting, in a way—if you’re crazy, then nothing’s your fault, which was just how I wanted to feel right then. Boggarts were scary, because if they were possible, and possible right here in this house, then all kinds of other stuff was possible, and most of it I didn’t much want to think about. But it was interesting, at least, and crazy isn’t interesting. Handy, I could see that, but not interesting.

When I did fall asleep, I didn’t dream about boggarts exactly. I dreamed that Julian and I had shrunk down to the size of boggarts, and that big people were chasing us with sticks. I don’t know why sticks, but that’s not important, that wasn’t the frightening part. There was something else in the dream, too, something or someone with big yellow eyes, such a raw, wild yellow they were practically golden. Big, big eyes, with a slitty sideways pupil, filling up the dream. We couldn’t get away from them until I woke, all tangled in my sweaty sheets and listening for voices. But I never did hear them again, not those.