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 not 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.