Cats in May (10 page)

We got the brigade that time. All it was was soot—caught by burning paper—smouldering on a ledge halfway up the chimney, and all they did, after checking it with a mirror, was brush it off with special brushes and hose it down. After a cup of tea, and comforting us with the information that in about five years the ledge would build up and probably catch on fire again but not to worry, just ring the old Brigade, they went. Leaving us, if you counted ten and took a broad, calm, practical view of things with hardly any more mess than when Charles and Father Adams did it the first time. As Charles said, at least we knew it was well swept.

It was wonderful, after all that, to be driving down to the cattery next day to collect the cats. Good old English
air, said Charles, taking deep breaths of it as we went along. Good old Sol and Sheba. Didn’t it seem marvellous to be fetching them home again?

It certainly did. Always, when we were going on holiday, we spent the last few days beforehand saying if we had to put up with them a moment longer we’d go clean round the bend. Always, when we drove down to Halstock with Solomon howling sorrowfully in his basket and Sheba apparently reciting poetry in hers, we said if we had to listen to them for another mile we’d go mad. And always, the moment we got back to the empty cottage and saw the poignant little reminders of their life with us, we felt unaccountably sad.

There were so many little reminders. The marks on the sitting-room wall, for instance—juicy and slightly spattered—where Solomon caught gnats on summer evenings. Similar marks in the spare room where Sheba, not to be outdone, sat on top of the door and slapped her lot to death on the ceiling. The staircarpet—new last year, but you’d never have thought it; not after four happy little pairs of feet had given it an all-over mohair effect and in one spot, on the top tread, two happy little pairs of feet (Solomon’s) had ripped a hole clean
through to the underfelt. The bath, which if it were cleaned ten times a day (and sometimes it very nearly was) could still be depended on to have a trail of footprints wandering nonchalantly round the edge and at the bottom resemble nothing so much as an elephants’ water-hole …

By the time I’d done a tour of remembrance, emptied their deserted earth boxes and put away their feeding bowls, I was practically in tears. By the time we were actually on holiday, with distance lending enchantment as, oddly enough, it always does with Siamese cats, we saw them as perfect little angels. We could hardly wait to get news of them—to make sure they hadn’t pined or caught chills or died of sorrow. Which, since we never booked our hotels in advance and the people who kept the cattery had to write to us Poste Restante, added a few more complications to life.

Whatever else we miss when we go abroad, we certainly know the Post Offices. There is one in Florence, under an old grey arcade, which we haunted so persistently I swear they took Charles for Dante’s ghost. There is one in Heidelberg where, when the
polite young man said
‘Nein’
, we went down to the river—Solomon and Sheba were five months old then and we were sure they’d died of broken hearts—and mentally threw ourselves in. There is one in Paris which smells—or it did when we were there last—distinctly of overripe cheese. Where, holding handkerchiefs to our noses, we argued for days that there must be a letter for us, and when it did arrive the clerk was so relieved he shook hands with us under the grille …

The message, of course, when it did find its way to us, was always the same. ‘S. and S. well, eating like horses and not missing you a bit.’ After which, feeling as if Mafeking had been relieved, we went and had a drink.

It
was
nice coming back to the cats. Even when we turned in at the gate of the cattery and heard two familiar voices busily bellowing the place down we didn’t flinch. Even when we saw they weren’t the homesick little creatures we had envisaged—when Solomon stalked the length of their run to inform the Siamese in the next chalet that if he said
that
again he’d dot him
one, and Sheba lay happily in Mrs Francis’s arms informing us she was staying on here because she liked the food—we were still glad to see them.

What with the fire, all the sun we’d been having and this absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder business, we were in fact in that bemused state of mind in which people
buy
Siamese cats. If anyone doubts that there is such a state I can only quote the case of someone I knew—in her fifties, she was; an old maid living alone whose only interest was taking care of herself. She went to bed every night at half-past eight even when she had visitors (if they overstayed she politely sent them home). She rested for an hour after lunch with her feet up and a bandage over her eyes to keep out the light. And her house was so spick-and-span that every ornament in the place had a little felt mat under it, cut exactly to shape, to prevent it marking the furniture.

If she wasn’t bemused when she bought a Siamese, I don’t know who was. Something came over her, she said, when she saw his little black face mewing pathetically at her through a pet-shop window. Actually he
wasn’t mewing but bawling away like a town crier, as she realised when she went into the shop and got on the same side of the glass. Something had certainly come over her, though. She bought him just the same. She doesn’t go to bed at half-past eight now; she’s still trying to get Lancelot in off the tiles at ten. She doesn’t rest after lunch—she can’t, she says, for worrying what Lancelot is up to. She doesn’t have little felt mats under her ornaments any more; she hasn’t got any ornaments. What she has got is Lancelot. And—though admittedly she worships the ground he strolls on—she still doesn’t know how it happened.

If that could happen to her, you can imagine how we were affected when, going into the Francises’ kitchen for coffee that night before our journey back, we were confronted by an entire family of Siamese kittens.

Entrancing it was, to people who either didn’t know Siamese or—like us—were still suffering from the Spanish sun. Kittens dangling from the door handles. Kittens diving off the stove. One sitting thinking by a saucepan and another blissfully asleep in a little doorway cut in the cupboard under the sink.

That, explained Mrs Francis, hauling him out while two more who had been queuing outside dashed precipitately in, was the way into their earth box and he wasn’t asleep at all, he was doing it purposely. That, she said, as there was a resounding crash from upstairs followed by the sound of a wardrobe apparently being trundled across the room and pushed through a window, was another lot playing with a rabbit foot. Locked in her office, as they were a slightly older family, to prevent them from murdering this set.

If there was a sort of despairing note in her voice just then we never noticed it. We were too busy dreaming a happy dream of one of those dear little kittens installed in our own cottage. Not for our own sakes, of course, but for Solomon and Sheba.

Give them a kitten, we said enthusiastically as we drove home in the car that night, and it might reform them on the spot. Give them something to think about—to protect and cherish and play with—and it might be the making of them. Maybe, said Charles—choking slightly as Solomon, finding a fresh hole in the basket, thrust his paw through it, hooked Charles
expertly in the hood of his duffel coat and pulled—it would even cure Solomon of
this
.

It was unfortunate that in the course of conversation the Francises had mentioned that all their kittens were booked. If they hadn’t, when by the following weekend we had decided quite definitely to adopt another kitten, we should have gone to them for one. They knew a lot about Siamese psychology, and they also knew Solomon and Sheba. They could have told us it wouldn’t work. That an orang-utan was about the only animal we could put with those two, for instance, and expect it to survive. Or, as Charles said on Sunday night in a mood of deep despair, suggested that we had our heads read.

As it was, hardly able to wait to have a dear little kitten around the place again, we got one from another breeder. From a very nice lady who said his name was Samson and wouldn’t that be
sweet
with Solomon and Sheba, and who asked, as we packed him into Sheba’s basket (which was the only intact one we had) if we would mind taking him to bed with us for the first night or two. In case, she said, blinking back a tear at
the thought of parting with him, to begin with he felt lonely.

She wouldn’t have worried about that if she’d seen the reception our two gave him when we took him in. Asleep they were. Curled affectionately together in a chair before the fire. With, as we entered, two heads—one big, beautiful and black; one small, intelligent and blue—coming up in a loving, cheek-to-cheek pose that a photographer would have given his pension for. She wouldn’t have worried if she’d seen the way the next moment, with an incredulous sniffing of the air, they were on their stomachs, ears flat, whiskers bushed, fighting ridges raised on their backs—creeping across the carpet like a pair of special agents.

She wouldn’t have worried either—not about where he slept, anyway—if she’d witnessed the spectacular scene when they reached the basket. When they crouched down one at each end like a pair of snipers and hissed long, warning hisses through the air holes—while Samson, the moment the lid was raised, gave one despairing hiss back and leapt straight into the air.

As Charles said, standing on a chair and trying desperately to unhook him from the curtain rail while our
two informed him from below that if he dared set foot on
their
carpet, in
their
house—in
their
valley, roared Solomon, his tail lashing from side to side like a whip—they’d eat him. As Charles said, she’d have had a fit.

Nine
The Great Siamese Revolution

Samson at first sight reminded us very much of Solomon. He had the same big ears, the same big feet, and the same aggravating swagger when he walked. He had the same old bounce too. Our initial glimpse of him, when the breeder opened the door to us that wet September night, had been a small white streak hurtling across the hall, passing us like a petrol advertisement a clear foot off the ground, and disappearing with a roar into the darkness.

That, said the breeder, while five other kittens peered suspiciously at us from behind her ankles, was Samson showing off. He’d be back as soon as she closed the door, she said. He didn’t like the dark. And sure enough—Solomon all over, said Charles emphatically when he heard it, and we weren’t having that one—as soon as the door was shut there was an ear-splitting wail from outside and Samson, screaming the place down to keep off the spooks, had to be let in again.

Samson, after that scare, had to use his box. Not with reticence, like a normal kitten, but importantly, to show what a narrow escape he’d had. Samson after that again—obviously he was already used to visitors—had to climb the ironing board. It was behind a heavy curtain in an old strange house, and when he reached the top and without warning a curtain-clad object swayed out into the room—and, as he changed position, swayed silently back again—there was no need for his owner to tell us not to laugh. We turned quite pale on the spot.

Samson was so like Solomon that we wouldn’t have had him at all except for one thing. We wanted a tom—
and he was the only tom of the lot. We wanted a tom so that when he grew up he would, we hoped, be able to stand up to Solomon on an equal footing. Most important of all, we wanted a tom so that Solomon wouldn’t get ideas. Adopt another she-kitten—give old Podgebelly the idea he had a harem—and, as Charles said, even if he couldn’t do much about it, he’d never stop showing off. On his back with one each side washing him—that would have been Solomon. Head on one and feet on another when he slept. Knocking ’em down like ninepins when he felt like it—the way he knocked Sheba down now, only more so on account of the effect.

So we had Samson—and it was just as well we did. If a she-kitten had had to endure the treatment Samson suffered in the days that followed, I doubt if she’d have survived at all.

Sometimes I wonder how I survived myself. The first night, remembering our promise, we took Samson to bed with us, and while he spent all night on guard on the tallboy—hiccuping at intervals because they’d frightened him at suppertime into swallowing a piece of rabbit whole—the other two howled like timber
wolves under the spare-room door. The second night, to even things up a bit, we shut Samson in the sitting room with a hot-water bottle and took them to bed with us—but that didn’t work either.