Cats in May (13 page)

Eleven
Solomon’s Friend Timothy

The next thing that happened to us was Timothy. The boy with the catapult. One morning he broke our kitchen window with a deft shot round the coal-house and while he was still gazing admiringly at the hole Charles nipped out of the back gate and grabbed him. We had been wondering for days who he belonged to. Now, when we marched him off, cowboy hat and all, to try and find who owned him, nobody was more surprised than we were when he suddenly fled howling up Father Adams’s path.

He was, it seemed, the Adamses’ grandson, and he was staying with them to give his mother a rest. The reason we hadn’t found it out before was that we personally had been busy with our own problems over the cats; in the winter we only saw Father Adams (to talk to, anyway) at weekends; and Father Adams, when we said fancy our not knowing about a thing like that, said he believed in keeping his troubles to himself.

That I remembered as one of Grandma’s favourite opening remarks too—and sure enough, next moment we were hearing the lot. The things Timothy had done at home—the last of which, nearly prostrating his mother for good and all, had been to swallow the axle off a toy motorcar. It wasn’t that so much that upset her, explained Father Adams—though she did faint off a couple of times when she thought of it going round in Timothy’s stomach. It was the fact that when the doctors got him to hospital and had him X-rayed they couldn’t find it.

They said he hadn’t swallowed it. He said he had. His mother, beside herself with worry, was expecting it to puncture his vitals at any moment. When, following a hunch, a doctor and nurse accompanied them home
and said now what about the little man showing them where it was—and he, bright as a button, produced it from the table drawer—she practically had hysterics. Why, she wept, before fainting off for the third time, had he told her he’d swallowed it? Laughing happily at his little joke on Mum, he said he had. And then he’d sicked it up.

How, in face of Timothy’s record, we came to ask him to tea with us I haven’t a clue. He’d not only broken our window. To date, while under the guardianship of Father Adams, he’d eaten the bus tickets on a trip to town and caused trouble with the inspector, broken the window of the Rose and Crown (also with his catapult; he said his granfer was inside and he wanted to speak to him, which we thought showed initiative but apparently the landlord didn’t), and painted the Ferrys’ gateposts a bright Post Office red.

The trouble there was that Fred Ferry had only recently done them pea-green. He came up the lane raving about Timothy ruining his brand-new paint with that rotten muck; Father Adams—who happened to be rather fond of red and the paint Timothy had used was in fact some left over from his own front door—took
offence and offered to punch him on the nose; Fred Ferry, in typical village fashion, had now taken out a summons against him—and if he got away with it under a fiver, said Father Adams, clapping his hat despondently over his eyes at the very thought, he’d be another ruddy Dutchman.

Maybe we’d been reading the church magazine and had our haloes on just then, but ask Timothy to tea we did. Turning the other cheek and hoping, perhaps—ignoring the job we’d so far made of Solomon and Sheba—to reform him.

I regret to say that didn’t work either. He drank his tea—when he didn’t spill it on the carpet—with noises reminiscent of a blocked drain. The cats were absolutely
fascinated
. He ate his bread and butter with both hands, gazing stolidly at us over the top of it as if it were some sort of earthwork. In spite of our attempts at conversation he said absolutely nothing. When he had finished, in reply to our query as to what he’d like to do now, he marched over to the window, picked up an ashtray, gave it a couple of taps to get its surroundings, and smashed it carefully on the sill. After that he went home—during which process Charles, hastening to
open the door for him, accidentally stepped on another ashtray which we’d put on the floor for safety. Only at the door did Timothy speak. ‘The man broke he,’ he announced with satisfaction.

The next move amazes me to this day. The following morning Timothy came down, swung silently on our gate for a while and then, when he found I was taking no notice of him after his behaviour at tea, took a pot-shot at Solomon who was digging in the garden. He missed him. Not that that influenced me. Livid with anger, completely forgetting the church magazine, I flew out intending to give him the tanning of his life. But when I reached the gate Timothy was still standing there gazing at Solomon in complete astonishment.

‘He spoke to I,’ he said, quite forgetting to run in his amazement. He had indeed. As the stone whizzed past his ear, just when he was a sitting duck, Solomon had given a loud, indignant bellow. What intrigued Timothy wasn’t so much his speaking—he’d been living with Mimi for a fortnight now and was used to Siamese rumination by this time. It was that he had such a deep bass voice. Why, Timothy wanted to know, was his voice different from Mimi’s? Because he was a boy of
course, I said. How did I know he was a boy? asked Timothy, his interest growing with every second. I had to think jolly fast about that one. Because of his voice, I said.

If anyone had said that a cat could solve the problem of Timothy I would never have believed them. Certainly not Solomon, who for four years now had been a full-time problem himself. But he did. Timothy—who had no animals at all in his home in town and didn’t, it seemed, think much of girl cats like Mimi—was absolutely entranced at the thought of Solomon being a boy. Solomon in turn, having graciously forgiven Timothy for the stone, thought he was pretty good too. From then on we had a mutual-admiration society around the place that nothing could shake.

In some ways it was very useful. Ever since he was a kitten one of our biggest nightmares, when we had to go to town, had been to get Solomon in beforehand. Sheba’s treks to the strawberry patch had turned out to be a passing phase and, in true Siamese fashion, had indeed stopped completely as soon as the strawberry season was over and the old man didn’t get mad with her any more.

Solomon, however—at any given time and particularly if we had a train to catch—could be practically depended on to be missing. Asleep in a field if it was warm; sheltering in somebody’s coalhouse if it was wet (or, which was equally possible, sitting in the rain watching somebody’s ducks); and if it was just ordinary, anywhere from visiting the Rector to beating it rapidly up the valley.

When I called him he came eventually. With Solomon, however, eventually could be anything from five minutes for a final sniff at a daisy to two hours during which I tore madly round the lanes in town clothes and gumboots wondering if my job was still open. It was wonderful, after the advent of Timothy, to be able either to open the door and spot them at once or else—if it was early and Timothy wasn’t around yet—to call him out, get him to do his two-fingered whistle, and watch while Solomon, with his latest Trigger-friend-of-Man expression on his face, appeared at the speed of Alice’s Cheshire.

It cost us a considerable amount in chocolate. Timothy, reformed or not, wasn’t the boy to do things for love alone. At times, with the church magazine far behind us,
we even had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t so much a case of Solomon vanishing and Timothy finding him but of Solomon staying where he was told while Timothy collected the reward.

There was also a slight disadvantage in that Timothy now insisted on coming with us on walks. We and the cats were bad enough. We, the cats, and a small boy in a cowboy hat who every now and then gave an ear-splitting whistle—whereupon one large Seal Point bounced excitedly to heel and one small Blue Point immediately sat down and said she wasn’t coming any further—were slightly outré even for our village.

We couldn’t have everything, however. And at least Timothy had put away his catapult and was taking an interest in nature. He took such an interest in it that eventually Charles, after a particularly embarrassing conversation about cows right outside the Rector’s gate, refused to come with us any more. I was better suited to deal with such questions than he was, he said. So he and Sheba, cowards that they were, stayed at home working on the kitchen. Which was why, the day we saw the rabbit, Timothy, Solomon, and I were on our own.

It was frightfully exciting for us naturalists. I hadn’t seen a rabbit since myxomatosis. Solomon had never seen one at all and immediately went up a tree in case it was a wolf. Timothy, who had heard about them but had never seen one in his life either, wanted to know all about it. An excellent little lecture I gave on rabbits and their habits. At the end of which Timothy announced that he wanted to spend a penny.

Chastened—for it seemed he hadn’t been listening at all—but thankful nevertheless that for once we were in the woods and not where he usually felt like it, which was bang in the middle of the village, I discreetly turned my back. There was a slight pause. ‘Going now,’ said Timothy, quite unnecessarily. ‘Down a rabbit hole,’ he announced a moment later. And then—to Solomon, loudly, and obviously pondering my story after all—‘Rabbits’ll think it’s raining, won’t they?’ he said solemnly.

They made admirable foils for each other, Timothy and Solomon. One moment so wistful—like the time Timothy, gazing round-eyed up at the craggy hill behind us, said if they fell off there they’d be dead wouldn’t they and go to heaven, and never eat any tea
again ever ’cos they’d only be bones—whereupon I blew my nose hastily and the Rector’s wife went straight out and bought him three boxes of caps for his pistol. The next so aggravating—like the time I found him standing on his head on our stairs, walking complicatedly up and down the wall in his gumboots while Solomon sat proudly by like a ringmaster—I could have spanked the pair of them.

Everybody admired the picture they made together. Everybody, that is, except Sheba, who went round them in a wide semicircle when she met them in the lane, assured everybody she met that she didn’t know them at all, and forecast darkly to us when she came in that before long Solomon would be using a catapult too and the pair of them would end up behind bars. Everybody—even Father Adams—said how it had improved Timothy. Darn he if he wouldn’t get ’un a kitten for hisself when he went home, he said—whereupon Sheba squawked her approval and immediately offered him Sol.

What was worrying us was how Solomon would react when Timothy did go back to town. Animals, they say, form strange attachments for children. Only
recently we had heard of a Siamese called Augustus who had been an absolute terror in his original home. Shouting, stealing, fighting cats and intimidating dogs—in the end they’d had to practically give him away to get him adopted at all. In his new home, however, they had a little girl, with whom Augustus had fallen in love so completely that when she went into hospital to have her tonsils out it wasn’t she her parents worried about but Augustus, who went into a decline on her bed, said his heart was broken, refused to get up or eat, and pretty nearly died. In the end, for his sake, they had to get her home from hospital at the first possible moment and let her convalesce in bed—where, we gathered, she and Augustus ate ice cream and arrowroot together, eventually got up together, and when last heard of were living very happily indeed.

It wouldn’t be like that for Solomon. Even if Father Adams’s summons went off all right Timothy wouldn’t be back at least until the spring. How, we wondered, would our black man manage when he went away?

As it happened, very well indeed. Solomon did wait by the gate for him the first morning—until he spotted me in the greenhouse trying to let out a blue tit which
had flown in and was trapped. He soon forgot Timothy in the excitement of trying to help me catch it—and of being bundled, yelling his head off, indoors, where he sat in the window roaring furiously about not being allowed to be a Sportsman.

I thought he looked pathetic the next morning, too, hunched motionless on the garden wall with Sheba—out of sympathy I supposed, since even she must have a heart somewhere—sitting silently beside him. I even went up to comfort him. It was quite needless. Absolutely entranced, they were watching a litter of piglets which had just arrived in the next field. Solomon turned his head to greet me as I went up. I knew the great big pig that lived at the farm, he said excitedly, his eyes as round as bottle tops. WELL. She’d just had kittens!