More Cats in the Belfry (8 page)

  This is jumping ahead of events, however. For weeks before Mrs Richards moved in Miss Wellington was as consistent a visitor to the valley as Mrs Binney had been, lurking around like MI5 at dusk, marching through proprietorially during the day, picking up loose stones from the bridlepath on her way up to the cottage in case, she explained, she turned her ankles on them; and snapping off odd sticks and branches in the hedge on her way back in case, she said, they scratched her sister's car when she moved in. The stones she dumped on the grass verges of the lane which, as I owned the land on both sides of it, were mine, and I kept the grass on them cut down with the hover-mower and from then on was forever catching the blade on the stones with a horrible scraping noise and using language about Miss Wellington that would have shocked the Rector. The branches she tossed into the wood on her way back up the hill – always at the same spot. The wood, too, was mine and the collection was starting to look like the beginnings of a Guy Fawkes bonfire. I didn't like to say anything to her, but the air was rapidly becoming electric.

  There was also the question of the lawn at Poppy's cottage. It was June, and the grass was growing fast. Miss Wellington mowed her own small patch with a hand-mower but she couldn't possibly cut her sister's much larger lawn that way, so she engaged Ern Biggs to do it, thereby putting another foot firmly through the sacrosanct crust of village etiquette.

  Once upon a time Father Adams had been the village odd-jobber, but he was now too old and rheumaticky to do more than potter round his own garden. Fred Ferry regarded himself as the old boy's natural successor, but Fred, never seen without the mysterious knapsack over his shoulder, reputed to be given to overcharging mightily for any job he did, wasn't everybody's choice, and when Ern Biggs, who lived in the next village, was invited to do some gardening by a newcomer who'd met him in the Rose and Crown one day, and his reputation for doing a fair job at a passable rate got round, quite a few people – newcomers themselves, who didn t know about village etiquette – switched to him. Now he had become as familiar a sight around our village as if he belonged to it.

  Miss Wellington had always coped with her own small garden and its population of concrete gnomes and toadstools herself, and when it came to Poppy's property, if there was anybody she wasn't going to employ it was Fred Ferry. Not only did she disapprove of the implications of the knapsack and of his rolling home singing from the pub at night to his cottage practically opposite hers, but once, when there'd been a spate of break-ins in the village and Miss Wellington, scared of being burgled herself, had been seen bobbing about behind her hedge with a trilby hat on a stick – presumably to give would-be intruders the impression that there was a man about the place – Fred had seized the opportunity to start the story that she had a fancy man, and he knew who it was, and Miss Wellington had never forgiven him.

  To Fred it was all a joke. Starting rumours is a traditional country pastime and nobody took much notice of his fabrications. But when Miss Wellington, who'd lived in the village as long as anybody could remember (though she hadn't been born here: her family had been a county one, with a big house some miles away, but she and her mother had moved here when she was a young girl, after her father died) when
she
so far forgot village propriety as to employ Ern Biggs to do her sister's garden, things, in Fred Ferry's eyes, had gone beyond the pale.

  He went round looking daggers every time he saw her and gazing pointedly in the opposite direction when he passed Poppy's cottage. Ern hadn't helped matters by copying an idea he'd picked up at one of the big houses, where a contractor had put a board outside reading ALTERATIONS BY W. BROWN. Ern now carried a board which he put outside places where he was working which read GARDEN BY E. BIGGS and seeing it outside Poppy's place was like a red rag to a bull to Fred.

  Fate having its own idea of fun and games, the next thing was that Ern slipped one day while mowing the steep hillside lawn at Poppy's cottage, broke his ankle and was off work for several weeks. At that point Miss Wellington had no option but to humbly beg Ferry to take on the garden as there was no-one else and Fred accepted. The first thing he did on taking over was alter the wording on Ern's board so that it read GARDEN BY E. BIGGS PUT RIGHT BY F. FERRY. And Miss Wellington, unable to find anyone else to do the work had to put up with it. Father Adams likewise went on record as telling a visitor who looked over his wall, saw his rampant row of raspberries and asked whether he took orders, that he was British and didn't take orders from nobody, and so the summer moved on.

  With it progressed the catastrophe-filled kittenhood of Saphra, abetted by Tani. One of his earliest accomplishments was to break an old oil lamp with a blue glass bowl and engraved shade which I'd treasured for years. It was set, deliberately out of reach of the cats, high in an alcove at the back of the sitting-room. Saph was hiding in a newspaper tunnel on the carpet while I dangled a piece of string enticingly at the opening when Tani, to show she knew he was in there, jumped on the tunnel from behind with all her might. He exploded out of it like a snooker shot, straight across the room, up the wall and into the alcove. He stayed there with his fur on end, the lamp fell out and smashed, and all I got in reply to my anguished wail asking why he had to do that was an answering wail to the effect that he was more important than an Old Lamp, wasn't he, and Somebody had tried to Get Him. Tani had meanwhile vanished discreetly under the sofa.

  In the same week he got into the glass cupboard in the kitchen while my back was turned and broke two sherry glasses (I saw them sail horizontally out of the cupboard as if by magic) and the very next day, tore ahead of me down from the cat-house when I was bringing them in at feeding time, and round the corner into the kitchen, whence came the immediate sound of smashing china. When I panted through the door he was eating his chicken off the floor out of the remains of the broken dish.

  Next, having once more unthinkingly left their dishes on the cooker top while I fetched them in (it had never been necessary to take precautions before), I followed behind to find him standing up there bolting food out of one dish with his feet in the other while Tani bawled from below that she'd Smack Him if she was me: he didn't have any Idea of Manners.

  Then he rediscovered the fascination of water. I found this out one day when I wondered where he'd gone and did my usual panic patrol round the cottage, opening doors and looking in cupboards. Rushing through the kitchen for the umpteenth time I happened to glance at the sink and there he was, a small seal-masked figure like a furry highwayman, sitting in it absolutely entranced, watching the drips, completely oblivious of the fact that as they fell they bounced off his outsize ears. After that, when I followed Charles's practice of watering special plants in the garden with rainwater from one of the butts, he would rush after me when he saw me with the watering can and follow me round assiduously. Straight from the spout or falling gently through the rose, it was all the same to him so long as it was water and he was watching it.

  Out of doors, when he wasn't following the watering can he was usually on the heels of Tani, whose turn it now was to look fed up when he jumped over her, or pounced on her tail, or spoilt everything by poking an excited paw into a hole in the wall that she'd been sitting patiently in front of for ages. At least I knew where he was, though, when I saw the snake.

  Leaving them together in the long grass at the edge of the lawn one morning, I'd gone up to the area beyond the garage where Charles had been in the process of building another conservatory. It was roofed with perspex sheeting, and the stones he'd been using for building the walls were still heaped underneath; until I could get round to clearing it out I used it for dumping things under shelter and I'd gone up to fetch the hoe I'd left there the previous day. As I went in, wearing sandals on bare feet, avoiding the nettles that had grown up between the stones, I felt a sudden warmth against one ankle. Saphra rubbing against me, I thought. But no, I remembered. He was on the lawn. It was my imagination. I went on without looking down, picked up the hoe, turned to come out – and saw, where I must have brushed against it going in, a large coiled snake lying sunning itself on the ground. It wasn't an adder. It was too big and it hadn't the diamond markings – but if there is one thing I don't like it is snakes.

  Saphra! I thought in alarm. Any moment he might come whizzing round the corner and pounce on it, scenting a plaything. And supposing it
was
an adder. Their markings and colourings do vary. There are black adders up on the higher hills.

  I leapt high over the snake, still curled, apparently asleep, and ran down the path. All was well. Saph was still on the lawn with Tani, his small cream and brown figure sitting importantly upright alongside her elegant, slender ice-white one. I grabbed him, hurried him to their run, rushed back for Tani, thrust her in with him and fastened the door. I went back to check on the snake's markings, but it had disappeared. It hadn't been asleep. It had seized its opportunity to slip away into the stone-pile. It couldn't have been an adder, I told myself. But I'd keep a weather eye open all the same.

  It was July before I saw the next one, and despite my watchfulness it turned up in the cat-run itself. Jeanine McMullen, author of A
Small Country Living
and presenter of a country programme of the same name on the radio, had come to do an interview with me and we got on like a house on fire. Jeanine herself runs a small farm on the side of a remote Welsh mountain and is fond of cats, and we had much in common. We exchanged hints on looking after cottages, and Jeanine recorded stories about the animals Charles and I had had, and our life in the valley. We were standing in the garden at the end of the interview when, microphone in hand, she looked across at the cat-run and said, 'Do you think the cats would talk so I can record their voices?'

  Sure, I said. A reader from South Africa and her husband had brought some biltong as a present for them the previous week. Biltong, which is sun-dried deer meat, once formed the travelling rations of the South African pioneers; today it is sold there in small bags, like potato crisps, and eaten as a snack. The cats were mad about it. I'd only have to wave the bag in front of their run, I assured her and they'd be yelling their heads off.

  So I fetched it and crackled the bag at them, but they took no notice: simply sat there some way back from the wire netting front of the run, facing each other and concentrating on the ground between them. 'They've got something live in there,' I said. 'Probably a slow-worm. I'll go in and rescue it.'

  So, I unlatched the door and went in, but it wasn't the grey, metal-smooth skin of a sloworm that met my eyes. It was a brownish back with diamond markings, lying in a crack between the paving stones.

  'An adder!' I yelled, leaping into action. Tani was sitting back from it, keeping a wary distance, but Saphra was crouched within inches, one paw raised to hit it if it moved. I grabbed him, rushed to the cat-house at the other end of the run, threw him through the door and latched it. I ran back and grabbed Tani, intending to do the same with her. Jeanine was in the run herself by this time, intent on helping me. She'd field Saphra, make sure he didn't rush out when I put Tani in, she said. Only it didn't work like that. As I put Tani through the door, Saphra erupted through the cat-flap at the bottom of it like a circus rider coming through a hoop. Back to watch the adder he streaked, and I streaked after him, leaving Jeanine to stop Tani from getting out. I ran down to the cottage with him, put him in the kitchen and dashed back with a box which I up-ended over the adder, still down in the crack between the stones, while we got Tani down to the safety of the cottage too. It took some time because Tani, hiding behind one of the deck-chairs stacked in the cat-house, had to be hauled out, screeching up and down the scale like a banshee.

  Frightened by the adder? That was what I imagined, grabbing her by the scruff and rushing her down the path still wailing like a set of demented bagpipes. Jeanine and I then went back to deal with the adder, but when we picked up the box it had gone. Out through the wire netting into the long grass behind the run, we decided, and it wasn't likely to come back. Tani's howling had been enough to frighten off an elephant. When we went back to the cottage, however, to make some coffee to restore our nerves, and Tani started up again, we realised it wasn't the adder she was protesting about. It was Jeanine. A stranger who'd had the temerity to intrude into Tani's Very Own Cat-house: her Refuge when Danger Threatened. And had it threatened! Tani bawled balefully from under the sofa. If she hadn't done her Defensive Call the kidnappers would have Got Her.

  It was at that point that Jeanine realised that her microphone, attached to her belt, was still switched on. The entire incident had been recorded. Tani's screaming opened and closed one episode of 'A Small Country Living', while the recording of our rescuing the cats formed part of it. People listening to it probably thought she was warning off the adder. What she was really doing was warning off Jeanine.

  That wasn't the end of it, either. After Jeanine had gone I cut down the long grass behind the cat-run and laced a foot-deep length of heavy polythene right round the wire netting to stop the adder coming back again, though after Tani's performance it was probably in a hole somewhere having a nervous breakdown. Later events were to show how wrong I was.

  For days I kept constant watch over the cats, going up regularly to check that they were all right in their run and listening, when I wasn't near them, to be sure nobody was screeching a warning. Thus, a week or so later, I came to be on the other side of the cottage from the cat-run, chopping down brambles in the lilac hedge that bordered the lane and stopping every now and then, as I couldn't see the run from that point, to listen to make sure all was well.