A Comfort of Cats

Praise for
Cats in the Belfry

'The most enchanting cat book ever'

'If you read
Cats in the Belfry
the first time round, be prepared to be enchanted all over again. If you haven't, then expect to laugh out loud, shed a few tears and be totally captivated by Doreen's stories of her playful and often naughty Siamese cats'

'A funny and poignant reflection of life with a Siamese, that is full of cheer'

Praise for
Cats in May

'If you loved Doreen Tovey's
Cats in the Belfry
you won't want to miss the sequel,
Cats in May
… This witty and stylish tale will have animal lovers giggling to the very last page'

Praise for
The New Boy

'Delightful stories of Tovey's irrepressible Siamese cats'

A COMFORT OF CATS

First published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1980

This edition published in 2008 by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.

Copyright © Doreen Tovey 1980.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.

The right of Doreen Tovey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Condition of Sale

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK

ISBN: 978-0-85765-956-9

Also by Doreen Tovey

T
here was a time when the sitting-room of our small West Country cottage would have done credit to a Christmas card with its white walls, dark-beamed ceiling, wine-coloured carpet, chairs covered in pale green rose-patterned linen and here and there a cherished piece of family china or glass – but that was before we had Siamese cats.

  The Copeland cabbage-leaf bowl belonging to Charles's grandmother which stood in one of the wide-silled windows, for instance... that departed from the family inheritance when our first Siamese, Sugieh, had kittens and some friends whom we invited to see them brought their own Siamese, James, along as well.

  Until then Sugieh and James had been the best of friends. She'd stayed with him as a kitten herself, while we were on holiday, and with the air of an indulgent elder brother he'd taught her to dig holes in the garden (she'd previously thought you went indoors to your earthbox for that); how to climb trees (within no time she was zooming up and down like a particularly ebullient piece of thistledown while he was hopelessly stuck); how to add a touch of Siamese variety to the everyday things of life... To quote one example the pair of them chose, entirely of their own accord, to sleep together in the cabinet of a record-player whose works had gone for repair. It was in the dining-room and according to James's owners the effect when people came to supper and two Siamese heads suddenly appeared through the hole where the turntable should have been – one big, dark and gravely contemplative, the other small, blue and spectacularly cross-eyed – was quite demoralising. More than one guest missed aim with his soup spoon as a result.

  They thought Sugieh would be pleased to see James when they brought him over to our place, and when she met him in the garden she was. It was only when they came indoors and Solomon, biggest and most bat-brained of her kittens, spat at him saying to Watch Out Everybody, he'd come to Kidnap Them, that the balloon went up. By the time it came down again Sugieh, in her role of devoted mother, had bitten James: somebody had bitten James's mistress... in the explosive battle-of-the-planets action that followed we were never quite sure who, though we rather believed it to be Sugieh as well since James appeared to be far too busy trying to escape up the curtains... and the Copeland bowl was in pieces on the floor.

  That was the first of our treasures to hit the dust. A Bristol glass jug and the porcelain figure of a Breton spinning-woman that stood on the bureau went next, during the course of the round-the-room steeplechases devised by Sugieh for the indoor exercise of her children. That she was behind the idea was obvious from the fact that whenever, hearing what sounded like the beginning of a cavalry charge, we came running to see what we could rescue, Sugieh would be standing on the corner of the Welsh dresser, head stuck out like a swimming instructor, inciting them in her raucous Siamese soprano to Go Faster, they'd never catch a mouse at That Speed, or to Jump the Table Lamp, never mind if they knocked it off, old Charles could Always Mend It.

  He couldn't mend the jug. It was shattered beyond repair. He did mend the Breton spinning-woman, whose only damage was that her head had come off. The snag was, though, that she sat posed with her tall, top-heavy Breton headdress bent attentively over her spindle. The repair held all right in normal weather but when it rained or we got hill-mist, as we do so often in the West Country, the glue would soften (this was before the days of waterproof resins) and her head, being heavy, would fall off.

  We got quite used to sticking it on again and really thought nothing of it. Came the day, however, when we acquired a household help. I was doing a full-time job at that time and having somebody to clean the place was wonderful. The floors shone, the brass gleamed, the tidiness was a joy to come home to. Unfortunately, after only a few weeks of lifting up our hearts, Mrs Pearson said she didn't like being on her own in the cottage. She was used to having somebody to talk to, she said, and when I asked whether she didn't find the cats company – Solomon in particular talked a lot – she said that was part of the trouble. She'd be working away listening to the silence, there'd suddenly be this awful yell – and when her heart stopped racing enough for her to turn round, he'd be sitting in the doorway
looking
at her.

  Solomon did tend to watch people. Knowing his concern for his stomach he was probably only making sure they weren't eating something behind his back but I appreciated that to an outsider the sight of a Siamese sitting bolt upright in a doorway that had been empty a moment before, looking like a feline Fu Manchu-cum-Judge Jeffreys, and Little Did They Know, said his expression, what he'd seen them Doing before they spotted him... I quite
appreciated
that it put one off a bit.

  I explained that he liked watching people and his wail was only by way of conversation – he was probably enquiring what was for supper and did she have an odd biscuit on her. It was no use. The following week the Breton woman's head fell off while Mrs Pearson was on the other side of the room dusting the mantelpiece, and while she was standing there rooted to the spot thinking the spirits must have done it (it seemed she hadn't realised that the head was stuck on and I'd never thought to tell her) from the doorway, to add to the effect, came that straight-from-the-graveyard wail...

  As usual she'd gone before we got home but that night she came back to see us. She knew we wouldn't believe her, she said. We'd think
she'd
broken the ornament. It wasn't because of that, though, that she was giving us her notice. When it came to our having ghosts as well as Siamese cats...

  In vain we plied her with sherry and explained about the figure being broken already. Her nerves wouldn't stand any more, she said. She was going to work at the mushroom farm.

  She did too, joining the happy band of local ladies who were picked up by private bus on the green in the morning and wafted off to a village three miles away where, cutting mushrooms to music in long rows of steaming sheds, they could talk to one another all day, with no ghosts, Siamese cats or other people's muddles to dismay them and, feeling as liberated and avant-garde as their town sisters, bowled back in the afternoon several pounds better off with a bag of mushrooms for their husbands' teas. It thus being impossible to get a replacement for her –
everybody
worked at the mushroom farm – I went back to doing the housework myself and the state of the cottage slipped steadily downhill.

  Solomon ripped a hole through the staircarpet. Working industriously away in the hall Sheba, his sister (we kept the two of them after Sugieh died), converted an entire hide armchair to suede. The pair of them swung like cuckoo-clock pendulums on the curtains and chased over the pale green covers in the sitting-room till they were more of an elephant grey...

  I washed the covers, of course. I was eternally washing them, much to Solomon's approval. With every wash they shrank still further and as he was now banned from the hall (we'd had to replace the staircarpet and were trying to keep him away from it) he'd transferred his exercises to the chairs instead and the tighter the covers fitted, the better.

  When he'd reduced them to the state where even Charles noticed they had holes in them we replaced them with heavy-quality stretch nylon. Easier to wash – but the cats' claws didn't, as the salesman assured us they would, slide over them. They latched into them like fish-hooks and within weeks we had laddered stretch astrakhan. What did we do, therefore, when at fourteen and a half our dark man died of kidney trouble, leaving us with an ache in our hearts and the stuffing hanging out of the lounge suite? We decided to get another boy as much like Solomon as we could.

  Siamese have that effect on people. Noisy, destructive, imperious to the point of autocracy – one look from those compelling blue eyes and they have you in bondage for life. I wouldn't put it past them to have decided to have eyes like that deliberately – to set them apart from other cats and stop people in their tracks. Add to the eyes the Oriental mask, those long thin legs, that tail like a taper, the voice like a rusty saw, the air of aristocracy... the knowledge that, despite such innate superiority, Solomon had loved us with all his heart, as dearly as we loved him...