A Comfort of Cats (13 page)

  I imagined them prowling round the caravan looking up at the rooflight. We must remember to keep that closed. I visualised Sass at work on the store cupboard when we were out. Sass has paws like jemmies. Any door that has a push-catch he can open within minutes. Leaving him for hours with a food cupboard didn't bear thinking about. Neither did the problem of his earthbox. Where were we going to keep it? There was a lavatory compartment in the caravan but I couldn't see him using it in there. His oracle would probably decide it had to be on Charles's bed and we'd have another clash of temperaments.

  We hauled the caravan out of its shed into Annabel's new field so that we could get it ready for the road. We quite often put Annabel in there to graze as well, on a tether as we hadn't yet done the fencing. Inevitably the rumour went round the village that we were going to use Annabel to pull it. Equally inevitably we had to reassure Miss Wellington that nothing was further from our thoughts and in any case it had to be towed by a
car
. Sometimes, said Charles... just sometimes... it would be nice if people got things straight. Meanwhile we were gathering information about other people holidaying with cats.

  There was the man, for instance, who came past one afternoon while I was cleaning the caravan windows. (Charles had replaced the broken one and made a perfect job of it.) Was I the one who kept the Siamese? he asked. I said with feeling that I was. Did I take them with us in the caravan? He imagined that it was ours... We'd bought it to take them with us, I said, but I was just realising the snags. Snags? he said. There weren't any. They always took their Siamese with them.

  All I can say is, there are cats and cats and anyway he had only one. I listened fascinated while he told the tale of how a balanced Siamese behaves. Ching, he said, was used to a collar and lead. (So were ours, I nodded.) For his sake they didn't tour around with the van – they took it somewhere and left it in one place. For a couple of days they exercised him around the caravan field on his lead, releasing him to run ahead of them as they neared the van. When he knew exactly where it was and raced to sit outside the door, they could then let him out for exercise on his own, knowing that he'd always come back.

  They'd never had to look for him? I asked. He said Ching was too fond of his food. (So were our two. So Seeley had been. But I'd never trust to that again.) What about when they went out? I enquired. Oh, Ching stayed in the caravan and slept. They left the windows slightly open, of course, in case it should get too hot... (I thought of Sass and his jemmy paws and likewise wrote off that one.)

  Earthbox? Outside under the caravan. Ching was accustomed to using the garden. At night they put a box in the lavatory compartment but he never got up to use it. Where did he sleep? In the wardrobe. He liked to lie on in the morning and that way they didn't disturb him when they got up and dismantled the bed. He was sure, said the man, that we'd find it easy to cope and that the cats would enjoy coming with us. I bet they would. Whether we could cope was a different matter. My doubts loomed larger and larger...

  We had two other testimonials in favour of taking them. One was from a schoolteacher who wrote saying that for years she'd taken her Siamese to Scotland in a motor caravan. The cat got really excited when the van was being packed and tore up and down the stairs. She used to take her climbing in a rucksack until Jan (the cat) became too heavy. She'd now retired and was about to move to Scotland – presumably because Jan enjoyed it.

  The other testimonial we were given first-hand when a motor caravan parked outside the cottage one Saturday afternoon. A girl got out and went round the back – to get her walking boots, I presumed. I was cutting the grass (the mower, touch wood, was going well) and prepared to ask my usual question. Was she likely to be long? If so, would she like to park behind our coal-house because where she was, nobody else could get by. Undoubtedly we live in what looks like an outpost of civilisation but we do have neighbours along a couple of tracks. One of them, a fiery Scot, was in the habit of letting the air out of the obstructer's tyres and then going home leaving his own car behind the first one. The times we'd soothed people, helped them blow up their tyres and rung Angus to come and let them out – his car now blocked theirs, which proved
we
hadn't done it, but it hardly made for a peaceful life.

  'Are you...?' I began to say to the girl, then stood there open-mouthed. Many people who have read about the cats and Annabel come to see us, but it was the first time one had brought her Siamese!

  We couldn't invite her to bring him in. Our two were already looking at him out of the window. Sass with interest, Shebalu with her ears flattened and her tail up. Her tail up... Oh crumbs, no! I thought in despair. I visualised her marching over to the earthbox, standing up when she thought of the Cheek of It, my not being there to sit her down... Oh well, I thought, smiling brightly, preparing to greet my visitor as a grateful author should.

  After we'd chatted for a while and she'd seen our two through the window she asked if she could exercise Simba up on the hill. Of course, I said, but if she'd excuse me I'd better go in. Our two would be getting awfully jealous.

  They already were. Shebalu was on the piano, swearing horribly with her eyes crossed. Sass had his tail bushed. It only bushes above the bent bit and looks all the more fearsome for that. I was still soothing them down when the girl returned, put Simba in the van and drove off. We'd already said goodbye so there was no need for me to go out. Which was why, seeing a stranger putting a Blue Point Siamese into a van right outside our cottage with neither Charles nor I in sight, Tim Bannett thought it was somebody kidnapping Shebalu and was hammering on our door within seconds.

  He'd spotted the incident as he was coming down from his field and had scratched the number of the van in the dust. Pretty smart thinking. Had it really been Shebalu we'd have got her before she left the county. If only Tim had been around the morning that Seeley went out... As it was, Charles came up with a new hazard. Supposing somebody fancied them if we left them in the caravan in a camping field and forced the door and carried them off?

  You'd think, from the complexities we thought up, that they were a pair of priceless diamonds. To us, of course, they were, added to which there was always the thought of Seeley, which made us so much more wary than most. I remembered a story Pauline Furber told me when I'd rung her to ask about having a kitten. She'd quoted it to reassure me that lost cats often do get found – that while she thought Sass was made to measure for us, Seeley might still come back.

  It seemed that some people from Manchester took their Siamese queen to a caravan site near Weymouth and halfway through the fortnight she disappeared. They searched for her, put up notices in the local shops, extended their holiday – but in the end they'd had to go home, asking the site-owner to contact them if there was any news, though by then they had little hope. The season ended, the winter passed – it was the bad winter of 1967. Even in Dorset the conditions were arctic. There was no hope at all now, thought her owners.

  It was nearly a year later that Pauline's mother-in-law, who lived near the site, saw a slender tail and black-stockinged legs going past her sitting-room door. Food had been vanishing from her kitchen for some time, though she had never previously managed to spot the culprit. She called her son. They went to the door and peered round the corner. It was a Siamese all right. Thin but fit-looking, with a coat that had thickened like a bear's – proof that it had lived out all the winter. It was carrying a fillet of haddock in its mouth. The son followed it across several fields. There, watching a family of kittens devour the fish, under a tree-root in a hedge, was undoubtedly the missing Siamese.

  He crept quietly away and told the owner of the caravan site, who phoned the people in Manchester at once. They drove down the same day. It was their cat, all right. She came when they called as though she hadn't been away for more than five minutes, bellowing a greeting, making a fuss of them, inviting them to Come and see what She'd Got. They took her back to Manchester, black and white kittens and all, saying they intended to keep the lot of them. Whether that had been the reason she'd wandered off – that she was in season and looking for a mate (though this wouldn't have been the original litter, there must have been a lot of half-Siamese around). Whether she'd simply felt the call of the wild as some Siamese seem to – we'd heard of so many who'd vanished from their homes and been found safe and well months later, having walked in on some other family with an air of condescension and just taken over the place... her owners were lucky; they'd got her back, thanks to a glimpse of a tail going past a doorway.

  Pauline had told us this story when we first met her, before we'd ever thought of having a caravan. I'd forgotten it in the interim but now it came back with a bang. Supposing our two managed to get out of the caravan despite our taking all precautions? Enlarged the hole round the sink-pipe, for instance, or managed to prise open one of the windows? The window over the cooker wasn't a very tight fit. I could just see Sass sitting there winkling it open. I visualised the pair of them disappearing across a field themselves, one long bent black tail accompanied by a small but valiant blue one. Our coming back to find them gone. The frantic search. The months of wondering. Two little cats living wild in a wood. Winter coming on. The pair of them cold and hungry... My imagination was building it up into an
Orphans of the Storm
scenario when Sass singed his feet on the cooker and my mind was definitely made up.

  He was mooching round the kitchen one morning when I took a pot off the stove. Normally he isn't allowed in the kitchen while I'm cooking, but somehow I'd overlooked him. Realising, presumably by ESP since he couldn't see it, that there was now a vacant space on the stove-top where it might be advantageous to stand, he took off from the floor in one of his leaps, straight for the red-hot ring. Fortunately I saw him coming and have learned to be fast-moving from long experience. As I raised the saucepan and his head appeared underneath, much as I hated doing it I knocked him flying with the other. He vanished under the table wailing that I'd Hit Him, in a strong aroma of singed Sass. He was quite all right, though. His pads weren't even blistered. Only the hair around them was scorched. But if he could do that in the kitchen, what could happen in the caravan, with gas rings, not much room and two of them about the place? It was no good, I said. My nerves wouldn't stand it. For our first trip, at any rate, we'd
have
to board the cats.

  How lucky we were. When I rang Pauline Furber to ask if she knew of anyone she could recommend she said she could take them herself if we liked. People had asked her so often that she'd just put up three houses and runs especially to take her own ex-kittens when their owners went on holiday.

  I could hardly believe it. She understood Siamese as thoroughly as the Francises did and loved the kittens she bred so much that, when we bought Sass from her she'd said that if Seeley did come back and we didn't want Sass any more, would we let her have him back, not pass him on to anyone else. I had assured her that Sass was ours for good, whether Seeley came back or not. Not for nothing had he wrapped that small bent tail around my heart as soon as I saw him. Not for nothing had he fixed me with his strange, hypnotic stare. The stare he still, as a grown cat, uses on occasion when he wants to bend me to his will, such as when sitting between me and the television he decides it is his bedtime and tries by telepathy to make me get His Milk, and hurry up and hand over His Chair...

  Yes, the houses were separate, Pauline assured me. And they did have locks on the doors. And the runs
were
paved so they couldn't tunnel under... Had I forgotten she had Sass's father, and that several of the kittens she boarded were his? Built like Alcatraz was her motto, and it would be nice for Sass to see his Dad.

  When we aimed the caravan up the hill a few weeks later watched by a group of interested neighbours – most of them were at the bottom, ready to push, but Miss Wellington appeared to be praying at the top – at least we didn't have to worry about the cats. They were safe with Pauline at Burrowbridge.

We made it. Eyes closed, gripping the edge of my seat, I just about willed that caravan up. There was a tense moment halfway up the hill when Charles stopped to check that he could take off again. He did it at the behest of one of our friends, who said if we could take off from standstill there we could take off on anything. He'd eat his lunch with a much better conscience, he said, if he didn't have a vision of us somewhere on a hill going backwards.

  It was a wonder his vision wasn't realised there and then. It felt as if we were being held by a heavy anchor. I was wondering at which point we ought to jump – then once more we were moving upwards. Past Miss Wellington – hands clasped, eyes closed. Round the corner by the Rose and Crown. The landlord came out to wish us
Bon Voyage
and see that we didn't hit his wall.