A Comfort of Cats (14 page)

  On round the bend, in more ways than one. Through the main part of the village. It was a Saturday morning and there were quite a few people about, glancing at the car and recognising us. Charles said did I
have
to look as if I was airborne at thirty thousand feet? I attempted to relax... to smile graciously at them, like the Queen. It wasn't an easy task. I don't suppose she'd feel much like smiling, either, towing a caravan for the first time behind her coach.

  The friend who'd lent us the magazines was right, though – after half an hour we hardly realised it was there. Our confidence grew with every minute of the journey down to Dorset and we drove into the camping field with aplomb. It was a Caravan Club Certified Location site – one of their small, five-caravan-only ones, which we had looked at some weeks before. It had seemed ideal for our initial try out, with its left-hand turn-in that led through an ample gateway and along a wide, well-gravelled track. There was plenty of room on the flat, grassy site, too. It would be the easiest thing in the world to park.

  Overcome by the success of our journey, Charles announced that he would now back into place. He hadn't backed a caravan before. Equally overcome I got out to direct him, trying to look as though we'd been doing it for years. I was so impressed with the skill with which he was managing it – it is quite a difficult business, one has to turn the steering wheel in what would normally be the wrong direction to start with and it's easy to jack-knife the whole thing, but there was the caravan, as if by magic, gliding expertly into line – that I failed to notice the black smoke pouring from under the car until one of the other caravanners came running up.

  'You've got the caravan brake on,' he shouted. 'This your first time out? We all do that at the start.'

  I should have remembered that the caravan brake goes on automatically when the car is in reverse. It is a safety measure, to hold the caravan if anything goes wrong on a hill. If you want to back the caravan the brake lever has to be held up by an assistant, or fixed with an elastic band. It was my job, I'd forgotten it in the excitement of the moment, and Charles had been reversing nearly a ton of caravan against the force of its very efficient brakes.

  When I asked if it mattered, Charles said not so you'd really notice it. We'd probably ruined the clutch. No doubt burnt out the brake linings, too, but what was a little thing like that? He gave a hollow laugh and kicked the caravan wheels. At least they didn't fall off.

  Actually our car is pretty tough and it didn't appear to have done it any harm. When I rang Pauline she said the cats were alright too, and eating like little pigs. Yes, she was feeding Sass separately. She saw what I meant about his being a gannet. (Sass not only ate twice as fast as Shebalu, he'd also perfected a system of bolting the first part of his own meal, looking across at Shebalu's dish and deciding that she had More, nipping over and grabbing half of it in one mighty Sass-sized mouthful, then scooting like lightning back to his.)

  No, she said, he hadn't blotted his copybook. (I'd warned her about his obsession with wool. He hadn't wet his blanket for a good while now but there was no knowing when he might start. Away from home, where he could let us down thoroughly, would be an obvious incentive to him, particularly if he decided that
not
doing it was the reason he was there.) He was using his box as good as gold, said Pauline. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. As for Shebalu, she was a poppet – exactly like her Dad. (Valentine, Shebalu's Champion of Champions father, had also been one of Pauline's cats.)

  So, content that they were in good hands and that hopefully the clutch and brake linings had survived, we spent our experimental week in Dorset. Charles liked caravanning so much he got carried away and bought a recorder to play in the evenings. This was the life, he said, pausing between piercing blasts while a cow answered him from over the hedge. The gipsy spirit. The feeling of freedom. Why hadn't we done this before? He reckoned he could compose on this recorder. He hadn't felt so inspired for years.

  That wasn't what he said at the end of the week when, on our way back to the cottage, we found ourselves going the wrong way through Langport. I was navigating and had missed the turning. I realised as soon as we'd passed it. But you can't pull a caravan outfit into the side of the road and reverse it as you would a car. We had to go on, down the steep winding hill into the main street, which in Langport is very narrow. There was traffic building up behind us, traffic coming towards us... What the hell, demanded Charles, did we do
now
?

  'Take the next turning left,' I said. Charles frantically swung the wheel. We found ourselves in a cul-de-sac in front of some garages. Charles said he couldn't reverse the caravan there, either, unless I fancied one that looked like a concertina.

  There was only one thing for it – to unhitch the caravan and turn it round by hand. We could just reverse the car on its own. And while we were heaving at the coupling and covering ourselves with grease (the book said to lubricate the tow-hitch liberally and Charles always takes instructions at their word) a gang of small children materialised from nowhere and squatted down to watch us with interest.

  'That your caravan?' one enquired.

  'Yes, it is,' I said.

  'Why did you bring it up this lane?'

  'To turn it round,' I told him.

  'What do you want to turn it round for?'

  'So we can go the other way.'

  'Why do you want to go the other way?'

  'WHY DO YOU THINK!' I said. Which was why, as a lesson to me to be patient in future with innocent, enquiring youth – as I bent with Charles over the two-bar, struggling to heave the hitch into position, several handfuls of gravel hit me on the seat of my slacks and a chorus of little voices said 'Yah!'

  All it needed after that was for us to go on to Burrowbridge, having arranged to collect the cats on the way, to learn that halfway through the week Sass had gone on strike against his box and had been using a hole in the paving of his run instead. It was hardly more than a crack, where a small stone had come out. Pauline said the accuracy of his aim was quite amazing. He sat on it looking so earnest, too, as though he was performing some sort of rite. He was, I said, though goodness knew what it was. All we could do was be thankful that he hadn't performed it on his blanket.

  Things didn't change much, did they? said Charles as we drove home across the moors. Siamese just existed to let one down. They thought up things one couldn't possibly imagine. Who would have expected that addle-pated cat to use a crack in the paving as a lavatory?

  Who, either, could have envisaged the trouble we were to have at the cottage when he evolved an even better system of opening doors – to the extent that we had to keep the back one locked because we kept finding him swinging from the handle, with Shebalu sitting beside him with her paws folded waiting for Genius to let them out?

  That one was easily taken care of by our locking the door, of course. It was the doors we couldn't lock that were the trouble. The pull-down flap in front of the cooker grill, for instance, which had foxed our other cats for years. I used to put things in there from the freezer when I wanted to thaw them out. The first time I found the conspirators in the kitchen gnawing a half-thawed chop between them, I thought I must have forgotten to close it. I removed the cats, got out another chop, grilled the chewed one for them for their own lunch...
separately
, on a piece of
foil
, I assured Charles, who is particular about germs...

  The next day I found them chewing at a string of sausages and this time I
knew
I hadn't left the grill door open. I decided to keep watch. I replaced the sausages, closed the flap and took the cats with me into the sitting-room. After a moment or two Sass departed nonchalantly in the direction of the kitchen. Equally nonchalantly Shebalu followed him. Creeping across to peer through the door-crack, I saw the ultimate in cat co-operation.

  Reaching up on his spindly back legs, Sass hooked the grill flap down with one pull. He did it as one who had practised it, putting his paw in at one side, no amateurish fumbling about with the handle. Shebalu, who'd been watching him from the top of the cooker, now got down on the flap and crawled inside on her stomach. She is smaller than Sass and the pair of them had obviously worked out that this was her part of the job. She backed out carrying the sausages, which she dropped to the floor with a frozen thud. Sass moved in to tackle them, she jumped down to join him... till then they'd worked like a couple of commandos, but at that point natural instinct took over. He growled at her and said the sausages were His and she hit him on the nose.

  They carried out this joint technique at every opportunity after that and I had to give up thawing meat in the grill compartment. For a while I used the oven instead, but it so happens that I make my own bread and I kept putting in liver, for instance, forgetting it was there, and then later I'd turn on the oven, ready to bake the bread... I fused so many helpings of liver to their polystyrene trays I could almost have started a glue factory.

  I next switched to thawing things in one of the wall cupboards but still Sass the Sleuth was on the trail. I'd find him reared up like a Lippizaner, his front legs poised in mid-air, sniffing at the door of whichever cupboard I'd chosen while his Blue Point accomplice looked on. Take those two in a caravan with us? We'd be asking for everything we got!

  Sass illustrated that, when I took them into the caravan parked in Annabel's field one day, by immediately hooking open all the cupboards one after another. Kid's Stuff, he informed me complacently, going off to sit in the doorway and impress passers-by with the fact that the van was All His. Shebalu was meanwhile busy trying to lift one of the mattresses, so she could get into the space underneath. How she knew there was a space there was beyond me, but to save the mattress from demolition I held it up.

  She got in. From there she couldn't see Sass, who was hidden from her view by the corner of the wardrobe, but immediately behind him, on the floor where she could see it, was the handle used to wind down the caravan supports. I'd put it there to remind me that we had to wind them up again before we did any towing. Dire things could happen if we didn't. It was made of half-inch-thick black iron and it was right-angled. It hadn't interested Sass in the least. But Shebalu was staring at it as if she was mesmerised. What did she think it was, I wondered. A snake?

  Sass reappeared, having tired of sitting in the doorway. She eyed him intently as he passed. She stared at his rear... back at the handle... and I suddenly realised what it was. She'd thought it was his tail. That, too, is black and right-angled. She'd been wondering what it was doing there all by itself.

  Shebalu is super-observant. It was she who, when I was with them on the lawn one evening, spotted movement in a patch of moss under the lilac tree and promptly sat down to watch. Probably a field-mouse, I thought, getting ready to grab her if she jumped. We don't let the cats kill things if we can help it and we were particularly vigilant that summer because Lancelot was presumably somewhere around. He'd left his quarters in the kitchen in the spring, it was odds on he was still in the garden, and Charles said he had a lot of nuts invested in Lancelot and we didn't want him being eaten.

  When the moss and bits of twig finished their slow-motion heaving, however, it wasn't Lancelot who emerged. I watched, my eyes as round as Shebalu's, as what looked like a snout came out. Grey, wrinkled... like a miniature elephant's trunk. The similarity struck me immediately. I held Shebalu by the collar – whatever it was might be dangerous. Sass was with us now, peering over Shebalu's back. Even as we watched, what looked like two African elephant's ears appeared – grey, wide at the top, with a striking flaming-pink lining. I guessed then what it was, though I'd never seen one before. Obviously an elephant hawk moth, emerging from its chrysalis in our lawn.

  I called Charles and we transferred it for safety to the flower border, putting it gently on a delphinium leaf. Shebalu, having watched its emergence, took no further interest in it, but Sass kept prowling around, testing the air with the exaggeratedly questing sniffs that are another of his attributes. Sass has the strongest sense of smell I have ever known.

  We kept an eye on the moth. Its wings unfolded within the hour. They were camouflage grey on top but I bent to look underneath and there the back ones still had their pink colour. The pink was becoming fainter now, as it dried out having served its purpose of emphasising the 'ears' of the moth as it emerged, still weak, from its chrysalis and persuading any potential enemy that it was an elephant.

  It had gone next day. But for Shebalu we would never have seen it. There probably aren't many people who've watched an elephant hawk moth hatch out. The cats certainly did help bring nature home to us. But... take them with us in the caravan?

  Sass settled that question with his own item of nature study. Again I was with them on the lawn. It was evening and Sass, his big ears stuck up like barge sails on the Norfolk Broads, was watching a patch of grass against the wall.

  By midsummer our lawn is always surrounded with what looks like the African bush where I can't get the mower close up to the wall. We always mean to cut the edge with the shears, but we never do. Neither of us can ever find the time. Eventually it reaches the stage where we say it would be a pity to cut it, the cats like hunting in it so much. Then, of course, we have to watch them more closely than ever, to make sure that what they do catch they don't kill...

  Both cats had their long nylon leads on. It was almost dusk and I wasn't risking their getting away. So, when Sass pounced and came out carrying the smallest of shrews, I relieved him of it in a second. With Sass it is just a matter of picking him up and he drops whatever he has at once. He holds it very lightly – he has a mouth like a retriever – it only has to wriggle and it has escaped. This one fell on the close-cut grass in the middle of the lawn, scuttled wildly around for a moment looking for cover and, failing to find any, went to earth under the instep of one of my rubber clogs. I put them on when I take the cats out after it has been raining, for I never know when I'm going to be led through mud and they are easy to slip on and off.