A Comfort of Cats (19 page)

  After that it had to be furnished – and that is only
indoors
. Outside, Elizabeth now has two sheep: a ewe called Marlene and a ram named Nicodemus whom she borrowed temporarily to keep down the grass and who, when she heard they were destined for the butcher, she naturally bought and added to the strength seeing that she has all that land. She has gophers, too, who spend their time undermining her rose-trees. Like us, she wouldn't dream of putting down poison. So she keeps buying new rose-trees, getting chased by Nicodemus, her problems with her lawn-mower would fill a book...

  Just like us. As I tell her, and now I think she believes it – it
happens
when you take on Siamese cats.

With us, back in the Valley, spring and the caravanning season were approaching. The pheasants had left us by this time, but we weren't worrying so much about them now. First Phyllis and Maisie had stopped coming; presumably they were building their nests. For a week or two longer Philip and Maurice continued to appear on the lawn – never with the confidence that the hens had had, never coming close to the house, but obviously taking advantage of their girlfriends' absence to get what was going in the way of corn.

  Then they too vanished – to look after the nests, I thought, until I looked it up in the bird book and discovered that they aren't that sort of bird at all. Only the hens sit on the eggs, which are laid in scanty nests in bracken or tall grass. Over in our orchard seemed a likely place, but if they were there, we never saw them.

  According to the bird book pheasants are polygamous, which was another let-down to the idyll. I'd imagined Philip guarding Phyllis's nest, Maurice patrolling Maisie's, the four of them bringing their families to the garden in due course. It now seemed more likely that, the hens being occupied with their eggs, the two Don Juans had gone in search of other conquests. They could even have been philandering with other hens while courting Phyllis and Maisie. So much for romance in the pheasant world. As Shakespeare said, it was ever thus.

  Tim Bannett had two goats by this time – Polly and a Toggenberg called Tanya. Both were in kid and he went past with them every day en route to his field up the lane. They weren't on leads. They followed him from affection as he'd hoped, pausing to nibble at top speed in the hedge then galloping like mad to catch him up. Eventually Polly produced three kids and Tanya had two and, until he sold the youngsters, he went past looking like a character from a frieze on an Arcadian vase, with seven of them skipping around him.

  We loved to see it. The kids went up and down as if they were on springs and butted and chased each other like tiny clowns. Goats aren't everybody's pigeon, however. Back when they only had Polly, Liz had once called on Mrs Ferry while taking her for a walk and while they were talking Polly had gone into the house.

  'She didn't do any damage,' Liz said later. 'She left some droppings on the carpet but, as I said to Mrs Ferry, they're all right so long as you don't step on them.' It was a new carpet. Mrs Ferry, practically incoherent, told me later that the droppings had rattled down on it like machine-gun bullets. When there were seven of them she kept the broom handy and watched with an extremely jaundiced eye when they went by. As for Fred Ferry, by way of adding interest to local life, he and Miss Wellington weren't speaking.

  It had started when Miss Wellington heard he was renting a piece of land behind her cottage. The old-style villager often does this – rents an odd bit of land that someone isn't using and raises extra crops of vegetables on it to sell. Fred, piqued perhaps by Tim's getting the use of the graveyard, had decided to go in for growing cabbages on a large scale and show everybody what was what. He'd accordingly rented the piece of land and, while he was putting in the plants the previous autumn, Miss Wellington had come out to object. She'd be able to smell them when she was in the garden, she said, and they looked so unsightly in the winter.

  Fred, breathing something which could only be represented by asterisks, asked what about thic cabbages in the graveyard then? Miss Wellington said she couldn't see those because of the wall and anyway there was only one row of them.

  Fred continued planting. That was that. A week or so later, when the leaves began to fall, Miss Wellington appeared, broom in hand, sweeping the lane outside the Ferrys' gate. Fred has a rather large sycamore which drops its leaves in the lane and in the normal course of things they stay there until the wind blows them away. Miss Wellington always predicts somebody will slip on them, of course, but nobody takes any notice. Now she was out sweeping them up herself.

  'They're not
my
leaves,' she announced to nobody in particular when Fred came clumping down the path.

  'Tain't thy lane either,' said Fred serenely, heading for the Rose and Crown.

  One result of this little contretemps was that she didn't worry about the graveyard wall collapsing on him that winter. It wouldn't have done anyway, since Tim had cemented it, but that hadn't prevented her from worrying previously. 'Remember the dyke that nearly gave way in Holland?' she asked me once. 'And the little boy saved it by putting his hand in?' I did vaguely remember reading it in an infant primer when I was at school, though I'd completely forgotten it till she mentioned it. Not so Miss Wellington, who presumably saw herself saving Fred's life by rushing out and holding a stone up. Not any more, though. Not since the cabbages. At pub turning-out time her door remained firmly shut, much to the relief of the ungrateful Fred who said her shining thic torch at him gived he the willies.

  Now it was spring, he was cutting his cabbages and Miss Wellington was complaining about that. Always lurking in that field, she said. She was sure he was up to no good. Quite a few people thought that when he went past with his knapsack, but – poor Fred – not when he was innocently cutting cabbages! Meanwhile, down at the cottage, our own thoughts were turning towards the caravan.

  It had been quite a progressive winter. Charles had at last finished the dresser and very good indeed it looked with its gleaming pine panelling, red-tiled top and a set of matching cupboards above it. We'd decided against open shelves, realising that the only things likely to be on them for long would be two Siamese cats. As it was they sat on the dresser top convinced that it had been built specially for them to watch me. Charles said he hoped I didn't roll pastry up there; he wouldn't fancy any if I did. Not after the muddy footprints I was forever wiping off it. I didn't. I am particular too.

  Yet what happened when I
wanted
their footprints? Somebody had asked for their autographs and, seeing them lying peacefully together in front of the fire, I thought that if I dabbed a paw each with damp kitchen paper right at that moment, and plonked them on a card, that way I'd get their paw-prints before they realised it and we wouldn't have howls about how I was Murdering Them.

  I dabbed. I plonked. Not the faintest smudge came off. I dabbed and plonked again. I had to go out, get mud and
put
it on their paws before I could get even the slightest impression. When I think of the letters they march over... the magazines people lend us... Income Tax returns... and there they were looking at me as if I'd gone out of my mind. Putting Dirt on their Paws, they said, pulling them away in horror, sniffing at them and fastidiously licking them. As I say a dozen times in the course of a day, with Siamese you never can win.

  Anyway, the dresser was finished and the conservatory was coming along; people had stopped asking whether it was going up or down and the Rector was beginning to eye it with interest, obviously with the thought of grapes for the Harvest Festival in mind. The next job, said Charles, was to get the caravan out and go over it, and at the beginning of April we did. We hauled it up into the field, Charles checked the wheels and the brakes and the towing mechanism, I spring-cleaned the inside – and discovered, in so doing, where Lancelot had been that winter. Snug as a bug in the caravan – in the cupboard under the sink.

  It must have been him. He hadn't appeared in the porch at all that winter. We'd wondered if he was dead. It could have been him that Sass had jumped on and flattened in the garden the previous summer and had eaten and as a result got worms... Anyway, I knew now it couldn't have been Lancelot. We'd been advised to put wire gauze around the rubber waste-pipe from the sink, where it goes through a hole in the caravan floor – otherwise, the man who'd sold us the van had told us, mice would get up there like one o'clock. We hadn't been able to obtain wire gauze. It seemed to have gone off the market. I cut a hole in a plastic yeast-tin cover instead, and fitted that round the pipe and put a stone on one edge to weight it down, and the first winter no mice had got in.

  Undoubtedly because the previous owner had cleaned it out so well before he delivered it to us. So, I thought the second winter, had I. I'd left a packet of paper napkins in a drawer, an empty bag or two in the cupboard, thinking they'd come in handy the following year. Certainly nothing smelling of food, though. Just a half-used tablet of soap in a holder and a couple of candles for emergency use.

  That had been enough. A mouse had chewed a hole through the plastic cover – presumably clinging to the pipe to do it. He'd made a nest in the paper napkins, eaten the paper bags, plus the candles and the soap, which he'd chewed level with the top of the holder. It was scented soap. Ugh, I thought. Lancelot certainly had peculiar taste... Why was I so certain it was him? Because the caravan was a considerable distance from the orchard and Charles's nut trees, but it will be remembered how Lancelot liked nuts, and around his nest in the drawer, where he could eat them while in bed (the soap and candles had no doubt constituted reserve rations) were hundreds and hundreds of nutshells undoubtedly from Charles's best Kent Cobs.

  I cleared it all out. Lancelot had obviously long since vacated the drawer and was probably living it up in the garden for the summer – telling all the other mice he met, no doubt, about how he owned his own caravan. Next winter, I said, there'd be wire gauze over that hole if I jolly well had to knit it myself. Now, though, we were back to the problem – were we going to take the cats?

Definitely not on our first trip of the year at any rate. We had decided to take the caravan to London – a proposal which, when we mentioned it to our neighbours, caused them considerable alarm.

  'Never heard of nobody taking a caravan up there,' said Father Adams. 'Wheres't be goin' to put it? In Hyde Park?' Fred Ferry said he wouldn't like to be us with thic thing in all thic traffic. Charles told him we weren't going to be. We were going to the Caravan Club Harbour at Crystal Palace – on a Saturday afternoon around teatime, when there wouldn't be much traffic about. According to the instructions we came off the M4 at Exit 2, made for Chiswick, got on the South Circular Road, stuck to it until we came to the junction of Thurlow Park and South Croxted Road, then followed the directions in the handbook.

  'Sounds all right', Ern Biggs said bluntly. 'But theest know what thee bist like. Whass thee goin' to do if theest get lost?'

  Impossible, we said firmly. Not if we followed the South Circular signs. To our more appreciative friends we explained that we were taking the caravan up because hotels are now so terribly expensive and we intended to stay for ten days – to see the museums and art galleries and so on we'd never got round to, though we'd been meaning to visit them for years. We had a caravan that was home from home, so why pay steep hotel bills and probably not be able to sleep into the bargain? At Crystal Palace they had showers and hot water and telephones and the caravans stood on hard ground. There was a stop right opposite the entrance from which buses went to all parts of London – it was more convenient, even, than many hotels. What a marvellous idea, said caravanning friends who'd never thought of doing it themselves. They'd be interested to hear how we got on.