A Comfort of Cats (2 page)

  To heck with the furniture. We went out and got Seeley. If
he
wrecked the staircarpet – there were more important things in life.

  As a matter of fact he didn't. One thing we can vouch for after all our years of Siamese cat-keeping is that, though they are universally destructive, even the most basic of their Machiavellian traits varies according to the cat. All of them claw things like Welshmen playing harps, for instance, but while Solomon practised pizzicatos on the staircarpet, Seeley did his on the draught-proofing round the doors. Ours is an old cottage, draughts whizz in like Atlantic gales and the door-surrounds are, or rather were, fitted with foam-rubber stripping – which Seeley, any time he was shut out of a room or just simply mad about something, ripped out with impassioned fervour and scattered in pieces over the floor.

  Seeley was four when he went out one morning for his pre-breakfast look-round and was never seen again. I have told his story before. I shall never, ever, forget the months of fruitless, heartbreaking searching. Even now, more than three years later, wherever we go we look at every Siamese we see. We still cherish the hope that if – which is one of the possibilities that might have happened that nightmare Sunday morning – he climbed into a stationary car and was carried away by accident, one of these days we might still find our dear dark bumble-head again.

  When he'd been missing for four months we could stand it no longer and got Saska, our present Seal Point boy. We had Shebalu, of course, the Blue Point girl who'd succeeded Sheba some two years previously, but for things to be right there had to be a set of gangling, spider-thin brown legs racing up the stairs, vanishing round corners or disappearing at top speed from the scene of any domestic crime as well as four slightly smaller blue ones – and anyway Shebalu missed Seeley as much as we did.

  Revel she might in coming to bed with us for company, sleeping with her head on my shoulder, no longer being pushed aside by someone who took it for granted that he always had Number One Place – but she still never ate without glancing to see if he was eating beside her; never went out without stopping to scan the hillside or look expectantly up the garden for a cat who never came.

  So we got Saska. He didn't waste time on the draught-proofing. From the beginning he was a kitten who worked things out. His reasoning was simple. Clawing at doors would get you nowhere. Tunnelling under them was the obvious way. We now have carpets with rounded corners where he hooked them up in front of any door that thwarted him and, when he found he couldn't burrow underneath, chewed them vengefully, with his head turned sideways, as determinedly as a dog.

  We also have vinyl protective pieces that fit over the corners of the carpets. A little late in the day, but they do prevent further erosion – except when anyone special is coming and we whip the vinyl pieces off. They look rather odd and people might think us eccentric so I expose the chewed-up corners, laughingly explain about Saska's idiosyncrasy, shut him and Shebalu out into the hall when it's time to eat so they can't climb over people's plates. And what do I see – what do I
know
I will see – when, the food cleared away, I open the door to allow them to rejoin the party? Two cats sitting bolt upright on the other side of it and, with the vinyl obligingly removed, a bite more chewed off the carpet. Sass the Indomitable has struck again.

  The cottage, as I say, looks rather different nowadays. We have these odd-looking vinyl corner-pieces. Our sitting-room carpet is a mottled tan. Not so aesthetically pleasing as the red one but it doesn't show muddy paw-prints, or the spots where they splash their supper milk, or the places where – being great ones for Better Health for Cats – having eaten enough grass to sink a battleship, they come in and sick it up with gusto on the floor.

  We have a settee and armchairs in hide-grained vinyl now. It looks like leather, people comment on its being saddle-backed – gives the room quite a ranch effect, they say. Maybe it does, but this is an English cottage. I sigh for my pale green covers of former days. Vinyl can be wiped, however, and the cats never attempt to claw it – which sounds incredible, but is absolutely true. Some people say it's the smell of it, others the slippery texture – the fact remains that whereas they will strop on leather or fabric like tempestuous impresarios, for some peculiar reason vinyl is taboo.

  I wish I could say the same about woodwork. Sass, for instance, can jump like a Mexican bean. When we take them over to the orchard he soars spectacularly over the bars which block the entrance – up, over and down from standing, to the astonishment of all who see him, while Shebalu clambers primly over them like one of the
Pirates of Penzance
girls over the rocks. Indoors, however, it is she who leaps without a second thought five feet up to the back window of the living-room – the high one that looks out on to the hillside where Annabel and her friends the magpies roam. And what does Sass the Indomitable do when, seeing her craning her neck at something that appears to be interesting, he decides to join her in the window sill? He clambers laboriously, as he did when a kitten, up the back of one of our antique carved chairs.

  Then it was delightful, watching him heave his small white body up the pattern of acorns and dog-roses like a climber ascending the Matterhorn, invariably losing his nerve halfway up and bawling for a leg-up over the top. But when the tallest cat we have ever had, who, standing on his hind legs, now reaches a good three-quarters of the way up the chair-back before he even starts,
still
clambers babyishly up the carving,
still
bawls for help because he's stuck and has, into the bargain, left a permanent trail of scratches over the acorns to mark his passage...

  What, I sometimes ask, will they think of to ruin next? Why do they always pick on something that might one day, if they hadn't mucked it up, have been valuable? Why on earth, with all the experience we've had, do we go on having Siamese cats? Then I see Sass's blue eyes looking at me out of that anxious, pointed face – and I pick him up and hug him. That is my answer.

F
ather Adams's standard comment when he looks at Sass is 'Theests 'ant 'alf got a rum 'un there.' Coming from the oldest and most omniscient of our neighbours, who never misses a thing that happens in the Valley and remembers our cats and their idiosyncrasies as far back as Sugieh's addiction to tracking down courting couples up on the hill, Solomon's belief as a kitten that he was a horse and the time Sheba got marooned up the telephone pole, that is saying something.

  He is right, however. Rum Sass certainly is – in his appearance, in the things he does and in the uncanny way he has of looking at people. At first sight the intensity of his gaze strikes one as comical. At second glance one wonders. Who
is
the wiser – he or you? What does he know? What can he see? What is he thinking?

  It is partly the shape of his face. Longer, narrower, with higher cheek-bones than any cat we have ever had, and a chin so pointed he looks like an Elizabethan philosopher. 'Look at the length of his head,' his breeder sighs every time she sees him. 'If ever a cat was born to be a champion...'

  He isn't one because, for all his Brain of Britain look, he got his tail bent as a kitten. Nobody knows how. He wasn't born like it. It isn't the now rarely seen throw-back Siamese kink which, when it does occur, is always towards the tip of the tail. At a month old he was perfect, his breeder Pauline Furber told us – then one day, suddenly, he appeared with this right-angled bend near the base. Whether he'd caught it in a door, or somebody had bitten it... certainly it couldn't have happened by itself. The Vet said the cartilage was damaged and it couldn't be splinted or operated on, being only a scant inch from his bottom. So there he was, the hope of the litter, with a tail like the starting-handle of a car.

  It was at this point that we had rung Pauline Furber seeking a successor to Seeley, and she said she had just the kitten for us. He was an absolute character. Stuck out a mile from all the others. His only fault was that he had this bend in his tail...

  I have told this part of the story before, too. How I discounted him at once. Our cats had always been perfect, I told her. It wouldn't seem right to see a crooked tail around the place. How we went, instead, to see the other kittens she had for sale – Saska's twin brother and four from a younger litter. Saska was there as companion to his brother – a role he'd so far fulfilled by hitting him in the eye. The younger kittens, however, were nowhere in the personality stakes next to Sass. His brother sat there with one eye shut like a woebegone small Lord Nelson. Guess who was swaggering round like Superman, bent tail raised at triumph stations? Guess who we brought home with us that night, much to the disgust of our blue girl? Guess who is now her inseparable companion, the delight of our hearts – and the most noted cat in the district for his peculiarities?

  We wouldn't have thought it possible. Our other cats, vigilant though we had always been with them, had nevertheless had a certain amount of freedom which enabled them to get into trouble. The daily look-round on their own before breakfast, for instance, which on occasion they extended to going half round the village, or the times when we took them for walks in the forest.

  Mostly they followed at our heels but there had been times when they digressed. Up trees where they got stranded. After those courting couples. Vanishing suddenly into the undergrowth and worrying the daylights out of us. We'd call them, implore them, practically stand on our heads peering under brambles for them... afraid, if we left them, of people with guns or prowling foxes.

  Somebody would usually happen by in due course to enquire what we were looking for and, being told a couple of Siamese cats, would inform us that there was one up that tree back there, or they'd just seen one go into our donkey field, or – as happened more than once – that there were two of them sitting right behind us. Would those be the ones? Though they didn't appear to be lost. They looked as if they'd been there for ages...

  These days it was different. Since Seeley's disappearance Shebalu always wore a collar and lead when she was out. The lead was a twenty-foot nylon cord, admittedly, and didn't restrict her movements but one of us was always there to grab it if she looked like taking off. Sass was too small for a collar yet. He'd have looked – being Sass he'd have undoubtedly seen to it that he did look – like a particularly hard-done-by cherub in a chain gang. In due course he, too, would have one. We couldn't risk losing a cat again. For the moment, though, there was no need. Like all young kittens he was nervous of the outside world and didn't want to venture far. His main concern was to keep close to us or Sheba.

  Neither did there seem any need for a collar and lead when, as his legs began to lengthen like spindly brown pipe-cleaners, I started to take him up on the hillside behind the cottage. He was still a baby, crouching when a jay flew over; leaping spectacularly at butterflies, batting cautiously, pretending they were dangerous, at fir cones lying in the grass. Shebalu, full as only a Siamese female can be of the fact that she'd been Longer With Us than He Had, Hadn't She, and Knew This Hillside Better Than He Did, Didn't She? and anyway we Liked Her Better, sat by my side importantly, wearing her collar and lead as though they were an Egyptian queen's insignia, far too superior to play games with little kittens. So it was that I started throwing fir cones to give Saska something to chase after. Nobody was more surprised than I was when he picked them up and brought them back.

  I threw them further away. Still he retrieved them – belting down the hillside with the speed of a greyhound and racing straight back up again carrying the cone in his mouth. He would put it down in front of me and watch it intently, ready to chase it again. It was always the exact one I'd thrown for him, too. If there were several lying around when he got to the end of his run, he would sniff round like a police dog till he found the one that had the right scent on it. The only time he was ever foxed was when the cone bounced, on its way down, into the middle of a very large gorse bush. After circling the bush for ages with a worried look on his face, he eventually came back hopefully with a piece of donkey dropping.

  While I thought Sass's retrieving act clever and encouraged him in it, there were some people who couldn't believe their eyes. Fred Ferry, Father Adams's perennial sparring partner, was the first outsider to see the performance as he clumped, knapsack over shoulder, along the lane one afternoon. From the way he stopped, watched incredulously for several minutes and then quickened his pace along the lane, I knew the news wouldn't be long in spreading and sure enough Father Adams appeared within seconds.

  Father Adams knows us well enough by now not to bother with the usual village ploys when he wants to see what we are doing. No whistling a dog, washing mud off his gum boots in the stream that runs past the cottage or picking blackberries in our hedge for him. He just stands there, arms folded, and stares. He was there on that occasion when we came down at the end of the session and so saw the finale that Fred Ferry, not wanting to be thought lingering, had missed: Sass running ahead of me with his pine cone in his mouth, through the back gate, and putting it carefully down on the lawn.