A Comfort of Cats (20 page)

  The fact was, people didn't have enough initiative, said Charles as we drove up the motorway at the beginning of May. Staying in stuffed-shirt hotels wasn't our cup of tea if we could help it. If one
had
to go to London, this was the way.

  It was, as far as Chiswick. We'd left the cats at Burrowbridge, got on the motorway at Bridgwater, driven up to Exit 2 in three hours... Unfortunately at Chiswick we got lost, as Ern had predicted. Having done a hundred and fifty miles in three hours flat, it took us two and a half to do the last nineteen.

  All had gone well to start with. We'd found the South Circular Road and were following it as instructed when we suddenly came to a diversion sign. We followed that. To the left. Across a couple of intersections. To the right. To the right again.
Somewhere
the diversion must have ended, but either the authorities had forgotten to signify it or somebody had moved the sign.

  My memory of what followed is somewhat kaleidoscoped. I remember Charles parking the caravan round corners every few minutes while I nipped out and asked the way. I remember a West Indian bus driver who nearly dropped when he saw us pull in behind him at a bus stop and then, giving us directions which involved crossing the busy road ahead, driving his double-decker out into the traffic and holding it up for us while we sailed majestically across.

  If we'd followed his directions to the letter we'd probably have been all right but we thought we'd gone wrong when we saw a sign saying 'To The West End'. It was evening by now. The Saturday evening traffic was heading theatre-wards. I could see us ending up in Trafalgar Square. 'To think,' I said, 'only this morning we were in the Valley. What on earth are we doing here?'

  'Looking for Crystal Palace,' Charles said determinedly as he turned off once more to the left.

  We got there eventually, after various people had given us different instructions. To go via Hammersmith Bridge. To go via Richmond. One said not to go over any bridge at all. For the record, we went over just about every bridge along that stretch of the Thames. Kew Bridge we went over four times. I remember some people standing at the bus stop at the beginning of it looking at us idly when we went past them the first time and staring at us as if they were seeing things when we came back. They were, of course. Realising we'd made a mistake we'd circled briskly to the left and were trundling back over again.

  'Not back the way we
came
!' I said warningly as we reached the other side. Charles obediently turned off to the right, circled round the back streets, came out heading for the bridge once more... Unfortunately turning to the right, where we should have gone, was forbidden from that direction, so we had to go over it again. Didn't it remind him of the time we went round Edmonton in circles in the camper? I asked. Charles said he was too busy to be reminded of anything.

  We got there in the end. I wanted to give up and drive back to Somerset at one point but Charles said no, we must carry on. I felt as if we'd done a two-man expedition to Katmandu by the time we turned in at the Caravan Harbour gates. Not that we were the only ones to get lost, of course. According to the warden most people do. We met one man there who'd towed a caravan from Greece. He'd had no trouble at all, he said – right across Europe, through Yugoslavia, Germany, Holland, driving on the wrong side of the road up from Harwich – but he'd spent two solid hours, once he had the Crystal Palace television mast in his sights, trying to get to it round one-way streets.

  We spent a marvellous ten days sightseeing and even then we didn't take in everything. We must come up and do it again, said Charles as, sated with art galleries, museums, Oxford Street and getting lost in Hampton Court Maze, we bowled triumphantly back down the motorway to Somerset. (This time we'd got from Crystal Palace to the M4 in thirty-five minutes and Charles was feeling pleased with the outfit.) Super, I said. The caravan's potential was terrific. But I
would
like a holiday with the cats. That, after all, was why we'd bought it. When did he think we could try it out?

  Soon, said Charles. In a few weeks' time. But still we kept delaying setting a definite date. Mainly because, every time we got round to considering it, something happened to put us off.

  Take Sass and his worm, for instance. If you remember, he'd had one back in the autumn as the result of eating that mouse on the lawn. Pauline had noticed the signs when he and Shebalu were staying with her and, when I'd rung her to see how they were, had asked if she should give them each a tablet. If one cat had a worm, she said, the other would probably have one too, so she might as well dose them both at once.

  She did. They'd come home full of beans, tearing around the cottage like racehorses. Sass in particular was all zip and sparkling eyes, his holiday and his worm tablet having done him good. So when, after we came back from London, he showed signs of having a worm again – obviously he'd caught a mouse we didn't know about – I rang Pauline, got the name of the tablets and obtained a couple from the Vet.

  They had to be taken on an empty stomach. 'Give the tablets to them at mid-day,' said Pauline. 'That'll be a good three hours after their breakfast. You mustn't feed them for at least another three hours afterwards, so they'll be all right for their supper at five. That way they won't have to miss a meal. They make such a fuss if they have to go without.'

  They do indeed, and what I hadn't the nerve to confess to her was that our two didn't have just the two meals a day that adult Siamese should have. Ever since Louisa's cat Ginger came to stay and Sass had seen him eating his minced beef on the dot of twelve, he, too, had demanded food at mid-day and, to keep him happy, he'd got it. Shebalu too, because I couldn't feed one without the other, though she didn't worry so much. It was Sass who always reminded me. Dead on twelve-thirty, if I was working upstairs in the study, I'd hear the sitting-room door creak and he'd come up and demand to be let in. He'd then stand on my lap with his head under my chin so I couldn't possibly type and was bound to hear his stomach rumbling. I
had
to give him a spoonful or two. It would have been like
Oliver Twist
if I didn't.

  How, then, to give him his tapeworm tablet?
Hamlet
wouldn't be in it if he missed his mid-day snack. The answer – and never have Charles and I felt nobler – was for us to get up at five in the morning. We went downstairs, lifted Sass from their chair, and Charles held him on the table while I put the tablet in his mouth. I'd lain awake most of the night anticipating that moment. Supposing we couldn't get him to swallow it? What did we do then? I needn't have worried.
Anything Sa
ss got in his mouth was there to be eaten. He didn't even stop purring while it went down.

  Shebalu was more difficult. She squirmed frantically and tried to spit the tablet out, but I held her mouth and down it went. I felt quite triumphant when we were back in bed. How simple it had been, I said. I was so elated, I couldn't see a single obstacle to our taking them with us in the caravan. It was just a matter of being
determined
in our outlook, I said – not anticipating trouble at every turn.

  I hadn't anticipated trouble as a result of giving Sass that worm tablet, but we got it just the same. We came down at eight, gave the cats their breakfast around nine – those horrible old worms were gone now, weren't they? I said. It was mid-morning when I noticed that, while Shebalu was asleep in front of the fire, there was no sign at all of Sass.

  I rushed upstairs, downstairs, looked in all the cupboards – absolutely no sign of him anywhere. He must have got out, I thought – maybe he was up at Fred Ferry's after sherry. I was just about to rush up the hill to check when there was a hefty thump (I was going through the sitting-room at the time) as Sass descended from the topmost bookshelf. He never went up there during the day. He never went up there at all unless Shebalu dared him. Yet here he was now, obviously up there of his own accord, diving exuberantly down through the lampshade... belting round the room from the piano to the Welsh dresser, across to the bureau, up the back of the carved chairs... He tore round the cottage on and off all day while Shebalu watched him with her lorgnette look. (Always fully in control of herself is our blue girl. Even a worm tablet fails to affect her.) He was so full of beans that, while we were listening to the six o'clock news, he came hurdling over the low side-table where I'd put the radio. Wham! He slammed right into it, nearly knocked himself out, and it didn't improve the radio either.

  Honestly, I said. When I thought of him in a caravan... Steady on now, said Charles. What had I been saying about not anticipating trouble? As a matter of fact, he'd had an idea. Why didn't we rehearse taking the cats away with us? We could camp out with them in the caravan while it was still in our own field. Sleep up there with them at night. If they did get out there'd be no harm done – we were only on our own doorstep. But it would give us a chance to iron out any problems, then we could take them away with us with confidence.

  Which was why a couple of days later, had anybody been watching, they could have seen us carrying up sleeping bags, saucepans, baskets of provisions and an earthbox and stowing them in the caravan. For just about the first time ever, however, nobody
was
watching. We'd chosen, quite by accident, a day when the contents of a house in the village were being auctioned and our regular passers-by – Father Adams, Fred Ferry, Ern Biggs and, since he bought his field, Tim Bannett – had all gone along to it hoping for bargains.

  Thus it was that our movements went unrecorded and that when we were in the caravan that night (it was dusk and we'd drawn the curtains and lit our pressure oil-lamp to save carrying up the battery for electricity, and Charles was playing his recorder saying wasn't this great, and I was trying to prevent Sass from burning his nose on the lamp-glass) there was a bang on the door, a voice demanded who was in there, and we nearly shot out of our skins.

  It was Tim. Coming back late from his field and seeing the light, he'd thought there were squatters in the van. We thanked him for his vigilance, explained what we were doing... even he, used as he was to us and non-conformist himself, looked shaken as he went on his way. Camping out with water containers and an oil-lamp, I could see him thinking, not a hundred yards from our own cottage...

  His surprise was nothing to that which beset Fred Ferry at five o'clock next morning, however, when, hearing the sound of footsteps moving round the caravan, I sat up, looked out of the window, and met him eyeball to eyeball peering in.

  What he was doing around at that hour we didn't ask. His knapsack was on his shoulder as usual. And if it did occur to us to wonder, we kept our thoughts to ourselves. What he said – which could very well have been true, since the cats had been gawking out of the windows all night, marching consistently over Charles and me to get to them, which was why I was wide awake at five o'clock – was that he'd seen Sass looking out of a window and thought he'd got locked in.

  'I knows what a tizzy theest get into if he was missing,' he explained. 'So I come over to have a look. By Gorry, it put years on I when I seen
thy
face at the window.'

  It might have been better put, but we could appreciate how he felt. We explained to him why we were there. He said 'Oh ah,' but he seemed to be pondering about something as he went on his way up the hill.

  We only spent a few nights in the caravan. Thanks to Fred, the news had got round. It was surprising how many people took to walking through the Valley in the evenings to see if what they'd heard was true. For years we'd had a reputation for being eccentric, but there didn't seem to be any point in making it worse. Besides, said Charles, we'd now proved we could sleep with them in the caravan. (We had? I thought. It was news to me!) It was coping during the day we had to practise.

  We did. We practised practically every day for weeks, but we never got it to work. Take meals, for instance. The only way we could eat those with dignity was to shut the cats in the car. To do it authentically, as we would if we were really caravanning, we had to park the car in the field alongside the van. We'd then have lunch, say, at the table in the caravan window, ducking when people we knew went past. Ducking wasn't much use, however, when riders were going by on horseback and could look down on us, and we heard some interesting theories as to what we were doing.

  'Cracked,' said one. 'Have been for years.'

  'Maybe they've got the decorators in the cottage,' suggested another.

  'What are they doing crouched on the floor then?' asked a third. 'And why have they got their car in there with the cats bawling their heads off inside?'

  'Like I said. Cracked,' said the first.

  It was just as difficult when the cats were in the van. They opened cupboards, knocked things down, were forever trying to get out of one of the doors. Once I found Sass in the wardrobe, his long black hind legs just touching the ground, with his front claws hooked firmly above his head in one of Charles's anoraks, which had been left there from a previous holiday. As usual, when in distress, he was completely silent. Supposing he'd done that while we were away, I said. He could have been strung up there for hours and no one would have known. It just wasn't safe to leave him in a caravan, the way he could open doors.

  Charles said he'd put a hook on it. He did. He put hooks on all the doors. The next thing I found Sass suspended from was the horizontal opening bar of the rooflight. I shut my eyes just for a moment one afternoon while I was keeping watch on the pair of them and when I opened them, there he was. Dangling by his front paws from the bar like a trapeze artist. Silent as usual
in extremis
. Eyes round with apprehension. He must have tried to edge across from the top of the wardrobe and had slipped.