A Comfort of Cats (3 page)

  'Well, if th'old liar weren't right for once,' said Father Adams. 'I 'ouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself.' And off he went to add his bit to the story – about our new cat carrying home things in his mouth like a retriever with a stick.

  Alas, before long we had to give up the games on the hillside. It should have been safe. The area was fenced. We grazed Annabel, our donkey, up there. Beyond the fence was thick, untracked pine forest that nobody ever wandered through. It was well away from the bridle path, too, where I now never took the cats. In the old days we walked along the path often, but after the lesson of Seeley... Supposing, said Charles, I was halfway up the track with them and met a dog?

  You can't win, of course. When it comes to being born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, man has nothing on Siamese cats. There we were minding our own business up on the hillside one morning, Shebalu pursuing her favourite pastime of biting the heads off daisies, Sass busily occupied stalking beetles, Annabel grazing companionably close at hand to make sure she wasn't left out of anything, when out of the forest and through the top fence charged three large black Labradors.

  It was like one of those animated dioramas. Shebalu went up a tree. Annabel took off across the hillside, bucking wildly in defence of her rear. She needn't have worried. Sass, an eye-catching target in his kitten whiteness, fled straight down the hillside towards the cottage, and the dogs, tongues lolloping, went after him.

  So did I. So did Charles, running madly across from the orchard. So did the woman, frantically blowing a whistle, who came clambering over the fence in my rear. Charles reached the yard ahead of the Labradors and barred them from coming through the gate. Where was Sass, though – conspicuous by his absence, last seen streaking like a comet down the hill?

  Upstairs under our bed, as a matter of fact. I always leave the cottage doors open when I'm out with the cats – from past experience one never knows when they'll need a quick retreat. When we'd located him and satisfied ourselves that he wasn't hurt we went out to talk to the woman. We'd often seen her around before, instructing the dogs to sit in the roadway, walking on up the hill herself, then calling or whistling them to come on. Giving them obedience training, obviously, but what on earth she'd been doing in the woods...

  Training them as gun dogs, according to her. She and her husband did a lot of it. The business out on the road was to get them to stay where they were put. The next step was to take them where there were likely to be distractions and teach them to still stay put till they were told. To this end she'd taken them into the forest, instructed them to 'sit' when a rabbit hopped out on to the path ahead—and the trio, deciding she couldn't possibly have meant it, had immediately shot off in pursuit. The rabbit must have given them the slip behind a tree and, pelting on, they'd spotted Sass.

  'They wouldn't have hurt him,' the woman assured us with airy confidence. 'By instinct they retrieve without harming their quarry.' I don't know about that. I had a vision of Sass being carted back to her in one of those big black mouths and went weak at the knees. So it was that though she never brought the dogs to the Valley again – her confidence being obviously not as strong as she made out – for a long time I didn't take Sass up on the hill again, either. I never knew what might come out of the forest.

  Instead I threw things for him to chase on the lawn – pine cones, pieces of stick and, as the summer advanced, small fallen apples from the tree in front of the conservatory. Sass himself devised the refinement to this one. If people's eyes popped to see him running back to me with sticks and fir cones, they positively goggled to see him carrying small apples by their stalks.

  Fred Ferry, not ordinarily an animal lover, was entranced. 'Theest couldn't half train he to be useful,' he kept saying. As a poacher's assistant I imagined, knowing Fred, who didn't carry that knapsack for nothing. He was equally intrigued when I told him that Sass drank. Anything from orange juice to whisky.

  Most Siamese like sherry, of course. One belonging to a friend of mine downed a whole glassful once. She put it on the floor by the side of her chair while she was having a quiet half-hour with the paper and when, after a while, she picked up the glass and found it empty she thought she must have drunk it without realising she had – until she saw the culprit weaving across the room with his legs crossed, just before he collapsed on the floor. Luckily her husband is a doctor. He said to lay him on the bed and leave him, and sure enough after an hour or two he recovered. If it had been us, we would have had to call the Vet. I can just imagine telling him one of our cats was drunk. That, I can hear him saying, is all he'd been waiting for...

  With that example in mind, anyway, we always warn friends to watch their glasses. Siamese are forward enough without encouraging them in their drinking habits, and in any case it is bad for their kidneys. A finger-lick of sherry is all our cats have ever been allowed – until Sass appeared on the scene and, almost before we knew it, there he was sitting persuasively on people's laps, bent tail at an angle behind him, hooking at their glasses with a determined paw and scoffing anything he could get.

  Orange juice we don't mind about – though I have no doubt he thinks it's something stronger. People with more potent drinks are permitted to give him only a single finger-lick – and no more than two guests in an evening at that. Even so, from the way he sizes up the gathering, longing written all over him, one paw going out like a grab-hook for a practised yank at the glass, you'd think Charles and I kept Bacchanalia every night with that cat as one of the party. Actually we hardly drink at all. Seeing Sass, nobody would believe it.

  Fred, as I say, was entranced when I told him about this. An ardent cider
aficionado
himself, he said Sass was a regular li'l wonder. I thought he was, too, watching him dashing about the lawn, diving head first into flower beds and nettles, retrieving apples with unerring accuracy and bringing them back to me like a dog. So much so that I got lax about always keeping close to him, Sass laid his plans accordingly, and one day, chasing an apple I'd tossed near the gate, he ran past it and over the wall.

  He was across the road and up into the wood like a flash. So was I, in determined pursuit. But it took time to haul myself up the steep, slippery bank and by the time I'd got to the top he had vanished. Up through the trees I raced. How often had I done this chasing after Solomon. In those days, though, I could tell myself he always came back in the end. Now there was the frightening thought of Seeley.

  I crashed through the wood, emerged on the lane at the top of the hill, went running past cottages and bungalows along to the end. There was no sign of him anywhere. No reply to my frantic calls. Only the sound of doors opening behind me as people came out to peer over their gates, and tap their heads at each other, I shouldn't wonder. Outside the Rose and Crown a thought came to me. Sass and his liking for drink. It was summer and the door was open. If he'd sniffed alcohol he might well have gone in.

  Plucking up courage, I went in myself. 'I suppose a Siamese cat hasn't come in here?' I asked the gathering in general. Silence swept the bar in a sort of wave. The customers looked at me oddly. 'He's run away and he likes drink,' I said. The silence settled even deeper.

  He obviously hadn't been there. I backed out, hot all over. Siamese land you in situations like that. I knew what those people were thinking. To add to my chagrin as I dashed back down to the Valley – the Forestry track being the next place to look for the truant – I suddenly saw him coming out of Fred Ferry's back door with Fred in attendance close behind.

  Where had he been? In the Ferry kitchen, proving what I'd said about his drinking sherry. 'Walked in like he was the Squire and owned the place,' said Fred. 'I thought thee usn't mind if I give he a drop.'

  Actually I did, but what was the use? 'Only give it to'n off me finger, like theest said,' Fred assured me. And Sass had licked his finger with enthusiasm and stood on his hind legs and sniffed hopefully at the bottle.

  When Fred told that one up at the Rose and Crown – in which direction he departed as soon as Sass and I left him – the customers would realise I'd had some reason for thinking he might be there, but I bet they still put me down as barmy.

There was one consolation. Charles and I were no longer considered the village's sole eccentrics. We had strong competition from the Bannetts.

  I have mentioned them before. Tim with his ginger beard. His wife Liz, who wore long skirts and dangling earrings. Their family of tortoises and turtles who each slept in a bedroom slipper in front of the sitting-room fire. They'd moved into the cottage next to Miss Wellington and were by this time living the rural life in earnest. Not as we do, simply because we like it and would hate a town existence. They are of the conviction, popular among the young, that when civilisation falls apart – they expect it to happen daily – the only solution will be to live off the land and they might as well get in training for it.

  They began by keeping chickens and bees. Tim being of an artistic as well as a practical bent, the chickens were not as other people's chickens. They were exotics – Oricanas and Marrons, funny little birds with ruffs and topknots, who laid arsenic-green and bitter-chocolate coloured eggs, which the locals immediately decided must be poisonous. Actually they were delicious, but only we and the Bannetts ate them. The rest of the village regarded them as akin to toadstools.

  The bees were normal bees, but people who keep bees always seem odd somehow. They wear strange clothes, for instance – in Tim's case a white boiler suit topped with a wide-brimmed yellow straw hat in which, with a black veil hanging from it, draped around his beard, he looked like a Victorian butterfly-collector bound for the Amazon or the Reverend Dodgson off on a picnic with Alice long ago.

  Bee-keepers do odd things, too. In Tim's case the two pictures which come most outstandingly to mind are of him standing in his bee-outfit in the lane one morning apparently rooted to the spot, saying 'Ow! Ow! Ow!' to himself in a voice that was muted yet fraught with anguish (he later explained that he'd been trying not to antagonise still further some bees that had got through a hole in his boiler suit and were stinging him, but they were obviously antagonised enough already so he gave up and went home at the double)... and of his lying on a chaise longue in his garden one day, right in front of the bee-hive, wearing only denim shorts and with a swelling bee-sting on his nose.

  He was, as is the case with most people's garden activities round here, in full view over the wall.

  'Now I've seen the lot,' said Father Adams, after he'd walked past specially to take a look.

  'Sure he ain't dead?' asked Fred Ferry, always out for a sensation.

  'Thee dussn't half have 'em round here,' opined the third member of our Hear All, See All, Tell All brigade, Ern Biggs, who, by virtue of his working as an odd-job man in our village but living in a neighbouring one, attributes anything that happens here to the fact that, as a village, we're all peculiar.

  Actually Tim was lying there combining a much-needed rest from his self-sufficiency activities – up at dawn to feed the chickens, hoeing potatoes, grinding wheat by hand for Liz to make home-made bread – with an experiment into the theory of gaining better results from bees by communicating trust and friendship to them. Some people do it by talking to them. Tim was endeavouring to do it by thought transference. He obviously hadn't transferred much trust so far since one of the guard bees had stung him on the nose, but one had to give him full marks for trying.

  'Why han't he got no clothes on?' enquired Ern Biggs when the motive was explained to him – but there was a reason for the bathing shorts, too. Bees, Tim explained, were angered by the smell of sweat. This way he wouldn't get so heated.

  All very well, but the village had its eye on him and when it came to the goats...

  Goat-keeping might well be described as the buttress of self-sufficiency, provided one has the space. They supply their owners with milk, cheese, yoghurt – even butter if one can stand the taste. Many people buy a goat in milk and start out that way. Tim and Liz began the other way round. They arranged to buy a female kid – the offspring of a goat belonging to some other self-sufficiency enthusiasts – which they proposed to have at six weeks old, rear by hand till it could look after itself, mate at the end of a year and so go into the goat business gradually.

  They prepared a small house and yard, put up a hayrack and feeding trough, bought a collar, chain and tethering pin. We thought it overdoing things a bit when, invited to inspect the preparations, we saw a milking-stool and stainless steel can hanging in readiness from the ceiling, but apparently that is one of the tenets of self-sufficiency. Buy now, while things are still about. By the time civilisation does fall apart there won't be a milking-stool or can to be had. They'll all be lying stacked in other people's goat houses and you'll have to barter for them with sacks of turnips.