A Comfort of Cats (5 page)

  She drifted on up the lane, picking an odd-shaped branch here, a sad-looking seedhead there, hard at work being a floral artist. Fred Ferry told me later that she'd just moved out from town. I wondered... should I have enlightened her?

  The broken fork, for instance, which her glance had dismissed as slovenly – that had history behind it. Charles had snapped the tine off years before, despatching an adder which had threatened the cats. Actually it was more useful with only three prongs; it fitted more easily between the plants. The flower bed was like concrete not on account of neglect, but because two cats, a donkey and a goat kept prancing over it. As for the faraway expression I wore – it had nothing to do with being bored. As a matter of fact I'd been thinking about Sass. Wondering what made him tick.

  We were always wondering that. There'd been the instance, a few days after his arrival, when Shebalu introduced him to grass. She'd loathed him to begin with, but now he'd begun to take on the smell of the cottage and she'd decided he wasn't too bad. So out she'd gone, sniffing a Daisy She Owned here, chattering at a Bird Who Was Frightened Of Her there, greeting Charles with a matey 'Waaaah' as she and Sass passed him – and, by the garage, at a clump she'd always favoured, stopping to eat Her Grass.

  Never had she chewed it so appreciatively, head on one side, eyes closed in satisfaction. Delicious, she announced. Been eating it for Years and Years. Nobody but her ate This Grass.

  They did now. Sass, having adopted her as his Mum and mentor, which meant faithfully copying everything she did, put his head down as near to her as he could get and started to chew it as well. There was a look of earnest owlishness on his face we were soon to learn to recognise. It meant that Sass was thinking. In this case presumably why big cats ate grass and deciding it must be on account of its colour. That was the only reason we could think of why from that time on he ate everything he came across that was green.

  Cabbages, brussels sprouts, watercress – he chewed industriously away at the lot. He smelt like Covent Garden, but we told ourselves it was doing him good. I remember the watercress particularly – I'd bought it to garnish a duck one day when we were having friends to supper, and when I nipped into the village shop for another bunch just on closing time, explaining that Sass had eaten the first... 'He ate the
watercress
?' echoed the proprietor in a voice that was loud with astonishment. 'Wasn't he interested in the
duck
?' The heads of the other customers swivelled like lightning. They thought I was talking about Charles. I explained about Sass liking green stuff, however, which they accepted as reasonably credible... One woman said she knew of a cat that ate cucumber. Another had a dog that liked rhubarb. A day or two later the first one turned up at the cottage bringing a bunch of watercress for Sass as a present.

  I invited her in and let her give it to him herself. I couldn't think what else
to
do. How, after what I'd said in good faith in the shop, could I have told her the truth? That he'd now got an obsession about green plastic netting and had abandoned fresh greenstuff for that?

  I might as well have done. You should have seen the look on her face when he backed, ears flat, away from the watercress. Trying to feed him that stuff, he wailed. She think he was potty or something?

  Obviously she now thought I was, and we were sure he was, which probably made some sort of equation. Even allowing for Siamese being different, however, his passion for netting was most odd.

  It started with our bringing home a half-hundredweight of onions in a green plastic sack which we'd bought at the local Saturday market. We'd happened to meet Tim Bannett there and he'd just bought two sacks himself. Next year, when he was better organised, he told us, he was going to grow his own. Meanwhile, as the next best thing, he was buying them in bulk. Liz was going to string these like the Breton onions – it told you how in the self-sufficiency book and they'd look good hanging up near the jars of honey. With their home-made wine on the shelves, he added, and the box of apples we'd given them... There was a sort of Virginian pioneer's Thanksgiving look on his face.

  There was one on Charles's, too, as we also drove home with a sack of onions. Tim was right, he enthused. The big porch outside the kitchen, which we'd recently had built to take gum boots and anoraks and the freezer, would make an admirable winter store. A couple of sacks of potatoes; one of flour; these onions; his cob-nuts when he harvested them. There was something in this self-sufficiency business – it gave one an independent, let-'em-all-come feeling.

  It did indeed. I began to have visions myself. Big stone jars of pickles; a neatly-stacked winter woodpile – not the last-minute odds and ends we frenziedly sawed up now. Perhaps we could get one of those big pine dressers for the kitchen, I said. I rather liked them. It would go well with our red-tiled floor and the strings of onions. We had our old oil-lamps, too, which we'd used before we got electricity at the cottage. I could get those out and polish them. They'd look really right on the dresser.

  So long as I didn't want to actually use them, said Charles. We'd had enough of groping round in dimness before. He had other things to do this winter.

  So, dreaming our dreams, we drove home with our sack of onions and stacked it proudly against the wall in the porch – only to find Sass chewing at the mesh a few minutes later as if it was his one hope of getting to Mecca.

  It couldn't have been the smell of the netting which attracted him. That was over-powered by the onions. It wasn't the onions either. When I offered him one he ignored it. It was then that it struck me it might be the colour of the netting – green like the grass and the watercress. Experts say cats are colour-blind and see only in shades of grey. I wondered, though – could Sass be different? It was a theory I put to Charles a few days later after an incident in the orchard.

  By this time, worried by Saska's preoccupation with the sack (Charles having come up with the thought that the dye in the netting might be poisonous), we'd moved it up to the spare-room-cum-study as the one place our gannet couldn't get at it. I write up there, it is a very small room and the smell of onions is hardly like that of violets – but, as Charles said, which was more important? Sass, indubitably. I put up with the onions.

  So this particular day I was upstairs working, Charles was in the orchard, Shebalu was asleep downstairs (four years older than Sass, she insists on senior rights occasionally) and Sass, bereft of company, was busy bawling the place down. I could tell by the rise and fall of the howling that he was wandering from room to room. Presently there was silence. A creak on the stairs. I waited for it – the sound of sniffing at the door jamb. Then the hiatus which I knew from long experience with Siamese meant he was peering under the door.

  His bellow when it came was like the foghorn on the Lizard. He knew I was In There! he roared. He could See Me! Why didn't I Let Him In? What was in there he wasn't supposed to know about?

  I could stand the foghorn. I'd had long experience of that, too. What I couldn't stand was when he started chewing the carpet. I carried him over to Charles who said of course he'd have him in the orchard – he was so intelligent he was always a delight to be with. 'Couldn't she be bothered with you then?' I heard him ask as the two of them made their way up through the gooseberry patch. Sass gave a man-to-man 'Wow!'

  I went back to my work. For a while all was peace and silence, then I heard footsteps thumping up the stairs. It was Charles, clutching Sass. His face was scarlet. Did I know, he said, what this cat of mine had done? Gone straight up an apple tree – right to the top – and chewed a whacking great hole in the net!

  The apple trees are netted to keep off the birds, whom we like but who devastate our crops. The nets are expensive and Charles had spent ages putting them on, manoeuvring them carefully with a pole to cover all the branches. Admittedly this was autumn and the birds wouldn't start in till the spring, but 'A brand new net!' groaned Charles. 'And now I've got to take a ladder up and mend the hole with string. That blasted cat must be bonkers.'

  It was then I pointed out that the nets were green, like the onion sack and the watercress. Perhaps he was a breakthrough, I said; a cat who recognised colour. Charles said breakthrough was the right description for him, the way he'd gone through that fruit net. But why should he get fanatical about things that were
green
, not brown or white or blue?

  Maybe when he saw Shebalu eating her grass clump with such reverence, I said, he thought he should eat everything that colour to be on the safe side. Maybe it was some sort of Siamese ritual, like that business of his with the rug. (The rug is a story with many facets. I'd better tell that one later.) The more I saw of Sass, I confessed, I wondered whether he was superstitious.

  Charles looked at the cat we were talking about. Sass never wasted time. Having done his stuff with green netting for the day he was obviously practising for his next encounter with Polly. Back arched, tail stuck out like a teacup handle, he was advancing across the room at absolutely nothing. He stiffened, feinted, jumped aside, spun round... advanced sideways at nothing again. He didn't know about superstitious, said Charles. If I asked him, that cat was nuts.

We first realised we had a strain of unusual mice in the Valley when we were returning from a walk one day with Annabel.

  I was in front, going ahead to open the Forestry gate, Charles was coming behind with his four-legged girlfriend, when what I thought was an autumn leaf skittered across the track in front of me and came to rest at the bottom of the bank. It moved again as I got near it and I saw that it was a field-mouse. Chestnut brown, small – the size of a half-grown oak leaf – and making no attempt whatever to get away. Maybe it was injured, I thought, stooping to pick it up and put it where Annabel wouldn't tread on it. (I'll pick up anything with gloves on except an adder; another thing I've grown used to over the years.)

  It wasn't injured, however. It was sitting up on its haunches eating grass seed, turning the tassel like a corn-cob in incredibly tiny paws, ignoring me completely as if I were some sort of local tree. By the time Charles came up it had finished that grass head and moved a foot or so up the bank, where it selected another which it sat up and nibbled while it looked interestedly down at Annabel.

  'Perhaps it's got concussion,' I whispered to Charles. Never had I seen an outdoor mouse so confident. Charles studied it closely.

  'Nothing wrong with that one,' he said. 'It's just not afraid of anything.'

  Neither was the one I saw next day eating bird crumbs by the cotoneaster in the yard. It was sitting nonchalantly with its back to me and didn't even turn round as I passed. It wasn't the mouse we'd seen in the lane. This one was definitely larger. There was the same air of insouciance, however – the obvious lack of fear. I wondered if they came from the same litter.

  That afternoon the cotoneaster mouse was taken into custody by Shebalu. I shouted when I saw her creeping up on him but he determinedly took no notice. She carried him indoors, moaning horribly between her teeth as is her wont when she's announcing that she's caught something. That in itself would frighten most mice to death – it shakes even me when I hear it. But the moment she put it down to give a louder bellow for Sass (never around, said her expression, when he was Wanted) the mouse got up and, while she still had her mouth open, nipped quietly into the kitchen.

  I hoped he'd go straight through it and out into the yard but instead he went into a cupboard. Not, we realised when we knew him better, because he was scared and seeking refuge. He was busy summing up the prospects. That was in October. That mouse, soon to be known as Lancelot (because, phonetically, that was what he did to Charles's nuts), stayed with us till the following spring, resisting all our attempts to expel him. He moved his headquarters at times but we always knew where he was. We had only to look for the cats.

  It was they, the first day, who told us he was in the cupboard. They were camped hopefully outside it. Sass with not the least idea why he was there – he'd never yet seen a mouse – but copying Shebalu, trying to look intent, though his ears did wander occasionally. I shut them in the living-room and turned out the tins and packets. Sure enough there was the mouse in the last corner. I put on a glove, reached out a hand – he jumped over it and disappeared behind me.

  He was under the cooker, according to Shebalu, whom I fetched out to say where he'd gone.
He
could actually See Him, said Sass, peering under with one eye. Apparently the mouse saw Saska, too. He shot out and into another cupboard. Only to check that he had an escape route, though. Having done so he came back and went under the cooker.