Cats in May (12 page)

So we told him. All about the sulking and the fighting and Sheba being Guy Fawkes and the fact that, unable to stand it any longer, we had arranged to return Samson to the breeder that afternoon. We were particularly sad about that. We had grown very fond of Samson in the short time he had been with us, and Samson, when he could spare the time from worrying about Solomon and Sheba, was obviously fond of us too.

We felt we had failed in our handling of the cats—and that, though she was kindness itself in saying how sorry she was and agreeing to take him back, was undoubtedly the opinion of the breeder. Her kittens, she told us when we rang her up, often went to homes where there were other cats—even other Siamese—and after the initial settling-down period there had never been any trouble with
them
. The inference was that if
we had given it a little more time and been firmer with our own two specimens—though how we could have done that, short of putting them in balls and chains, we didn’t know—we wouldn’t have had any trouble either.

Dr Tucker soon put us right on that score. Nothing, he said, could have altered the situation. It arose from the fact that Solomon and Sheba were twins and had been brought up together. They had a much greater affinity, he said, than kittens raised together but coming from different families—and though in time they might have come to tolerate Samson it would only have been an armed truce. Never would there have been the affection that, despite their feuds and battles, our two held for each other. Never the fun either. In due course Solomon and Sheba themselves might—as they had already begun to do—have grown completely apart. In any case, he said, glancing professionally at Solomon—who all this time had been sitting in the road with the owlishly innocent expression he always adopted when people were talking about him—in any case, with Solomon so jealous and Samson being another tom, eventually Solomon would have started to spray.

Solomon’s ears shot up like train signals at that and
so did ours. Solomon, we said—firmly, in case the gremlins were listening—was neutered. Before he could look round, Solomon assured him soulfully—though there was a distinctly speculative look in his eye too. We were stunned when the doctor explained to us that while neuters didn’t usually go in for such pastimes there was nothing, once they were roused to jealousy over another cat—and particularly, it seemed, if they were Siamese—to stop them. We were even more stunned when we realised what an escape we’d had. As Charles remarked more than once on the way home, once Solomon got the idea he wouldn’t have stopped at spraying. He’d have gone round acting like a stirrup pump. All the perfumes of Arabia, said Charles, fanning himself faintly at the very thought, wouldn’t have helped us in that case. One whiff and we’d have been out of bounds for weeks.

So, less reluctantly than we would otherwise have parted with him but sadly nevertheless, we took Samson back to his family. The last we saw of him he wasn’t worrying about us at all but was simply a fat black paw happily baiting his sisters round a bookcase. And gradually life returned to normal.

Only gradually. It was several days before Sheba finally stopped spitting at Solomon—and Solomon, in turn, stopped going round as if he expected to see Dracula round every corner. But eventually peace did return, and with it the morning when, as soon as the door of the spare room was opened, they marched happily in to us side by side. Sheba pausing to wash Solomon’s ears before she cuddled down on Charles’s shoulder and Solomon, by way of his own private celebration, diving head-first under the bedclothes, rolling on his back, and going to sleep with his feet on the pillow.

Now, for the first time in weeks, we had a chance to look round and see what was happening in the village.

Things hadn’t been exactly standing still there either. Something had upset Father Adams—what it was we didn’t know yet, but it was a sure sign when every time he passed the cottage he had his hat so far down over his eyes he could hardly see. The people down the lane had a new car. (Cream with a nice hard top, reported Solomon, watching it with interest from the window and agitating the curtains so hard they probably thought it was us. Just the thing for autographing. He must go down and walk over it as soon as possible.) And Sidney, with Christmas looming ahead, had temporarily given up odd-jobbing and was working for a local builder. With results which, from what we could hear, were likely to set the housing programme back for years.

Sidney laughingly told us some of them when he came to mend a tap one Sunday morning. In one house, it seemed—working with a double team because it was wanted in a hurry—they’d whipped the walls up so fast it wasn’t till lunch time, when somebody went to fill the kettle, that they realised they hadn’t left any
gaps for the doors. There was no need to ask who’d filled them in; it was, of course, Sidney.

In another one they had for days been going in and out by means of a space left for a large plate glass observation window. Apart from filling kettles Sidney’s gang apparently never used doorways in the normal way, but leapt light-heartedly through windows or over four-foot walls to show their agility. Thus it was that not ten minutes after the window had been put in place one bright autumn morning another member of the team, late for work on account of his motorbike breaking down, had come tearing up the path, taken off at the spot from which Sidney & Co. usually launched themselves across the sill, and before anybody could stop him had gone clean through it.

He hadn’t hurt himself—head like a coconut he had, Sidney assured us; all he got was ringing in his ears and a dent in his driving helmet—and they’d laughed themselves sick over it for days. Until, in fact, their next hilarious little faux pas, when they put a staircase in backwards.

This was in a contemporary house—the first ever to go up in our village—and this time, said Sidney,
knocking our stopcock for six with the coal hammer, it was the boss’s fault. We were glad to hear that. We were beginning to have visions of Sidney and his pals spending Christmas in the workhouse if they went on at this rate, and it was a relief to hear of a little balance coming into their affairs.

On this occasion, it seemed, the boss couldn’t understand the plans. Brought up on solid, foursquare bungalows and good old semi-detacheds, his first open-plan layout had floored him completely. Not wishing to confess it he had puzzled it out as best he could—with the result that the staircase had gone in the wrong way round and in one place passed so close under a beam they had to go on hands and knees to navigate it.

The funny thing about that, said Sidney—dealing our tap a clonk which certainly stopped it leaking, though whether it would ever run again was another matter—was that everybody did go under it on hands and knees. The boss, the workmen—even the people the house was being built for. Somehow, Sidney said, it just grew on them as part of the construction; nobody stopped to think they’d still be doing it when the house was finished. Nobody, that is, until the architect came
down from London, and what
he
said when he saw them playing Oranges and Lemons up his staircase—Sidney said he turned bright purple, and it didn’t come out of the dictionary.

Never believe it would we? asked Sidney, downing his hammer and looking hopefully at the teapot. We would, alas. Only too well. Back in the days when we had Blondin and had just moved into the cottage we, too, had innocently engaged a local builder to level the kitchen. After several days during which I washed up with one foot on a plank and one knee on the sink to avoid falling into six inches of cement and the builder told us unceasingly how clever he was—never used a spirit level, he assured us; never used a plumb line either; just went by his eye and never made a mistake in his life—the boards were removed to reveal that at long last, and unfortunately on our kitchen floor, myopia had caught up with him. It was still two inches out of true.

When we pointed it out to the builder, first of all he swore it wasn’t and then—when we proved it by putting one of Blondin’s nuts at the top and letting it roll down the slope—he said he’d done it purposely. So that when I threw a bucket of water over it it would run straight
out of the back door, he said with sudden inspiration. Nothing—not even our protests that if we did the first thing it would do would be to run straight into the cupboards—would move him. And there, a monument to the invincibility of local builders, our floor slopes gently to this day. With cooker, three cabinets (and now of course the refrigerator) supported on the blocks he provided not only to level them up but presumably so we could throw water under them as well.

Not, as Charles said, that we could have told Sidney that. It might have given him ideas. Not that we had much chance to dwell on our kitchen floor either. That was the morning Sheba got bitten by an adder.

I know it was October and that adders usually bite in the spring. That was what the Vet said when I rang him up and told him—though as an afterthought he said our cats were capable of finding anacondas in January if they felt like it and he’d better come over right away. I know it was always Solomon we’d worried about over adders. Solomon, whose idea of capturing anything from a grass snake to a wasp was to poke it first to see if it moved and then sniff it to see if it was good to eat. Solomon, who when we took him for a walk dived impressively
into every clump of grass we came to and then got so excited, seeing his own black paw emerge on the other side, that if an adder had been there he would have been a trophy on its totem pole before he could look round.

Not that Sheba was a snake catcher either. It was just that—being so good at everything—we’d always imagined that if she did go in for snaking she’d come home wearing them like leis. Which was why when she crept sadly into the cottage on three legs, holding one paw in the air and looking pitifully at us as she passed, to begin with we didn’t worry too much. There was always the chance she was imitating Solomon; apart from which we’d had so many false alarms with one or the other of them falling off walls, the Vet rushing over to diagnose sprains, and cats’ liniment at 7/6d a time simply piling up in the bathroom—unused, because they hid the moment they saw the bottle—we informed her the slings were in the first-aid cabinet and continued talking to Sidney.

It wasn’t till we discovered she was under the bed and that her paw, normally so small and neat, was the size of a balloon that we realised there was something
wrong—and by that time it was almost too late. When we got her out from under the bed she was already in a coma. She lay in Charles’s arms as if she were dead while I phoned the Vet. Completely limp she lay there—though by this time her eyes were slightly open—while he examined her, said it did indeed look like snakebite and we could take no chances, and swiftly injected histamine into her rump.

That was to stop the swelling. For the next halfhour our world stood still while we waited to see if it acted and the Vet arranged to get snake serum, if it were needed, from the local hospital. I had her by this time—close in my arms for warmth, with Charles and Sidney standing by and Solomon, always to the forefront in a drama, peering curiously from a nearby chair.

Never had she seemed so dear to us as she lay there while the minutes passed and the swelling rose slowly to her shoulder—not even in those long night hours when she was lost. Then at least there was a chance that she was safe somewhere. Now we could only watch her and know that if she left us—wicked, destructive, maddening as she was—part of our hearts would go too.

There was, as Charles said when it was all over, no need for us to have worried. Sheba was made of tougher stuff than that. Quite apart from anything else she wasn’t going to bequeath all the fish to Solomon if she could help it.

Half an hour later, with the swelling miraculously halted and Sheba herself happily playing Camille on a hot-water bottle, the Vet pronounced her out of danger. All that remained now, he said, patting her gently on the cheek, was for the little girl to get better.

The little girl did that all right. After a couple of days’ convalescence on our bed, with Charles carrying her up and down stairs because her foot still swelled when she walked—and the only thing she could
eat
, she assured us, casting triumphant glances at Solomon every time she saw him gloomily chewing cod, was gallons and gallons of crab paste—she was as right as rain. When she did get up she nearly drove us mad for days drinking water non-stop with the noise of a St Bernard—but that, said the Vet when we reported it, was just her system counteracting the effect of the histamine. After we’d opened the kitchen door for her about fifty times in an evening it seemed to us more
like Sheba being cussed, but eventually, just before our legs gave out, that wore off too.

All that remained was Sheba telling everybody ad nauseam how she’d been bitten by an adder and nearly died; a certain cogitation on the part of ourselves and the Vet as to whether it might, after all, have been a wasp; and a firm conviction on the part of Sheba that Sidney—when we looked back we realised that he had indeed been standing behind her at the time—was the one who stuck the hypodermic into her. Right in the Bot, she reproached him every time he appeared. Right where it Hurt. Just when she was Almost Dying. Sidney did his best to make it up, but she wouldn’t go near him for weeks.