Cats in May (15 page)

Well, there we were. Charles meditating all over the place with Grandma’s blessing and practising deep breathing. The cats sitting importantly by him meditating as well and announcing that they used to do this in Siam. Any minute now I expected to see the three of them wearing turbans. Until, once again, I had an idea.

This, like the snuff one, was also born of desperation. We were visiting some friends who lived on the moors at the time—staying with them, as the weather was bad, for the night. It was winter still, of course, and all the evening Charles had been talking happily of Yoga—how it mentally lifted one … raised one above bodily things … He didn’t, he announced (wonderful indeed, seeing there were several degrees of frost) even feel the cold.

I did. When we went to bed—without bottles because we’d been talking so late and Charles said we really
didn’t need them, not feeling the cold—I was absolutely perished. Round about two o’clock in the morning I got out and put the floor rugs on the bed, but it made no difference. I was still perished.

Charles, who had rolled over while I was getting the rugs and was now comfortably cocooned in at least three-quarters of the bedclothes, informed me once more that he didn’t feel the cold. Mind over matter, he assured me, snuggling cosily into his pillow. I ought to take up yoga. I ought to meditate too.

I did. After a little meditation I put my hand on one of the bedposts—one of those old-fashioned brass ones it was—until it was icily cold. Lovingly I burrowed through the cocoon with it in search of Charles. Tenderly I placed it in the middle of his back. There was a loud, excruciating yell … And Charles gave up being interested in Yoga.

Thirteen
With Solder and Crowbar

That was the winter Grandma’s parrot, Laura, died. As a result, according to Grandma, of the coalman looking at her through the window.

Everybody else said it was old age. To the family’s knowledge Grandma had had Laura for thirty years, and she hadn’t been first-hand even then. Grandma had bought her from a pub in the belief that parrots from licensed premises (or, she said, from a sailor if you could get one) talked—and had kept her, when she turned out to be completely dumb except for
screaming like a maniac at mealtimes, on the grounds that it was wicked to keep birds in such places and she couldn’t send her back.

So, after a little financial adjustment (Grandma, as she told the landlord herself, was no fool) Laura had lived with her happily for thirty years. Until, in recent months, she had begun to droop, and lose her feathers, and develop a wheezy little cough. When we reminded Grandma of that, and how for weeks now Aunt Louisa had been putting whisky in her drinking water and tying a hot-water bottle to her cage every night and still Laura had gone on failing, Grandma said it was rubbish. Laura always got bronchitis in the winter, she said; Louisa always put whisky in her drinking water (a statement which we had to clarify when there were strangers present for the sake of Aunt Louisa’s reputation) and it was no use our arguing. With her own eyes she had seen the coalman looking through the window with his great black face, it had frightened poor Laura, and now she was dead.

She was indeed, and there wasn’t much we could do about it except change the coalman the following week and offer to get her another parrot. After which—the
management of Grandma being rather wearing at times—Charles and I went down with flu.

It wasn’t so bad to begin with, when only Charles had it. True it was unfortunate that the first day he took to his bed I had to go to town. When I got back
the cats, whom I had left sitting happily on his chest enjoying his temperature—the first time, Sheba announced, that she had been really warm this winter—were waiting anxiously for me in the hall window. Charles hadn’t fed them, complained Solomon, regarding me indignantly through the glass. Charles was groaning, said Sheba, and they’d had to come downstairs because they couldn’t stand it. Charles hadn’t let them Out, roared Solomon, whose idea of anybody staying home, even with double pneumonia, was to let him in and out of doors all day long. Charles was hardly a little ray of sunshine either. When I went up to see him all he said—presumably in case it helped at the inquest—was that he’d taken his temperature at three o’clock and it was a hundred and two.

For three days he lay there wilting heroically. With his knees up most of the time because Sheba had decided that in the bed, in a little cave under Charles’s knees if he would kindly raise them for her, was the warmest place to be. Calling feebly for more food—not because he was hungry but because by the time he’d
braced himself to tackle his soup or his poached plaice Solomon, who didn’t believe in this weaker brethren business, had appreciatively eaten the lot. Assuring me, when I asked how he was, that he felt very frail indeed … very frail.

It was on Monday, however, when Charles was on the convalescent list and I had taken to my bed, that the fun really started. Not that it was exactly fun for me. I had a temperature too, and to my poor flubefuddled mind it seemed more like one of those symbolic plays where people keep walking in and out.

First it was the cats, coming in with round, astonished eyes to ask what on earth I was doing there and when was I going to get up. Lying there instead of Charles, said Sheba reproachfully, and I
knew
she liked it under his knees. Then it was Charles, asking if he should make a cup of tea. Then, a few minutes later, it was the cats again—Charles having apparently decided there wasn’t much chance of my making it, anyway-appearing to report that he wasn’t half mucking about in the kitchen and he hadn’t given them their breakfast
yet. Then it was Solomon, howling wrathfully downstairs, charging—grumbling loudly to himself—up to his earth box in the spare room, and then appearing dramatically in the doorway once more to inform me (even in bed I was still in charge in Solomon’s little world) that Charles hadn’t changed it, Charles wouldn’t let him out, and if I didn’t do something quick there’d be an accident.

At that point I summoned strength to yell for Charles, whereupon the cats were let out, I got my cup of tea, Charles—flushed with achievement—announced that he would now get the breakfast, and, save for a monotonous
creak … BANG
from down below where the sitting-room door latched itself firmly every time he went through (and what on earth he was
doing
going through it about fifty times a minute I couldn’t imagine), there was peace.

It lasted about five minutes, at the end of which Charles called up to say the post van hadn’t arrived yet and ought he to get Solomon in—after which my next diversion was Charles in the garden calling Solomon. Shortly after that there was the sound of a tray being deposited on the hall table. Breakfast now, I told myself,
and felt quite hungry at the thought. But no. Charles, having got it that far, was once more in the garden calling Solomon …

It took twenty minutes to round up Solomon and get that tray up to my bed. By that time the toast was stone cold—which Charles said was odd, because it was hot enough when he made it. The tea was cold too. Colder even than the toast. Understandably so when I questioned Charles and found that he hadn’t made a fresh pot. Having, he said, only poured one cup each out of it, and there was still bags left, he’d used the lot he’d made an hour ago.

I will skim the details of the rest of the morning, taken up by the Rector arriving to enquire whether he could get us anything in town (yes, I replied gratefully via Charles; a rabbit for the cats); Charles coming up again to ask what size rabbit; Charles shouting at me from the garden could I see, because the Rector was waving to me from the road; Charles coming up ten minutes later to ask whether I was awake and should he make some coffee; and, ever and anon, the cats marching in like a Greek chorus to enquire was I
still
in bed, they didn’t like what Charles had given them
for breakfast, and—once again—Charles wouldn’t let them out.

By then it was lunch time. There was no need for Charles to ask me what he should do about that. Before he wore his legs out completely I got up and fixed it myself.

What followed was, of course, inevitable. After all that work Charles had a relapse. By afternoon he was back in bed and I was tottering up with cups of tea for him. By evening, too—and there was no denying it; Sidney said he could hear him from the other end of the garden—Charles had a cough. There was no need as Sheba said, snug once more in her little tent under Charles’s knees while Solomon lay determinedly on his chest, heaving like a storm-tossed sailor with every wheeze—to ask who was most sick in this house. It was undoubtedly Charles.

He recovered eventually, of course. By the end of the week, with people going down like flies all over the village and the cats sitting on the wall happily informing people as they passed that we’d had it first, Charles except for his cough—was quite flourishing. Which
was how, looking round for something to occupy us during convalescence, we came to restring the grandfather clock.

You remember, perhaps, the grandfather clock. The one in the hall, where Sheba used to sit on top and Solomon was eternally opening the door to watch it tick? We’d found a key for it eventually, and for a while there’d been peace. Sheba had even given up sitting on the top. No fun in that, she said, if old Podgebelly wasn’t mucking about underneath.

And then one day the key broke off in the lock, and we were back where we started. Sheba sitting on the top, Solomon hanging through the door, entrancedly watching the pendulum. He was taller now than he had been—or else a bit more athletic. And when we went home one night and, when I opened the hall door, only Solomon ambled through, I had the fright of my life. No sign of Sheba, the door of the clock wide open, and—the silence struck me immediately—no sound of ticking from the clock …

I hardly dared look, so sure I was of what I’d find. Sheba lying in the bottom of the clock flat as a pancake,
with a weight on top of her—pushed in experimentally by Solomon or, as she was apt to do when nobody was about, having an inquisitive look on her own account and overbalancing.

Sheba, as it happened, was asleep on our bed. Frozen to the eiderdown, she said when I found her there a few minutes later and hugged her with relief. Which was why she hadn’t come down, and I’d be a lot more useful if I got her a hot-water bottle. Solomon it was who’d stopped the clock. Want to see how? he enquired excitedly as I set it going again. Standing on his thin hind legs he opened the door, reached in a long black paw, and prodded the pendulum. Clever, wasn’t he? he said.

After that little scare we went back to tying the door with string while we were away, and it was just as well we did. One night we went home to find that the clock had stopped again—and this time, when we opened the door to find out why, one of the weights
was
off. The catgut had snapped and it was lying in the bottom.

So, during our convalescence, it seemed an apt
time to rehang it. Quietly, contemplatively—with, as Charles said, plenty of time to appreciate the way craftsmen of old did their work.

What the craftsmen of old did with grandfather clocks, as we discovered when we started in on ours, was to hang the weights on catgut, tie the ends in knots inside a couple of hollow cogwheels—and then bung the clock face on fast, right in front of the cogwheels and fixed so firmly that we couldn’t get it off.

We used everything but a crowbar on it before we’d finished, and still we couldn’t get it off. We never did get it off. We were in fact fast reaching the stage of jumping on it when Father Adams looked in to see how we were and informed us that you didn’t put new gut in like that. Not by taking off the hands and strewing pendulum, weights, and pieces of clock case all over the floor. You eased it—with a piece of wire if necessary, but definitely without touching the clock face—in through they little holes …

We managed it in the end. What Charles said before we’d finished about the craftsmen of old and those little holes must have scorched their ears even
at a distance of a hundred and twenty years—but we did it. We even got the clock back together again, mounted on its pinnacle, and working. We have never, to this day, been able to replace the second hand. It got a bit bent when we were taking it off, and though we straightened it again with a hammer, every time we put it back it gets hooked up in the other hands and the clock immediately stops. For days, too,
we nearly went mad because no matter what we did to it the clock kept striking on the half-hour—five at half-past four, for instance, and midnight at half-past eleven. Which, even in a household like ours, was a little muddling.