Cats in May (17 page)

We started going for walks after supper—round the village in the soft spring evenings, with the cats greeting people they hadn’t seen all winter Most Friendlily and people gazing apprehensively back. We went off for a few days by the sea to get our strength up for the summer—and when Solomon’s basket fell
off its handle as we carried him into Halstock, there again was another sign. Woodworm on spring manoeuvres in the cover; the only part Solomon had left intact.

And finally—the one thing we needed to convince us that spring was really with us—Tarzan the tortoise came back.

He appeared one day as magically as he had vanished, ambling down the garden helped by two excited paws. He didn’t half look thin to him, said Solomon, lying down when we appeared and squinting anxiously under his shell. What about giving him some rabbit? Found him in the garage, said Sheba, beaming proudly at Charles. Under that straw heap she’d been watching for days, and wasn’t she clever?

She was indeed. So was Charles, whose idea it subsequently was to paint a bull’s-eye on Tarzan’s back to match the cottage. White for the walls, he chanted, describing a neat lime-wash circle on his drab brown shell. Blue for the doors, he said, putting a small circle inside the first one while Timothy and the cats stood admiringly by. Now, he announced, we could
never
lose Tarzan. We could spot him anywhere he went.
Even if he got out and wandered round the village, people would know he was ours.

Which was how, quite simply, we arrived at the next stage of our springtime saga. Visitors to the valley were apt to be surprised these days anyway, when at the top they met Hardy and Willis sporting purple whiskers. When, rounding the corner one morning, one of them then encountered Timothy in his crash helmet, a tortoise painted blue and white, Solomon because at that moment Tarzan had stopped for a rest—looking worriedly underneath and Sheba, following them at a distance shouting that they were all very silly and had Better Come Right Back Home … he jumped and turned quite pale.

That, said the villager with him, was the lot from
Cats in the Belfry
. The visitor mopped his brow. If he asked him, he said shakenly, we were ruddy well up the pole.

Fifteen
Cats in May

It is Maytime now in the valley. The birds are singing; the lilac is in bloom; Solomon and Sheba are moulting; and—judging by the ants in the greenhouse—our dandelion wine is a riot.

Timothy is still with us. Father Adams never got Fred Ferry’s summons after all. At the eleventh hour they united instead over a right of way running through some building land. Fred Ferry says he remembers distinctly using it when he were courting … Father Adams says so does he, and the elm
tree is up there still … From the sentimental expressions they assume when they are talking about it I have a strong suspicion they are making it up, particularly since if they are successful it will result, according to Father Adams, in something unique even in this district—a footpath going through a house. Meanwhile, there being nothing like a good fight for his rights to put him in a good humour, he has arranged to keep Timothy for the summer. Do ’un a power of good, he explained when he broke the news to us, and he weren’t much trouble, were he?

We are resting now from the turmoil on the lawn. Charles has just come back from a hayfield, where he has spent two hours looking for Timothy’s scout knife which he—Timothy, that is—and Solomon lost while they were being naturalists. Tossing it up they were, wept Timothy, when a jackdaw distracted their attention, and when they looked round it was gone.

I, as a further mark of Timothy’s zest to be a naturalist, am now a swallow’s Mum. One just a few days old which he found lying in the lane one night in the shelter of the barn and brought to me for succour. Much good did it do me, too, to say I didn’t know what
to feed it on. ‘Flies caught on the wing,’ advised Timothy pontifically, without a thought of the sight which would have ensued had we taken his advice. Charles and I and the cats, catching swallow’s flies on the lawn.

It is, as a matter of fact, doing very nicely on boiled egg and biscuit crumbs. Fed every hour, of course, which means my taking it to town during the day, but what is that to Timothy? Or to my colleagues, to whose delight—with happy memories of Blondin—it feeds clinging to the front of my dress, looking open-beaked up at my mouth and taking egg from a matchstick with aplomb.

It lives, when we are home, in the bathroom which is why Sheba is now sitting on the bathroom windowsill, imploring us piteously to open up. Thirsty she says she is, bawling so hard that already the Rector’s wife has stopped to ask if she is Well. So thirsty she can hardly speak … and we
know
she likes to drink from the washbasin …

But as Timothy says, we want the little swallow to grow up, don’t we? And fly, according to his bird book, away to Africa in the autumn? And come back again next year and nest in our roof instead of the starlings?
And be a perishing nuisance for evermore, I think despondently. Throwing its fledglings down for me to look after—and I bet they all like egg.

I dare not say this openly, of course. We are all such naturalists now. Solomon, when I left a chicken in the
kitchen this morning ready for the oven—and he, with a quick glance over his shoulder, nipped it into the yard—was quite hurt when I said he’d stolen it. Fainted it had, he assured me sorrowfully. He’d taken it out for Air.

Solomon right now is lying in a deckchair, waiting for his tea and swatting—though not, I fear, with the swallow in mind—the gnat flies as they pass. Time we finished writing, he says—and probably he is right. Who, if we told them, would believe any more of our stories? About our getting a mate for Tarzan, for instance, at Timothy’s suggestion … and what happened after that. Solomon in any case is tired—and you know who
really
wrote this book? Not me, if you go by his expression. But a big, Seal-Pointed cat.