Cats in the Belfry (11 page)

  Their chief quarry was a tortoiseshell called Annie, who lived with an old lady further down the lane. Sugieh, as a kitten, had had a sort of Topsy and Eva friendship with Annie, and although they didn't have much to do with one another after they grew up and Sugieh realised she was a Siamese, Annie often used to sit on our garden wall watching the kittens play. Not, however, after Solomon had issued his edict about no cats being allowed to look in either. Any time we saw Annie after that she was playing the lead in a sort of Willow Pattern procession that went past our front gate about a dozen times a day. Annie first, flat on her stomach and looking hauntedly over her shoulder; Solomon, on his stomach too, with his spotted whiskers bushed out like a walrus, slinking stealthily along behind like a musical comedy spy; and Sheba, carefully avoiding the puddles and looking to see if Charles was watching, bringing up the rear.

  They had no mercy on anybody. Well, hardly anybody. When Mimi turned round one day in the lane, saw them slinking along behind her and gave them a cuff each alongside the ear, they decided to make an exception in her case, seeing that she was a Siamese too. But there was nothing soft about them the day they found a stray tabby queen and her kitten sheltering, after a heavy night's rain, under a row of cloches in the garden. When I, touched by the sight of the tiny, homeless kitten asleep on the bare earth, took out some bread and milk and put it under the cloche they stared at me incredulously. Didn't I know, they said, that these were Dangerous Characters? In Our Garden? Probably going to Eat All Our Food? Probably got Fleas too, added Sheba, who was getting more like her mother every day. The moment the mother cat, unnerved by their awful threats, slunk out at the far end of the cloches and over the wall, Solomon and Sheba went into action. In through the near end they marched, growled fiercely at the kitten – Sheba with her cloth cap look and crossed eyes for good measure – and ate his bread and milk. That showed him, by Jove. He took off as fast as his small white paws would carry him, screaming frantically for his Mum. We never saw
him
again.

  Nemesis caught up with them in the end, of course. At least it caught up with Solomon. Sheba was up a tree at the time. She kept telling him the black and white tom from the farm was one of those nasty cats Mum had warned them about, but he wouldn't listen. Jack the Giant-Killer he said he was, and as fast as I brought him back to the safety of the garden, back, to sit in the lane and spit, he went.

  When the tom, after staring at Solomon incredulously for nearly an hour, said he didn't believe it and strolled off into the woods Solomon was beside himself with triumph. Long after he had followed his quarry up into the undergrowth we could hear him telling the world how valiant he was, and how All the Cats, Even the Ones as big as Elephants, were afraid of him.

  A few minutes later there was a hideous scream and the pair of them bounded out of the woods like shots from a gun. To our amazement – for from the noise we thought he'd murdered Sol: Sheba, indeed, was as high as she could get in the damson tree saying now she was our only comfort she'd better take special care of herself – the tom was in the lead. We caught just one glimpse of him as he hit the road before streaking off up the hill in a cloud of dust, and he looked as if he had seen a ghost. The funny thing was, Solomon was in exactly the same state. Though he didn't appear to be damaged in any way he fled indoors and hid under the bed.

  Later that night, a sad little Solomon indeed, he crept out to take a saucer of milk and we discovered what had happened. It couldn't have happened to anybody but him. Trying to spit, talk and look fearsome at the same time he had bitten clean through his own tongue. It didn't inconvenience him in any way, though it healed as forked as a lizard's. It would have taken a lot more than that to stop Solomon eating or talking. But it stopped him chasing the tom. Any time the enemy appeared in sight after that – proceeding very warily because he thought Solomon had beaten
him
and he didn't want another meeting – we knew exactly where to find the giant-killer. In our bedroom, hiding under the eiderdown.

ELEVEN

S
ometimes we wondered what we had done to deserve those cats. Take, for instance, the American we met in Florence. It was all very well for her to stand in front of Lippi's portrait with her hands clasped in ecstasy, declaiming Browning's poem about him at the top of her voice. It was all very well for her to feel so deeply about Savonarola she nearly passed out at the first sight of St Mark's. She had time for such things. She wasn't so addled by a pair of slant-eyed tyrants that she'd booked her train reservations for the wrong day. She wasn't still suffering from the effects of the latest trip to the cattery with Sheba bawling to Charles to Spare Her every inch of the way and Solomon eating car rugs as hard as he could go. Her cats knew how to behave themselves.

  She had three of them, all Siamese. In winter they lived graciously in a New York apartment and never dreamed of trying to tear the doors down to get out. In the summer, together with a Boxer, a 'cello, a sewing machine and her husband, who was a member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, they drove in an estate wagon up to Maine where they spent three happy months hunting in the New England woods.

  They were simply wunnerful on the trip, she said. The only snag was that as it was a five-hundred-mile journey they had to stay at a motel overnight, and while dogs were allowed in motels they never knew how the proprietor might react to cats. They had overcome that, she said, by having three wicker travelling baskets made to look – we admired the touch – like Gladstone bags. When they arrived at the motel the cats were popped into the bags, cautioned to be quiet, and carried in with the luggage.

  'And are they quiet?' I asked, with a horrible vision of Solomon being carried screaming into the cattery in his basket, long black paws flailing out of every hole he could find so that it looked as if we had captured an angry octopus.

  'Oh sure,' she said. 'After they've cased the joint to make sure it's all right they settle down so quiet you'd never know they were there. They wanna go to Maine as much as we do.'

  While we still had our mouths open she told us about Clancy. That, as she said herself, was really something. Clancy was a champion Siamese tom belonging to a friend of hers back home. He was handsome, he was affectionate, and he fathered such wonderful kittens that his services were in demand all over New York. The trouble was he had to eat so much raw beef to keep his strength up that his food bill was colossal, and nothing like balanced by his stud fees. It was a problem in economics that had Clancy's owner's husband, who was a stockbroker – of Scottish descent, said our friend, anxious that we shouldn't get the wrong angle – quite worried for a while. Then he found a solution. He opened a stockbroking account in Clancy's own name, all his stud fees were invested in it, and Clancy was now the richest cat on the New York Exchange. Didn't we think, she asked, finishing her coffee at a gulp – she had a busy afternoon ahead of her, buying tablecloths and seeing the place where Savonarola was burned – that that was wunnerful? We said it sure was.

  Our cats might not be wizards of the Stock Market but there was little doubt that they would have made wonderful actors. Sheba could melt the stoniest heart with her fragile, wide-eyed innocence, deceptive though it was; and Solomon, when he was sitting down and you couldn't see his spindly legs, which were now so long he walked like a camel, could look unbelievably tragic.

  As a combination they were irresistible, and well they knew it. Nobody would think, when we had visitors and they sat side by side on the hearth-rug with Sheba demurely reaching up to wash Solomon's ears and Solomon occasionally retaliating with an ­affectionate slurp that nearly knocked her off her feet, that right before the doorbell rang they had been fighting like a couple of alley cats over who was going to have first place on Charles's lap. Nobody would think – seeing them trotting meekly down the hill behind the Rector, who had for the umpteenth time that week found them sitting outside his front gate wailing that they were lost – that to their dear little minds it was the side-splitting equivalent of ringing doorbells and running away. Nobody except us, who had seen them marching determinedly up the hill in the first place, ignoring our appeals to come back and changing their pace to a forlorn meander before our very eyes as they rounded the corner.

  And even we were flabbergasted when we heard that when we were at the office they could be seen in the hall window every afternoon at four-thirty, gazing wistfully up the hill and imploring passers-by to tell them when we were coming home. When we got in just after five they were always Sound Asleep in an armchair and there was such an exhibition of opening one eye, yawning and complete astonishment that we were back so soon that we could hardly believe it. Until we went home one night to find them Sound Asleep and the hall curtains lying in their water bowl. Nobody misses anything in the country and the woman who told us how that happened – it was just after four and Solomon, presumably limbering up for the show at four-thirty, was swinging upside down on one of the curtains like a monkey – said she hoped he hadn't hurt himself but he went down with an awful bang.

  Solomon was all right. It was just that his weight – his favourite pastime just then was eating and he was, I regret to say, familiarly known as Podgebelly – had brought down not only the curtains but the blocks on which they were screwed to the wall as well. He was in any case not entirely to blame. He was only copying Sheba, who often swung upside down on the curtains to amuse Charles.

  He was always copying Sheba. Brash though he was, always noisy, always in trouble – underneath it all Solomon was a small, wistful clown, valiantly striving to be most important and best at everything and pathetically conscious that he was not. Sheba, on the other hand, was a veritable prodigy. Frail and tiny as a flower, she could run like the wind, climb like a monkey, and had the stamina of an ox.

  What Solomon envied most was her prowess as a hunter. Solomon was hopeless at hunting. Not because of any physical incapacity but because he just hadn't got a clue in his big, bat-brained head. His idea of catching mice in the garden wall was not, like Sheba, to lie patiently in wait for them. That, he said, was girl's stuff. He blew threateningly down the hole and then, when they wouldn't ­come out and fight like men, thrust in a long black paw and tried to hook 'em out.

  Any time he did sit down with her to watch something – very impressive he looked too; head narrowed, dark nose pointing eagerly, every inch Rin-Tin-Tin on the trail – five minutes without action and Solomon was either sound asleep from sheer boredom or, with his head swivelled back to front, busy talking to a passing butterfly.

  The result was that while his sister slaughtered mice and shrews by the dozen, Solomon never caught anything first-hand in his life. Unless you count his snake, which was quite six inches long, and he got so excited when he found it that he jumped on its tail instead of its head and it got away.

  It was, we knew, his secret sorrow. The look on his face as he watched Sheba prancing and posturing with her trophies before laying them Eastern-fashion at our feet was pathetic. Sometimes, when he could bear it no longer, he would dawdle up on his long, sad, spidery legs, head down so that Sheba shouldn't see what he was carrying, and present us with a soggy leaf. Then he would sit down and look soulfully up into our faces, imploring us with all his small Siamese heart to make believe that he had caught something too. It was a heart-rending scene – marred only by the fact that the moment he managed to grab Sheba's booty away from her, Solomon was a different cat altogether.

  Then, tossing it high into the air, leaping after it and catching it in his paws, flinging it spectacularly across the room – it was just as well to be out of range when he got to that stage; Charles once fielded a boundary right in his cup and it put him off tea for days – Solomon's ego was back with a bang.

  It was His Mouse, he said, panting fiercely over the corpse at Sheba and daring her to pant back. But you couldn't catch Sheba out. She just sat smirking at Charles saying didn't Solomon look silly showing off like that and it was only an old one anyway. It was His Mouse, he said, crouching defensively over it when the Rector called – adding, quite untroubled by conscience, that he'd Caught It All Himself. He went on yelling about it being his mouse until either everybody was fed to the teeth and Sheba went and sat on a door or else, taking him completely by surprise – on one occasion indeed frightening him so much he leapt several feet into the air – the mouse got up and ran away.

  Once it happened with a field mouse which, while Solomon was telling the milkman how he caught it, nipped smartly round the corner and under a cupboard door. We never did find out what happened to that one, except that the next time Charles took his duffel coat out of the cupboard all the toggles fell off.