Cats in the Belfry (12 page)

  It happened several times with shrews. What with live ones looking for the way out and dead ones tucked tidily under the hall rug by Sheba – she was pressing them, she said, for her collection, and it didn't matter if we stepped on them one bit – in the end we got to know quite a lot about shrews.

  Before we had the cats I had only seen one live shrew in my life, and that was the one which came tearing round the corner where I had just dug away a flower border from the side of the cottage, only to discover that he no longer had a home to go to. I can see him now scuttling to and fro on the cobbles, searching incredulously for his front door, and me scuttling conscience-stricken behind him, wondering whether it was safe to pick him up and help him find a new one. Some people said shrews were so nervous they died if you touched them. Others said they bit. I never learned who was right from that one. In the end my nerve failed me and I went indoors while he made up his own mind what to do. I learned soon enough when we had Solomon and Sheba, though. Shrews bite.

  Both Charles and I were bitten at different times. I by one which Solomon had delightedly cornered in the kitchen after its first escape – he was talking to it and when I put out a nervous hand to pick it up that must have been the last straw; squealing with rage it leapt fiercely at me and bit me in the finger. And Charles by one which, as it looked a little battered, we had put in a box lined with leaves and grass and locked in the bathroom to see if it would revive. It did. When Charles went in to look at it a while later it was trying, mad with temper, to climb out of the box, and when he put out a helping hand he got bitten too. He yelled so hard that Sheba, who was looking under the bathroom door at the time, fled out of the house in terror and up the damson tree, Solomon hid under the bed and I dropped the pastry bowl. Not that a shrew's bite is very big, of course. Hardly more than a pin-prick. It was just, said Charles, appearing with a large strip of sticking plaster round his finger and the shrew, ready for release, bouncing furiously up and down in the toe of a sock, that it was so unexpected.

  Even more unexpected was the shrew that actually lived with us for four days. This was a good deal later, when Sheba, finding that if she came in with anything alive we took it away from her, had developed the habit of sneaking her trophies up on to our bed. There she could do her nature study against a background of nice clean eiderdown, with the advantage that when she heard us coming she had only to pick up her victim and dive under the bed and we couldn't touch her. This particular shrew, however, she took up to the bed while there was still somebody in it. Aunt Louisa. (Although we had only the two cats now we still put guests in our room and slept in the spare room ourselves. It saved a lot of argument with Solomon.) And Aunt Louisa, when she saw the shrew, let out such a scream that Sheba, who was normally as imperturbable as an iceberg, dropped it in amazement and it got away.

  I know all about shrews eating several times their own weight of food a day and it being impossible to keep them in captivity. Sidney, who has a natural countryman's interest in such things, told me he had seen it on the Telly. Impossible or not, that shrew appeared so often during the next four days even Sheba began to look shaken when she saw it. Upstairs – cruising like a small grey submarine across the landing or through the bedrooms. Downstairs – ambling airily out from under the chest or the cupboard door and across the carpet. We never caught it, though it never hurried. Charles refused to touch any of Sheba's shrews now, without gloves, and by the time he had fetched them – I refused to touch it at all – it had always vanished, while the cats were so embarrassed they had obviously decided the best thing to do was to ignore it.

  Several times when I went to change Solomon's earth-box I found it lurking under the rim. Charles said that was probably how it kept alive, eating worms and insects out of the earth-box. That seemed unlikely. If there were any worms or insects around Solomon would have eaten them himself. It put a new responsibility on me, though. Not wishing to have its death on my conscience, every time I changed the box I felt obliged to put down a handful of grass as well.

  Aunt Louisa said I took after Grandma and both of us were crazy. Solomon enquired indignantly how he could ignore what was under his earth-box if I fed it right under his nose and said that until it went he was going to use the garden. Charles took to surreptitiously shaking his shoes in the morning before he put them on. We felt like running up the Union Jack when, on the evening of the fourth day, the shrew ambled down the porch step and out of our lives for ever.

TWELVE

T
he day Sheba chased a gnat behind the picture over the bureau and left a row of black footprints up the wall Charles said it wasn't fair to blame the cats for everything. It wasn't her fault, he said, that when it flew past she happened to be looking up the chimney and had her paws covered in soot. I must remember that Siamese were not as other cats, and make allowance for their verve and curiosity.

  He didn't say that when we put down the new stair carpet and Solomon, busily showing Sheba how Strong he was, ripped the daylights out of the bottom tread while we were still hammering down the top. He said Solomon was a damblasted little pest and if he wasn't careful he'd end up in the Cats' Home. Neither did it improve matters when I, to protect the rest of the carpet until Solomon got tired of sharpening his claws on it, made a set of stair pads out of folded copies of
The Times.
The idea was to put a pad on each stair whenever we were going out. It worked for a few days – then one morning Charles, dashing up at the last moment to fetch his wallet, slipped on the top copy and slid from top to bottom on his neck. Both Solomon and I were in the dog-house then, and although it didn't worry me unduly – Charles, who is six feet tall, falls down the cottage stairs, which are steep and narrow, quite regularly, and I would get the blame even if I were on the top of Everest at the time – Solomon was quite put out about it.

  While Sheba comforted Charles in the hall, walking up and down on his stomach and asking anxiously if he were Dead, Solomon sat at the top of the stairs delivering a long Siamese monologue about the injustice of it all. Sheba Clawed Things, he said, and Nobody Complained About Her. She did too. The underside of the spare room armchair sagged like a jelly bag where Sheba, when she first woke up in the morning, dragged herself round and round on her back by way of exercise – and all Charles said about that was that we had to make allowances for her high spirits.

  She Knocked Things Down and Hit People Too, wailed Solomon. You could tell when he got to that bit by the pitch of his voice. Always powerful, it rose to an ear-shattering roar when he was in the right and knew it. Solomon didn't knock things down and hit people. He couldn't climb high enough to start with. But Sheba, shinning like a mountain goat ­up the bookshelves either side of the fireplace, was always bombarding unwary visitors with dislodged encyclopaedias or law books. Lately I had begun to wonder whether that, too, was quite the accident she claimed it to be. It had certainly been no accident the night I was just in time to stop her crowning Solomon with a Benares brass pitcher. When I caught her she was standing on the arm of a chair trying as hard as she could to hook it off the mantelpiece with her paw while he, stretched out full length to warm his stomach, lay innocently asleep on the rug below.

  Now, craning his neck over the landing to make sure everybody heard him, Solomon continued his tale of woe. Charles was Clumsy, he wailed, staring reproachfully down at the spot where Sheba, relieved to find that Charles was good for a few more years yet, was making the most of the occasion by treading vigorously on his waistcoat and assuring him that she was a good girl. Charles would have Fallen Down the Stairs even without the newspapers, yelled Solomon. Charles Fell Over Everything. Charles Fell Off the Ladder only last Saturday. Nobody, said Solomon, with the mournful wail-cum-sniffle which meant that at that moment he was feeling particularly hard done by, could blame him for that. Charles had done it All By Himself.

  Charles had indeed. He had been painting the eaves of the cottage, perched on the sloping hall roof, on a ladder that had a cracked leg and was – despite Father Adams's warning that he knew several blokes who had killed themselves like that – suspended by faith and a piece of ancient rope from the chimney stack. Charles's own version of what happened was that he was just reaching up to put on the last brushful of paint, thinking to himself (he was given to making up tense little dramas to amuse himself while he worked) 'And at that moment, just as he reached out for the final handhold, there was a sharp crack of breaking rope and he fell like a stone into the abyss below' – when the rope did break. Not with a sharp crack. It unravelled slowly and sadistically before his very eyes as he stood helplessly on the top rung. He didn't fall into any abyss either. He landed on the hall roof with a thump that shook the cottage to its poor old foundations. When I rushed out, convinced that I was a widow at last, he was sitting despondently on the roof in a pool of pale blue paint while, standing side by side on top of the coalhouse, craning their necks like a couple of spectators at a Lord Mayor's Show, Solomon and Sheba anxiously enquired what he wanted to do that for.

  Charles said I might not believe it, but as he slid down the roof after the crash he had seen – actually
seen
– that pair gallop down the path and scramble up on to the coalhouse as if it were a grandstand. I believed it all right. So often in trouble themselves, there was nothing they liked better than sitting smugly by, tails wrapped primly round their front paws and expressions of pained incredulity on their faces, when somebody else was in the soup. I remember once when a dog chased a neighbour's kitten up the electricity post outside our garden wall. Solomon was hardly in a position to talk, after the incident of the fire brigade, while Sheba had lately developed her mother's habit of demanding to be rescued by Charles from every tree she came across. It made no difference. While Charles and I tried to solve the problem of getting a ladder safely balanced against the rounded post, they sat side by side at the foot, their necks stuck out like giraffes to emphasise What A Long Way Up She Was, their eyes round as bottle tops, yelling encouragingly up at her that she was Very Silly To Do A Thing Like That and They Didn't Suppose We'd Ever Get Her Down Again. The fact that no sooner had Charles rescued the kitten than he had to go up again to fetch Solomon, who had meanwhile climbed the ladder himself by way of an experiment and was now stuck halfway up bellowing his own head off, was quite incidental. It still left Sheba at the bottom nattering away happily about what a long way up
he
was and she didn't suppose we'd ever get
him
down either.

  It was inevitable, of course, that their rubber-necking would one day lead them into trouble. It happened at a time when we had new neighbours in the next cottage and Sol and Sheba, consumed with their usual curiosity, were going up every day to see how they were getting on. We warned the people not to encourage them. Disaster, we said, would unfailingly follow. Solomon would wreck their stair carpet or raid their pantry and Sheba would either go up their chimney or fall down their lavatory. They wouldn't listen. They hadn't met any Siamese before and they were fascinated, they said, by the way our two marched one behind the other down the garden path, greeted them with an airy bellow and proceeded to inspect the place as if they owned it. Which, so far as we could see, made it entirely the Westons' own fault when they tried to fill their water-butt during a drought by means of a hose-pipe sneaking illicitly through the delphiniums and lupins to the kitchen tap and Solomon and Sheba promptly gave them away to the entire village by sitting on the outhouse roof, gazing wide-eyed down at the bubbles, and loudly inviting passers-by to come and see what they'd found. Father Adams, who was one of the people who did – years ago his grandfather had lived in the Westons' cottage and that, according to country politics, really gave him more right to walk up the front path than the Westons themselves, who were newcomers from town – said old man Weston turned all the colours of a shammylon when he saw he'd been found out. He hadn't been there long enough to know that practically everybody else – certainly Father Adams – filled their water-butts in exactly the same way, and for days he went round ­hardly daring to look anybody in the face. Which, as Aunt Ethel said the day Solomon ate her guinea pot of beauty cream, just showed the folly of having anything to do with Siamese at all.

  We never managed to get the better of them ourselves. Every time we thought we had them weighed off, up they came with something new. Mouse-catching, for instance. No sooner had we got used to the routine of Sheba catching them and Solomon slinging them round our heads for hours than Sheba, feeling that Solomon was getting too much limelight, decided that she'd better tell us when she caught a mouse in future, so there would be no mistaking it was hers. The first time Solomon heard her coming under the new system, moaning like a travelling air-raid siren, he said it was ghosts and hid under the bath and we had an awful job to coax him out; but it wasn't long before he, in turn, thought up an even better gimmick. He ate the mouse. Not quietly, in a corner, but noisily on the hearthrug, leaving us the head and tail as souvenirs. The next thing was that Sheba ate a mouse too, but her stomach wasn't as strong as Solomon's and she went straight out and sicked it up on the stairs. And so, as Charles said, life went on.