Cats in the Belfry (13 page)

  There was a period, just after Sugieh died and the kittens were beginning to feel their feet as individuals, when if we had visitors we just couldn't move for them, sitting solidly in people's laps, licking their iced ­cakes when they weren't looking, investigating their handbags and chatting to them under the bathroom door. They liked people so much that when we shut them in the hall one night because one of Charles's friends had a dark suit on and wasn't very fond of cats anyway they climbed the curtains, got out through a transom window which we didn't know was open, and appeared suddenly with their small smudgy faces pressed to the window of the sitting room, gazing wistfully in like orphans of the storm.

  A great success that was. Everybody cooed over them and gave them ice cream and Charles's friend went home with a suit that looked as if it were made of angora. The next time they were shut out on account of visitors Solomon, remembering the ice cream, promptly jumped out of a window again. This time, however, as all the hall windows were shut, old Bat Brains went upstairs and jumped out of the bedroom window. One visitor fainted on the spot when she saw him coming down, but he landed in a hydrangea and was quite unharmed. The only thing was that now Solomon had discovered that he could open windows by putting his fat little bullet-head under the catches and pushing them up, in addition to spreading twelve copies of
The Times
on the stairs any time we shut them out, we now had to tie up all the window catches with string as well.

  Though the cats drove visitors nearly mad with their attentions when they first arrived, however, if anybody stayed after eleven o'clock things were very different. Then, retiring to the most comfortable armchair (if anybody was sitting in it they just squeezed down behind him and kept turning round and round till he got out; it never failed), they curled up and ostentatiously tried to go to sleep. Tried was the operative word. Any time anybody looked across at the chair there would be at least one Siamese regarding them with half-raised head, one eye open and a pained expression that clearly indicated it was time they went home, Some People were tired. If this had no effect, in due course Solomon would sit up, yawn noisily, and subside again with a loud sigh on top of Sheba. Few visitors missed that hint. Solomon yawned like fat men belch – long, loudly and with gusto. What was most embarrassing, though, was the way – after lying for hours as if they'd been working all day in a chain gang – they suddenly perked up the moment people did start to go. It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd just politely seen them off at the door, the way Sugieh used to do. These two sat in the hall and bawled to people to hurry up – and as we shepherded people to the front gate they could be seen quite plainly through the window, hilariously chasing one another over the chairs by way of celebration.

  To be quite honest, by that time the visitors usually weren't looking with such a kindly eye on the cats either. There was the friend, for instance, who brought an old pair of stockings for playing with the cats and left her best ones in our bedroom for safety. She expected the old ones to be ruined, and she was right. Solomon gave her a friendly nip in the ankle while we were having tea and bang they went. Unfortunately the bedroom door wasn't properly shut and while Sheba was, of her own accord, bringing the new ones down for the lady they went bang too, hitched up in a snag on the stairs.

  There was the friend who unthinkingly left her car keys on the hall table. An innocent enough gesture – except that that was the time when Solomon was being an Alsatian dog and carrying things round in his mouth and it took us two hours to find where he had put them. Down the clock golf hole in the lawn.

  There was the cactus which disappeared mysteriously from its pot while its owner, who had just been given it by another friend, was calling on us for a cup of tea. Charles said if that didn't prove Solomon wasn't right in the head nothing did – but as a matter of fact it wasn't Solomon. It was Sheba, as we discovered later when we started raising cacti ourselves and had to lock them in the bathroom every night for safety while she howled under the door for just a little one to play marbles with.

  It was Solomon though, alone and unaided, who killed the fur coat. We laughed at the look of awe on his face the first time he saw it, and the way he immediately put up his back and offered to fight. ­We didn't give it a thought as the owner, patting him on the head and saying it was only a coat little man, tossed it nonchalantly on to the hall chair. But Solomon did. As soon as he'd had his share of the crab sandwiches he went out and killed it so dead I shudder even now to think how much it cost us to have it repaired.

  We kept a strong guard on fur coats after that. Whenever one arrived Charles held Solomon in the kitchen while I personally locked it in the wardrobe and then locked the bedroom door. Even so I had qualms the night someone arrived wearing a particularly fine leopard coat and Solomon, as soon as supper was over, disappeared quietly into the hall. As soon as I could I slipped out too, to check. Everything seemed all right. The bedroom door was still firmly locked and when I spoke to him Solomon, sitting innocently on the hall table and gazing out into the night, said he was only looking for foxes.

  It wasn't until the visitor, getting ready to go, started looking round the hall saying it was funny but she could have
sworn
she left it on the chest that I realised I hadn't taken her hat up to the bedroom as well – and by that time it was too late. It had – or rather it had had – a smart black cocksfeather cockade on one side. When we picked it up, from under the same chair that had once concealed Aunt Ethel's famous telegram, all the feathers fell off.

THIRTEEN

B
y the time Solomon was six months old he had, despite his unpromising beginnings, grown into one of the most handsome Siamese we had ever seen. True he still had spotted whiskers and big feet and walked like Charlie Chaplin. But he had lost his puppy fat and was as lithe and sleek as a panther. His black, triangular mask – except for one solitary white hair right in the middle which he said he'd got through worrying over Sheba – shone like polished ebony. His eyes, set slantwise above high, Oriental cheekbones, were a brilliant sapphire and remarkable even for a Siamese. When he lay on the garden wall with his long black legs drooping elegantly over the edge he looked, according to Father Adams, exactly like a sheik in one of them Eastern palaces.

  Father Adams, who was a great fan of Ethel M. Dell's, would have liked Solomon to be a sheik in the real romantic sense of the word. At that time he was still dreaming of making a fortune from cat breeding and Solomon was so magnificent that there was nothing he would have liked more than to see him drag Mimi off into the hills by the scruff of her sleek cream neck and there found a race of Siamese that would, as he was always telling us, fetch ten quid apiece as easy as pie.

  He was so disgusted when we had Solomon neutered that he wouldn't speak to us for a week – which was all very well; we didn't want to spoil Solomon's life either, but we had to share it with him and even our best friends wouldn't have lasted long in a house with an unneutered Siamese. The only way we could have kept him – unless we let him wander, in which case a Siamese tom usually develops into a terrible fighter and rarely comes home at all – would have been outside in a stud house.

  When we asked Solomon about it he said he'd rather have beetles than girls. And cream cakes, he added, casting a speculative eye at the tea trolley. And sleeping in our bed, he said that night, burrowing determinedly under the blankets to find my head.

  That settled it. We could as soon imagine Solomon a stud tom as pretending to be a lion at the zoo. The following weekend he was neutered, and Sheba along with him, and not a scrap of trouble did we have with either of them except in the matter of Sheba's stitches. Two she had, and the vet who did the operation – a town one this time; not for one moment did we attach any blame to the vet who did Sugieh's operation, but it seemed fairer all round to have Sheba done by someone else – said we could easily take them out ourselves on the tenth day. Just snip here and here, he said, pull smartly – and the job was done.

  It might have been with normal cats, but not with Sheba. She wasn't going to have any ham-fisted amateurs handling her, she said. Every time we approached her with the scissors she fled to the top shelf of the bookcase and barricaded herself in. Even Charles couldn't get her to come down. She liked him very much, she assured him from behind the Britannicas – but not her stitches, if he didn't mind. He could practise on Solomon, Mimi or even me. She wanted a real doctor. After the night when the stitches began to itch and she lay on our bed first trying to get them out herself and then letting Solomon have a go until the perpetual snick-snicking nearly drove us mad she got one, too. We could hardly ask the local vet to do the job, as he hadn't done the operation, so the next morning we rang Doctor Tucker, who came over and obliged at once. Sheba didn't run away from him. She told him at great length what we'd tried to do to her and did he think he ought to report it to the Medical Association. Then, while he snipped and pulled with the self-same scissors we had tried to use, she stood quietly on the table, her eyes happily crossed, and purred.

  That, we thought, was the end of our troubles. The cats were growing up now. They had their little idiosyncrasies of course. Like Sheba's habit of turning out the vegetable rack every night, followed by complaints from our new help that it wasn't her job in other houses to fish sprouts and squashed tomatoes from under the cooker every morning. Not that it mattered much because she gave us notice quite soon anyway on account of Solomon's habit of walking over floors as soon as she'd scrubbed them.

  Sheba was jolly pleased when she went. Now, she said – and how right she was – she'd be able to file sprouts under the stove until they smelled real high before anybody moved them. Solomon was pleased. She kept throwing the floorcloth at him, he said, and if he hadn't been a gentleman – in the highest sense of the word, he said, ignoring Sheba's aside to Charles that he Wasn't Any More Was He, Not Since His Operation? – he'd have bitten her. Charles was pleased. If she hadn't gone, he said, judging by the looks she gave him when he asked her to empty the ashtrays she'd have been throwing the floorcloth at him next. The only one who wasn't pleased was me – and I was too busy doing the housework to complain.

  There was Solomon's keen interest in things mechanical which led him to follow the vacuum cleaner like a bloodhound, with his nose glued firmly to the carpet, watching the bits disappear inside. Come to think of it, it was a good thing the help wasn't around the day he decided to experiment with that and, while I was moving a chair, poked his ball of silver paper curiously into the works. I turned round just in time to see a long black paw disappearing under the front and to hurl myself at the switch like a bomb.

  Mrs Terry wouldn't have done that. She'd have screamed, thrown her apron over her head and fainted, the way she did when she removed the guard from the electric fire in the sitting room for cleaning and Solomon, with happy memories of Mum, promptly walked over and stuck his rear against it. The only result of that incident had been that for a while Solomon's tail, indented in two places by the electric bars, had looked more like that of a poodle than a Siamese and Sheba had made him cross by pretending to be frightened every time she saw it. What might have happened with the vacuum I hardly dared to think.

  These though, as I have said, were idiosyncrasies such as all Siamese owners experience. So long as we got up at five in the morning to let them out – otherwise Sheba knocked the lamp off the dressing table and Solomon bit us; so long as we only ate chocolates wrapped in silver paper and let Solomon have every single piece – he sulked like mad when somebody gave us a four-pound box for Christmas without an inch of silver paper among them: Done It On Purpose he said they had, watching disconsolately every time the box was opened, and couldn't we eat them faster than that; so long as we kept a box of All Bran permanently on the kitchen floor to fill the corners when he felt peckish – if we didn't he was liable to get in the cupboard and look for it himself with disastrous results; so long as we remembered little things like that we had no trouble at all. Real little home birds they were. Always running in to see that we hadn't gone for a walk without them – or even more important, that we weren't eating something behind their backs.

  Which made it all the more worrying the morning I called the cats and instead of the usual mad stampede to see what was for breakfast only Sheba appeared, looking very small and forlorn and nattering anxiously that Solomon had vanished: she'd looked all over the place for him and she didn't know where he could be.