Cats in the Belfry (14 page)

  We didn't know it then but Solomon, tired of the chains of civilisation, had gone to be an explorer – and, as explorers sometimes do, he had met with a hazard. When I found him an hour later, after scouring the countryside till I was practically on my knees, he was in a field more than a mile away with a pair of large and angry geese. When I panted up he was crouching in a corner bawling his head off about what he'd do if they came any nearer, but he didn't fool them – or me. He was scared stiff. His ears stuck up like a pair of horrified exclamation marks. His eyes were nearly popping out of his head. When I called him he gave a long, despairing wail which clearly signified that if I didn't hurry up the cannibals would get him, and he wasn't half in a fix.

  I got him out of that by wading knee-deep in a bed of stinging nettles, leaning over a barbed wire fence and hauling him out by the scruff of his neck. From the look on the faces of those geese it was obvious there wasn't time to go round by the gate. He never learned, of course. No sooner was he safely on my shoulder and the geese out of ear-shot than the old bounce was back. All the way home I had a monologue right in my ear about what they said to him and what he said back – punctuated halfway by a decision, which I nipped in the bud by grabbing his tail and hanging on to it firmly, to go right back and tell them some more.

  By the time we got home Solomon, in his own mind at least, was a budding Marco Polo. And from then on we had hardly a moment's peace. Summoned by a wail that turned my blood cold when I heard it, I rescued him from one emergency after another. Once, under the impression that she was running away from
him
, he chased a cow that was being tormented by flies. That was fine fun while it lasted, tearing across the field with the wind in his tail and his long black legs going like a racehorse – until the cow turned round, saw Buffalo Bill capering cockily at her heels, and chased him instead.

  I rescued him that time from a handy wall, doing a fine imitation of the Stag at Bay with the cow's horns about an inch from his trembling black nose. The time he frightened a little lamb, though, he wasn't so lucky. His nearest point of escape then was through a hedge which topped a steep bank above the woods, and by the time he made it the lamb's mother was so close behind he couldn't stop to look for a proper way through. As I toiled wearily up through the woods in answer to his yell for help he appeared dramatically on the skyline, leapt into space, and landed ignominiously in a pool of mud.

  That taught him nothing either. The very next day I saw him – in his own inimitable way, which meant laboriously hiding behind every blade of grass he came across and crawling across the open bits on his stomach – tracking a small kitten into the self-same woods. I let him go that time. His dusky face was alight with eagerness, there was such an Excelsior light in his eyes – and he couldn't, I thought, get into trouble with a little kitten like that.

  That was where I was wrong. A few minutes later there was a volcanic explosion, a mad crashing of branches, silence – and then, once more, the familiar sound of Solomon yelling for help. Creeping stealthily through the woods he had, it seemed, come across his enemy from the farmyard, doing a bit of mousing. Judging by the way the tom went streaking up the road as I dashed into the woods he was just as alarmed as Solomon by the encounter – and indeed it wasn't that that Columbus was belly-aching about. It was that just as he had taken refuge up a tree, so had the kitten. Up the same tree. Solomon had made it first and was clinging for dear life six feet up while the kitten, unable to pass him, was directly under his tail. Solomon, in all his glory, a magnificent, intimidating specimen of a male Siamese, was howling because a tiny kitten no bigger than a flea wouldn't let him get down.

  After that Solomon kept away from the woods for a while. He took to sitting on the garden wall instead, pretending, when we asked him why he hadn't gone exploring, that he was Waiting for a Friend. That, unfortunately, was how he came to get interested in horses. Unfortunately – because when Solomon got interested in anything he invariably wanted a closer look. Unfortunately – because it wasn't long before the owner of the local riding school was ringing us up to ask whether we would mind keeping him in while her pupils went by. He was frightening the horses, she said. Little Patricia had already fallen into our stinging nettles twice, and her mother didn't like it.

  When we said, somewhat indignantly, that cats didn't frighten horses, she said ours did. She said he lurked in the grass until the first one had gone by, then dashed out into the road and pranced along behind him. It looked, she said, almost as if he was imitating the horse – though that of course was ridiculous. The first horse was all right because he couldn't see the cat; the ones behind, she said – and we could quite see her point – nearly had hysterics.

  We saw to it that after that Solomon did his imitations from the hall window when the riding school went by. Unfortunately, while it was easy enough to tell when they were coming – what with the trampling of hoofs and instructions to people to watch their knees or keep their eyes on their elbows they made, according to Father Adams, more noise than the ruddy Campbells – solitary riders were different. Sometimes we were in time to stop Trigger the Second following his latest idol down the lane. More often the first we knew that a horse had passed that way was when once again Solomon was missing.

  It was very worrying. Sometimes it would be a couple of hours or more before he came plodding back on his long thin legs, looking rather sheepish and trying to slip through the gate so that he could pretend he'd been there all the time. We tried everything we could think of, short of a cage, to curb this latest craze. We even bought some goldfish, seeing it was things that moved he liked, and set up a special tank for him in the sitting room.

  Sheba and Charles thought they were wonderful. They sat in front of the tank for ages goggling like a couple of tennis fans as the fish flipped and glided lazily through the water. Solomon, however, when he found there was no way in at the top or sides and that they didn't run away when he looked at them, lost interest and slipped silently out. Charles was too intent on the fish to see him go, or to notice the lone, red-coated rider clopping up the lane; and I was in the kitchen. The first I knew of his latest escapade was when the 'phone rang and a farmer from the other end of the valley said he didn't know whether I knew it but that black-faced cat of ours had just gone by following one of the huntsmen. He was going it well, he said, stepping it out like a proper little Arab. But the horse was a kicker with a red ribbon on its tail and he didn't…

  I didn't wait to hear any more. I dropped the 'phone and ran. When I caught up with them Solomon was still, unknown to the rider, following doggedly along behind that pair of wicked-looking hoofs. The huntsman stared in admiration as I picked him up. Plucky little devil, he said, to have followed all that way. Ought to have been a horse himself.

  He didn't know me, of course, or Solomon from Adam. He looked a little alarmed when, holding old Bat Ears firmly by the scruff of his neck, I said it was a remark like that which started all this horse business in the first place.

FOURTEEN

T
here was a time when our garden was practically a naturalist's paradise. Jackdaws nested in our chimney. If during the breeding season we never got a wink of sleep after daybreak, what with first the parents getting up and talking to one another and later on four or five youngsters hissing non-stop for breakfast only a brick's width from our ears – what, as Charles said, was that compared with the sight of a black feathered rear sticking trustfully out of our chimney pot while its owner fed the offspring underneath?

  Thrushes, bursting with confidence, banged their snails on our path till it sounded like a blacksmith's and looked like a cockle-stall at Southend. Blackbirds, joining us for meals on the lawn and heaving worms out of the ground like lengths of elastic, put more visitors off their food than we could count. One year – just, according to my grandmother, to show how Mother Nature trusted us – we even had a baby cuckoo on our doorstep. Every morning when I opened the front door it was squatting on the porch, close up to the milk-bottle. We never knew why – unless it was lonely and thought the bottle was another cuckoo. It never attempted to get at the milk and as soon as I brought the bottle indoors it flapped and fluttered round to the back where it sat all day on a heap of stones, watching us stolidly through the kitchen window.

  Even when it was being fed by a depressed-looking hedge-sparrow that soon had to hover in mid-air to get anywhere near that cavernous mouth it still watched us. We were jolly glad when it grew up and went off to Africa. My grandmother, bitterly disappointed because we wouldn't let her rear it at home – it reminded her of Gladstone, she said, and Aunt Louisa could easily have fed it – said we didn't deserve the trust of innocent little creatures. Charles said innocent little creatures be blowed – the way that damned thing had watched his every move for weeks he felt so furtive he expected to be arrested by Scotland Yard every time he set foot outside the door.

  It was interesting all the same. What with the cuckoo, the robin that used to come in and perch on a chair while we ate and the woodpecker that went a bit queer in the head and started pecking a hole in a nearby telegraph pole in the middle of winter – we watched that entranced for days until somebody told the Post Office about it and they came out and tacked a metal plate over the hole – we saw ourselves as budding Ludwig Kochs. And then we had the cats.

  After that the sensible birds gave the cottage a wide berth. Any time they had to fly over our territory when the cats were about they zoomed smartly up at the front gate and flew over at ceiling height until they reached the back. The jackdaws persevered for a while but even they gave up when Sheba climbed the chimney stack one day and looked meaningly at them through the cowl. The only bird that came near us when the cats were about – and he disappeared pretty smartly when Sheba looked round the corner – was the blackbird who used to play with Solomon. At least the blackbird was playing, as birds sometimes do – flying low over Solly's head as he crossed the lawn, uttering mocking little cries and perching enticingly on the wall. Solly wasn't. He went after him like a Wimbledon champion, leaping spectacularly through the air with his paws going in all directions.

  That, actually, was where the blackbird made his mistake. He had obviously watched Solomon hunting mice in the garden and summed him up as a blockhead who couldn't catch anything. He hadn't seen him indoors, practising with ping-pong balls and flies. Solomon with a ping-pong ball was a joy to watch. Sheba had what Charles loftily described as a typically female way of trying to catch things. When we threw a ball in the air for her she leapt hazily towards it, waved her paws and missed. It was surprising when you considered her prowess with mice – no less surprising than the fact that Solomon, who couldn't catch anything on the ground to save his life, could shoot through the air like an arrow and field anything we threw between his front paws while still in flight.

  It was his only talent and he made the most of it. When we wouldn't throw balls for him, or rolled-up silver paper, he went round swatting flies. It was a little disturbing to have a cat continually sailing through the air as if he were Anton Dolin, particularly since he invariably came down again like a bomb, but it got rid of the flies. It also – though the blackbird didn't know it then – made it rather dangerous for little birds to make fun of him. One day, after a particularly good practice with a meat-fly, Solomon went out, leapt smartly into the air, and fielded two feathers out of old Smart-Alec's tail.

  We knew the blackbird got away. We saw him with our own eyes, streaking down the valley as if the spooks were after him. Not, however, according to Solomon. He spent the rest of the evening swaggering round the place in a style we knew only too well – Charles called it Podgebelly's panther walk – with his head down, two black feathers sticking out of the corner of his mouth and a look which inferred that if you wanted to know where the rest of the bird was, he had it inside.

  When he went to bed that night and the owls began to hoot across in the woods he got up and stalked to the window. There was a time, when he was a kitten, when he was scared of the owls and used to back rapidly under the bedclothes when they started up, but not now. Face pressed to the glass, his camel-like rear hunched threateningly in the air, he told them exactly what he'd do to
them
if they didn't shut up. Eat them and put their tails with the blackbird's.

  Often in the days that followed I remembered Aunt Ethel's prediction that Solomon would grow up not quite right in the head. Watching him leaping round the lawn, shadow-boxing – on the strength of two blackbird's feathers – everything that flew over from a sparrow to an aeroplane, I wondered which of us would end up in a straitjacket first. Solomon or me.