Cats in the Belfry (3 page)

  She liked milk, but only if she was allowed to drink it standing on the table, out of a jug. We got over that by keeping her milk in the jug and filling our own cups surreptitiously, so as not to offend her, from the bottle, which we kept behind the bookcase. People said we were foolish, and we ought to make her drink out of a saucer. They didn't know Sugieh. She was the living example of an iron hand in a small, blue-pointed glove. The only thing she would drink out of a saucer was coffee – and that was only because the coffee cups were too small for her to get her head in.

  As for her yeast tablets – obviously Anna had indelibly impressed on her the importance of eating those regularly if she wanted to grow up a big strong cat and keep human beings in their place, but she ate them in such a revolting manner, with her face screwed up and her mouth open, dropping half-chewed tablets onto the carpet and then licking them up again, each time more soggy and repulsive-looking than the last, that we just dumped four of those in front of her every night and bolted into the kitchen, so that we wouldn't have to watch.

THREE

W
hen I went home one evening after Sugieh had been with us for about a month and announced that my firm wanted me to go to Liverpool on business and it would mean my being away overnight, Charles looked at me in horror. Who, he asked, was going to look after the cat?

  He was, I said brightly. There was nothing to it. Just give her shredded rabbit for supper, making sure there weren't any bones in it; fish for breakfast – be very careful about the bones in that and be sure it didn't boil over on the stove; change her earth-box night and morning – if she yelled at him with an urgent expression on her face it meant it wanted changing in-between as well; wipe her if she got wet; see that she didn't play with Mimi, who had designs on being the only Siamese in the district and was inclined to try to murder Sugieh if nobody was looking; make sure she had her yeast tablets and didn't stay out after dark; see that she didn't—

  At that moment there was a loud splash, followed by a wail. Sugieh, who had been looking for fresh fields to conquer ever since she was barred from the bathroom, had fallen down the lavatory. She couldn't have chosen a worse time to do it. If I had, even for a few brief seconds, hoped that Charles would agree to looking after her, that moment was now past. He took one look at her as I hauled her squirming and yelling from the depths, shuddered, and said he had just had an idea. We would ask my grandmother to have her for the night, then he could drive me up to Liverpool by car and we could both have a rest.

  My grandmother loved animals and had, fortunately, not encountered Sugieh to date, so we had no difficulty in fixing that up. What we hadn't bargained for was that since that first journey out from town, when she sat sedately on my lap watching the traffic with wide-eyed interest and occasionally – hypocrite that she was – smirking affectionately up into my face, Sugieh had developed a Thing about cars.

  The moment I got into the car with her the morning of that ill-fated trip, before Charles had even so much as pressed the starter, she began to yell: Charles patted her on the head as she sat on my lap and told her not to be a silly girl, she knew she liked carsy-warsies. With Sugieh, of course, that was just asking for trouble. By the time we got to the top of the hill leading to the main road she was standing on her hind legs, clawing frantically at the window and shrieking for help. Charles said it was the noise of the bottom gear upsetting her; once we got on the flat road she'd be all right. I have no doubt at all that Sugieh understood every word we said, because by the time we were halfway to town and the road had been flat as a pancake for miles all the other drivers were gesturing violently at us as they passed, threatening to punch Charles's nose for swerving all over the place and not giving signals, and Charles himself was shouting that if I didn't get that damblasted cat off his neck she'd have us up a telegraph pole.

  It was even worse on the return trip. First of all we had my aunt to contend with. My grandmother's concern for animal welfare had always gone to extremes. When she was younger she had had a tame owl called Gladstone whose favourite perch was on top of the bathroom door. My father swore that sometimes it was so draughty with the door open you could see waves on the bath water and in the winter my grandfather used ostentatiously to bring a hip bath down from the attic and wash in his bedroom instead, but it made no difference. Grandma wouldn't have the door shut. She took the line that human beings could look after themselves but poor dumb animals couldn't, so you either took your bath with Gladstone glaring ghoulishly down at you – as like as not with a piece of dead mouse lovingly provided by Grandma in his claws – or not at all.

  I can remember her myself hurrying down, armed with my old push-chair and scarlet with indignation, to fetch home a collie which somebody told her had been pledged at the local pawnshop. Actually the pawnbroker had taken the dog in, without any hope that the owner would ever redeem it, rather than see it starve; and he had looked after it quite well. Nothing would convince my grandmother, however, that it hadn't been heartlessly ticketed and stacked with the rest of the goods in pawn. She wheeled it home in the push-chair telling everybody she met that it couldn't walk and reducing them practically to tears with the harrowing story – quite untrue – of how she had lifted it off the pawnshop shelf with her Own Two Hands. I remember it so well because for a fortnight after that I was the one deputed to push Baldwin, as she called him – this of course was years after Gladstone had eaten his last mouse on top of the bathroom door – to the park in the pram every day for an airing. And when at last Grandma decided he was strong enough to stand on his own feet again, I was the one – Grandma said she knew I loved poor dumb animals just as much as she did and God would reward me for it – who was persuaded to take him for his first walk and, in consequence, had to face the music when he promptly jumped into the first pram he came to and sat on the baby.

  She was just as firm in her convictions even when, in later years, she grew too old actually to look after the animals herself. The first time we left Blondin with her, for instance, in spite of our assurances that he would be perfectly happy locked in the spare room with his basket and climbing branches she insisted that my Aunt Louisa had him in her bedroom in case he was lonely.

  If he had been locked in the spare room Blondin would have settled down quite happily in the wastepaper basket filled with old pullovers which he used in the garden house, but when he saw my aunt's comfortable bed it proved too much for him. He grabbed a nut, dived under the eiderdown, and there he stayed all night, rattling his teeth like castanets every time the poor soul moved.

  She complained about it the next day but my grandmother merely asked sternly whether she was man or mouse, to be afraid of an innocent little creature who had come to her for comfort. After fifty years of living with Grandma poor Aunt Louisa was, alas, indubitably mouse, so for the next fortnight she shared her bed with Blondin and his nuts, hardly slept a wink, and discovered on the last morning that, tired of sleeping
under
the eiderdown, which presumably allowed draughts to seep in through the gaps, Blondin had chewed a hole in the cover and was blissfully asleep inside. My Grandma was furious about that, I remember, but not with Blondin. With my aunt who, she said, shouldn't have allowed him to do it.

  It was a foregone conclusion of course that if we left Sugieh with them Grandma would make my aunt take her to bed too, but we didn't see much harm in that. Sugieh, despite our original resolutions, often slept with us. Within a week of her arrival she had worked out that if she nipped smartly upstairs when she heard the hot-water bottles being filled and hid under the dead centre of the bed we couldn't get her out. Then, when the room was in darkness and she judged we had had time to go to sleep, she would creep out, climb on to the bed and insert herself so gently under the bedclothes and into my arms that I hadn't the heart to move her.

  Apart from snoring, the only disturbance she caused us was when, promptly at five in the morning, she got up and stropped her claws on the padded top of the blanket box, but as my aunt didn't have a blanket box we thought there was nothing to worry about. How were we to know that Sugieh would choose her visit to develop a Thing about woollen clothes?

  We learned later that among other dark, Oriental aspects of their nature which only come to light when they have firmly established themselves in some soft-hearted household, Siamese are often confirmed wool-eaters. A breeder who is something of a cat psychologist told us that he believes they do it to comfort themselves when they are lonely, in the same way that children suck their thumbs, and it is a fact that our present cats, having each other for company, never eat wool except when travelling. We put them in separate baskets then and Solomon, Sugieh's big, burly son, invariably drags the end of the car rug in through the wickerwork and chews it steadily, between muffled sobs, all the way to his destination.

  My aunt, however, was no psychologist. When she went up to bed that night and found that Sugieh had eaten several large holes in her bedsocks she just got so plain, unpsychologically mad that she tucked the sheets firmly round her head and refused to let our dear little kitten get in with her. Sugieh, unused to such unfriendly treatment, got so mad in turn that when Aunt Louisa, who always wore wool next to her skin, woke up in the morning, she found holes in everything she had taken off overnight as well. She got no sympathy from my grandmother, who laughed her head off when she heard about it – and Sugieh, locked in the spare room to prevent further damage, spent the day swearing horrible oaths at the top of her voice and leering under the door at my Grandma's fat black neuter, who sat transfixed with horror on the other side. That upset my aunt too. She worried so much in case the two cats got at each other and had a fight that by the time we arrived, late in the evening, she was practically hysterical with suppressed guilt because she had been too scared to open the door and give Sugieh any food and too scared, afterwards, to confess it to my grandmother.

  We drove home in silence, shaken by the impact of one small Siamese kitten on that tranquil Victorian household, while in the back seat Sugieh continued happily with her game of Kidnapped. This time, while there was nobody else about, she sat there quite quietly, bolt upright with her paws together, her tail tucked primly round them, and the expression on her face of a dowager duchess returning from the theatre. The moment she saw lights, however, whether in a house or a passing car, she flew to the window, pressed herself pathetically against it and screamed wildly for help. She staged a magnificent performance going past a cinema just when the late-night audience was coming out, beating her paws against the window with a frail, pathetic frenzy that would have done credit to Lilian Gish. But where she really excelled herself was when we drew up at the traffic lights at the busy town centre. Most Siamese sound uncannily like human babies when they cry, but Sugieh that night outdid any Siamese or human baby I have ever known. She sobbed, she wailed, she howled, until people on the pavement began peering into the car with set faces looking for the little orphan who was apparently being simultaneously beaten, starved and tortured inside. By that time, needless to say, Sugieh was out of sight, doing her ventriloquist act from under Charles's seat. The only thing that saved us from being mobbed by a crowd of angry passers-by was the last-minute changing of the lights and the fact that Charles, having been something of a racing driver in his gilded youth, was away off the mark like a shot.

  We never took Sugieh to my grandmother's again. Charles's nerves wouldn't stand it. The next time we went on holiday we arranged to leave her with a family from the next village who fell in love with her one day when they walked past and saw her playing innocently in the garden and pleaded that if at any time we wanted to go away we would send her to stay with their own Siamese, James.

  We accepted with alacrity. At the last moment our consciences did get the better of us and we rang up explaining that it wasn't really fair to expect anybody outside a lunatic asylum to take our cat and we'd better call the whole thing off, but our new friends wouldn't hear of it. James, they said, who had been a real cat-about-town until the age of three, when he underwent an operation that had become imperative if they were to continue to share the same house with him, had turned so sanctimonious in recent months that they felt somebody like Sugieh about the place might do him good.

  She did too. The only peace the Smiths got that fortnight was during the evenings, when she and James sat in solemn consultation inside a gramophone console whose works had gone for repair. When the lid was lifted two heads would appear through the turntable hole – one Roman-nosed, dark and aristocratically handsome; the other small, blue and slightly cross-eyed – and gaze reprovingly upon the intruder before vanishing again into the depths. There, it seemed, they planned the mischief for the following day, which began with a free-for-all steeplechase at five a.m. – Sugieh's idea that; James never got up till midday in the normal way – and continued in crescendo until supper time when they appeared, sleek, well-mannered, hair metaphorically parted in the middle, ate their meal with regal dignity and disappeared once more inside the gramophone.