Cats in the Belfry (5 page)

  Father Adams was always changing doctors. He had had two new ones since we knew him. The first he changed because he drove a fast sports car ­and when the National Health contributions went up Father Adams blamed it directly on his petrol consumption. The second he changed, presumably by way of making a clean sweep, at the same time as his dentist, when he had trouble with his false teeth.

  Now he had changed again, to a doctor who had just come to live in a neighbouring village. Father Adams, who signed up with him the day after his arrival, said he was a proper nice young man and understood his arthritis perfectly. It was, we understood, pure coincidence that he had an unneutered Siamese tom named Ajax. It was pure coincidence, too, that the next time Mimi came in season Father Adams had such a chronic attack of arthritis he had to stay in bed and send for the new doctor.

  He was an understanding young man. As soon as he heard Mimi screeching in the attic and learned the sad story of her unrequited love he drove straight back home and fetched Ajax. He must have been a good doctor too. That very evening Father Adams's arthritis was so much better he was able to hobble triumphantly down to the Rose and Crown.

FIVE

S
ugieh came into season for the first time in September, while we were in Scotland and she was once more staying with the Smiths. We were afraid she might. According to the book it could happen with a precocious Siamese as early as four months, and as Sugieh was by this time seven months old and so precocious it made you want to spit, it was obvious she was saving her efforts for a special occasion.

  With the aid of James she staged it magnificently. She uttered her first call in the middle of a dinner party and scared everybody, including herself, nearly out of their wits. The Smiths, realising what was happening, had hardly finished assuring the more nervous guests that she was not going mad when she called again, louder than before. Whereupon, they told us, their eyes glazing slightly at the memory, James, hearing her voice through the mists of sleep and forgetting for the moment that he was no longer the cat he had been, had leapt gallantly out of the gramophone and tried to make love to her on the hearthrug, and Sugieh had shinned up the standard lamp in alarm and brought it down in the cutlets.

  It said much for the Smiths that, even after that, we still remained friends. They wouldn't even let us pay for the lamp. They did warn us, though, that Sugieh was what they termed an exceptional caller. Eventually they had had to lock her in their spare room, and though James was allowed to visit her whenever he liked and within a couple of days had succeeded in persuading her that there were other things in life besides love – she emerged, they said, as placidly as if it had never happened, drank a jug of milk to cool her throat and went happily off with him to dig holes in the garden – while it lasted they had been quite unable to hear themselves speak.

  It was quite a while before we heard her ourselves. After that first effort she went so long without calling again that in fact we began to get suspicious. Those moonlit October nights when she had refused to come in and we had gone to bed without her, lying awake worrying about foxes and badgers until, around midnight, she would come tearing up the stairs bellowing that she hadn't any idea of the time and why on earth hadn't we called her? Had she perhaps gone innocently into the woods and been pounced on, even as she opened her mouth for her first tremulous call, by some feline Don Juan? Or had she – which was much more likely, knowing Sugieh – kept her love pangs to herself and gone deliberately off to look for a tom, realising from her experience with the Smiths that if she let out one squeal while we were around we would lock her up and spoil all the fun?

  Sugieh knew, but she wasn't telling. As the weeks wore on and we eyed her more and more suspiciously – there was no doubt at all that she was getting plumper, though that might have been because she was growing out of kittenhood – all she did was smirk coyly and stretch so that we could get a better look. When we asked her sternly what she had been up to, she half-closed her eyes and gave a faint, ecstatic squawk.

  Christmas drew nearer, Sugieh still hadn't called, and eventually there was no doubt at all in our minds. While up the lane Father Adams rubbed his hands and prepared gleefully for Mimi's happy event, we shook our heads reproachfully at Sugieh and prepared to conceal her shame.

  As it happened we were all wrong. Mimi, to Father Adams's chagrin, had a false pregnancy and produced no kittens at all while Sugieh, tickled pink at the way she had fooled us, came triumphantly into season on Christmas Day, roaring like a lion. It seemed that social occasions had that effect on her. After a feed of turkey – never shall I forget the look of awe on her face when she saw a turkey for the first time; you could see her mentally writing off those pheasants on the spot – a run in the woods to see if there were any more turkeys up there, and a brisk game of snakes and ladders which she won by sweeping all the counters onto the floor, she suddenly threw herself on her back and burst into song. My brother-in-law looked at her in alarm and asked what was wrong. Mindful that there were children present I looked at him meaningly and said Nothing. She got like that sometimes, when she was Excited. Our nine-year-old twin nephews, looking at each other in horror, promptly put aside their snakes and ladders and explained that she was making
that
noise because she wanted a husband.

  The Smiths were right about her being an exceptional caller. Sugieh had always had a powerful voice, even for a Siamese, and her love song was excruciating. By day she followed us round the house screaming and throwing herself hopefully on her back every time we looked at her. At night she thumped round in the spare room, yelling more furiously than ever because, unable to stand the racket at such close quarters, we refused to let her come to bed with us. By dawn on the morning after Boxing Day we could stand it no longer. Charles, loudly damning all Siamese to perdition, took her down and shut her in the bathroom.

  Ours is an old place and the bathroom is not only on the ground floor but separated from the original part of the cottage by a two-foot-thick stone wall. When after a while the screams, now mercifully faint, stopped altogether we told ourselves smugly that Sugieh was no fool; she knew when we had her beaten. For the first time in two days we prepared to get some sleep.

  A split second later the father and mother of all cat fights started up in the garden, and we nearly went through the roof. 'Sugieh!' I screeched, barely touching ground as I leapt out of bed and down the stairs. 'Quick!' urged Charles – stopping nevertheless to put on his slippers and belt his dressing-gown before pelting after me.

  Sugieh was quite safe. She had not, as by this time we suspected her of being perfectly capable of doing, gone through the ventilator or prised the window open with a crowbar. She was sitting in the bathroom window like the queen of a medieval tourney, squinting with smug delight while outside two lusty knights battled for her favours in the polyanthus.

  She stayed in season for a week and each night, with unfailing regularity, there was a cat fight outside the bathroom window. A fortnight later she began calling again. We had intended waiting until she was a year old before having her mated, but it was more than flesh and blood could stand. At eleven months Sugieh, with great enthusiasm, became a bride.

  She was mated – the maiden lady's tom being in our opinion too flat-faced, and Ajax being unromantically laid up with an abscess in his ear – to a cat called Rikki, at a Siamese cattery forty miles away. Rikki's owners said she was one of the most forward cats they had ever seen. She was also, they said, the loudest. Normally it took about four days to make sure that young queens, who were often nervous, were properly mated, but on the evening of the second day they 'phoned to say there was no doubt at all about Sugieh and would we please fetch her as soon as possible because she was disturbing all the other cats while Rikki, far from being the triumphant male, was padding round his enclosure with a haunted look on his face and jumping every time he heard her voice.

  At least, we thought, as we drove wearily home that night with Sugieh in the back still sobbing hysterically for her beloved husband – her owners had told us to keep her indoors for a couple of days or, love-him-forever or not, she might console herself with the farmyard tom and still have mongrel kittens – at least after
this
was over we should have some peace.

  We were always forecasting things like that about Sugieh, and we were always wrong. After the noisiest marriage in the history of the cattery Sugieh embarked on a pregnancy which couldn't have been more involved if she'd read a doctor's book. First, after two days of dewy-eyed dreaming about Rikki – she couldn't waste any more time than that; she only had nine weeks to get everything in – she developed Morning Sickness. Either that or she was suddenly overcome with shame at the thought of her scandalous behaviour at the cattery. The result was, anyway, that she went completely off her food, sat around looking frail and swaying slightly with closed eyes – and finally, with a temperature of 104, had to be driven dramatically through a snowstorm for streptomycin injections.

  No sooner did we get her over that – 'When you love animals they make you their slaves,' said the vet gazing sentimentally into her sad blue eyes, but even he couldn't have anticipated the scene when, suddenly recovering her appetite in the middle of the night, she insisted on being fed with crab paste on Charles's pillow – she developed a passion for jam tarts. They had to be jam tarts, though she never ate the jam; and they had to be stolen. If we gave her one she retched realistically, shook her back leg at it and walked away. Left alone, however, she would clear a plateful in a day, stealing them from the pantry and carrying them off to the bathroom, where she carefully ate the pastry rims and left the middles on the floor and Charles absent-mindedly trod them all over the house.

  Fired, we imagined, by a desire that her kittens should all be Seal Points like Rikki – a real Yul Brynner of a cat he had been, with massive black shoulders and a wicked, wedge-shaped head – she also drank more coffee than it seemed possible a cat could hold, and, for some unfathomable reason, took to chewing paper; a habit which, the day she ate Charles's Aunt Ethel's telegram, landed us in serious trouble.

  Charles's Aunt Ethel, when she decided to stay with members of the family, always announced her impending arrival by telegram; that way the family had no chance to get out of it. In our case, as we lived, as she was always telling us, at the back of beyond, the telegram also contained the time of the train so that Charles could drive over to the station and collect her.

  When, therefore, she appeared dramatically on the doorstep one cold wet night, looking grimly at us over the top of her streaming pince-nez and announcing that not only had she Waited in Vain for a whole hour at the junction but the taxi she had then been Forced to Take had broken down at the end of the lane (it always did for strangers; Fred Ferry had no intention of taxing his springs on our potholes if he could help it), it was obvious that we were for it.

  She wouldn't believe we hadn't had the telegram. She had Sent It, she said, and that was that. It didn't help, either, when Charles rang the post office – rather irately, to impress Aunt Ethel – and asked what the devil they'd done with it. The postmaster, who was a man of spirit, said what the devil did we think? Pushed it under the door himself he had, while he was out for a walk, and had his hand grabbed by a blasted cat. Why, he wanted to know, couldn't we have a letter-box, like ordinary normal people?

  We did have a letter-box. It was, as the regular postman knew, in the kitchen door. Charles had transferred it from the front door after Blondin nearly decapitated himself one day through sticking his head nosily through the flap and not being able to get it back. If the telegram had been put by mistake under the front door, Charles told the astonished postmaster, only one thing could have happened. Our cat must have eaten it.

  She had. While she watched strategically from the top of the stairs and Aunt Ethel dramatically waited for an explanation at the bottom we found the incriminating evidence – a soggy, well-chewed corner of the envelope – under the hall chair.

  What happened then was little short of miraculous. Aunt Ethel was just about to storm out in high dudgeon – she had never liked our animals very much since the day Blondin light-heartedly deposited a small warm trickle down her neck while she was dozing in a chair and this, she informed us icily, was the Last Straw – when Sugieh got up and lumbered slowly down the stairs.

  By this time she had a figure like a pear-drop, though up till now it didn't seem to have inconvenienced her very much. Only the previous week she had gone across the garden so fast after a bird she had run into a cloche and cut her nose. Not seriously; just enough to send her even more cross-eyed than usual for a few days looking at the scar. She still, too, climbed trees like the wind without any apparent ill-effect on anybody except Charles who groaned and clutched his head every time she banged her – we hoped – valuable cargo of kittens against a branch.