More Cats in the Belfry (10 page)

  That evening two small boys appeared, each clutching a shop-wrapped sheaf of flowers which I guessed had come out of their pocket money. Eyes down, avoiding looking directly at me or they'd have realised I wasn't the person they'd sworn at, they apologised, said they'd never do it again, and shot off up the hill, obviously glad to get away without being clapped in jail.

  I never did find out who it was they'd sworn at. Probably Miss Wellington, I decided. I could imagine her remonstrating, in her role of protector of the valley, with anybody riding rough-shod over my field. What I couldn't understand was her not telling me about it. Always ready with what she'd said to people and what they'd said to her was Miss W. Always keen to be seen upholding the right. I can only imagine the language they used was such that, being a lady, she couldn't repeat it. I've always longed to know what it was.

  Summer also brought the visitors – readers who, passing through Somerset en route to Devon or Cornwall, wrote to ask if they could come to see the cottage and the cats. Most of them hadn't seen Tani before, and were upset to hear that Saska had died. But all of them were entranced by Saphra – the way he welcomed everybody as his friends – and all of them were intrigued by Tani, who would hide for ages on a chair tucked under the big oak table, come out eventually, when she saw Saphra getting all the attention, to rub against a hand or two herself, and then, in the middle of being made much of, would creep across the carpet, flat on her stomach, and take refuge on her sanctuary chair again.

  'Why on earth does she do that?' people would ask.

  'She thinks you're white slavers,' I would explain solemnly – much, I feel sure, to Tani's satisfaction. 'She's always expecting somebody to kidnap her.'

  She was, too, and one day the pair of them gave a memorable performance. I'd made tea for the visitors – a couple and their two young daughters – and brought in a plate of biscuits to accompany it. Saphra adored biscuits and the girls gave him one on the carpet straight away. One bite, of course, and there were better things to do to attract attention – like racing round the room, hurtling along the back of the sofa on which the visitors were sitting, diving to the floor with a mighty plop, then doing it all over again. Everybody was laughing, everybody was watching him. Saphra got quite carried away, and when, on one of his wall-of-death circuits, in diving off the sofa he landed on his abandoned biscuit and it scattered in smithereens, he was overcome by the merriment he caused. They put down another biscuit and round he raced again, leaping off the settee to land on it deliberately, the fragments flying, and the light of supreme achievement beaming from his small black face. Tani meanwhile, unable to bear his hogging the limelight, kept venturing out from under the table to watch and then, having successfully drawn all eyes to
her
, putting on an act of Realising the Danger she was In, dropping flat and crawling stealthily back to her chair.

  'Like to be the centre of attention, don't they?' said the husband, nearly dropping his teacup as Saphra, zooming along the sofa-back behind him, hurled himself off on to yet another biscuit.

  They certainly did. That, I remember, was a Monday. By Wednesday, with me in panic-stricken attendance, Saphra was the centre of attention at Langford, under suspicion of having eaten a purple towel.

W
hen Saska was at Langford under observation I had asked the vet who was treating him whether there was a nearby practice that specialised in small animals. The local vets I knew of dealt chiefly with horses and farm animals. For years I'd been driving my cats on a round trip of fifty miles when they needed attention, and it was a long journey: I'd done it on occasion in snow, ice and fog, and a cat expert nearer home would be a blessing.

  To my surprise the vet told me that Langford had just opened its own Small Animal Practice. Hitherto they had only accepted animals referred to them, as Saska had been, by a vet baffled as to diagnosis. But they had recently taken over the practice of a local vet who had retired, and so long as the animal needing treatment wasn't on the books of another vet in the district it could now be taken direct to Langford.

  My previous vet being such a long way away, my cats qualified at once. Tani went there when her loose stomach recurred. She was prescribed special bran to be mixed with her food and never suffered from nervous diarrhoea again. (Nowadays they recommend cooked rice mixed with the food, and that achieves the same result.) Saphra had been neutered there… made much of by the staff, but I did wonder why the senior professor, who also presided over the evening surgery, carried him out to the car when I fetched him that night. Was he glad to see the back of him, and if so why? I wondered. And now there was the episode of the purple towel...

  Siamese cats are given to chewing things, and Saphra was no exception. First it was tea-towels, red and white checked ones. He chewed the corners off them any time he could contrive to be on his own in the kitchen, and I used to turn cold at times when I looked at his litter tray and wondered what dreadful malady he'd developed, until I realised it was only the tea­-towels taking their normal course and gave fervent thanks that they had. Then he discovered the purple hand-towels, also belonging to the kitchen, that hung from a rack over the washing machine.

  Sitting on the latter he could reach them comfortably, and apparently they were just the job for filling hungry corners. Before long every purple towel I owned had a pair of parallel holes halfway up it, to the limit of kitten-sitting level, and when I hung them on the line after washing people had even more cause to stare when they went by. They looked for all the world like a row of Ku Klux Klan masks.

  Then, the Wednesday after his exhibition of jumping on the biscuits, Saphra went off his food. He sat about looking worried, didn't want to go out and eventually disappeared. I searched everywhere I could think of, including the space between the side of the freezer and the wall in the kitchen extension which Saphra, odd-minded cat that he was, had adopted as his private lair. Situated where it was, near the back door, I think his main idea was that if I didn't know he was there I might leave the back door open and he could get out. But he would sit there for long periods meditating, as well. So I looked, and he wasn't there either, but something was. A long, mysterious something which, when I hauled it out, turned out to be a purple towel, half of it eaten away.

  Whether he'd had it there for some time as reserve rations or had eaten it at one sitting I didn't know – he could have taken one out of the kitchen cupboard at any time – but the moment I did find him, sitting behind the bedroom curtains and looking wanly out of the window, which was quite out of character for him, I rang Langford, told them what had happened and they told me to bring him over straight away.

  Getting the car out, putting a cat in the carrying basket, tearing up the hill at panic stations – I'd done it so many times before. But this time it wasn't a matter of twenty-five miles to go. Ten minutes and Saph was on the surgery table. The teaching professor sounded his heart, felt him all over, took his temperature. That was up a bit, he said, but there didn't appear to be much wrong. He'd give him an antibiotic injection. Would I bring him back next morning and, if his temperature as still up then, they'd do an X-ray. He paused, looked at Saph, who was looking back at him with the most penetrating of sapphire stares, and seemed to remember something. On second thoughts, he said... seeing it was him... they'd do an X-ray anyway.

  What did he mean? I wondered. Was he remembering Saska? Or had Saphra blotted his copybook when he was neutered there?

  I took him home again. Back to the cottage. He didn't want any supper. But later, in the garden with Tani, with me standing by, worrying myself sick about what the next day might reveal, he stage-managed something that was absolutely typical of him. Suddenly darting across to a clump of ferns he caught, with one swift pounce, a mouse. A baby mouse which he brought across, dumped on the grass in front of me and then, as I bent to retrieve it, grabbed and tossed tantalisingly in the air. It flew sideways and through the mesh of the wire netting round the cat-run. Hoping it was still alive I dashed into the run after it – only to see him, on the path outside, toss his head again, and another mouse flew through the mesh and landed at my feet. He must have caught two at once. True, they were only babies – he must have found a nest – but only he could have picked up two at once. 'Waaah' wailed Tani disgustedly when I asked her what she thought of it, which I took to mean that he wasn't half a show-off and we shouldn't encourage him. He certainly was, I agreed, and told myself there couldn't be much wrong with him, prancing about like that – but he still didn't want any food.

  So there we were next morning in the X-ray room at Langford, the veterinary nurse and I in lead-lined aprons and Saphra stretched out on the table between us. I imagine I'd been asked to assist on the premise that my presence might stop him from being scared, but there was no fear of that. 'Now we're going to see whether your sins have caught up with you, young man,' the nurse said with mock severity. Lying on his side, confident that everybody was his friend, he regarded her with wide-eyed equanimity.

  The X-rays taken, he was put back in his basket and I was asked to sit in the waiting room while they were developed. It was just my luck – I had been full of equanimity myself until then – that while I was sitting there someone came out of an adjoining room, left the door open, and through it I was suddenly aware of two white-coated figures examining an X-ray plate. They were holding it against a light. It
couldn't
be Saphra's, I told myself, though I knew it most probably was. 'I wouldn't
think
that was a growth,' I heard one of the viewers say. I would, at that moment. I'd heard the uncertainty in her voice. I was going to lose my boy the same way I'd lost Saska, I thought, my heart sinking like a stone. Realising that the door was open, somebody closed it. I heard nothing more. A little later, someone came out and said the X-rays had been inconclusive. They were going to keep him in, give him a barium meal and watch its progress. Would I like to go home and ring around mid-day?

  I did. Nothing had happened, I was told when I rang. There was something there – at junction of the colon and the rectum. But it wasn't moving. Could I ring again in two hours' time? I did. Still no news. Could I ring in at five o'clock?

  At five o'clock they said they wanted to keep him overnight and I rang off sick at heart, convinced I was going to lose him. Tani, talking her head off, was busy shadowing me everywhere, being my Faithful Companion. I have noticed that she does this when she is the only one around. Whether she was missing Saph, or taking advantage of his absence to bring herself to the forefront whereas normally she took second place and occupied herself with her fantasy of kidnappers I don't know, but she went with me to the kitchen, to the bathroom, jumped on the freezer and lectured me while I bolted the back door for the night, stood on the bed and talked to me, tail in air, while I undressed, and curled in my arms and purred like a bumble bee when I lay down, though normally she slept downstairs with Saphra. She was sitting by me on the hall chest, still talking away, when I rang Langford next morning. Whatever it was appeared to have moved slightly, they said. Could I ring again at mid-day? The bulletins being issued about Saphra, as if he were royalty, would have pleased him had he known, I thought. Possibly, being Saphra, he did.

  It was a Friday, when I always went to Bristol to see Louisa and help her with any jobs she wanted done. I would ring from there, I told them. At mid-day they said could I ring at three and ask for the professor, who would like to speak to me himself. Sure, once more, that I was going to hear bad news, I had to sit down to make the call at three o'clock, knees knocking together, while Louisa stood by with a glass of brandy. Whatever it was was on its way, reported the professor to my relief, but it was taking a long time. Would I mind having him home for the weekend and watching progress? He didn't seem to like their arrangements, he added in what I thought sounded a hesitant voice. Oh, Lord, what had that cat done
now
? I wondered. But at least he was coming home. Louisa drank the brandy herself when I told her.

  The professor asked me to collect Saph before the five o'clock surgery. He would explain matters when I saw him, he said. It was just after four when I left Bristol, and as I drove out of the city I noticed groups of people congregated along the roadside. At first I wondered what they were waiting for, but then the penny dropped. The Queen had been in Bristol that day, opening a hospital extension. She was due to leave the airport just before five. This was the route to the airport and people were gathering to see her. Schoolchildren. Guides. Scouts. They stood there ready with their flags. A Guide grinned and waved her flag at me. The girl next to her waved and cheered as well. In a flash the whole line was cheering. Goodness knew who they thought I was but I entered into the fun of it, waving back with one hand and bowing graciously as I drove. The cheering and waving spread. I wondered what the royal party must be thinking if they were at all close behind me. For me, though, it was an occasion for celebration. I was going to collect Saphra who, diabolical though he was, had installed himself so dearly in my heart. I waved and bowed all the harder.