More Cats in the Belfry (11 page)

  When I got to Langford, I found that the reason the Menace was being sent home – expelled, if one looked at it squarely – was, the professor explained, that he wasn't co-operating. Wouldn't use his litter tray. Had only used it once since he'd been there, so how
could
anything come out? And his bladder was fit to burst he said, feeling Menace's stomach gingerly with his eyes raised to the heavens. I knew at once why it was, but I thought I'd look silly if I explained. I used pine-needles from the forest in Saphra's litter and he wouldn't have anything else. And it had to be changed after every sitting – he wouldn't use a litter tray twice, however large it was. I didn't suppose they had time for that at Langford.

  So I brought him home, and Tani was pleased to see him, and he headed for his litter tray and performed at once, a relieved expression on his face. It took until Sunday for anything of note to appear, however. Something that looked like a miniature Catherine wheel, about the size of a 1p piece, and I recognised it straight away. A piece of the fringe off the rug in the hall, coiled tightly round and round.

  The professor had asked to see anything that transpired, however, so I put it in a box addressed to him personally, added 'from Saphra' by way of identification and took it over to Langford on Monday morning. Only afterwards did I wonder what his staff had thought, opening what must have appeared to be a present from a grateful cat. Probably by that time both Saphra and I had been written off as odd, I decided. Certainly there wasn't a modicum of surprise in the professor's voice when he spoke to me later on the phone, to tell me he didn't think that could have caused the trouble. They didn't know what had, but he was sure there was nothing wrong with him now. I needn't bring him back again, but would I contact them immediately if I was worried.

  I watched like a hawk, but all was well. The only thing I learned from my observation was that Saphra had invented something. Was it, I wondered, the result of having been, if only for a short while, at such an august seat of learning?

  It was the following day and it was raining. The cats were in their garden house with their infra-red heater on while I got on with some work. I went up to the garage to get some papers from the car and as I passed their run the flap in the cat-house door lifted smartly and Saphra's face appeared out of the opening. He didn't come out. Just watched me go past with the flap resting flat on his head, keeping off the rain. It wasn't an accident. He did it again when I came back from the garage, peering out with the complacent expression of being perfectly protected from the elements. Saphra had invented a cat umbrella.

  I was astounded by his cleverness, and equally bemused by something else that had happened around then. Readers of
Waiting in the Wings
may have remembered that after Charles's death I'd gone into the legend, told me years before by my father-in-law, that his family was descended from Tovi Pruda, standard-bearer to Canute. I'd found out a great deal about Tovi, including the fact that Waltham Abbey, in Essex, is on the site of a church originally built by him alongside one of his hunting lodges.

  I also learned that in 1042 he'd married Githa, daughter of another Danish nobleman called Osgod Clapa, at Lambeth – and that Canute's successor, Harthacanute, had died suddenly while drinking a toast to the bride at the wedding feast. Harthacanute was only twenty-three years old, wasn't very popular, and one wonders what dark deed lay behind the happening. Tovi doesn't seem to have been implicated, however. He and his descendants continued as standard-bearers to the kings of England down to the time of the Norman Conquest, when Tovi's grandson Esegar was Marshal and Staller (the equivalent of High Constable of England) to Harold, fought with him at the Battle of Hastings, and was the only one of the king's retinue to survive it, dying in London three months later.

  After the Conquest all the Tovi lands were given to William's henchman, Geoffrey de Mandeville, and the family faded into obscurity, but it was a story that completely fascinated me. My own family goes back a long way, but we have nothing on Charles's history, and when Gemma, one of my cousins-twice-removed, came, with her husband, to stay with my cousin Dee that summer, and Louisa and I went to supper with them and the talk turned to family history, I couldn't resist telling them about Tovi.

  I hadn't met Gemma before. It was Dee's side of the family that had kept in touch with hers, and Dee had told me that Gemma wasn't terribly bright. Apparently it was taken for granted in Gemma's own highly intelligent family. Once, Dee told me, when she was staying with Gemma as a child, Gemma had rushed to her mother complaining that Dee had called her a fool, and her mother had replied tartly 'If Dee says you're a fool then you must be.' Even I, though, was at a loss for words when, after I'd conjured up for them a picture of the wedding at Lambeth – Tovi looking, I imagined, rather like Charles: tall, nordic-featured, green-eyed; Githa blonde and slender as a lily in girdled, sweeping white silk; Harthacanute and his nobles carousing lustily (No doubt wearing, in Gemma's imagination, helmets with whacking great horns on them, though actually Viking helmets didn't have horns at all) – Gemma leaned towards me and asked eagerly 'Have you got any photographs?' I was completely stunned. It was quite some while before I could close my mouth and point out faintly that photography had not been invented then. 'Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer,' said Gemma, serenely. I still haven't worked out that one.

T
hat was the summer I decided to sell our sailing canoe and started another local rumour. The canoe had hung, unused, from its pulleys in the garage roof ever since Charles's death, and though I hated the thought of parting with it I was also afraid that one day the ropes would give way and it would fall down and damage the car.

  So I got one of my neighbours to help me lower it, and we carried it down to the lawn so that I could clean it, and unwittingly put it just where it caught the eye of everybody coming down the hill. A graceful sixteen-foot two-­seater, sails, mast and paddles on the grass at its side: half the village appeared at one time or another to speculate as to why it was there.

  Mrs Binney was the first to actually ask me. She hadn't been down for quite a while, but the news had obviously reached her by local grapevine and she must have decided it meant I was moving at last.

  'What be goin' to do with that boat, then?' she began, leaning on the gate to watch me varnishing the decking.

  'Sell it,' I replied.

  'Gettin' ready to move? she queried hopefully.

  'No,' I said. 'It's just a pity to leave it in the garage unused.'

  'Don't forget my Bert'd like to know when you
are
goin',' she continued single-mindedly.

  ''Tis too big for you.' The cottage she meant. 'You wants one of they little bungalows up Fairview.'

  A little bungalow up on Fairview was the last thing I wanted, but Mrs B. obviously thought she was sowing a seed of thought in my mind and, patting her violet curls, she stumped back up the hill, having imparted a piece of information of her own that she was also patently anxious I should know. The Friendly Hands Club was departing on its communal summer holiday at ten o'clock the following Saturday morning, this time to Edinburgh. She was going, she announced. So was Stan she added coyly, peering at me from under her eyelids to see whether I was impressed. I was impressed, all right. Stan, she'd said. Obviously she meant Mr Tooting. In all the years I'd known her she'd never referred to her husband, alive or defunct, other than as Mr Binney. Things certainly did seem to be moving.

  This I must see for myself, I thought. So I made sure I was in the post office on Saturday morning when the coach arrived in the square ready to observe how our village siren operated. It was simple really. The coach drew up and the passengers gathered to go aboard, Mrs Binney determinedly at the front of the queue. She climbed the steps, subsided heavily on the seat just inside the door, dumped her holdall next to her and leaned back and closed her eyes – firmly, so that the availability of the vacant space brooked no question from anybody until, when the coach was full, Mr Tooting climbed aboard (he, as secretary, had been checking everybody on from a list on a clipboard) whereupon Mrs Binney opened her eyes and transferred her holdall to her lap. Mr Tooting had no option but to take the seat next to her – the only one left with nobody in it and where, as self-appointed courier, he no doubt thought he should be anyway. In front, right behind the driver.

  Father Adams's wife didn't go on the trip. She wouldn't leave the old boy on his own, and wild horses wouldn't have dragged him on it. She was in the post office too, though – wouldn't have missed it for worlds, she said – and together we waved the coach on its way. 'Looks like romance, duunit?' she observed, her eyes glued to Mrs B. and Mr Tooting. I wasn't so sure. To me it seemed more like a female spider weaving a calculated web and Mr Tooting falling inescapably into it.

  I walked back to the valley thinking that anyway, I had a week's reprieve. Mrs B. couldn't come pestering me about the cottage. Country life being what it is, Miss Wellington descended upon me instead. She hadn't gone on the communal holiday either. It wasn't Miss W's style. What she had done was notice the canoe on the cottage lawn from the top of the hill, ask Fred Ferry if he knew why it was there – he was still cutting the grass at Poppy's cottage and calling at Miss Wellington's to be paid – and he, never one to miss a chance of leg-pulling, particularly when the leg was Miss W.'s, said hadn't she heard? I was going round the world. Taking the cats as well, he added as a bonus.

  He'd obviously got the idea from a report in the papers at the time about a man proposing to cross the Atlantic in a barrel. It didn't come off – the authorities prevented him doing it – but Miss Wellington had no doubt read about it too, and the possibility of my trying something equally stupid must have seemed credible to her.

  Down she came, the afternoon of the day the Friendly Hands trip went off, when as luck would have it I was scrubbing the sails, spread out flat on the lawn, while the cats, to be companionable, were sitting one in each cockpit of the canoe, for all the world as if they were ready to take off. Our previous cats had often sat in the canoe like that when it was on the lawn for cleaning. There is nothing Siamese like better than being involved in what is going on. It would have been more unusual if they hadn't been sitting in it.

  But Miss Wellington rushed through the gate, threw her arms round my neck and burst into tears, causing Tani to bolt for the cottage. Saph stayed where he was and yelled 'Waaah' at her in greeting, but Miss Wellington had other things on her mind. 'Don't do it,' she sobbed imploringly. 'You mustn't do it. Think of the poor little cats.'

  'Do what?' I enquired. 'I'm only scrubbing the sails. That isn't going to hurt them.'

  It came out then. What Fred Ferry had said. And Mrs Binney had told her Bert was hoping to get my cottage. And I always had been adventurous. Look how Charles and I had gone to the Rockies searching for grizzlies. But I mustn't think of doing such things now, without him. He wouldn't like it.

  I put her right on all counts. I wasn't going anywhere, I assured her. I noticed, though, that when I'd sold the canoe – I advertised it in the paper that weekend and someone bought it the following Monday (a man wanted it to sail with his young son on the Somerset rhines, as Charles and I had done, and I couldn't think of a better future for it) – I noticed that no sooner had it gone up the hill on top of the purchaser's car, its yellow warning streamer fluttering from its stern, than Miss Wellington came pattering down the hill to look over the gate. To make sure I was still there?

  That same week, while I was watching over the cats in the garden one morning, a little man arrived who'd been coming through the valley almost daily for quite a time, on what seemed to be a regular walk around the forest. He always stopped to pass the time of day with me and admire the cats. He liked gardening and he loved cats, he told me regularly, while Tani equally regularly fled indoors growling and Saphra, crouching, fixed him with a suspicious look and said he didn't believe him.

  He was short, pompous – another Mr Tooting. I found him boring, but he would stay and talk. He was a comparative newcomer to the village and he lived on the Fairview estate – a widower, he informed me. He watched me for a while that particular morning as I nipped about in the wake of Saph, dead-heading a rose here, pulling a weed out there, crook in my hand ready to field the Menace should he try to take off. 'What you need is a man about the place,' he said suddenly in a sympathetic voice, leaning confidentially over the gate.

  I nearly jumped out of my gumboots. Was there no peace anywhere? Mrs Binney. Miss Wellington. Now him. So far as I was concerned there was nobody in my life but my tall, handsome Charles. Never had been. Never would be. I hoped he was, indeed, waiting somewhere for me in the wings. Perhaps I misjudged my visitor's intentions, but I wasn't taking any chances. I had no desire to be thought another Mrs Binney. 'I've just acquired a very good handyman,' I told him icily. He stood for a moment, then walked on up the lane. He never came past again.