More Cats in the Belfry (19 page)

  For quite a while I'd noticed a man going past at weekends, wearing a beard and a wide-brimmed hat like a Bohemian artist and his head bent over a book. A most unusual sight because most people came to the valley to enjoy its beauty and he wasn't looking at it at all. Also, the going is rough past the cottage, with pot-holes and ankle-turning stones. If he really was reading poetry or the classics, as he obviously thought anyone who saw him would think, he'd have fallen flat on his face long before. More likely he was doing it for effect, surreptitiously looking down past the book at the ground – but to what end could he be doing something so ridiculous? And going up the side lane to Poppy's cottage – was he calling on her? She'd been a teacher. Was she running some sort of literary circle in the village of which he was an enthusiastic member?

  I longed to know, and now she was annoyed with me and I couldn't ask her. Well, things would sort themselves out, I decided. I shut the door and went back to the sitting-room and the log fire and the cats, which combination gave cause for further development.

  Charles, it will be remembered by my readers, had gone in for growing cobnuts, mostly eaten by Lancelot, our resident field mouse, but this winter Lancelot hadn't put in an appearance. Either age had caught up with him and he was now playing a mouse-sized harp or he'd found better quarters for the cold weather. Anyway, there was the nut harvest, for once unclaimed, across in the wood. I went over and gathered a big basketful, beating the squirrels by a whisker: they moved in next day with much squirrel-barking to herald their arrival and buried the rest of the crop in the lawn.

  I spent about twenty minutes that evening, reading and eating cobnuts, before Saphra decided he ought to try them too. Wanted Some, he wailed, standing against my knee and touching my hand with his paw. 'You wouldn't eat these,' I said, holding a shelled one out to him and expecting him to reject it. He took it, ate it with gusto and immediately demanded more. He, said Tani, sitting by me with her tail wrapped primly round her feet, was Bonkers. Cats weren't monkeys. They didn't eat
nuts
.

  He did. Not only that, when I got tired of cracking them for him and instead threw one in its shell for him to chase, he ran after it, carried it back to the hearthrug, cracked it with his teeth, his head held sideways – then dropped the whole thing on the rug, sorted out the kernel from the shell and ate it.

  It became quite a party piece with him that winter – all the more so because his audience laughed to see him do it. When Dora and Nita came to lunch one day and afterwards I laid out a line of cobnuts on the rug to show them, thinking Saph would take what he wanted and it would save me giving them to him one by one, he obliged by cracking them along the row one after the other, eating the kernels as he went. 'How did you teach him to do that?' asked Nora, astounded. It was all his own idea, I said.

  He and Tani had lots of ideas between them. Sometimes their perspicacity shook me rigid. Was it, I wondered, because I was alone with them so much, and noticed their behaviour more? Or was it – a theory that occurred to me more than once – that cats were becoming more intelligent with each generation, and therefore gradually becoming more dominant?

  I was provided with further evidence in support of my hypothesis just before Christmas. I wanted to see an American Civil War serial on ITV called 'North and South'. The first episode ran from 8 to 10 p.m. I was allowed to watch that one in peace. It was when subsequent episodes were shown at 10.30 p.m., after the news, that I became aware of disapproval.

  The cats and I normally went to bed around eleven o'clock. When we didn't – when I sat there sometimes till after midnight, taking no notice of their efforts to remind me of the time – boy, did I get the treatment! Saph pacing round the room like a Victorian father, looking at the hall door. Tani informing me from the back of a chair in a cracked soprano that if I wasn't Careful I'd go to the Dogs. The pair of them sitting side by side in front of me trying to hypnotise me into switching off and heading for the duvet-under which, it seemed, Everybody ought to Be by eleven o'clock.

  I found myself feeling guilty. Actually apologising. Sitting on the edge of my chair telling them it was nearly over. Several times I gave in and switched off before the end. Who, I asked them sternly, was boss around here? Two supercilious squints supplied the answer. I had made my bed, now I must lie on it. With them under the duvet, of course.

  Christmas came. Saph was entranced. He hadn't seen Christmas decorations before. He poked the prickles on the holly, gazed riveted at the glass balls and glittering tinsel (hanging from spruce branches threaded through the big wrought iron ceiling candelabra: I dared not have a Christmas tree with him around). He stared entranced at the swags of cards strung on ribbons round the walls – to stop him scattering them as he'd been doing when I first set them out in the windowsills and on the dresser and bureau. I put things in funny places, didn't I? he said.

  I did indeed, but I couldn't hang the parcels on the walls to protect them from him. Those I had to pile on the table, and remember I only have the one large living-room. Remember, too, how interested he was in the boxes in the bedroom cupboards. The parcels, to him, were boxes, and he dealt with them in the same way. Pushed them off the table with his paw, looked over to see if they'd come open when they fell, got down and tackled them with teeth and claws if they hadn't... Tani sitting on the table saying Nothing was Anything to do with her, but intensely interested just the same. One of the parcels contained, not a present, but a new telephone I'd ordered through the post. It arrived marked FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE. I heard the bump of that one going down from the other side of the closed kitchen door, and rushed in to pick it up. To tell the truth, I'd been in a hurry when I dumped it on the table or I'd never have left it there. It was all right. It was heavily padded and intact, but it took me a time to open it. Saphra was disgusted. He was even more disgusted when he found it was a telephone. Ought to have been something to eat, he said.

  Some of the parcels were, which was one reason why he was so interested in them. Addressed personally to him and Tani from people who'd come here during the year, they contained cat biscuits and packets of Cat Treats and Cat Love. Presents of catnip mice, too: he could have opened a shop with those. And one of them contained a catnip adder, coiled in a Camembert box – a present from a woman in Exeter who had heard the story of the adder on the radio and had managed to find a lifelike length of diamond-patterned cotton for the adder's skin.

  I keep it now in the bureau. It is too unusual – and startling – to leave lying around. But when Saph first had it he was entranced. He would swagger round the garden with it – me in attendance of course – pretending he was carrying his Trophy. And there, one morning, Miss Wellington came down the lane and saw him. From outside the gate, at a distance, she let out a scream that rocked the valley. 'An adder!' she screeched. 'Quick! He's got an adder!' And, forgetting in her concern that adders aren't around in December, she came rushing to the rescue, slid on one of the loose stones she was always worrying about, and fell flat on her face. I picked her up, helped her into the cottage, and administered brandy – watched by Saphra who'd followed us in and was sitting by her sniffing the air hopefully; a little brandy wouldn't go amiss with
him
after that scream, said his expression. Fortunately Miss Wellington was quite unscathed. She'd been wearing a woollen headscarf and a heavy coat. 'You and those cats put years on me, though,' she protested, giving Saph the lick off her finger he expected.

  They put years on me, too. Take what happened on Christmas Day – this time entirely due to Tani. I'd been invited to lunch with Dora and Nita and their friends, as I had been every Christmas since Charles's death. I was also going to call en route on Jonathan and Delia, the neighbours who'd been such a help to me when he died and who now lived some three miles away. If I left at eleven, I decided, I'd have time for a chat with them before pressing on to Dora and Nita and the turkey. So I took the cats out for a good long session in the garden to make up for leaving them, telling them we'd have a cosy evening together.

  Saphra, as usual, was the one I shadowed, keeping him in sight at every step. I'd put them in their garden house at ten, I thought – the heater was already on. That would give them another hour outside while I changed, and filled their hot water bottles and litter trays. Tani was nowhere in sight, but I didn't worry about her. It only needed a call when I wanted her.

  And then at ten o'clock, when I called Tanny-wanny-wanny, no Tanny-wanny appeared. I went round the garden, looking in all her hunting spots. Rushed into the cottage and searched that – having first pushed Saphra through the door of the cat-run and shut it. I didn't want him vanishing as well. There was no sign of her indoors, however. Not even on her sanctuary chair. I ran out again, stood on the path by the cat-run and blew a mighty blast on Charles's scout whistle, guaranteed to bring her back from any secret lurking-place at the double in the normal way. No slender, ghost-white cat appeared this time. Only a worried black-faced one, coming through the pop-hole to meet me with a look of pathetic loneliness on his face.

  Almost immediately the front gate clicked and Miss Wellington materialised – obviously on her way up to Poppy's cottage, gift-wrapped parcel in hand. Had I heard that whistle? she demanded. As detachedly as possible I said I had. Coward that I was I'd long determined I'd never admit to blowing it to bring the cats home. People would be positive I was scatty.

  Probably somebody trying to contact somebody else, I suggested – which was true enough when you analysed it. It had nearly ruined her eardrums, said Miss Wellington, looking indignantly around for the culprit. Unable to spot him, she pattered on up the lane. I withdrew surreptitiously through the back gate and hared fruitlessly up the Forestry track, calling Tanny-wanny-wanny at every bush. Back down again, preparing this time to go up the hill to the Rose and Crown and on round the wide, circuitous sweep where I'd searched, back in the summer, for Saph.

  As I stood at the bottom of the hill, ready to start out on my trek – Christmas lunch was out of the question now, I told myself: I'd have to ring my friends to cancel it as soon as I got back – another friend, Tina, companion of my riding days before I damaged my back, came by on her horse Barbary, taking him out for exercise before the day's festivities started. I told her about Tani. She'd look out for her, she said. Go the circuitous way I'd been about to embark on. She couldn't bring her back if she found her – Tani would have fainted in coils before anybody got her near a horse – but if she did spot her she'd ring me from the stables. Meanwhile I'd be free to scout in the other direction.

  Along the lane, up the track to Poppy's cottage and on to join the circular route, that was. Dejectedly I set out, up the path to the back gate. Passing the cat-run en route, with Saph still sitting forlornly on the paving stones inside. All Alone, he wailed. Nobody to keep him Company. Where was she, his beloved Tani?

  I found out almost immediately. What prompted me to step aside from the path and go and peer through the cat-house window I'll never know. I'd looked through it earlier and she wasn't there. She was now, though. Sitting bolt upright in the cat-bed under the heater, as calm and collected as an ivory statue.

  It was no good asking her where she'd been. Obviously she hadn't been anywhere. She must have tired quite early of roaming about in the cold, and gone into the cat-house for a warm: I always leave the door open for them as a quick retreat should danger threaten, and Tani often goes in and sits under the heater on her own. But she hadn't done it straight away this time. She wasn't under the heater the first time I'd looked through the window. She must have been deliberately hiding on the floor, and got into the bed while I was chasing round the countryside looking for her. And no doubt encouraged Saphra to do his orphaned act. Relief flooded over me like an avalanche. 'Phew,' I breathed, mopping my brow. Nothing, said Tani as usual, was Anything to do with her. Fooled me, hadn't they, said Saphra, abandoning his orphan act and coming into the cat-house to join us rubbing heavily round my legs. That was their Christmas Surprise for me.

  I made it to Jonathan and Delia's, and on to Dora and Nita for lunch. But I was a nervous wreck for the rest of the day. Fooled me they had indeed.

C
hristmas was over and it was time to reply to all the letters I'd received: letters from people bringing me up to date on events in their own lives, from whom I didn't hear all that often. Siamese owners for the most part, whose experiences defied imagination.