More Cats in the Belfry (20 page)

  There was the woman who had sent Saphra the home-made adder, for instance. She had a Siamese called Bertie, of whom she'd written to me previously, when he'd kept bringing home white mice. Day after day, and she couldn't think where he'd been getting them, until her husband spotted him one day from the bathroom window going into a shed several gardens away, coming out with a mouse in his mouth and bringing it back over several high walls. On investigation it transpired that the man along the road had rescued the mice from a research laboratory and was temporarily keeping them in an aquarium in his garage, with a box over the top for safety, confident that nobody would know. Bertie had ferreted them out, though – the man had wondered why he kept finding the box off the top of the aquarium – and what with feeling guilty about someone knowing he'd kidnapped them, and Bertie's owners feeling guilty because he kept coming in with them, it was a Siamese ­manufactured mix-up of the first order. The end of the story was cloaked in diplomatic secrecy – I never heard how they sorted it out – but I do know that later she sent me a photograph from her local paper, showing, heads together, a very paternal-looking Bertie with his friend, a live white mouse.

  Now Bertie had put his foot in it again. It seemed his owners' daughter had been married the previous autumn. She was a professional dancer with a troupe in Italy, and had married an Italian musician. Prior to the ceremony, which took place in England, Bertie's mistress had gone over to meet the new in-laws, and they'd taken her on a tour of the country during which she'd been particularly impressed by the Leaning Tower of Pisa and had bought an Italian couture suit to wear at the wedding. Back in England, she got down to the preparations. Made the bridesmaids' dresses. The daughter was wearing her mother's wedding dress: that only had to be altered to fit. Did some house redecoration because people were coming to stay. Made the wedding cake. As a compliment to the bridegroom's family and the tour of Italian architecture, not to mention the effect Siamese cats have on one's sanity, she'd made it as a replica of the Tower of Pisa. What with its odd angle and the pillars it couldn't be transported as it was: it had to be assembled by the chef at the hotel where the reception was being held. He'd said it was quite a challenge, she wrote. I could believe it.

  Anyway, the night before the wedding, everything was ready. The in-laws had arrived from Italy. The guests who were staying with her and her husband were already there. Her new suit was on its hanger, suspended from the wardrobe door. Bertie wasn't at all pleased about the visitors – he was marching about with his ears flat – but she was allowed to have people staying
sometimes
, she told him. She decided she'd have an early night and relax. Went to the bathroom to clean her teeth. She was only away
minutes
, she wrote, but when she came back, Bertie, to put his protest on record, had sprayed all down the skirt of her suit.

  She'd marched round the house calling him an awful name – which couldn't be true, she admitted, because she had his pedigree showing who his parents were. Her daughter had sponged the skirt and dried it with a hair dryer – it hardly showed at all. And of course it wasn't as pungent as it might have been because Bertie was neutered. But she'd stayed awake half the night worrying about it, stood as far back from people at the reception as she could, and goodness knew what they'd thought. She sent me a photograph which showed her doing it. It looked most odd, as if it was the people she was talking to who were ponging. And the cake was leaning madly sideways on the table in the background. She should have had Bertie at the reception, I told her. Wearing a notice saying It Is All My Fault.

  From my friend Pat there was the news that her seal-point boy, Luki, was driving her round the bend as usual. His recent crimes included coming home with a large raw beefburger stolen from goodness knew where and being found sitting on top of a kitchen cupboard astride a turkey which was up there because it was too big to go in the refrigerator, trying to get it out of its wrapping. She, said Pat, had washed her hair by way of relaxing her nerves and had afterwards found herself spraying it with liquid starch. Did I ever do things like that? she asked. I told her about the teapot.

  From a parson's wife I heard the story of how, in their previous country living, the rectory was near a duck pond. One day her queen went out and returned in due course with an entire brood of ducklings waddling under her stomach – she with her legs spread so as not to tread on them, looking most self-­conscious. They must have mislaid their mother and tacked on to her as a substitute. She couldn't think where she'd Got Them, she said – it wasn't Her Fault... Her expression, said the parson's wife, was priceless. Nobody could believe it. Any Siamese owner could, I said.

  Another letter was from an American woman who lived in Philadelphia and for years had kept me up to date with the doings of her cat, Daisy. Some months earlier she had written telling me that Daisy had died and she wasn't replacing her. There could never be another Daisy, and besides, she was too old now to take on another. What would become of it if anything happened to her?

  Nonsense, I wrote back. There were always cats around whose owners had died or moved away, and if nobody adopted them they would be put down. She should give a home to one of those. I was sure Daisy would have approved, I told her. She consulted her vet, he agreed, and within a week brought her Daisy's successor. Two years old, timid but becoming friendly: it was nice to have a cat around again, she reported. So there I was, imagining this elderly lady consoling herself with the homeless cat she called Miss Kitty – unable to forget Daisy, of course, but it was someone to cherish... And what had I received in my Christmas mail? A letter describing how Miss K. – the most affectionate, intelligent cat, I understood, that it was possible to meet – was now disrupting the Philadelphia communications system by answering the phone when her new mistress was out.

  It seemed that friends calling Mrs C. would, after waiting while the bell rang, hear a crash at the other end as the receiver was knocked off the cradle, then the sound of a cat purring into it loudly. Realising what had happened they would hang up – and Mrs C. would return home to find the receiver on the floor. To avoid it being smashed, she said, she had taken to putting the phone on the floor anyway before she went out, and had actually seen the cat sidling up to it and sitting watching it, waiting for it to ring.

  In order to amuse her, Mrs C. went on, one day recently she'd taken off the receiver so that Miss K. could hear the dialling tone – which, after a brief interval, changed to a buzz as a warning that the phone was 'open'. After a minute or so the phone would go dead, but could be reconnected by depressing a button on the cradle, when the whole cycle started up again.

  Believe it or not, by being shown how to depress the button (she did it to see it pop up again, said Mrs C.) that cat had now learned not to wait for the phone to ring, but to knock the receiver off, listen for the dialling tone and the buzz, and then re-start the cycle by pressing the button.

  Mrs C. was proud as a peacock about Miss K.'s cleverness, and wondered whether Saphra could learn to do the same. Not if I could help it, I replied. I was thinking of tying my telephone up with string.

  I was soon to learn the depths of mayhem a cat could achieve in England without even trying. Meanwhile there I was answering letters, the cats curled in the Snoozabed at my feet. Every now and then Tani chittered in a dozy, high-pitched soprano with her eyes closed, about the typewriter Disturbing Her Sleep. Immediately Saphra, also without opening his eyes, would echo her in a low­pitched bass. He didn't know what he was complaining about. He only did it to copy her. Saph, bombastic as he was, Head of the House and In Charge of Everything, still liked sleeping with his head on her stomach and her paw protectively across his neck, as if she was his mum. What she did, he did, and keeping me in order was the order of the day.

  So January passed, with indoor occupation. I got a lot of letters written. And Poppy Richards and I were friends again. We'd met up at a neighbour's party and I explained again that I hadn't been hooting at her, but at the blackbird. And I asked her about the man in the wide-brimmed hat who walked through the valley reading, and she said she'd been wondering about him too: she'd thought he'd been visiting
me
. It showed how speculation starts up in a village, and now Mrs Binney started some more. Well, more than speculation actually. This was straight from the horse's mouth. She appeared one day at the cottage gate in a state of agitation, her emerald coat buttoned all awry. Shirl was expecting, she told me. She didn't know what she and Bert were going to do.

  'But surely...' I began, then stopped myself.

  No point in saying but surely that was the natural outcome of Shirl and Bert living together. In Mrs B.'s eyes it evidently wasn't. Shirl and Bert living together a la mode was one thing. A baby in the offing was another. Shirl and Bert should be in their own place, not a caravan, she insisted. Following, I gathered, a quiet, practically anonymous wedding, Shirl should merge into village life as an accepted ostensibly long-wed, mother-to-be. 'You thinkin' of movin' yet?' she enquired.

  I wasn't, I told her, as I'd told her before. This was my home and I was staying in it. I felt like asking why she didn't marry Mr Tooting and let Shirl and Bert have her cottage, but I thought I'd better not. I didn't know how matters stood with her and Mr T. Fred Ferry had stopped telling me of late that he'd seen them around together in the local trysting places – though that might have been because of the weather.

  Something would turn up for them, I told her, as helpfully as I could. She mustn't worry about it. People looked at things differently nowadays, even in villages. Think how proud she'd be when she was a grandmother.

  Obviously undecided about that Mrs B. plodded back up the hill. Would she be back to try her wiles again? I wondered. Why was it my cottage she wanted for the errant couple, anyway? Because it was picturesque, I supposed. And Bert had professed a liking for it. People were always saying they'd like to live here.

  While I was still in the garden, putting bread on the bird-tray, Mr Woodrow happened past with his dogs. I hadn't seen him for weeks. 'You've just missed Mrs Binney,' I said by way of conversation. 'She's just this moment gone back up the hill.'

  'Have she?' he said. 'Can't stop this mornin'... In a bit of a hurry...' And paddled off up the hill in her wake. I ought to have suggested she married
him
, I thought. That would have left her cottage free for Shirl and Bert. Sharing it with them certainly wasn't on the cards. It would have looked too much like dire necessity.

  There was one bright interlude before the next trauma descended. I went to Connie's New Year party. As a naturalist she had a circle of very interesting friends, none of whom I'd met before. Other naturalists: a man who was an authority on otters and owls and actually kept them; a famous woman botanical artist; a man who made nature films for television and had just come back from filming alligators in the Florida swamps... We sat around her long sitting-room talking to each other – at least, they talked: I sat listening to their experiences with avid interest – until I suddenly spotted Ming, who'd been in the bedroom to begin with but had obviously realised he had a captive audience across the hall. He'd come into the room, edged himself around it behind the chairs and, not bothering with the radiator nearest me, which was the one he'd leaned on to impress me when I first met him, had made his way to the long one under the window at the far end of the room. And there, against the one area of radiator between the chairs that was open to view like a stage, leant his Lordship Ming. Bolt upright, sideways on, his cheek pressed pathetically against the white-painted surface.

  'Look,' I said, pointing. Even as the heads swivelled, that cat half-closed his eyes – only half-closed them: he wanted to see the effect – and chicken vol-au-vents and prawns were immediately proffered. Connie put the electric fire in the middle of the room and switched it on in resignation, at which he swayed weakly out, almost Too Cold to Stand, we understood, and stretched full-length on the carpet in front of it. Saphra, I had to concede, had nothing on Ming when it came to histrionics. Ming would have made a pretty good Hamlet.

  Now it was February and the snowdrops were out under the beech tree on the lawn, and the pussy willows budding yellow up in the forest. Winter wasn't over yet, though. Came the third week of the month and the sky turned leaden grey and it snowed. Heavily, covering the snowdrops and lying deep on the ground, with Saphra venturing valiantly out into it. Making his way, tail raised, up to the covered area beyond the garage, where he could pretend-hunt among the heaps of stones.

  He soon got bored, though. No mice were about in that weather. And I got cold watching over him. I would pick him up and carry him back down to the cottage, where Tani sat sensibly in front of the fire. Sitting by the fire all day, however, wasn't for him. He wanted something more engrossing. That was why, when I found him sitting in the sink one morning studying the cold tap, which was dripping slightly, I didn't call a plumber immediately. Anything that kept that cat occupied and out of mischief was welcome, and the drip kept him mesmerised for hours. Leave it for a while, I thought. It was wonderful to know where he was, and that he wasn't raiding cupboards or baiting Tani.

  So the tap dripped and, outside, penetrating frost set in. Frost that lasted for a fortnight, so deep that the septic tank outlet froze and the run-off couldn't get away into the ground and, due to the dripping tap, the tank filled up, back-fired up the pipe and overflowed.