More Cats in the Belfry (22 page)

  She went on gathering sticks. I got over the fence and headed for the pond. The geese made off when I waved a branch at them, but the ducks immediately tried to follow them. I was jumping backwards and forwards over the fence like a retriever and had herded two ducks into their shed and was trying to round up the third, which was rushing about like a demented hen, when the woman came drifting back. 'What about trying it with a carrot?' she suggested helpfully. I didn't tell her that ducks don't eat carrots but I was beginning to wonder about the countrywoman business.

  It was mating time everywhere just then. A Siamese-breeding friend I hadn't heard from for ages rang to tell me of the trouble she was having with her Golden Burmese male. She'd gone to buy a queen the previous year, she said, but while the breeder was actually making out the pedigree this absolutely gorgeous kitten walked up and looked at her, and she fell for him and bought him instead. She'd heard that the Burmese-Siamese cross was wonderful, and had the idea of using him as a stud with her Siamese queens. The trouble was, he was now a year old and he still didn't know what was expected of him. At first he used to hide when the queens started calling, so she took him to her vet to have him checked. The vet had up­-ended him, pronounced that he had the biggest balls he'd ever seen on a cat, and said there was nothing wrong with him. Give him time and he'd work it out, he said.

  She was on hand when daylight did start to dawn. One of the queens was calling, rolling on the floor yelling, waving her paws, Claude looking on in mystification – when suddenly the penny dropped. His face cleared. He knew what was wanted. He got down, threw himself on his back, and rolled as well. Waving his paws in the air, bawling and looking backwards over his head at the queen. He did it now whenever the girls came on heat – and that was all he did. He had such a limp paw, too, and she was wondering... Was it because she'd called him Claude?

  I was in the middle of laughing when a thought suddenly struck me. Some while before, Pat had told me that Luki had a habit of rolling on his back, waving his paws and peering backwards at her chocolate-point girl, Sahra. Pat described it as Luki trying to look alluring. Sahra, she said, always looked more horrified than allured. I'd told her that Saphra often did the same thing with Tani, and Tani usually slapped him on the nose. Why should our respective boys try to look alluring? I wondered now. Could they possibly be odd like Claude?

  I needn't have worried. A few days later we had an incident that proved who was the man about the cottage. It was a hot day, and I'd propped the cat-house window open so that Tani and Saph could sunbathe on the shelf inside. Going past on my way up to the garage I saw Tani sitting on the shelf, for all the world like a mediaeval princess at a tourney, gazing at the knight wearing her favour in the jousting ring below; and down in the jousting ring – the paved run of the cat-house – crouched Saphra, one paw upraised at something hidden behind a clump of grass. I was in there in an instant, grabbing him. Behind the grass, head up and hissing, was an angry adder.

  I rushed Saph down to the cottage, tossed him in, shut the door and ran back armed with a spade. There was no need to rescue Tani. She was still sitting in the window, watching calmly with her paws tucked under her, knowing that at that distance she was safe. The adder was still there, head up and watching me, tongue flickering in and out. I dealt with it regretfully but firmly. Adders have now been declared a protected species but they weren't at that time – and how else can one deal with an adder in a cat-run? From its size I reckoned it was the one that escaped Jeanine McMullen and myself the previous year. Probably it had wintered under the cat-house, which is on bricks; grown bigger; had come out to bask in the sun and, in the way of snakes, would have gone on doing it, a constant and predictably fatal danger to the cats, if I hadn't happened past and been suspicious.

  It was the final lesson as far as Tani was concerned, at any rate. She is nobody's fool. The next evening I was out on the lawn with the pair of them, dragging a piece of rope around for them to chase. Saph, in his element, was jumping on it wildly, rushing away with his ears flat and coming back to jump on it again. Tani, who had possibly seen the adder come out from under the cat-house and recognised the same sinuous movement in the rope, hardly touched ground as she belted round the corner and into the cottage. It was Saphra's business to deal with snakes, she said. He was the he-cat round here.

  Meanwhile, more cats were appearing in the valley. There were new people in the cottage up by the forest gate, Tim and Margaret, and they had a lilac-point girl called Suki. Suki, they said, was shy, and nervous of meeting people, but they used to take her for walks further up the valley, by the stream, and she soon began to explore the neighbourhood on her own. I went round the corner of the cottage one day and saw what I thought was Tani sitting bolt upright on the path outside the cat-house looking down at me, while Saphra was sitting inside looking out at her. 'How on earth did you get out?' I asked in astonishment, making a move to pick her up – and she turned and shot out under the gate and up the bridlepath. She wasn't Ours, bawled Saphra when she had gone – which was now patently obvious. 'Ours' was a pair of pyramid ears and two crossed eyes peering Chad-like over the cat-house windowsill. From the inside, of course.

  Tim and Margaret, seeing my two together and thinking Suki was perhaps coming down to sit by their house for company, decided she ought to have a friend of her own and got a seal-point kitten called Cleopatra, who turned out to be of Killdown descent and related to Saphra. I warned them they were in for trouble, and they got it.

  It took, as it usually does, a little while for the two cats to accept each other and then I began to get reports about Cleo turning out to be a minx and having an effect on Suki. Suki still went off on expeditions of her own – down to my garden and up to Poppy Richards, where she used to go into the cottage and pretend it was hers and scared Miss Wellington nearly out of her wits one day when she went in and met a large white cat, like a ghost, gliding silently down the stairs. But at home the two of them were playing together. Cleo was stealing Suki's food. More important, Suki – who'd all her life been a Good girl like Tani (maybe it's inherent in lilac queens) – was stealing Cleo's, and belting about the place like a kitten herself. Obviously the experiment was a success.

  They both went for walks with Tim and Margaret, Cleo prancing along beside them, Suki, pretending not to be with them, shadowing them far in the rear. The only trouble was, said Margaret – already discovering that, with two Siamese, crises are endemic – that she and Tim couldn't nip up for a drink at the Rose and Crown of an evening any more without a protesting duet through the sitting-room window about People being Cruel and Deserting Them. What she and Tim had to do, she said – she would never have believed it, but I'd been right in my forecast – was to go out ostentatiously, start up the car (parked where the cats couldn't see it), run the engine for a minute or two, then switch it off and creep surreptitiously out and up the hill. The cats, thinking they'd gone off in the car, would then shut up and go to bed. Wouldn't think it possible, would I? she asked. Wouldn't I just, I said.

  Adding to the impression that cats were beginning to take over the valley, two new kittens had meanwhile appeared down the lane. The black one with a white star on his chest was called Starsky. His brother, naturally, was Hutch. The Reasons' tabby was now pretty old and given to sleeping a lot, and the kittens had been acquired to look after the place in general and keep the stables free of rats and mice. Hutch, the under-cover kitten, took on that job, and was rarely seen. Starsky, the extrovert, was more of a front man, patrolling the lane, exploring up the hill, and continually coming over the wall to check on my two. He would openly lie under the beech tree on the lawn, calmly studying Saphra, who was threatening him from the cat-house, secure in the knowledge that Saph couldn't get at him. Tani, as usual, was nowhere to be seen. White Slavers, according to her, could come in Disguises.

  Starsky also attached himself to the goose and duck patrols. He seemed to have struck up a friendship with Gerald, and I often saw him going up the hill with the gang, or sitting on the hillside with them behind my cottage. Another hanger-on down the lane at the time was a large Muscovy drake called Charlie, who'd flown in one day from a smallholding over the hill, apparently attracted by the ducks. His owners had another, even bigger, drake, which was why Charlie had left home, and they said he could stay here if he wanted. So he, too, got added to what was beginning to look like a menagerie.

  No prizes for guessing who was eventually to be seen leading them like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, of course. I'd parked my car outside the front gate one morning, ready to take off for town. I'd put the cats in the cottage, gathered up my coat and handbag, gone out to get in the car – and there, surrounding it, were Gerald and the geese and Charlie and the ducks; Gerald as usual admiring his reflection in the car panels.

  'Out of the way,' I said, waving my arms. The crowd shuffled back a fraction. Leaving, in the foreground, a black kitten with a white star on his chest, inquisitively examining the wheel arches. The geese and ducks, I knew from experience, would scatter when I started the engine. Starsky – I wouldn't like to bet on what he'd do. I wasn't taking any chances, either.

  Picking him up, I started down the lane to take him home. Gerald and the geese fell in, honking, behind me. Behind them waddled Charlie and the ducks, for all the world like a Scouts' and Guides' parade – until halfway down the lane Charlie, realising where we were going, decided to show the others he knew. He took off and passed us all, quacking, at shoulder height, and flew on down to perch on the terrace wall. A horse, coming up the lane, panicked, turned and bolted, his rider with her arms around his neck. Fred Ferry, appearing, knapsack on back, round the corner, said 'What d'ust think thee'st be doin? Runnin'a circus or somethin'? Thee bist lucky that 'ooman din't come off!' And all I'd done was try to take Starsky home. I sometimes wondered where the justice was in this world.

To be fair to Fred, he had his own worries at that time. Like summer itself, things were coming to a head in the village. I hadn't known much of what was going on beyond the valley, being so busy with my own affairs, and I nearly fell flat with astonishment one morning when Miss Wellington came in to tell me that Poppy Richards and Mr Tooting had been married. At the register office in town, but when they came back from Torquay, where they'd gone on honeymoon, they were going to have a blessing in church. And Poppy was going to live in Mr Tooting's bungalow and her cottage would be up for sale.

  Miss Wellington was sorry she couldn't tell me before, she assured me, but she'd been sworn to secrecy. They didn't want a fuss. Oh, that was all right, I said. And nearly fell even flatter when, the following day, Father Adams's wife told me another piece of news... that Mrs Binney's banns had been called in church on Sunday. Not, as I'd half expected, with Will Woodrow – but with Fred Ferry's father, Sam!

  Perhaps she'd seen the way the wind was blowing and pre-empted matters. But I don't really think that was it. She'd been at school with Sam. They'd grown up together. This was obviously what his smartening himself up had been in aid of. And she'd make him a good wife, and they'd neither of them be lonely in future, and she was going to move into his cottage and let Bert and Shirl have hers... Everything was right in the village heaven except for Fred Ferry, who was going round with a face as long as his knapsack at the thought of having Mrs B. as his stepmother, after all he'd said about her.

  As for me, there is one last event to record before I finish this chronicle. Revolving, of course, around the cats. I was watching over them one Sunday afternoon while they were having one of their free sessions in the garden. Fortunately I wasn't weeding this time. Just standing with them, cat-crook in hand, up by the garage while they decided what to investigate next. I spotted a girl and a young man coming down the hill with an Alsatian. The girl had the Alsatian on a lead.

  I watched them approach the drive gate, which is some forty feet from the garage. The cats watched too, at my side: Tani apprehensive – expecting the White Slavers, as always; Saphra interested because he likes meeting people. You never know who might come in.

  What came in that afternoon was a Jack Russell terrier, previously unnoticed because of the Alsatian – squirming under the gate, barking ferociously and nearly falling over himself in his haste to get at the cats. I lunged at him with my crook; he dodged me, still barking; and he and the cats vanished down the path to the cottage in a welter of dust and scraping claws.