More Cats in the Belfry (5 page)

  The next silly thing I did was get in a muddle over Tani's spaying. She should have the operation at six months, the vet had told me when he treated her for her nervous stomach. She'd been born at the end of January... six months from January was June, I calculated. I booked her in for the end of June and had driven her almost the twenty-five miles to the vet's on the appointed day when it dawned on me that six months from January was July. Tani was only five months old.

  I drove on to the surgery to explain. Some cats were big enough earlier, said the vet, examining her. But definitely not Tani. She was still very small – needed to grow a bit more. She was a lovely little girl all the same, he said, cuddling her closely, which she decided was what she'd come for. So I brought her home for another month, unwisely told Miss Wellington what had happened, and started her off on another of her campaigns – which this time was not to have Tani spayed at all, but to let her have kittens.

  Miss Wellington will be remembered by my readers as the elderly lady who concerned herself deeply with everything that happened in our part of the village. Whenever the stream flooded in the valley, though her own cottage was at the top of the hill and she was in no way inconvenienced by it, she took it on herself to patrol the swallet – the large natural hole in the limestone bed of the stream higher up in the forest down which the surplus water was supposed to go but very often didn't. She rang the Council to tell them when it was blocked with silt – and again when they didn't arrive at the double to unblock it. She foresaw catastrophe every time it snowed, rained hard or the wind got up to gale force, and scurried round trying to organise forces to counter whatever threatened – masculine forces if possible, so that the male residents of the valley usually took cover when they saw her coming, though she did once suggest that she and I should move an enormous tree trunk to stop the overflow from the swallet sweeping down the bridlepath. In vain I protested that I would do myself an injury. Before I knew it I was on the other end of the log, struggling like Samson to shift it.

  Way back when Annabel was young Miss Wellington had tried hard to persuade us to let her have a foal. Every time she went to stay with her friend who lived by the sea in Devon she would send us postcards showing mother donkeys on the beach with their cuddlesome offspring and
Some day – this?
written heavily across them. 'Old Mother Wellington's at it again,' the postman used to announce when he delivered her holiday greeting; and when we did try to get Annabel a foal – a fine old caper that turned out to be, too, what with her measuring fifty-four inches round the waist (Annabel, that is); collapsing in the lane telling us she could Go No Further, it was her Condition, when we tried to get her to exercise; and keeping us on the hop for three months waiting for a late delivery when in fact she wasn't having a foal at all – a good few people thought we'd been brainwashed into it by Miss Wellington, when what we'd hoped for was a small companion for Annabel.

  Now, Mrs Binney being otherwise occupied in lurking behind her curtains watching for Mr Tooting, it was Miss Wellington who popped up at the front gate just about every time I put my nose outside to tell me what a beautiful little cat dear Shantung was, what a lovely mother she was sure she'd make, and what wonderful companions the kittens would be for me.

  I recalled the one and only litter we'd ever bred: Sugieh's, consisting of Solomon, Sheba and the two Blue Boys who, with Solomon as their self-appointed leader, had terrorised the valley so many years before. Playing ring-a-­roses round the chimneys high up on the cottage roof because in those days, before we'd had an extension built on at the back, it had been possible to jump from the hillside across to the sloping roof of the single-storey kitchen and thunder in a miniature posse up to the ridge.

  I remembered Solomon, who couldn't climb for toffee though he considered he was best at everything, going up the damson tree at the front gate by sheer force of impetus and falling on the head of the Rector, who never came to visit us after that without pausing at a distance to stoop and peer up into the tree to be sure that Beelzebub, as he called him, wasn't up there. Solomon going up a pine tree on the hillside by the same sheer force of impetus when chased by a dog. Right to the Top, Sugieh had always told them, and right to top he went, and had to be rescued by the fire brigade, clinging to the topmost branch like the Christmas star and bawling the valley for help. The lot of them, chewing holes in socks and blankets, fighting, falling in the water-butt and in their food, constantly demanding More like a detachment of Oliver Twists.

  I couldn't stand that again, I told myself. Not my own. Nor could I stand having eventually to part with the kittens, which was the main reason we'd decided against breeding any more in the early days. It had been too much of a heartbreak parting with the Blue Boys, and hearing later that one of them had been run over made us feel like murderers for not having kept them all. Tani wouldn't have a keepable number, that I could bet. With my luck she'd have eight or more, they'd all chitter in chorus when I used the typewriter and I'd go round the bend.

  So at six months she was spayed, and apart from Miss Wellington not speaking to me for several weeks and Saska spitting at Tani when she came back from the vet's, saying that she Smelled (next day, as she was full of beans, I put them out in their garden run to enjoy the sunshine, but we had a sudden summer storm and as I passed their run en route from the garage there was no sign of Tani, obviously comfortably ensconced inside the cat-house, which she loved, only of Saska sitting in the open run in the pouring rain announcing that he Wasn't Going In, she Smelled and he wouldn't ever sleep with her again)... apart from one or two vicissitudes like that, all was peaceful at the cottage.

I
t didn't last long. Miss Wellington took on a family of doves somebody over in the next village didn't want and chaos broke out once more at the top of the hill.

  Given a picture of a pink-washed cottage with lichened roof and lozenge-paned windows, a garden full of lavender, hollyhock and roses, and an elderly lady in a straw hat standing in the middle with a white dove perched on her hand, most people would have said that, for them, was the epitome of rural England. Alas, while that was exactly how Miss Wellington's garden did look, with her raffia-flowered hat adding just the touch needed for the right old-world atmosphere, the snag was that her cottage overlooked the lane, and she'd had the dovecote fixed between her two front bedroom windows. The birds took to their new home at once, but instead of fluttering lovingly down to sit on her hand among the hollyhocks they spent most of their time stumping about in the road, picking up grit and holding up people wanting to drive past.

  Wherever they'd come from they'd obviously never experienced a road before, and had no idea of the danger. They just pottered about playing Who's Afraid when vehicles came along. Practically every time I drove up I had to get out of the car, shoo them away and then rush to nip past before they settled again, and one day I saw the coalman standing in front of his lorry furiously waving a sack at them while Miss W. screeched up and down the scale about his having No Soul, absolutely No Soul, and in future she'd get her coal elsewhere, and he said she was ruddy well welcome, and the pigeons just went on walking about.

  The climax came when Mrs Binney happened past one morning and stopped to ask Miss Wellington 'What be goin' to with they, then?' which was one of her stock remarks and actually related to nothing except her desire to start a conversation. Fred Ferry, who lived opposite Miss Wellington and happened to be leaning on his gate, promptly bawled 'Turn 'em into pigeon pie,' and guffawed so loudly at his own joke that he really did scare the doves, who rose into the air in a panic-stricken flurry and made for the dovecote, and in the rush one of them had an accident on Mrs Binney's violet hairdo.

  Fred Ferry slapped his knee and nearly fell down laughing, Mrs Binney bellowed something she'd certainly never learned at the Mothers' Union, Miss Wellington said that anybody who used language like that was no lady, and Mrs B. departed in high dudgeon.

  Later that day, with the cottages at the top of the hill glowing golden in the evening sunshine and the doves once more pottering about in the road, a car turned the corner by the Rose and Crown and drove slowly along the road past the farm – so slowly it was hardly moving. As it approached Miss Wellington's cottage a hand came out of the window and quietly lobbed something on ahead.

  There was an almighty bang, the doves erupted in all directions, and the car came down the hill, turned at the bottom where I was peering out of the window wondering what on earth had happened, and proceeded unhurriedly back up again. There were no doves on the road when it passed Miss Wellington's. Fred Ferry said they were still going round up in the air. Not a bird was hurt. Apparently it had been nothing but a noisy firework. All the cottagers had rushed out, though, and recognised the car and its occupant as it went by, and I heard that Bert Binney came in for a good few free pints at the Rose and Crown that night. And on subsequent nights, because the doves never ignored a car again. Miss Wellington was livid, but she couldn't do anything about it – except pass Mrs Binney with her head in the air when she met her in the village, and as Mrs Binney was doing the same when she saw Miss W. that, as Father Adams said, made two of 'em.

  It had been Fred Ferry's fault in the first place, of course, for laughing that outrageous laugh. Like a ruddy hyena, as Father Adams so often remarked. It was, rather. I'd often heard it myself and longed to dot him one, following some ridiculous remark he'd made about the cats. I felt like that when I was taking them for a walk up the Forestry path one night. I'd chosen my time carefully – immediately after supper, when there weren't likely to be many people about with dogs. Saska was on his lead, to which he was quite accustomed. Tani was on one too, for her first expedition outside the cottage boundaries: a light elastic collar with a cord attached, which I'd made by way of training her and also so that I could pick her up immediately if we met a dog, rather than have her bolt in some irretrievable direction.

  She wasn't too bad on it. She squirmed a bit and tried to wriggle out of it backwards, but we'd got almost as far as the Forestry gate and she was just beginning to walk properly on it when we happened upon the Smell.

  It
was
a smell, too. About half an hour earlier a rider had come down the hill on a strange horse, tried to get it across the stream to go up into the forest, and it had started playing up. Some horses are like that about water crossings they don't know. It had backed, reared on its hind legs and frothed at the mouth. One must never let a horse get the upper hand, of course. Give in to it, turn away, and it will never cross that stream again. So the rider dug her heels in, I went out and made a noise walking behind it, and the horse capitulated and went across... where, to relieve the tension, it did a pool the size of our garden pond in front of the Forestry gate, shook itself, snorted, and went on.

  Only in extremity will a horse relieve itself in the roadway. It prefers the straw in its stable, or will move off the bridleway on to a grass verge rather than get splashed. Tani had never met such a spectacle before, but she obviously realised what it was. Anybody would, by the overpowering pong. Her only previous experience of such matters was when Saska performed, and presumably she thought this was one of his efforts – which, being a boy and careless, he hadn't been too careful about positioning. So there we were. Me standing by an enormous wet and pungent patch in the dust, Saska obliviously ahead on his lead tugging to get through the gate, and Tani like small mouse on a string behind me, scratching furiously to try to cover it up.

  I tugged the cord, but she wouldn't come. I couldn't go back to her, with Saska pulling hard in the other direction. At that moment Fred Ferry swung briskly down the hill behind me and rounded the corner (Fred was always appearing like that, knapsack on his shoulder and heading for the hills, which was why he had the reputation of being our local poacher) and said, his eyes like saucers, 'Cor did
she
do that?' He knew very well she couldn't have done, but it didn't stop him reporting it as a fact up at the pub, so that people kept coming past for days asking was it true that I had a cat that widdled like a water-cart?

  They used to stop and watch to see if she'd perform, and she didn't like it. She would run indoors and hide behind the sofa, protesting that the White Slavers she was always expecting had caught up with her at last.

  Life had its complications where my Aunt Louisa was concerned, too. Now nearly eighty, in her young days she'd helped my grandmother bring me up, and I looked on her as my responsibility. She still lived in the old family house in Bristol and, with a strong strain of independence, kindly neighbours and myself keeping an eye on her, she managed very well indeed.