More Cats in the Belfry (7 page)

  'Sinbad?' I queried.

  'The parrot,' she said. I nodded as if that explained everything.

  It possibly did. There was one brief interlude when the kitten stopped batting his sister, belted across to me, and sat studying me with eyes of the most vivid blue I have ever seen, even in a Siamese. Then, loudly encouraged by Sinbad to 'Go on, then! Go on!' (it was his favourite remark, the breeder told me), the kitten climbed my leg, sat on my lap and peered into my face, and I knew that he was mine.

  I brought him home with me and introduced him to Tani who spat at him as a matter of principle, walked past as if he was of no consequence at all and completely ignored him after that. He ignored her, too. He didn't hide from her, as she had done with Saska. Kittens brought up by a parrot called Sinbad obviously knew no fear, and he strutted round the cottage as if he were a pirate kitten wearing an invisible bandana and cutlass. He sealed the resemblance a morning or two later when he met up with one of the village postmen.

  He was a hefty young man with a big black beard, a gold hoop in one ear and riotous black curls on which he never wore his postman's hat. Altogether his appearance was quite intimidating and he didn't have much to say to people – just handed them their letters or put them through the box. On this particular morning his red van arrived while I was in the top garden with the kitten, and, as I ran down the path past the cottage to collect the mail, the kitten – I'd decided to call him Saphra as he was the son of Sapphire, but he'd already acquired the much more fitting name of the Menace – dashed ahead of me and round the corner into the yard with a swoosh. My first thought was to hope that the postman wouldn't frighten him. My second was that meeting up with Blackbeard might teach him not to rush to greet people he didn't know. I rounded the corner at a gallop myself to a sight I could hardly credit, the postman was on his knees, my letters dumped anyhow on the paving stones, and the Menace was standing on his hind legs with his front paws on the postman's chest. The two of them looked at each other admiringly. 'Like to come home with me? asked the postman. He wouldn't mind. Could he ride in the Van? enquired Saph.

  It certainly didn't make him more careful about meeting people. The following Sunday Louisa came to see him. Dee, my cousin who usually brings her out, was away on holiday, so I drove into Bristol to fetch her. When we got to the cottage we came in by the back , so that we could use the kitchen as a Davy escape hatch, closing each door behind us in as we went through to the sitting-room.

  By this time the kitten and Tani were the greatest of friends. She'd missed Saska; Saphra, by his very nature, was completely bomb-proof; and they'd accepted each other more quickly than I'd ever known cats do before. So I'd left them together in the room, with the stairs and hall to play in and the hall door shut to safeguard the sitting-roo­m ornaments – and when I opened it wide, said 'Here he is – the Menace', he entered, not as a kitten darting through with fun in mind, but as the Head of the Household, advancing, small spike tail raised like a personal standard, with complete insousiance to meet his guest.

  Tani was nowhere in sight, but I knew where she was. Upstairs, on the far side of the bed, sitting on her usual act of hiding under the valance in case the kidnappers had come to carry her off. He, however, marched down the middle of the room like royalty progressing along a red carpet, straight up to Louisa who, tearful with delight, fell on her knees to hug him. 'Oh, the little darling!' she said.

  A good many people fell on their knees and called him darling when they met him for the first time. They didn't know what he was like behind the scenes. On his first day at the cottage he'd climbed the bureau by hauling himself up its carved front by his claws, knocked a wooden statue of a prancing stallion off the top so that one of its legs came off, and knocked over a china model of a Breton spinning woman so that her head came off as well (though admittedly that had been stuck on, years before, after a charge by Sugieh's kittens. One gets used to these things with Siamese). On his second day he'd climbed the back of a tall carved chair reputed to be genuine Stuart and rather valuable, stood on the top of it to reach a picture which he also tried to climb, and fallen down in a heap with the picture. And on his third day he fell in the fishpond, which was a sign that he now Belonged. Ever since the time of Solomon, who'd chased a hare through it almost as soon as it was built, all our Siamese boys had fallen into the pond in their early days. Charles had constructed it in the middle of the yard, between the back door and the side gate, and while I'd prophesied that it would regularly catch the postman or the milkman, all it had caught so far was Siamese cats. Usually when they were chasing something, and they only did it once. After that they avoided it.

  But Saphra did it twice. The first time by accident, while out with Tani. I say by accident. Surely she couldn't have egged him on to do it deliberately? The fact remained that they'd come down the garden path together under my supervision after their morning outing and had gone across the yard and round behind the toolshed, where there was a stone outhouse for storing logs, which required regular examination to see who'd been visiting it during the night. Badgers did, I knew. I'd often found badger pawprints, like baby handprints, on the log-house floor.

  Anyway, knowing where they were I'd nipped into the kitchen to lower the heat under their rabbit saucepan and had gone straight out again to find Saphra in the yard looking like a drowned rat. I guessed where he'd been. I went across to check – and there, sure enough, was a large splash-mark by the side of the pool and the water still moving where he'd clambered out of it. I looked for Tani and found her sitting in the log-house, busy thinking. Nothing was Anything to do with her, said her expression.

  'Well, you won't do that again, will you?' I said, carrying him in the kitchen and wiping him down. But next day he did do it again, and this time I saw him – heading for log-house corner and taking a diagonal short-cut through the pool to reach it. He quite possibly went in initially by accident, but he paddled the strokes necessary to get to the other side like a water-spaniel. And while Tani may have encouraged him to do it, when I looked for her she was once more sitting innocently in the log-house thinking. Where on earth had he Been? she enquired when she saw him. Couldn't leave him for a Second, could she? So in case he had done it deliberately, on the premise that all pirate kittens swam, I hunted out the netting we used to put over the pool to keep passing herons from taking the fish and reinstated it. The Menace, finding that outlet closed to him, turned his mind to higher things.

  He started to climb everything out of doors that he could find. Up trees, up gateposts and on one occasion up Mrs Binney. She still came down occasionally to keep an eye on things, but not nearly as often as before the providential advent of Mr Tooting, and this was the first time she'd seen him. I took him to the gate and lifted him up to meet her and in an instant, his gaze fixed on her eye-catching hairdo, he had scrambled on to her shoulder and up over her head, and was sitting on top poking his paw down the violet curls. 'Forward little beggar, in't he?' said Mrs Binney, which was really quite amiable coming from her, and when I'd untangled him from her hair she patted him.

  He started to climb the wire netting run of the cats' garden house from the outside too – it was a good six feet high, on a bank on a raised base, and he'd shin up and dash about on the wire top like a mad thing. Which was all very well – I was always on hand to lift him down from the slope of the cat-house roof when he'd had enough – until the day he and Tani were watching a mousehole in the stone at the top of the lawn. I'd slipped in to take something out of the oven (I had to do things like that when I thought they were safely based a moment) and when I scurried out again they were missing.

  I called them. No response. I blew Charles's scout whistle which I kept in my pocket for such emergencies – I'd long ago discovered that when I blew it Tani, always expecting the kidnappers, would emerge full pelt from wherever she was and bolt for the cottage. But, this time she didn't. The lawn – and it was almost dusk – was bare and silent. So I dashed inside for the only thing I could think of – the tin of cat biscuits that to both of them was a summons to heaven – and ran up the garden path rattling it. As if by magic Tani appeared from somewhere at the back of the cottage and rushed indoors and Saphra, too, shot across my vision. Not at ground level but darting across the top of the cat-run and, in order to get to the cat biscuits before Tani, launching himself from above my head out across the path and plonk down on the lawn on the other side.

  It was a good eight-foot drop and I started to run again, sure he must have hurt himself, but he bounced up fresh as a daisy and came tearing towards me. Pirate kittens did things like that, he informed me in a Siamese bawl. That was his Boarding Jump. Sinbad had taught him about it. Now what about those biscuits?

  A few days later he did far worse than that. It was a Sunday evening, and as usual I'd been out on the lawn with them. I'd picked up Tani and carried her in because it was supper time and gone back to fetch the Menace, whom I'd left studying a beetle in the border. Always ready for a game, he put his ears back, raced across the lawn and shinned up the tall plum tree against the garage wall. Right to the top from which he stepped off on to the wide, gloss-painted strip that edged the sloping garage roof, and immediately lost his footing on it.

  The garage is a conversion of a 250-year-old barn, the same age as the cottage. It is some twenty feet high at the apex and the roof-slope is steep. He couldn't get a grip on the painted wood, it didn't occur to him to jump beyond it on to the rougher tiles, and he started to slither down towards the bottom.

  'No... please!' I breathed, unable to do a thing to help except hope I might be able to catch him when he fell off. Then one of his claws caught in a splintered bit, he held on there for dear life anchored by one paw and yelling at him not to move, I rushed down to the woodshed for a ladder. He couldn't have known what I was saying – he hung there because he wasn't able to move – but the result was the same. I belted back with the ladder – fortunately of light aluminium, and I managed to extend it easily – slapped it against the roof and scuttled up it. He wouldn't let me unhook him with my hands, but clung to the wood strip for all he was worth. Only when I lay flat against the ladder and put my shoulder under his back feet, so that he could get a grip with them, did he turn and clamber cautiously down my body, sinking his claws into me like climbing pitons every inch of the way. How he would manage when he got to the end of me I dared not think. At that point, however, he was a good way down from his original mind-bo­ggling height and was level with the top of the Bramley apple tree on the other side of the path. One leap and he was across the gap and sprawled flat as a starfish across a branch of his haven.

  Hurriedly I scrambled down the ladder and grabbed him before he could find anything else to climb. I'd thought I was alone while all this was happening. I should have known better, of course. No sooner did I start down the path, one hand firmly clutching Saph's scruff, the other under his feet, holding him against my cheek because, despite the fact that he put years on me with every day that passed, he was Saska all over again and I loved him dearly, than 'You shouldn't let him do things like that – he might hurt himself' came a voice from the now darkening shadows of the lane.

  I recognised it at once. Miss Wellington. If it had been Mrs Binney, after all the tales I'd been hearing – mostly from Fred Ferry – ­about her being seen around the country lanes at twilight with a companion in a pork-pie hat, I wouldn't have been so surprised. But Miss Wellington? What on earth was she doing out and about almost in darkness?

I
soon found out. Miss Wellington, having revealed her presence in the lane, obviously thought she'd better explain why she was there before the rumour went round that she, too, was having secret assignations in the gloaming.

  It seemed that her sister, widow of a headmaster and herself recently retired as headmistress of an infants' school in Wiltshire, had bought a cottage which was for sale further up the lane from me and was shortly moving into it. I'd mentioned the cottage to Mrs Binney as a possibility for Bert, but she said Shirl was a town girl and din't fancy living up among all them trees, whereas mine was in a spot where there were more people about and had a proper road running down to it. Shirl wanted her own car when they got settled, she said importantly.

  Which took care of Shirl, and why Miss Wellington's sister wanted to live in such a remote spot, up a side lane off the main one, with a very rough stretch of bridle path to drive over before she got to it and, if it came to that, close to Miss Wellington, was anybody's guess. But she did want it, and had bought it, and Miss Wellington was keeping a self-appointed eye on it. To see that vandals didn't damage it before Poppy moved in, and dusk was the time when they were most often about, she told me, which left me with two thoughts uppermost in my mind: first that from now on I could expect Miss Wellington to be hovering in the lane any time I was in the garden at twilight; and second that if her sister's name was Poppy what on earth could Miss Wellington's own Christian name be? I'd never heard her referred to as anything but Miss Wellington. If I'd been asked to hazard a guess I'd have said something like Augusta or Victoria with that surname. In fact in the fullness of time, when Poppy Richards had moved in and started to refer to her sister in conversation around the village, we discovered at Miss Wellington's name was Pansy. Before long the two sisters' cottages – one at the top of the hill and the other up the valley in the other direction – were known as Pansy's and Poppy's, and Miss Wellington had become Old Pans when spoken of by the more disrespectful locals such as Fred Ferry, while her sister needless to say became Old Pop.