by Doreen Tovey
So we told him. All about the sulking and the fighting and Sheba being Guy Fawkes and the fact that, unable to stand it any longer, we had arranged to return Samson to the breeder that afternoon. We were particularly sad about that. We had grown very fond of Samson in the short time he had been with us, and Samson, when he could spare the time from worrying about Solomon and Sheba, was obviously fond of us too.
We felt we had failed in our handling of the cats—and that, though she was kindness itself in saying how sorry she was and agreeing to take him back, was undoubtedly the opinion of the breeder. Her kittens, she told us when we rang her up, often went to homes where there were other cats—even other Siamese—and after the initial settling-down period there had never been any trouble with them. The inference was that if we had given it a little more time and been firmer with our own two specimens—though how we could have done that, short of putting them in balls and chains, we didn’t know—we wouldn’t have had any trouble either.
Dr Tucker soon put us right on that score. Nothing, he said, could have altered the situation. It arose from the fact that Solomon and Sheba were twins and had been brought up together. They had a much greater affinity, he said, than kittens raised together but coming from different families—and though in time they might have come to tolerate Samson it would only have been an armed truce. Never would there have been the affection that, despite their feuds and battles, our two held for each other. Never the fun either. In due course Solomon and Sheba themselves might—as they had already begun to do—have grown completely apart. In any case, he said, glancing professionally at Solomon—who all this time had been sitting in the road with the owlishly innocent expression he always adopted when people were talking about him—in any case, with Solomon so jealous and Samson being another tom, eventually Solomon would have started to spray.
Solomon’s ears shot up like train signals at that and so did ours. Solomon, we said—firmly, in case the gremlins were listening—was neutered. Before he could look round, Solomon assured him soulfully—though there was a distinctly speculative look in his eye too. We were stunned when the doctor explained to us that while neuters didn’t usually go in for such pastimes there was nothing, once they were roused to jealousy over another cat—and particularly, it seemed, if they were Siamese—to stop them. We were even more stunned when we realised what an escape we’d had. As Charles remarked more than once on the way home, once Solomon got the idea he wouldn’t have stopped at spraying. He’d have gone round acting like a stirrup pump. All the perfumes of Arabia, said Charles, fanning himself faintly at the very thought, wouldn’t have helped us in that case. One whiff and we’d have been out of bounds for weeks.
So, less reluctantly than we would otherwise have parted with him but sadly nevertheless, we took Samson back to his family. The last we saw of him he wasn’t worrying about us at all but was simply a fat black paw happily baiting his sisters round a bookcase. And gradually life returned to normal.
Only gradually. It was several days before Sheba finally stopped spitting at Solomon—and Solomon, in turn, stopped going round as if he expected to see Dracula round every corner. But eventually peace did return, and with it the morning when, as soon as the door of the spare room was opened, they marched happily in to us side by side. Sheba pausing to wash Solomon’s ears before she cuddled down on Charles’s shoulder and Solomon, by way of his own private celebration, diving head-first under the bedclothes, rolling on his back, and going to sleep with his feet on the pillow.
Now, for the first time in weeks, we had a chance to look round and see what was happening in the village.
Things hadn’t been exactly standing still there either. Something had upset Father Adams—what it was we didn’t know yet, but it was a sure sign when every time he passed the cottage he had his hat so far down over his eyes he could hardly see. The people down the lane had a new car. (Cream with a nice hard top, reported Solomon, watching it with interest from the window and agitating the curtains so hard they probably thought it was us. Just the thing for autographing. He must go down and walk over it as soon as possible.) And Sidney, with Christmas looming ahead, had temporarily given up odd-jobbing and was working for a local builder. With results which, from what we could hear, were likely to set the housing programme back for years.
Sidney laughingly told us some of them when he came to mend a tap one Sunday morning. In one house, it seemed—working with a double team because it was wanted in a hurry—they’d whipped the walls up so fast it wasn’t till lunch time, when somebody went to fill the kettle, that they realised they hadn’t left any gaps for the doors. There was no need to ask who’d filled them in; it was, of course, Sidney.
In another one they had for days been going in and out by means of a space left for a large plate glass observation window. Apart from filling kettles Sidney’s gang apparently never used doorways in the normal way, but leapt light-heartedly through windows or over four-foot walls to show their agility. Thus it was that not ten minutes after the window had been put in place one bright autumn morning another member of the team, late for work on account of his motorbike breaking down, had come tearing up the path, taken off at the spot from which Sidney & Co. usually launched themselves across the sill, and before anybody could stop him had gone clean through it.
He hadn’t hurt himself—head like a coconut he had, Sidney assured us; all he got was ringing in his ears and a dent in his driving helmet—and they’d laughed themselves sick over it for days. Until, in fact, their next hilarious little faux pas, when they put a staircase in backwards.
This was in a contemporary house—the first ever to go up in our village—and this time, said Sidney, knocking our stopcock for six with the coal hammer, it was the boss’s fault. We were glad to hear that. We were beginning to have visions of Sidney and his pals spending Christmas in the workhouse if they went on at this rate, and it was a relief to hear of a little balance coming into their affairs.
On this occasion, it seemed, the boss couldn’t understand the plans. Brought up on solid, foursquare bungalows and good old semi-detacheds, his first open-plan layout had floored him completely. Not wishing to confess it he had puzzled it out as best he could—with the result that the staircase had gone in the wrong way round and in one place passed so close under a beam they had to go on hands and knees to navigate it.
The funny thing about that, said Sidney—dealing our tap a clonk which certainly stopped it leaking, though whether it would ever run again was another matter—was that everybody did go under it on hands and knees. The boss, the workmen—even the people the house was being built for. Somehow, Sidney said, it just grew on them as part of the construction; nobody stopped to think they’d still be doing it when the house was finished. Nobody, that is, until the architect came down from London, and what he said when he saw them playing Oranges and Lemons up his staircase—Sidney said he turned bright purple, and it didn’t come out of the dictionary.
Never believe it would we? asked Sidney, downing his hammer and looking hopefully at the teapot. We would, alas. Only too well. Back in the days when we had Blondin and had just moved into the cottage we, too, had innocently engaged a local builder to level the kitchen. After several days during which I washed up with one foot on a plank and one knee on the sink to avoid falling into six inches of cement and the builder told us unceasingly how clever he was—never used a spirit level, he assured us; never used a plumb line either; just went by his eye and never made a mistake in his life—the boards were removed to reveal that at long last, and unfortunately on our kitchen floor, myopia had caught up with him. It was still two inches out of true.
When we pointed it out to the builder, first of all he swore it wasn’t and then—when we proved it by putting one of Blondin’s nuts at the top and letting it roll down the slope—he said he’d done it purposely. So that when I threw a bucket of water over it it would run straight out of the back door, he said with sudden inspiration. Nothing—no
t even our protests that if we did the first thing it would do would be to run straight into the cupboards—would move him. And there, a monument to the invincibility of local builders, our floor slopes gently to this day. With cooker, three cabinets (and now of course the refrigerator) supported on the blocks he provided not only to level them up but presumably so we could throw water under them as well.
Not, as Charles said, that we could have told Sidney that. It might have given him ideas. Not that we had much chance to dwell on our kitchen floor either. That was the morning Sheba got bitten by an adder.
I know it was October and that adders usually bite in the spring. That was what the Vet said when I rang him up and told him—though as an afterthought he said our cats were capable of finding anacondas in January if they felt like it and he’d better come over right away. I know it was always Solomon we’d worried about over adders. Solomon, whose idea of capturing anything from a grass snake to a wasp was to poke it first to see if it moved and then sniff it to see if it was good to eat. Solomon, who when we took him for a walk dived impressively into every clump of grass we came to and then got so excited, seeing his own black paw emerge on the other side, that if an adder had been there he would have been a trophy on its totem pole before he could look round.
Not that Sheba was a snake catcher either. It was just that—being so good at everything—we’d always imagined that if she did go in for snaking she’d come home wearing them like leis. Which was why when she crept sadly into the cottage on three legs, holding one paw in the air and looking pitifully at us as she passed, to begin with we didn’t worry too much. There was always the chance she was imitating Solomon; apart from which we’d had so many false alarms with one or the other of them falling off walls, the Vet rushing over to diagnose sprains, and cats’ liniment at 7/6d a time simply piling up in the bathroom—unused, because they hid the moment they saw the bottle—we informed her the slings were in the first-aid cabinet and continued talking to Sidney.
It wasn’t till we discovered she was under the bed and that her paw, normally so small and neat, was the size of a balloon that we realised there was something wrong—and by that time it was almost too late. When we got her out from under the bed she was already in a coma. She lay in Charles’s arms as if she were dead while I phoned the Vet. Completely limp she lay there—though by this time her eyes were slightly open—while he examined her, said it did indeed look like snakebite and we could take no chances, and swiftly injected histamine into her rump.
That was to stop the swelling. For the next halfhour our world stood still while we waited to see if it acted and the Vet arranged to get snake serum, if it were needed, from the local hospital. I had her by this time—close in my arms for warmth, with Charles and Sidney standing by and Solomon, always to the forefront in a drama, peering curiously from a nearby chair.
Never had she seemed so dear to us as she lay there while the minutes passed and the swelling rose slowly to her shoulder—not even in those long night hours when she was lost. Then at least there was a chance that she was safe somewhere. Now we could only watch her and know that if she left us—wicked, destructive, maddening as she was—part of our hearts would go too.
There was, as Charles said when it was all over, no need for us to have worried. Sheba was made of tougher stuff than that. Quite apart from anything else she wasn’t going to bequeath all the fish to Solomon if she could help it.
Half an hour later, with the swelling miraculously halted and Sheba herself happily playing Camille on a hot-water bottle, the Vet pronounced her out of danger. All that remained now, he said, patting her gently on the cheek, was for the little girl to get better.
The little girl did that all right. After a couple of days’ convalescence on our bed, with Charles carrying her up and down stairs because her foot still swelled when she walked—and the only thing she could eat, she assured us, casting triumphant glances at Solomon every time she saw him gloomily chewing cod, was gallons and gallons of crab paste—she was as right as rain. When she did get up she nearly drove us mad for days drinking water non-stop with the noise of a St Bernard—but that, said the Vet when we reported it, was just her system counteracting the effect of the histamine. After we’d opened the kitchen door for her about fifty times in an evening it seemed to us more like Sheba being cussed, but eventually, just before our legs gave out, that wore off too.
All that remained was Sheba telling everybody ad nauseam how she’d been bitten by an adder and nearly died; a certain cogitation on the part of ourselves and the Vet as to whether it might, after all, have been a wasp; and a firm conviction on the part of Sheba that Sidney—when we looked back we realised that he had indeed been standing behind her at the time—was the one who stuck the hypodermic into her. Right in the Bot, she reproached him every time he appeared. Right where it Hurt. Just when she was Almost Dying. Sidney did his best to make it up, but she wouldn’t go near him for weeks.
Eleven
Solomon’s Friend Timothy
The next thing that happened to us was Timothy. The boy with the catapult. One morning he broke our kitchen window with a deft shot round the coal-house and while he was still gazing admiringly at the hole Charles nipped out of the back gate and grabbed him. We had been wondering for days who he belonged to. Now, when we marched him off, cowboy hat and all, to try and find who owned him, nobody was more surprised than we were when he suddenly fled howling up Father Adams’s path.
He was, it seemed, the Adamses’ grandson, and he was staying with them to give his mother a rest. The reason we hadn’t found it out before was that we personally had been busy with our own problems over the cats; in the winter we only saw Father Adams (to talk to, anyway) at weekends; and Father Adams, when we said fancy our not knowing about a thing like that, said he believed in keeping his troubles to himself.
That I remembered as one of Grandma’s favourite opening remarks too—and sure enough, next moment we were hearing the lot. The things Timothy had done at home—the last of which, nearly prostrating his mother for good and all, had been to swallow the axle off a toy motorcar. It wasn’t that so much that upset her, explained Father Adams—though she did faint off a couple of times when she thought of it going round in Timothy’s stomach. It was the fact that when the doctors got him to hospital and had him X-rayed they couldn’t find it.
They said he hadn’t swallowed it. He said he had. His mother, beside herself with worry, was expecting it to puncture his vitals at any moment. When, following a hunch, a doctor and nurse accompanied them home and said now what about the little man showing them where it was—and he, bright as a button, produced it from the table drawer—she practically had hysterics. Why, she wept, before fainting off for the third time, had he told her he’d swallowed it? Laughing happily at his little joke on Mum, he said he had. And then he’d sicked it up.
How, in face of Timothy’s record, we came to ask him to tea with us I haven’t a clue. He’d not only broken our window. To date, while under the guardianship of Father Adams, he’d eaten the bus tickets on a trip to town and caused trouble with the inspector, broken the window of the Rose and Crown (also with his catapult; he said his granfer was inside and he wanted to speak to him, which we thought showed initiative but apparently the landlord didn’t), and painted the Ferrys’ gateposts a bright Post Office red.
The trouble there was that Fred Ferry had only recently done them pea-green. He came up the lane raving about Timothy ruining his brand-new paint with that rotten muck; Father Adams—who happened to be rather fond of red and the paint Timothy had used was in fact some left over from his own front door—took offence and offered to punch him on the nose; Fred Ferry, in typical village fashion, had now taken out a summons against him—and if he got away with it under a fiver, said Father Adams, clapping his hat despondently over his eyes at the very thought, he’d be another ruddy Dutchman.
Maybe we’d been reading the church magazine and had our haloes on just then
, but ask Timothy to tea we did. Turning the other cheek and hoping, perhaps—ignoring the job we’d so far made of Solomon and Sheba—to reform him.
I regret to say that didn’t work either. He drank his tea—when he didn’t spill it on the carpet—with noises reminiscent of a blocked drain. The cats were absolutely fascinated. He ate his bread and butter with both hands, gazing stolidly at us over the top of it as if it were some sort of earthwork. In spite of our attempts at conversation he said absolutely nothing. When he had finished, in reply to our query as to what he’d like to do now, he marched over to the window, picked up an ashtray, gave it a couple of taps to get its surroundings, and smashed it carefully on the sill. After that he went home—during which process Charles, hastening to open the door for him, accidentally stepped on another ashtray which we’d put on the floor for safety. Only at the door did Timothy speak. ‘The man broke he,’ he announced with satisfaction.
The next move amazes me to this day. The following morning Timothy came down, swung silently on our gate for a while and then, when he found I was taking no notice of him after his behaviour at tea, took a pot-shot at Solomon who was digging in the garden. He missed him. Not that that influenced me. Livid with anger, completely forgetting the church magazine, I flew out intending to give him the tanning of his life. But when I reached the gate Timothy was still standing there gazing at Solomon in complete astonishment.
‘He spoke to I,’ he said, quite forgetting to run in his amazement. He had indeed. As the stone whizzed past his ear, just when he was a sitting duck, Solomon had given a loud, indignant bellow. What intrigued Timothy wasn’t so much his speaking—he’d been living with Mimi for a fortnight now and was used to Siamese rumination by this time. It was that he had such a deep bass voice. Why, Timothy wanted to know, was his voice different from Mimi’s? Because he was a boy of course, I said. How did I know he was a boy? asked Timothy, his interest growing with every second. I had to think jolly fast about that one. Because of his voice, I said.
