by Doreen Tovey
If anyone had said that a cat could solve the problem of Timothy I would never have believed them. Certainly not Solomon, who for four years now had been a full-time problem himself. But he did. Timothy—who had no animals at all in his home in town and didn’t, it seemed, think much of girl cats like Mimi—was absolutely entranced at the thought of Solomon being a boy. Solomon in turn, having graciously forgiven Timothy for the stone, thought he was pretty good too. From then on we had a mutual-admiration society around the place that nothing could shake.
In some ways it was very useful. Ever since he was a kitten one of our biggest nightmares, when we had to go to town, had been to get Solomon in beforehand. Sheba’s treks to the strawberry patch had turned out to be a passing phase and, in true Siamese fashion, had indeed stopped completely as soon as the strawberry season was over and the old man didn’t get mad with her any more.
Solomon, however—at any given time and particularly if we had a train to catch—could be practically depended on to be missing. Asleep in a field if it was warm; sheltering in somebody’s coalhouse if it was wet (or, which was equally possible, sitting in the rain watching somebody’s ducks); and if it was just ordinary, anywhere from visiting the Rector to beating it rapidly up the valley.
When I called him he came eventually. With Solomon, however, eventually could be anything from five minutes for a final sniff at a daisy to two hours during which I tore madly round the lanes in town clothes and gumboots wondering if my job was still open. It was wonderful, after the advent of Timothy, to be able either to open the door and spot them at once or else—if it was early and Timothy wasn’t around yet—to call him out, get him to do his two-fingered whistle, and watch while Solomon, with his latest Trigger-friend-of-Man expression on his face, appeared at the speed of Alice’s Cheshire.
It cost us a considerable amount in chocolate. Timothy, reformed or not, wasn’t the boy to do things for love alone. At times, with the church magazine far behind us, we even had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t so much a case of Solomon vanishing and Timothy finding him but of Solomon staying where he was told while Timothy collected the reward.
There was also a slight disadvantage in that Timothy now insisted on coming with us on walks. We and the cats were bad enough. We, the cats, and a small boy in a cowboy hat who every now and then gave an ear-splitting whistle—whereupon one large Seal Point bounced excitedly to heel and one small Blue Point immediately sat down and said she wasn’t coming any further—were slightly outré even for our village.
We couldn’t have everything, however. And at least Timothy had put away his catapult and was taking an interest in nature. He took such an interest in it that eventually Charles, after a particularly embarrassing conversation about cows right outside the Rector’s gate, refused to come with us any more. I was better suited to deal with such questions than he was, he said. So he and Sheba, cowards that they were, stayed at home working on the kitchen. Which was why, the day we saw the rabbit, Timothy, Solomon, and I were on our own.
It was frightfully exciting for us naturalists. I hadn’t seen a rabbit since myxomatosis. Solomon had never seen one at all and immediately went up a tree in case it was a wolf. Timothy, who had heard about them but had never seen one in his life either, wanted to know all about it. An excellent little lecture I gave on rabbits and their habits. At the end of which Timothy announced that he wanted to spend a penny.
Chastened—for it seemed he hadn’t been listening at all—but thankful nevertheless that for once we were in the woods and not where he usually felt like it, which was bang in the middle of the village, I discreetly turned my back. There was a slight pause. ‘Going now,’ said Timothy, quite unnecessarily. ‘Down a rabbit hole,’ he announced a moment later. And then—to Solomon, loudly, and obviously pondering my story after all—‘Rabbits’ll think it’s raining, won’t they?’ he said solemnly.
They made admirable foils for each other, Timothy and Solomon. One moment so wistful—like the time Timothy, gazing round-eyed up at the craggy hill behind us, said if they fell off there they’d be dead wouldn’t they and go to heaven, and never eat any tea again ever ’cos they’d only be bones—whereupon I blew my nose hastily and the Rector’s wife went straight out and bought him three boxes of caps for his pistol. The next so aggravating—like the time I found him standing on his head on our stairs, walking complicatedly up and down the wall in his gumboots while Solomon sat proudly by like a ringmaster—I could have spanked the pair of them.
Everybody admired the picture they made together. Everybody, that is, except Sheba, who went round them in a wide semicircle when she met them in the lane, assured everybody she met that she didn’t know them at all, and forecast darkly to us when she came in that before long Solomon would be using a catapult too and the pair of them would end up behind bars. Everybody—even Father Adams—said how it had improved Timothy. Darn he if he wouldn’t get ’un a kitten for hisself when he went home, he said—whereupon Sheba squawked her approval and immediately offered him Sol.
What was worrying us was how Solomon would react when Timothy did go back to town. Animals, they say, form strange attachments for children. Only recently we had heard of a Siamese called Augustus who had been an absolute terror in his original home. Shouting, stealing, fighting cats and intimidating dogs—in the end they’d had to practically give him away to get him adopted at all. In his new home, however, they had a little girl, with whom Augustus had fallen in love so completely that when she went into hospital to have her tonsils out it wasn’t she her parents worried about but Augustus, who went into a decline on her bed, said his heart was broken, refused to get up or eat, and pretty nearly died. In the end, for his sake, they had to get her home from hospital at the first possible moment and let her convalesce in bed—where, we gathered, she and Augustus ate ice cream and arrowroot together, eventually got up together, and when last heard of were living very happily indeed.
It wouldn’t be like that for Solomon. Even if Father Adams’s summons went off all right Timothy wouldn’t be back at least until the spring. How, we wondered, would our black man manage when he went away?
As it happened, very well indeed. Solomon did wait by the gate for him the first morning—until he spotted me in the greenhouse trying to let out a blue tit which had flown in and was trapped. He soon forgot Timothy in the excitement of trying to help me catch it—and of being bundled, yelling his head off, indoors, where he sat in the window roaring furiously about not being allowed to be a Sportsman.
I thought he looked pathetic the next morning, too, hunched motionless on the garden wall with Sheba—out of sympathy I supposed, since even she must have a heart somewhere—sitting silently beside him. I even went up to comfort him. It was quite needless. Absolutely entranced, they were watching a litter of piglets which had just arrived in the next field. Solomon turned his head to greet me as I went up. I knew the great big pig that lived at the farm, he said excitedly, his eyes as round as bottle tops. WELL. She’d just had kittens!
Twelve
Highly Entertaining
The cats didn’t like the winter. Sheba, who had rather a thin coat, complained because it was cold. The first sign of a frost in our house was indeed not the pipes bursting or the dahlias turning black but Sheba sitting hopefully in front of electric fires waiting for them to be switched on. Solomon, on the other hand, having a coat like a beaver, a circulation that was apparently oilfired and an insatiable desire to be out, complained because he was kept in.
He was kept in—comparatively speaking, that is, as against his ranging freedom of the summer—for three reasons. Firstly that cold, wet weather was supposed to be bad for Siamese and, as Father Adams said the day he saw him sitting on the wall watching the pigs, if we didn’t watch out he’d get a chill in his backside. Secondly that after an hour or so with the back door open and the east wind cutting through like a knife Charles would suggest that we got him in and shut it before we got a chill in ou
rs. And thirdly that it wasn’t safe for him to be out after dark on account of foxes and badgers.
It was the last part that annoyed him most. Darkness, with the foxes barking in the woods and the sound of badgers grunting their way up the track to their playground in the clearing on the hillside, was just when Solomon wanted to be out.
Every night after supper he would make a tour of the windows. Hear that? he would demand, sticking his head indignantly through the curtains as a mournful hooting came from up in the oak tree. Owls. People let them out. Hear that? he would wail as a vixen called way off in the darkness. Foxes. Nobody kept them in. Hear that? he would entreat as the sound of cracking branches told of animals with white-striped snouts lumbering clumsily through the undergrowth. Badgers. Supposed we never wanted him to see a badger, he would complain, his voice rising to an aggrieved wail. Knowing his propensity for poking things with his paw and, as Charles said, not wanting a cat with a wooden leg around the place, he was certainly right there.
What with outbursts like this from him and Sheba eternally complaining that her Ears were Freezing (they were too; like most Blue Points they had hardly any fur on them at all, five feet from the fire and you could practically see the icicles) our cats certainly didn’t like the winter. Neither did the Rector’s, who marched indignantly indoors with the first frost, announced that they were half Siamese and this was when it showed, and promptly went to earth under the eiderdown.
Neither, if it came to that, did the Rector. The electricity supply wasn’t too good at our end of the village. This was the time of year when he was faced with the tricky little problem that if he switched on the heating in the church the villagers complained because their lights went down, and if he didn’t the organistcomplained because the damp made the keys stick on the organ—when, passing his study window, he could be seen with a decidedly unecclesiastic expression on his face writing to the Electricity Board.
We liked the winter. Hope, as several people said when they heard about our adopting Samson, certainly sprang eternal in our breasts—and never did it spring more strongly than when winter came upon us. When, after a long and arduous summer we looked forward to a period of rest. Dormant, as Charles poetically put it, as the season itself. Reading our books. Relaxing by the fire. Entertaining our friends.
The fact that it never turned out like that—that the long and arduous summer was invariably followed by a longer and even more arduous winter—meant nothing to us. This year, we told ourselves annually, was going to be different.
This year, as a matter of fact, Solomon opened the proceedings the day the clocks went back by swallowing a prawn’s head. Celebrating the beginning of the season in our own quiet manner, we had invited friends round to supper. Making sure Solomon was well out of the way—he was, to be exact, sitting on a notice board up on the hillside; a notice board which was there to stop people going up a private road but which, since he had adopted it as his personal crow’s nest, now leaned so far forward nobody could read what it said—I was shelling prawns for scampi.
The wind was in my favour, Solomon I thought was scanning the horizon for Sheba—that, of course, was where I made my mistake. Solomon was actually scanning it for prawns. I left my post for just two seconds to check that the table was properly set, and by the time I got back there he was going backwards round the kitchen with one jammed firmly in his throat and that was the end of relaxation for that evening.
Supper was late, our guests arrived just in time to help hold him down while the Vet got it out, and hardly was that little crisis safely over than Solomon was sick. Not on account of the prawn but as a reminiscent afterthought, halfway through the coffee.
Solomon was often sick when people came. Not because he felt ill. It just happened that when we had visitors his favourite place was on the bureau, keeping an Oriental eye on them. After a while, when nothing exciting happened like somebody eating something or somebody wanting a game with his Ping-Pong ball, he would get bored and yawn. When he yawned, being Solomon, he did it in style. A great big noisy yawn about a foot wide that invariably overreached itself—and there he was. Sick. Usually down the front of the bureau, where he sat and watched entranced while it trickled round the carving and looked most hurt when people moved away.
When he wasn’t sick, Sheba quite often bit her nails for us. When we were spared that, Solomon could be depended on to want his earth box. In the spare room it was. Out of sight but not, unfortunately, of sound. However loudly we talked—and crescendo had nothing on us when we saw him disappearing into the hall—there was always somebody to peer at the ceiling a moment later and ask what on earth that noise was. Always somebody, too, to say ‘Niagara Falls’.
Not, mind you, that the cats were responsible for everything that happened to us on social occasions. The time Charles fell through a chair, for instance, in somebody else’s house—we could hardly blame them for that. We could hardly blame our hosts either. All they said by way of friendly conversation was that they had picked it up at a sale last week for ten bob, and didn’t we think it was a bargain. It was a shock to them, too, when Charles, who was sitting in it, seized the arms, braced himself rigidly against the back to test it—and before anybody could do anything about it, there was a sudden crack and the seat collapsed.
Neither was it the cats’ fault the night the same people came to visit us back and Charles offered them gin and lime.
They were quite happy with gin and tonic. We hadn’t touched lime juice ourselves for months—not since the day I spilt some on a table and it took all the polish off, and Charles got worried about its effect on his stomach. Why he offered it right then I couldn’t imagine, but unfortunately he did.
Unfortunately, because when he went out to the kitchen and found that what we did have had gone peculiar, he didn’t leave it at that and say we’d run out. He brought it in to show them. Sorry chaps but it was a bit high, he said, waving before their astonished eyes a bottle absolutely covered in dust and containing what looked like a flotilla of long-dead fish. Would they perhaps rather go without?
Not only that but, covertly eyeing the remains of their gin and tonics to make sure there weren’t any peculiar things in them, it wasn’t long before they went home as well.
Things like that happen to everybody at times, of course. A neighbour of ours was making ham croquettes one night for her visitors and got the mincer stuck, and when she called her husband and he couldn’t unjam it he threw it out through the door. Because he was naturally mad with it and, according to him, because he thought the jolt might loosen it. What in fact did happen was that the mincer pitched in a bed of stinging nettles, they couldn’t get it out without cutting the whole lot down and there wasn’t time for that, so she had to rush up and borrow ours. Did things ever go wrong like that for us? she asked tearfully as I hauled it out of the cupboard and blew the cobwebs off. Almost every day, I assured her.
With us, as a matter of fact, things could go wrong even when we were not having visitors. Not having them, that is, in the sense of trying to put them off. Most people do that at some time or other—on account of being tired, or having booked up two lots of people by mistake, or, when the time comes deciding that they just can’t face up to it.
That was what happened with the Joneses. Charles himself had invited them round for the evening. Charles himself, every time I groaned at the thought, kept saying we had to ask them some time and if we played cards or something it wouldn’t be too bad. And it was Charles himself who, the day they were due to come, had a vision halfway through tea of old Jones being hearty and bellowing the place down like a foghorn and Mrs Jones being coy and wanting to play whist, and said he couldn’t stand it. Not today, he said. Next week perhaps—but not today. He wasn’t feeling strong enough. Couldn’t I ring up and say he was dead?
What I did say, going hot and cold all over and quite certain they knew I was cramming, was that I thought he had a cold. An excuse that has probably been used a mil
lion times before—but I bet this was the only time it was greeted at the other end by the assurance that they didn’t mind a bit; never caught colds; hadn’t had one for years; what old Charles wanted was somebody to cheer him up and not to worry, they were coming right on over.
That put us on the spot all right. There was Charles saying his reputation was ruined. There was I—after all, I was the one who’d made the excuse—thinking mine was too. There was the clock ticking on to seventhirty. When suddenly I had an idea. In the circumstances it was a jolly good one too. All it involved was Charles taking a really sound pinch of snuff.
It worked all right, though I had to stand over him to see he did it thoroughly. By the time the Joneses came—throwing wide the windows, slapping him on the back and simply dying, they said, for a nice game of whist—he was sneezing so hard he wasn’t worrying about his reputation. All he was worrying about was whether he’d ruined his nose.
Winter pursued quite a moderate course after that. Nothing untoward happened at all that I can remember. Friends came and went, and played canasta with the cats sitting on their laps, and talked of world affairs. The only thing of note at all was the night somebody went into the bathroom and tugged and tugged, and just as it got to the stage (owing to the acoustics you can, unfortunately, hear the tugging all over the cottage) where we usually yell through the door to give one good pull and wait, then it’ll work—just as we reached that stage the door of the sitting room opened and in came the visitor, rather red in the face, clutching the chain. Come off in her hand, she said it had—but it wasn’t exactly surprising. Mighty tough was our flush. People’d been tolling it like a bell for years.
