The goat man, trudging past on his usual morning visit, stopped and looked across at me. Oh good, I thought. He was going to offer to hold the branch while I sawed. Like heck he was. Would I be going out that afternoon? he asked, and when I said I wouldn't he said he and his wife would be away for the rest of the day and one of the goats was due to kid. Would I keep an eye on her and phone the vet if necessary? I said that I would and he went on his way, apparently without noticing that I was arched on the gatepost like Nelson on his column, preparing to saw off an awkward branch, and might have appreciated assistance.
That was why I put up with Mrs Binney's visits as patiently as I did instead of, as Father Adams and Fred Ferry continually advised me, 'giving she a kick in the pants'. They meant it, metaphorically, of course. Father Adams, who'd been at school with her, always referred to her as Old Mod (her name was Maude). Old Mod, he said, had been a misery for as long as he could remember. She was a widow too, though. Always referring to the fact. Always talking to me of 'people in our position' or 'people of our age' – which at times made me feel like taking Father Adams's advice since she was, I knew, a good twenty years older than I was.
But she was obviously lonely. Probably felt as bereft of people who cared about her as I did at times – which was why my mouth fell open and stayed that way when she told me one day that there was somebody in the village who was keen on her.
'Spicy bit of news then?' enquired Father Adams, happening to pass by as usual at the crucial moment.
'Oh... no...' I managed to get out, while Mrs Binney gave him a look that should have withered him on the spot. It wasn't just spicy, it was electrifying. The revelation that Mrs B., of all people, had an admirer.
THREE
That was her interpretation of events, at any rate. There was, with its headquarters over in the centre of the village so that living a mile and a half away in the valley I knew little of its goings-on except by hearsay, a Friendly Hands Social Club which catered mostly for the over-sixties but, in order to augment its numbers, welcomed widows and widowers of any age. I'd been invited to join it myself after Charles died, but I felt that life held more for me yet than the excitement of a monthly communal visit by a chiropodist from the local health centre, or annual holidays by coach to Aberdeen or Durham, where the party stayed in the unoccupied university hall of residence during the students' vacation and was shepherded on daily sightseeing tours by the enthusiastic element that inevitably emerges as leaders of such organisations, and so I made my excuses. I was fully occupied with the cottage, the cats and writing. I took my van away on holidays. I didn't go out in the evenings if I could help it – not winter evenings, anyway, since in turning in to the cottage driveway in the dark I could easily land myself and the car in the stream.
Not so Mrs Binney, who went to anything that offered tea, biscuits and the chance of a gossip, especially when it was held in the village hall, a matter of yards down the road from her house. She'd been sitting non-participantly in the front row of what Fred Ferry called the Old Trouts' Knees-up for years until fate suddenly took a hand by arranging the demise of the octogenarian who'd hitherto played the piano for the Singalong Half-hour that wound up every meeting. When nobody else volunteered for the job, Mrs Binney unexpectedly upped and offered her services as accompanist – and, to everybody's surprise, did it very well. Father Adams's wife, who belonged to the club herself and kept me up to date with what went on there, said she didn't remember Maude Binney learning the piano as a girl – maybe she'd done it while she was away in service – but she could play all right. 'Sally', 'Keep Right On to the End of the Road', 'Silver Threads among the Gold'...
'Ah,' I said, recollecting the evening back in the spring when I'd passed the village hall on foot on my way home from a meeting of the History Society at the chairman's house, where we were planning the reissue of the village history we'd done a few years before, and I'd heard 'Sally' being belted out with such vigour it sounded as if the piano was coming through the corrugated tin roof at any moment. That explained it. I liked to know these things. I'd wondered at the time who was making all that noise.
Anyway, it seemed that the Singalong leader was a Mr Tooting who, with his wife, had retired to the village from the Midlands some years earlier. His wife had since died and Mr Tooting, distinguishable at any distance around the village by the fact that he was short, wore glasses, a military moustache, an air of supreme self-importance and a checked tweed pork-pie hat, had thereafter thrown himself into helping run local affairs. He was the most active churchwarden the Rector had ever had, always ready to organise beating the bounds, head a sub-committee for repairs to the organ, or personally oversee the men re-leading the roof. He fetched the old people's medicines en bloc from the chemist in the next village if they left their prescriptions in a special box in the post office, and was secretary of the Gardening Club, the Boys' Club and the Friendly Hands Club, at which he conducted the Singalong Half-hour by standing beside the piano, waving his arms at the audience as if trying to levitate them out of their seats, and leading the songs in a hearty baritone.
According to Mrs Adams, on the occasion of Mrs Binney's acting as accompanist for the first time, he bowed to her afterwards, led her forward by her fingertips as if they were dancing a minuet, and presented her to the audience, who supposed they must be meant to clap and obligingly did so. 'And then,' said Mrs A. with meaning, 'he kissed 'er 'and.' I could just imagine it. Mr Tooting doing a pint-sized impression of the conductor of the London Philharmonic at the last night of the Proms.
What did Mrs Binney do?' I enquired.
'Turned red as a beetroot and showed her teeth,' said Mrs Adams.
I could imagine that, too. Mrs Binney's smile, fortunately rare, was the result of somewhat antiquated dentistry and reminded most people of a horse about to bite.
Mr Tooting, still busy bowing to the audience, must have missed that bit. From then on all the Singalong Half-hours ended with his leading Mrs B. forward for applause, escorting her to her chair in the front row while he returned to the platform to read out the notices, and afterwards helping her on with her coat and walking with her to her front door, which was only a few yards up the lane, on his own way home, and anyway he had a torch. It didn't fail to arouse comment in the village, however.
'Tryin' to hang her hat up there all right.'
'Fancies herself livin' in thic bungalow.' 'Flatten he like a steam-roller on thur weddin' night', was Fred Ferry's country-candid observation to me outside the post office one day as we watched them walking up the village street together.
They were walking up the street together – big, brawny Mrs Binney and bantam-sized Mr Tooting – because she'd spotted him from behind her curtains as he passed her gate and had nipped out to catch him up. Mrs Tucker, who lived opposite her and kept a watchful eye on village goings-on from behind her own curtains, said she was always doing that.
Given that she'd decided he was interested in her, Mrs Binney was obviously doing her best to further matters – to which end, rocking the village to its stolid foundations, and as suddenly as she'd volunteered to play the piano, one day she abandoned the chamber-pot hat and drainpipe coat she'd worn ever since I could remember and appeared, first of all in the post office and later the same day in the valley, wearing a Picasso-patterned summer dress and a hairdo of violet bubblecurls.
Father Adams was talking to me at the cottage gate when she came somewhat self-consciously down the hill. 'Gawd, Mod,' he said, stopping in mid-sentence to stare at her in feigned astonishment. 'Thee'st look like a hyacinth wrapped up in a Tesco bag. What on earth'st thee bin doin' to theeself?'
Ignoring him, she patted her curls complacently and asked me how I liked it. 'I... er... hardly recognised you,' I stammered, which was obviously the right answer because, while Father Adams faded quietly into the background and disappeared – no doubt to tip his cronies at the top of the hill not to miss on her way back – she confided to me that
Shirl had done it. Took all last night, she had, doin' the perm. And made the dress for her. Very handy with her sewing machine, was Shirl. Appreciating the effort needed to construct a dress that fitted Mrs B.'s large and angular form in any material, let alone matching up sections of white nylon patterned with red, yellow and green triangles, I said she certainly must be.
Shirl, I would explain, was Mrs Binney's son Bert's girl-friend. Twenty years back she would have been living with her parents in the nearby seaside town where she was a hairdresser, with Bert zooming over on his motor-bike to court her in the evenings and at weekends. In these days of couples no sooner fancying each other than moving in together, however, Shirl and Bert were ensconced in a caravan behind the Barage on the main road where Bert worked as a mechanic, while they looked around for something permanent.
Twenty years back Mrs Binney would have disowned Bert and written off Shirl as a brazen hussy, if not a daughter of Jezebel, but as they were only emulating what went on on the telly, and even, if rumour was to be believed, in some of the yuppy-owned big houses around the district, what, Mrs B. demanded of her neighbours, not without a touch of pride in her Bert's being among the avant-garde, could she do about it?
It was none of my business. Indeed, what with the dress, the violet hairdo and the piano-playing I began to wonder about her own intentions towards Mr Tooting. Did she see herself as Thoroughly Modern Maude, sharing his bungalow as Shirl shared the caravan with Bert? And if so, with her being a member of the Mothers' Union and Mr Tooting a churchwarden, what would the Rector say?
For the moment, at any rate, it made my life considerably easier. She gave up coming down the hill quite so often to bemoan the condition of the cottage garden or tell me that I'd never raise Tani – and Tani, almost magically, started to thrive.
She still had nervous diarrhoea at the drop of a hat but Pauline's vet, whose practice was twenty-five miles away from me but worth the journey because he had Siamese cats himself and understood them, prescribed charcoal and kaolin granules to mix with her food. That controlled the diarrhoea and she started to put on weight.
She started to stand up to Saska, too. When he was indoors, where he didn't have to keep up his public image of an Eminently Superior Prince from Siam, he had a habit of trying to frighten her, when he thought I wasn't watching, by lowering his head, flattening his ears and stalking round her in a menacing circle while she crouched at bay on the carpet. Then one day I saw her, instead of crouching, lying on her side with one long back leg extended stiffly against him, fending him off like somebody using a boat-hook, and one front paw outstretched ready to hit him. As he moved round her she revolved correspondingly, as if on a pivot, so that she was always facing him, and when he couldn't find a point from which to pounce on her he gave up and pretended he was just passing by en route for food.
That was another thing. Fortified by the charcoal and kaolin she began to bolt her own meals and then start eating his, and I had to feed them separately so that he got his share undisturbed. So it was that one morning I came down, gave Saska his breakfast in the sitting-room and Tani hers in the kitchen, nipped out into the yard to change their litter trays, pulling the back door, which had a Yale lock, behind me to stop her following me – all part of a Siamese cat-owner's routine – and realised, even as I slammed it, that I'd locked myself out.
Normally I kept a spare key in the woodshed, but the previous day I'd gone out in the car, tossed my handbag on to the back seat after shopping and found, when I got home, that its contents had fallen out on the car floor. I'd gathered them up, put the car away and come down to the cottage to discover that the back door key wasn't in its usual place in my handbag. I thought it must be still on the floor of the car, decided to leave it until next day, and used the spare key from the woodshed instead.
That was the one now marooned indoors on the kitchen dresser – along with the car keys, so that I couldn't go up and look for the original door key on the car floor either.
Panicking about what the cats might do if left where they were – they normally expected to go out into the garden directly after breakfast – I fetched a ladder and a screwdriver, climbed on to the sloping hall roof, thankful that for once nobody was about to ask what I was doing, and crawled up it to the spare room window. Joy oh joy! As I thought! I'd left the casement slightly ajar for air when I'd cleaned it a few days previously. I raised the catch with the screwdriver, climbed in and belted downstairs – passing a puzzled Saska who had just finished his breakfast and couldn't make out why I'd come in through that door when I'd gone out through the other one, and a claustrophobic Tani who'd been marooned in the kitchen without anybody for company and didn't like it – shot out into the yard to fetch the litter trays which I knew they must by now be in urgent need of – and realised immediately that I'd done it again. Slammed the door behind me without thinking and locked myself out.
There was no point in trying the spare room window this time. I'd fastened the latch properly when I got in. I moved the ladder and tried the boxroom window over the kitchen. No go. Charles had long ago secured that one against intruders and I had kept it like that, with wire wound round the latch and bar. I climbed down and called to Tani through the back door keyhole to be a good girl. I wouldn't be long getting back to her, I said. I'd Better Not Be, she screeched back with the promise of imminent stomach upset in her voice. Where was Saska? Where was her BOX? she demanded in a rising soprano.
I rushed round to the sitting-room window and instructed Saska likewise. Where was Tani? Was I taking her out Without Him? he bawled, standing on the window sill with his tail raised threateningly against the curtain.
'Oh no!' I wailed aloud. 'Don't let him do that!' Saska had an unfortunate habit of spraying when he was upset about anything. I hadn't any idea whom I was asking. I didn't suppose the Almighty would be greatly concerned at my being locked out of the cottage through my own stupidity or the prospect of Saska spraying up the curtains. I often asked Charles for help when I couldn't find things or was in a predicament and it was surprising – sometimes to the point of being uncanny – how often the situation resolved itself. But I couldn't expect Charles to help me over this. And judging by Saska's tail the matter was urgent.
I ran down the lane to the Reasons'. Father Adams wasn't on the phone. Janet Reason had already gone off to her job at the nearby airport. Peter was just getting ready to leave himself. Could I use their phone to ring the police? I asked, explaining what had happened. When I rang the local police station, however, an answering machine informed me that it wasn't manned, and I should dial 999 if there was an emergency.
It was an emergency as far as I was concerned, I told the voice that answered when I did, explaining that if someone could come and open the car for me I could get the key of the cottage. I was given the number of Taunton police station, where they said they only had a few car keys. I'd better try the AA; they'd give me the number. There a female voice said I'd got their Travel Bureau, which didn't open until nine o'clock. What did I want? I told her, including the urgency about the cats' litter boxes. She was most sympathetic. Wouldn't they hold on? she asked, passing me swiftly to Emergency, who said someone would be me within an hour.
An hour! I tottered back up the lane, imagining the mayhem Tani might commit in the kitchen, and Saska against the sitting-room curtains, in that time. When Peter drove past a few minutes later, leaning out of his car window to ask was I all right, because I'd told him I was going back to wait for the AA, I was once more up on the hall roof, tapping away hammer and screwdriver.
'Fine,' I answered, more brightly than I felt. 'Had a sudden idea. Almost in. Any minute now.' It was something I'd seen Charles do on odd occasions when we'd been locked out – and sure enough, even as I spoke somehow I'd tapped the window frame enough for me to jolt the catch loose, insert the screwdriver, lift it up… and I was in again, downstairs, giving the cats clean litter boxes. In the Nick of Time, Tani announced, jumping into hers
with evident relief, while I put the key in the outside lock so it couldn't happen again.
Now I just had to ring the AA and say there was no need for them to come. In my agitation I couldn't find their number in the phone directory. I decided to open the car now that the car keys were available, get the number from the AA book, which was in the door pocket, and retrieve the other back door key that had been the cause of all the trouble. I couldn't believe it when I couldn't find the key on the car floor. I phoned the AA, turned out my handbag once more in desperation and there, after all the panic, it was. Hidden in a corner, where it must have been all the time.
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.
More Cats in the Belfry Page 3
