'Don't know,' replied her weary spouse.
'Somebody's calling,' persisted the woman. Then, answering her own question, she announced, 'It's one of the Siamese on heat.'
'Thank goodness horses don't make that noise when they're on heat,' said her husband with feeling.
I couldn't hear any howling with the cottage between myself and the cat-run, but Tani had been spayed… it must be another adder. I erupted from under the hedge, much to the couple's astonishment, and tore up the path – to find the two cats side by side, tails bushed like flue brushes, swearing horrible oaths at the ginger cat from up the lane, who'd come down to sit outside their run and tantalise them about being Shut In like Cissies.
SEVEN
That story soon went the rounds as further evidence of my eccentricity. 'Mrs Haskins be tellin' people thee'st come up out of thic lilac like a Jack-in-the-box and frightened her hoss near out of his wits,' Fred Ferry informed me happily later. 'What wust thee doin' on thee hands and knees anyway?' he enquired hopefully.
I wasn't telling him, but neither was I surprised to learn that I was being talked about. I always had been, ever since I'd been seen in the garden shortly after we moved to the cottage with our tame squirrel sitting on my head to get a better view of his surroundings, and Father Adams assured me that he'd told the person who'd seen me that I wasn't as daft as I looked.
From then on there'd been a succession of incidents for people to mull over. When Cats in May was published, for instance, a television crew had come out to the cottage with the idea that Solomon and Sheba were going to climb out of transom windows, carry things round in their mouths and walk welcomingly out of the front door, on either side of me, as I'd described in the book. What actually happened when they had an audience, as any Siamese owner could have forecast, was that Sheba disappeared completely for the duration of the visit and Solomon, after one look at the camera, dived into a clump of delphiniums in the flower border and refused to come out. In the hope of encouraging some action I tied a kipper to a piece of string and, long after Charles and the camera crew had given up and retired to the cottage for refreshment, there I was, jogging round the lawn trailing it behind me, with no sign of a Siamese cat anywhere – just me, an empty lawn, a kipper on a string and, as I suddenly realised, the local riding-school teacher and her retinue of pint-sized riders watching me open-mouthed over the wall. Once I'd given up, of course, and retired indoors covered in embarrasment, Solomon emerged from the delphiniums and started prancing about with the kipper like Nureyev – but the riding party had long gone by that time, the camera crew packed up, and all that remained of that episode was the legend, oft recounted in the Rose and Crown, of me and the kipper on a string.
It was the same when we acquired Annabel, our donkey. Me being towed down the lane on my bottom when Annabel was supposed to be hauling wood. Me trying to give rides with her at the village fete, and Annabel going determinedly in the wrong direction. And, remembered in the village to this day, the time Charles and I were going to a music recital and Annabel went missing.
We didn't dress up very often. Neither our lifestyle nor our inclination subscribed to it. But the recital, a charity affair, was being given in a stately home, and proper gear was de rigueur. So the cats were indoors, the car was waiting in the drive and Charles and I were dressed. All that was necessary was to put Annabel in her stable for the night with her bowl of apples, carrots and bread – a task made easy by the fact that she normally followed Charles, who always gave her her supper, at the trot, with her head in the air like the Bisto Kid. We'd left her up on the hillside till the last moment because it was a summer's evening, the sun was still shining, and it seemed a shame to put her in before we had to. Then out went Charles, shaking the bowl to attract her attention and keeping a weather eye open to make sure nobody saw him in a dinner jacket – only to discover that the gate to Annabel's hillside grazing ground behind the cottage was open and she was nowhere to be seen.
Goodness knew who'd opened it but we couldn't go off and leave her roaming at large. It would be after midnight before we got back and Annabel, not in her stable after what she considered to be her bedtime, was apt to bawl the valley down telling the neighbours about it. Equally certain was the fact that Charles wasn't going to be seen hunting the highways and byways for her in his get-up. So who charged up the hill in gumboots and floating chiffon skirt hauled up to the knees, a bridle in one hand, Annabel's supper bowl balanced precariously in the hand holding up the skirt, enquiring of every passer-by whether they had seen her?
I did, of course, and nobody had. She wasn't at the local farm, where she stayed when we went on holiday, or up in the pub yard where she could be sure of plenty of attention any time she played truant. I got the attention instead.
I trundled back down to the cottage, where Charles was reversing the car into the lane so we could search for her further afield, and suddenly spotted her up on the hillside, coming through a gap in a thicket in the far top corner, where there was a path that ran behind two cottages further up the lane. She hadn't run away. She'd been along there all the time, spying on the neighbours which was another of her favourite occupations; hadn't deigned to come back because she was Busy, and now was ambling back for supper in her own sweet time, supremely indifferent to the fact that we were going to have to drive hell for leather to get to the recital and that I, chasing around in wellies and evening dress clutching a bowl of bread and carrots, was going to be the object of head-tapping in the village for weeks.
If I had thought, however, that things had changed – that with just me and the two cats at the cottage my image was going to subside into one of quiet, cat-companied sobriety – I soon discovered my mistake. I had far more to do now that I was on my own – weeding the borders, weeding the paths, pruning the fruit trees, cutting the lawn-edges – and, to make the best of my time, I hit on the idea of doing such jobs while I was out with the cats. It worked. It is amazing how many weeds one can pull out of a section of path, or leaders one can cut off an apple tree with long-handled pruners, in five minutes while keeping an eye on a kitten. The snag was, it usually was only five minutes. Tani I had no need to worry about. She never went outside the garden, and if ever I lost sight of her I only had to blow Charles's scout whistle and she would reappear, streaking at the speed of light for the cat-run and into the cat-house where she considered that Nobody, not even Kidnappers, could get her.
Saphra, growing up now and not so inclined to tag at her heels, was a different proposition. One minute he'd be on the front path with her, peering down a mousehole while I pulled out some weeds. Next moment he'd have upped and offed to the top border to dig a hole and I'd be up there with him, discreetly cutting a piece of lawn-edge. As soon as he'd finished that (and hole-digging was an art in itself as far as Saphra was concerned: he'd excavate down to his elbows before the hole was deep enough, sit on it, flood it to overflowing and turn round to examine it, his very own contribution of that most interesting substance, water, in wondering detail before covering it over with a long-distance paw as if such things were nothing to do with him)... as soon as he'd finished that, tail up, feeling a New Man, he'd belt up the steps by the garage, round the corner and along the drive, and I'd be after him, cat-crook in hand, to stop him going out under the gate.
The cat-crook was home-produced. Years before, cutting down undergrowth in the wood opposite the cottage, I'd bent down a tall hazel rod that was too thick to cut with shears and was impeding my way. Some two years later I came across it one day when I was again clearing the ground up there. The rod was now about an inch and a half thick and some six feet long, with a hook where I'd bent it over at the top. A natural shepherd's crook, I decided, and sawed it off at the base, brought it back to the cottage, trimmed it, dried it out and varnished it. A fine support stick it make for rambling over the hills, and useful protection for a woman on her own, or in the garden for seeing off dogs that threatened the cats through the gate,
or for fielding one fast-growing young boy cat with ambitions to be an explorer. It fitted exactly round his neck and, extended from behind, reached him across distances which I, with just my hands, couldn't have spanned.
He knew when he'd been foiled. He'd reverse out of the crook and come back to sit watching for anything that might move in the row of raspberry canes – where I, dropping the crook and picking up the three-pronged fork I kept at the side of the garage, would weed at top speed for a moment or two until he moved on again.
Logical when one knew the reason for it, and I got through a lot of weeding that way, but it was a source of considerable speculation to casual passers-by. Not so casual eventually. I began to recognise the same faces, gathered two or three together or in Fred Ferry's case on his secretive own with the mysterious knapsack on his shoulder, gazing over the wall in wonder as I darted hither and thither, picking up a tool, scratching the ground with it, then throwing it down and sprinting like mad to some place else, always clutching my shepherd's crook.
'Never keeps at any thin' for long. She's always on the run like that,' was one comment I heard.
'Sad how gets 'em, innit?' was the reply. 'But she always was a bit queer, wun't she?'
'Whass she got thic crook for? Reckon she's goin' in for sheep?' reached my ears on another occasion.
Well, I wasn't. And I hadn't replaced Annabel, either. I'd thought of it, but Louisa reminded me of the winter nights when Annabel had colic and Charles and I had to hold her up between us and lead her up and down the lane by torchlight till she recovered, with her sagging dramatically to the ground at every opportunity.
'You could never do that on your own,' said Louisa, and she was right. Neither could I be sure of getting a donkey that was colic resistant. So I gave up the idea, and the grass in the field beyond the cottage, where I kept the caravan, grew long with nobody to eat it, and I had to keep it cut down with the hover-mower so that I could drive the car in to hitch up when required, and when I found that riders were getting into the field through the gap at the far end, cantering down the mowed section and jumping the pole across the entrance into the lane, I got annoyed. The horses' hooves made deep indentations in the surface that became a quagmire when it rained and, in dry weather, a rocky, pot-holed area that was hard on the car's suspension. When I found the pole broken one day I'd had enough. I put up a notice saying that the land was private property and that riders jumping horses or ponies in it were trespassing and would in future be prosecuted without further notice.
The result was amazing. This was years after the incident of Solomon and the kipper. By this time there were two riding schools in the village and several more, from neighbouring villages, who came over to trek in the forest, and the day after I put up the notice the girl in charge of one party appeared at the cottage door to apologise for the fact that two boys who rode with her had been going regularly into the field and jumping the pole. They'd ignored her instructions not to do it, she said, but now they'd seen the notice they were scared of being prosecuted and she'd come to plead on their behalf.
I wasn't going to prosecute anybody, I told her. The notice was just to keep people off, and I didn't suppose those two were the only ones who'd been doing it. Well, she'd told their mother about it, she said, and she thought I'd be hearing from her. With which, vastly relieved to hear that her riding school wasn't about to appear en masse in a magistrate's court, she departed and the next thing was a call from the boys' mother apologising for their behaviour, saying that she'd stopped their riding for a week, had told them she'd sell their ponies if they did it again, and felt terribly embarrassed about what they'd called me.
'Called me?' I echoed. 'But I've never spoken to them. I don't know your boys – and I'm sure they aren't the only ones who've been jumping in there.'
Their riding teacher had told her that they'd sworn at me, she insisted. Had actually repeated what they'd said, and she wasn't having them use that sort of language to anybody. She was sending them to apologise in person, and would I please tick them off thoroughly when they came.
That evening two small boys appeared, each clutching a shop-wrapped sheaf of flowers which I guessed had come out of their pocket money. Eyes down, avoiding looking directly at me or they'd have realised I wasn't the person they'd sworn at, they apologised, said they'd never do it again, and shot off up the hill, obviously glad to get away without being clapped in jail.
I never did find out who it was they'd sworn at. Probably Miss Wellington, I decided. I could imagine her remonstrating, in her role of protector of the valley, with anybody riding rough-shod over my field. What I couldn't understand was her not telling me about it. Always ready with what she'd said to people and what they'd said to her was Miss W. Always keen to be seen upholding the right. I can only imagine the language they used was such that, being a lady, she couldn't repeat it. I've always longed to know what it was.
Summer also brought the visitors – readers who, passing through Somerset en route to Devon or Cornwall, wrote to ask if they could come to see the cottage and the cats. Most of them hadn't seen Tani before, and were upset to hear that Saska had died. But all of them were entranced by Saphra – the way he welcomed everybody as his friends – and all of them were intrigued by Tani, who would hide for ages on a chair tucked under the big oak table, come out eventually, when she saw Saphra getting all the attention, to rub against a hand or two herself, and then, in the middle of being made much of, would creep across the carpet, flat on her stomach, and take refuge on her sanctuary chair again.
'Why on earth does she do that?' people would ask.
'She thinks you're white slavers,' I would explain solemnly – much, I feel sure, to Tani's satisfaction. 'She's always expecting somebody to kidnap her.'
She was, too, and one day the pair of them gave a memorable performance. I'd made tea for the visitors – a couple and their two young daughters – and brought in a plate of biscuits to accompany it. Saphra adored biscuits and the girls gave him one on the carpet straight away. One bite, of course, and there were better things to do to attract attention – like racing round the room, hurtling along the back of the sofa on which the visitors were sitting, diving to the floor with a mighty plop, then doing it all over again. Everybody was laughing, everybody was watching him. Saphra got quite carried away, and when, on one of his wall-of-death circuits, in diving off the sofa he landed on his abandoned biscuit and it scattered in smithereens, he was overcome by the merriment he caused. They put down another biscuit and round he raced again, leaping off the settee to land on it deliberately, the fragments flying, and the light of supreme achievement beaming from his small black face. Tani meanwhile, unable to bear his hogging the limelight, kept venturing out from under the table to watch and then, having successfully drawn all eyes to her, putting on an act of Realising the Danger she was In, dropping flat and crawling stealthily back to her chair.
'Like to be the centre of attention, don't they?' said the husband, nearly dropping his teacup as Saphra, zooming along the sofa-back behind him, hurled himself off on to yet another biscuit.
They certainly did. That, I remember, was a Monday. By Wednesday, with me in panic-stricken attendance, Saphra was the centre of attention at Langford, under suspicion of having eaten a purple towel.
EIGHT
When Saska was at Langford under observation I had asked the vet who was treating him whether there was a nearby practice that specialised in small animals. The local vets I knew of dealt chiefly with horses and farm animals. For years I'd been driving my cats on a round trip of fifty miles when they needed attention, and it was a long journey: I'd done it on occasion in snow, ice and fog, and a cat expert nearer home would be a blessing.
To my surprise the vet told me that Langford had just opened its own Small Animal Practice. Hitherto they had only accepted animals referred to them, as Saska had been, by a vet baffled as to diagnosis. But they had recently taken over the practice of a local vet who had retir
ed, and so long as the animal needing treatment wasn't on the books of another vet in the district it could now be taken direct to Langford.
My previous vet being such a long way away, my cats qualified at once. Tani went there when her loose stomach recurred. She was prescribed special bran to be mixed with her food and never suffered from nervous diarrhoea again. (Nowadays they recommend cooked rice mixed with the food, and that achieves the same result.) Saphra had been neutered there… made much of by the staff, but I did wonder why the senior professor, who also presided over the evening surgery, carried him out to the car when I fetched him that night. Was he glad to see the back of him, and if so why? I wondered. And now there was the episode of the purple towel...
Siamese cats are given to chewing things, and Saphra was no exception. First it was tea-towels, red and white checked ones. He chewed the corners off them any time he could contrive to be on his own in the kitchen, and I used to turn cold at times when I looked at his litter tray and wondered what dreadful malady he'd developed, until I realised it was only the tea-towels taking their normal course and gave fervent thanks that they had. Then he discovered the purple hand-towels, also belonging to the kitchen, that hung from a rack over the washing machine.
More Cats in the Belfry Page 7
