by Weldon, Fay
That was fifteen years ago, Miss Jacobs. Holly is fifteen, and that’s old for a cat, isn’t it? Don’t you multiply their years by seven for the human equivalent? But that makes her one hundred and five years old, and she certainly isn’t that. I’d give her seventy-three in human terms. A neighbour brought her round one morning seventy-three years ago, saying, ‘If you don’t take in this creature it’s the water bucket for her,’ so of course we did. We moved over, made room for her. Our proper cat had been run over. There was indeed a vacancy, which we had meant to fill, when the time was right, when our pet-keeping courage was back, with a Persian or a Manx, or something interesting and glamorous. And so we always had the sense about Holly that she’d been foisted upon us; she wasn’t quite chosen; she was never a talking point, just Holly the workaday tabby: dismissible stand-in for the proper family cat. Not a nice way to live, though she was always well fed, and wormed, and even stroked when anyone thought about it. I just don’t want her to die. It seems important that she shouldn’t, this ordinary cat.
I remember that the curtains Holly clawed her way up and ruined that first morning, as I railed against fate and the consequences of my own good nature, were particularly ordinary themselves. It embarrasses me even to think about them. They were of the dusky-rose velvet kind, totally unimaginative. But I daresay they suited the clutter we lived with then; the chaos of books and papers and children’s homework, and interesting shells brought back from the beach, and uncleared plates, and the hairdryer on the bookshelf and the football boots left under the table, required a neutral background to sop it up. Jenny was thirteen then, Carl was six. Don and I were forty-something. And Holly was just beginning.
When I first met Don he had a cat called just ‘The Cat’. I was jealous of her. She was sleek and black and vaguely Siamese. When I moved in she ran away, and Don was so concerned that I said to him, I remember, ‘I suppose you’d rather have the cat than me,’ and he looked at me with his clear hard blue eyes and said, ‘If I thought too much about it, perhaps I would,’ so I never said anything like that again. He would not gratify my neuroses: he would not allow me to whirl up emotional storms. I think that’s why I stayed. I was so astonished that someone wouldn’t want them, wouldn’t exploit them. Jenny was five: she’d had a succession of uncles; once she’d even been kidnapped by the jealous wife of a man I was in love with and had to be rescued by the police – but I told you all about that, Miss Jacobs: we worked that one through – and I knew it was time I stopped that kind of life, the storms and the wonders and the sexual passions, for her sake. Jenny was always the one good thing; her father was the one true love, the one central passion, but he died. I had no cats during those disrupted and illegitimate and wonderful days. They were wonderful. The fifties. I grieve for them. I grieve for them because now we know too much, and then we knew too little, and to know too little is better than to know too much. To be innocent is to be in touch with the infinite and unafraid. And we can never go back to where we were, but must go on, however grievous that may be.
The Cat came back after a week and acquiesced to my presence. She became the proper family cat. She never again slept on Don’s bed, but on a cushion I put down for her between the polished anthracite stove and the bookcase. I think she really appreciated the new warm heart of the house. She grew more stolid, even plump. I think she liked the centrally heated core of the bedroom, where Don and I made love; the energy that throbbed out from it and made the houseplants grow and the cakes rise in the oven and gave birth to Carl, and nourished Jenny so she stopped pining and whining and started skipping about. I think The Cat even liked me. She had been presumptuous in her almost human love for Don, and knew it, and was relieved that I had restored some kind of natural balance to the situation. He and I were the masters of the universe, the givers of life; that is to say of Whiskas and a fitting place by the fire. She had no real right to the bed, and felt it. Dogs and cats will sleep on beds if they can, but it makes them feel guilty, and uneasy. In any case they prefer the quiet beds of children or single people: the beds of the young married are too tumultuous, albeit, as I say, life-enhancing; the air in the marital bedroom is too busy for a cat to lie there peacefully for long. The souls of possible children mill around, waiting for permission to enter, to begin, creating a psychic disturbance.
Jenny wasn’t happy when Carl was born, but what could we do about that? Carl has his right to life. Jenny came home from school at the age of seven with a diagram of the human reproductive organs and asked if it was true that Don and I had done that to produce this baby and I said yes and she sulked for days. I think some damage was done to her then. Jenny sleeps around a lot, but I don’t think she enjoys it much. She enjoys the power she has over men, she says: she enjoys the sense of inevitability, the realization that you don’t have to do anything but exist, be anything but what you are, as the male determination takes over, from the first grasping of the arm, the steering of the elbow, out of bars or restaurants towards the bed.
‘You must have a low self-image,’ I say, ‘in that case.’
‘I have,’ she says.
‘I didn’t give you one,’ I say. ‘Don’t blame me for that. I spent years telling you how pretty you were, how good you were and this and that, and so you were. And so did Don.’
‘He wasn’t my real father,’ she said.
‘Your father was dead or you would have had him.’
‘No, you would,’ she said, spitefully, leaving me breathless – that was at a time we were still rowing. What can you do? The human situation is at fault, Miss Jacobs. If only men gave birth to girl babies, and women restricted their output to boys, and each suckled offspring of the opposite sex, why then I imagine girls would be as cheerful and confident and positive as boys. They wouldn’t have to creep around trying to please, forever looking for the satisfaction that men naturally have; of once having controlled, owned, taken total nourishment from a creature of the opposite sex, and then, loftily, discarded it. Only then, and that will be never.
Sometimes at night The Cat would disturb Don and me. We would be woken by the familiar ghastly caterwauling, the lament of tormented souls. We would go to the window. There The Cat would sit in the back garden in the moonlight, centre of a circle of yowling toms, and when she’d had enough one would move and break the spell and The Cat would split and run, wailing and squealing, and in the morning she’d be on the step, not deigning to use the cat flap, waiting for milk and meat and acknowledgement, bringing with her untold tales of mystery and drastic pleasure.
After Carl was born The Cat had kittens: just the once. The vet said female cats will sometimes do this: some hormone deficiency lowering their fertility; we were lucky, he said. She had two kittens, one black and like herself, one ordinary and tabby. The black, a tom, went to my friend Audrey; the tabby, female, to a friend of a colleague at work, whom I never met, which I daresay was irresponsible, but Carl was teething and I was short of sleep and Don was away and I was having some doomy affair, and you know how things get sometimes. There’s no time to do things by the book. Sometimes I wonder if Holly isn’t the granddaughter of The Cat. She could be. Holly came from a litter in Audrey’s area of London, her father an unknown but black torn: who knows what goes on in the cat world, except that it overlaps and links with ours? Holly and The Cat have the same temperament – broody, impulsive and bad-tempered – and Holly in her youth had a kind of watchfulness which always reminded me of The Cat. Except that The Cat regarded our home as hers by right. Holly is more careful, as if sensitive to being some kind of long-term guest, only allowed in by courtesy. Poor Holly. I should have been more welcoming on that first morning.
The Cat had not a single white hair anywhere: which is, I believe, unusual. Such cats are in demand by witches, someone once told me, searching poor The Cat for evidence till she scratched and ran; which just shows you witches are nutty. Unless, of course, there is some physiological link between the temperament of certain cats and
their pigmentation – bearing in mind the fact that, for an unknown reason, a large proportion of all-white cats are born deaf – which means you could rely on an all-black cat to be intelligent, responsive and dependent. In which case anyone who looked to their witchly status would be wise to seek one out. Otherwise, nuts!
Holly, like broody, impulsive and bad-tempered The Cat, is also intelligent, responsive and dependent. When Holly was seven, forty-nine cat years old, I was tempted to bring a kitten into the house. It was the prettiest, liveliest, sweetest little thing. It pranced around, entertaining us; it would jump on my knee as I sat and twirl around and pat my face with a soft paw and then settle and purr. And Holly sat on the top shelf of the dresser and sulked, and she wouldn’t eat and she wouldn’t drink; and there she sat, glowering and suffering, stiff with jealousy, awkward and plain, and I gave in and gave the kitten to a friend. As with children, as with kittens, the prettiest get adopted first. Holly came down from the shelf and for a day or two attempted to prance and dance and entertain us; she sat on my knee but was too big to twirl and never realized a cat sits comfortably on a human lap only when facing outwards, so she’d slip off and dig her claws in to save herself and I’d scream and it was terrible. Presently, thank God, for it was a most humiliating exercise, she forgot and went back to being her charmless, stolid self, and we all settled down, but I never tried bringing another kitten into the house. We were doomed to Holly.
Jenny was seven when Carl was born. I didn’t give Carl away. Carl was an easy, happy, loving baby. I didn’t feel the same fierce protectiveness for him that I had towards Jenny, my fatherless child. I don’t think I ever clutched Carl to me, the way I did Jenny. I didn’t have to. It seems to have done him no harm.
I lament for both Jenny and Carl the fact that they know so much about sex. Sex seems, to them, to have lost the majesty and power it had for my generation. I think they have seen too many pictures, too many films, too much pornography. We only got to see a naked body, and then only a piece of it, in a changing room, or at home, and then by accident. Quickly covered. Our children can name the parts of the body. We could not. There is a word for every activity. We had none. We were moved by instinct, not knowledge. All was dark, and wonderful. For myself and my friends love and sex were another world which ran parallel to the real one. Sex was a secret we hugged to ourselves. There were these two worlds to live in: one in which you could walk on air, in elation, forever unsafe but buoyed up by the knowledge, he loves me, he loves me and I love him, sustained by the discovery of undreamed-of pleasures, the excitements of carnal nights, the swooning languor of exhausted mornings in forbidden beds – and the other everyday feet-on-the-ground existence of ordinary practical virtuous life. And you could be two people at once: indeed were two people – even four, for do not the sleeping and the waking life provide us with another doubling? And so we were never bored. At least while love lasted. Only in adultery, I imagine, does the contemporary young person capture something of this rich duality, quadruplicity, of existence.
The words spoil everything. Penis, vagina, cock, cunt, buggery, fellatio, cunnilingus. How dreary the po-faced responsibility of the sex-education class! Caring relationships! Sensitive approaches! Safe sex. Where is the exultation, the exaltation? Safe sex. Why do it at all, the young must think; absurd, the very notion, that sex might be for pleasure’s sake. Perhaps, as with Jenny, it seems okay to do it to exercise power, to improve status, to relieve a low self-image. That’s all. Once you define it, you’ve had it. Language makes nothing of sex. Words should not enter in. But they do, they have, and the world of carnal mystery is denied our children, poor impoverished things; they are obliged to live in their one, unified, seedy, boring, over-real world: no wonder they look so dreary, so hopeless, so alienated, in their black mourning clothes with their white faces, their exhausted eyes. They are mourning a world they do not even know exists.
When Jenny went through her drug phase and nearly killed me with the distress of it, I blamed myself, as you know well, Miss Jacobs. How those first three years, I said, everyone said, must have scarred her! Forget what came after. Poor little Jenny, all her mother Mary’s fault, all of it. Mary was irresponsible, said everyone, Mary stayed out, went to parties, drank too much, took a job, had a career even after she married Don and settled down (so-called); Mary was wild, wasn’t she; the rows she and Don had; glasses of wine and plates of food flung in restaurants, so what can it have been like for poor little Jenny left at home? The marvel is, said the friends, said the world, said me, that Carl is so steady, not that Jenny went to the bad.
That’s what was said, Miss Jacobs, and don’t think it didn’t hurt me. It did: it gave a new, quite violent dimension to guilt and anxiety and shame. I longed for Jenny to reflect credit on to me, be the proud child of love and sexual freedom, of kindness and cuddles: not this angry skinny devil who shot up heroin and would steal and borrow money from my friends to do it. This laughing buoyant child of the family photograph: Jenny, with her pretty bedroom with the Kate Greenaway wallpaper and the tasteful toys, to come to this? So full of hate, so determined to humiliate her mother? Well, Jenny is okay again. Given up the drug culture, back at college, doing fine: but her twenties thrown away, wasted. Ordinary, loving Jenny back again. But she’s almost thirty, and only beginning now. Did she just take longer to grow up than young people are supposed to? Do we have unreasonable expectations, that by the age of twenty a person should be able to cope, go out to work, make a living, live on their own? Perhaps these days the young just take longer to grow up and we must expect them to stay round for thirty years, not twenty? Support them, sustain them, sop up their passions, for all that time; not attempt to pass on to them the burden of responsibility at twenty-five any more than we do when they’re ten. It is the much-loved child of the middle classes, Jacob’s Benjamin, who so often goes to the dogs, to the drug culture: the Minister’s son, the Judge’s daughter; see the scandal in the paper? We sneer and say, told you so: a failure in parental love; they were too busy, those bad, bad parents, about the world’s business, too little at home; so the child suffered. I am not sure any more it’s true: I think there is another element at work here: some other phenomenon. Perhaps the parent-child bond can be too powerful, too immediate; the assumption of love is strong in the parent but quite fails to get through to the child. Too much trust is placed in ‘love’. Love is a mere instinct; there is no credit in it; no achievement: no sacrifice. The child demands sacrifice from its parents: not a flow of easy emotion. And does not the child inherit its temperament from both parents, good bits and bad bits alike? The body is not an innately healthy organism which will grow up straight, proud and true unless you somehow thwart it: it is destined to grow up flawed, and as pleasant and perfect, or neither, as the mixture of its parents’ genes would suggest. I daresay a mother, or father, can get the best out of that mix or the worst, but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Jenny’s okay now: and I do think my love, instinctive as it was, helped her, not hindered her. It was not my fault that she took to the dogs: it is to my credit that she survived.
Jenny survived to get to Narcotics Anon, where she met many a child of many a long-lost friend of mine: and they all sit round together, brooding on the sins of their parents, that is to say me, and losing their anger and beginning to laugh.
A strange thing happened, Miss Jacobs. It was how Jenny got out of drugs, got to Narcotics Anon. She was lying on a mattress on the floor of some dreary squat, with black walls and only hate, hate, hate written in white paint on the ceiling for decoration, and she was staring at this ceiling, working out who to con so as to get her next fix, and a black cat jumped on to her chest. A very flat chest, Miss Jacobs, though she’s put on some weight since, thank God. It stared at her, and she thought for a moment it was The Cat, but of course it couldn’t be, for The Cat was dead.
The Cat had been walking along outside our house when a car went out of control and mounted the pave
ment and killed her. I watched the spirit go out of her – I held her head as she died. Don was there beside me. We crouched in the street and watched this creature turn from live to dead, from something to nothing, become just a lump of fur. The Cat was twelve. I think she was too proud and stubborn to envisage any kind of lingering death, any diminution of energy: sudden was best for her and worst for us. I don’t think Jenny liked the way we grieved. A cat, she said, just a cat. The proper cat for us, we said; the family cat: The Cat, deceased.
But as, years later, Jenny lay on her dirty mattress, a stray black cat jumped on her chest and stared at her for a moment and then ran out of the open door. And Jenny went after the animal to see if it was The Cat though she knew it couldn’t be; and once she was out the door in the clear air she began to cry, she didn’t know why, and couldn’t bear to go back in. Or that’s what she told me. Drug addicts are like that: reason drags them down – the hopelessness and pointlessness of existence if you think about it too much – instinct saves them. And one of my friends – I do have friends: I talk so much it saves them the bother of talking: they just hang around: they like it – just happened to be passing and took Jenny in and talked to her and she was receptive, for some reason, and she joined Narcotics Anon, and it worked, though the start was shaky.
Intervention by cat happened on a second occasion, Jenny now tells me. It’s why I’ve come to see you. I need to talk about it. She said she went home one night with a boy she’d met at Narcs Anon. She woke in the morning, before him, full of the guilt and spite that went with her list of one-night stands. She was about to slip out of the bed and slam out of the house. She still had her eyes closed: she was under the quilt. She felt a gentle thud and a scrabble down by her feet and knew a cat had arrived. She felt the cat pick its way up her, over her, sit by her ear. She felt a velvet tapping on her cheek. She opened her eyes and saw Holly staring at her. She lay still. Holly moved across her and tapped about for a bit and circled, and then settled down, purring, between her and the boy. And presently the purr became intermittent and the cat slept, a warm, steady presence. So Jenny felt reassured and went back to sleep too. When she woke, Holly had gone and Saul – that’s his name: she’s still with him: I really like him: he turns out to be the son of one of my friends – was making coffee in a domestic kind of way, so Jenny stayed. And between them they worked it all out, and neither went back to the needles, which had been in the air.
