by Roy Vickers
Miss Paisley, who affected an ignorance of cockney idiom, asked herself what the words meant. As they would bear an interpretation which she would not allow her imagination to accept, she assured herself that they meant nothing. She began to wonder at her own audacity in bearding a coarse, tough man like Mr. Rinditch, who might well have started a brawl.
In the meantime, the cat had gone up the stairs and was waiting for her at the door of her apartment. It still did not wish to be touched. But when Miss Paisley rested in her easy chair before preparing her lunch, the cat, for the first time, jumped on to her lap. It growled and changed its position, steadying itself with its claws, which penetrated Miss Paisley’s dress and pricked her. Then it settled down, purred a little and went to sleep. The one-time dining-room clock chimed two o’clock: Miss Paisley discovered that she was not hungry.
On Sunday the cat resumed its normal routine, and seemed none the worse. It tackled its meat ration with avidity, and wound up with Miss Paisley’s other meringue. But that did not excuse the gross brutality of Mr. Rinditch. On Monday morning, Miss Paisley stopped Jenkins on the first floor landing and asked for Mr. Rinditch’s full name, explaining that she intended to apply for a summons for cruelty to animals.
“If you’ll excuse me putting in a word, madam, you won’t get your own back on him by gettin’ him fined ten bob. Why, he pays somthink like fifty pounds a month in fines for ’is runners—thinks no more of it than you think o’ your train fare.”
Miss Paisley was somewhat dashed. Jenkins enlarged.
“You’d be surprised, madam, at the cash that comes his way. The night before a big race, he’ll be home at six with more’n a couple o’ hundred pound in that bag o’ his: then he’ll go out at a quarter to eight, do his round of the pubs and be back at ten thirty with as much cash again.”
The amount of the fine, Miss Paisley told herself, was irrelevant. This was a matter of principle. The lawyer, whom she consulted during her lunch hour, failed to perceive the principle. He told her that she could not prove her statements: that, as the cat admittedly bore no sign of the attack, the case would be ‘laughed out of court.’
She had never heard that phrase before, and she resented it, the resentment being tinged with fear.
When she reached home, she found the cat crouching on the far side of the escritoire. It took no notice of her, but she could wait no longer to unburden herself.
“We should be laughed out of court,” she said. “In other words, Mr. Rinditch can kick us, and the Law will laugh at us for being kicked. I expect we look funny when we are in pain!”
In the whole of Miss Paisley’s life, that was the unluckiest moment for that particular remark. If her eyes had not been turned inward, she would have interpreted the behaviour of the cat, could not have failed to recognise that its position by the escritoire was strategic. She was still talking about her interview with the lawyer when the cat pounced, then turned in her direction, a live mouse kicking in its jaws.
“Oh, dear!” She accepted the situation with a sigh. She was without the physiological fear of mice—thought them pretty little things, and would have encouraged them but for their insanitary habits.
Now, Miss Paisley knew—certainly from the cliché, if not from experience—the way of a cat with a mouse. Yet it took her by surprise, creating an unmanageable conflict.
“Don’t—oh, don’t! Stop! Can’t you see? … We’re no better than Mr. Rinditch! Oh, God, please make him stop! I can’t endure it. I mustn’t endure it! Isn’t it any use praying? Are You laughing, too?”
Physical movement was not at Miss Paisley’s command, just then. The feeling of cold in her spine turned to heat, and spread outwards over her body, tingling as it spread. In her ears was the sound of crackling, like the burning of dried weeds.
Her breathing ceased to be painful. The immemorial ritual claimed first her attention, then her interest.
After some minutes, Miss Paisley tittered. Then she giggled. The cat, which can create in humanity so many illusions about itself, seemed to be playing its mouse to a gallery, and playing hard for a laugh.
Miss Paisley laughed.
Chapter Three
There were periods of normality, of uneventful months in which one day was indistinguishable from another, and Miss Paisley thought of herself as an elderly lady who happened to keep a cat.
She deduced that the cat wandered a good deal, and sometimes begged or stole food from unknown persons. She had almost persuaded herself that it had abandoned its perilous habit of visiting Mr. Rinditch’s flatlet. One evening in early summer, about a fortnight before the end came, this hope was dashed.
At about half-past eight, the cat had gone out, after its evening meal. Miss Paisley was looking out of her window, idly awaiting its return. Presently she saw it on top of the wall that divided the yard from the old burial ground. She waved to it: it stared at her, then proceeded to wash itself, making a ten-minute job of it. Then it slithered down via the tool shed, but instead of making straight for the drain pipe that led past Miss Paisley’s window sill, its changed direction. By leaning out of the window, she could obtain an oblique view of Mr. Rinditch’s rear window.
She hurried downstairs along the corridor, past Mr. Rinditch’s door to the door that gave on to the yard, skirted a group of six Corporation ash-cans, and came to Mr. Rinditch’s window, which was open about eighteen inches at the bottom. She could see the cat on Mr. Rinditch’s bed. She knew she could not tempt it with food so soon after its main meal. She called coaxingly, then desperately.
“We are in great danger,” she whispered. “Don’t you care?”
The cat stared at her, then closed its eyes. Miss Paisley took stock of the room. It was sparsely but not inexpensively furnished. The panelling was disfigured with calendars and metal coat-hooks.
The sill was more than four feet from the ground. She put her shoulders in the gap, and insinuated herself. She grasped the cat by its scruff, with one finger under its collar, and retained her hold while she scrambled to the safety of the yard, neglecting to lower the window to its usual position. They both reached her apartment without meeting anyone.
During that first fortnight that remained to them, Miss Paisley received—as she would have expressed it—a final lesson from the cat. She was returning from work on a warm evening. When some fifty yards from the chambers, she saw the cat sunning itself on the pavement. From the opposite direction came a man with a Labrador dog on a leash. Suddenly the dog bounded, snatching the leash from the man’s hand.
“Danger! Run away!” screamed Miss Paisley.
The cat saw its enemy a second too late. Moreover, its stiff leg put flight out of the question. While Miss Paisley ran forward, she felt the dog’s hot breath on the back of her neck, nerved herself for the breaking of her bones. And then, as it seemed to her, the incredible happened. The dog sprang away from the cat, ran round in a circle, yelping with pain, while the cat clambered to the top of a nearby gatepost.
The man had recovered the leash and was soothing the dog. Again Miss Paisley extemporised a prayer, this time of thankfulness. Then the habit of years asserted itself over the teaching she believed she had received from the cat.
“I am afraid, sir, my cat has injured your dog. I am very sorry. If there is anything I can do—”
“That’s all right, miss,” a genial cockney voice answered. “He asked for it, an’ he got it.” The dog was bleeding under the throat, and there were two long weals on its chest. “That’s the way cats ought to fight—get in under and strike UP, I say!”
“I have some iodine in my flat—”
“Cor, he don’t want none o’ that! Maybe your cat has saved ’im from losing an eye to the next one. Don’t you give it another thought, miss!”
Miss Paisley bowed, sadly confused in her social values, which were also her moral values. The man’s cockney accent was as inescapable as the excellence of his manners. Miss Paisley’s world was changing too fast
for her.
She enjoyed another six days and nights of the cat’s company, which included four and a half days at the office. But these can be counted in, because the attention she gave to her work had become automatic and did not disturb her inner awareness of the relationship. She never defined that relationship, had not even observed the oddity that she had given the cat no name.
Chapter Four
It was a Tuesday evening. The cat was not at home when she arrived.
“You’ve started being late for meals again,” she grumbled. “Tonight, as it so happens, you can have ten minutes’ grace.”
Her subscription to an illustrated social weekly was overdue. She filled up the renewal form, went out to buy a money order.
In the hall, Mr. Rinditch’s voice reached her through the closed door of his apartment—apparently swearing to himself. There followed a muffled, whistling sound, as of cord being drawn sharply over metal. Then she heard a queer kind of growling cough and a scratching on woodwork—the kind of scratching sound that could be made by a cat’s claws on a wooden panel, if the cat’s body were suspended above the floor.
She stood, holding her breath, paralysed by a sense of urgency which her imagination refused to define. She seemed to be imprisoned within herself, unable to desire escape. The sound of scratching grew thinner until it was so thin that one could doubt whether one had heard it at all.
“You are imagining things!” she said to herself.
She smiled and went on her way to the post office. The smile became fixed. One must, she told herself, be circumspect in all things. If she were to start brawling with her neighbours every time she fancied—well, this-that-and-the-other—without a shred of evidence—people would soon be saying she was an eccentric old maid. She wished she could stop smiling.
She bought the money order, posted it and returned to her apartment, assuring herself that nothing at all had happened. That being agreed, everything could proceed as usual.
“Not home yet! Very well, I shan’t wait for you. I shall cut up your meat now, and if it gets dry you’ve only yourself to blame.” She put on the gloves with which she had held reins thirty-seven years ago. “Just over a year! I must have used them to cut up your meat more than three hundred times, and they’re none the worse for wear. You couldn’t buy gloves like this nowadays. I don’t fancy tinned salmon. I think I’ll make myself an omelette. I remember Cook was always a little uncertain with her omelettes.”
She made the omelette carefully, but ate it quickly. When she had finished her coffee, she went to the bookcase above the escritoire. She had not opened the glass doors for more than ten years. She took out Ivanhoe, which her father had given to her mother before they were married.
At a quarter past ten, she closed the book.
“You know I’ve never waited up for you! And I’m not going to begin now.”
The routine was to leave the curtains parted a little—about the width of a cat. Tonight she closed them. When she got into bed, she could soon see moonlight through the chinks by the rings—and then the daylight. In the morning, she took some trouble to avoid meeting Jenkins. As if he had lain in wait for her, he popped out from the service cupboard under the staircase.
“Good morning, madam. I haven’t seen your pussy cat this morning.”
Pussy cat! What a nauseating way to speak of her cat!
“I’m not worrying, Jenkins. He often goes off on his own for a couple of days. I’m a little late this morning.”
She was not late—she caught her usual train to London with the usual margin. At the office, her room mates seemed more animated than usual. A fragment of their chatter penetrated. “If Lone Lass doesn’t win tomorrow, I shall be going to London for my summer holiday.” A racehorse, of course. One of the so-called classic races tomorrow, but she could not remember which. It reminded her of Mr. Rinditch. A very low, coarse man! Her thoughts shifted to that very nice man who owned the dog. One of nature’s gentlemen! ‘Get in under and strike UP.’
She did not go out in the lunch hour, so did not buy any catsmeat.
That evening, at a few minutes to eight, she heard Jenkins’ footstep on the landing. He knocked at her door.
“Good evening, madam. I hope I’m not disturbing you. There’s somethink I’d like to show you, if you can spare a couple o’ minutes.”
On the way downstairs, there broke upon Miss Paisley the full truth about herself and Jenkins. Madam! She could hear now the contempt in his voice—could even hear the innumerable guffaws that had greeted his anecdotes of the female clerk who gave herself the airs of a lady in temporarily distressed circumstances. But her dignity had now passed into her own keeping.
He led her along the corridor, through the door giving on to the yard, to the Corporation ash-cans. He lifted a lid. On top of the garbage was the carcase of her cat. Attached to the neck was a length of green blind cord.
“Well, Jenkins?” HIer fixed smile was unnerving to him.
“He was in Mr. Rinditch’s room again, soon after you come ’ome last night. You can’t really complain, knowin’ what he said he’d do. And hangin’ an animal isn’t torture if it’s done properly, like this was. I don’t suppose your pore little pussy cat felt any pain. Just pulled the string over the top of the coat-hook and it was all over.”
“That is immaterial.” She knew that her cold indifference was robbing this jackal of the sadistic treat he had promised himself. “How do we know that Mr. Rinditch is responsible? It might have been anybody in the building, Jenkins.”
“I tell you, it was him! Last night, when my missus went in with his evenin’ meal, same as usual, she saw a length o’ that blind cord stickin’ out from under his bed. And there was a bit o’ green fluff on the coat-hook, where the cord had frayed. The missus did a bit more nosing while she was clearing away, an’ she spotted the cat’s collar in the waste paper basket. You couldn’t hang a cat properly with that collar on, ’ cause o’ the metal. She said the strap part had been cut—like as it might be with a razor.”
Miss Paisley gazed a second time into the ash-can. The collar had certainly been removed. Jenkins, watching her, thought she was still unwilling to believe him. Like most habitual liars, he was always excessively anxious to prove his word when he happened to be telling the truth.
“Come to think of it, the collar will still be in that basket,” he said, mainly to himself. “Listen! He keeps it near enough to the front window. Come round to the front and maybe you’ll be able to see it for yourself.”
The basket was of plaited wicker. Through the interstices Miss. Paisley could see enough of the collar to banish doubt.
She could listen to herself talking to Jenkins, just as she had been able to see herself standing at the ash-can, knowing what was under the lid before Jenkins removed it. How easy it was to be calm when you had made up your mind!
When she returned to her room it was only five minutes past eight. Never mind. The calm would last as long as she needed it. In two hours and twenty-five minutes, Mr. Rinditch would come home. She was shivering. She put on the green suede lumber-jacket, then she sat in her armchair, erect, her outstretched fingers in the folds of the upholstery.
“Before Mr. Rinditch comes back, I want you to know that I heard you scratching on his wall. You were alive then. We have already faced the fact that if I had hammered on the door and—brawled—you would be alive now. We won’t argue about it. There’s a lot to be said on both sides, so we will not indulge in recriminations.”
Miss Paisley was silent until twenty-five minutes past ten, when she got up and put on the riding gloves, as if she were about to cut meat for her cat. The knife lay on the shelf in its usual place. Her hand snatched at the handle, as if someone were trying to take it away from her.
“‘Get in under and strike UP!’” she whispered—and then Miss Paisley’s physical movements again became unmanageable. She was gripping the handle of the knife, but she could not raise it from the shelf. She had
the illusion of exerting her muscles, of pulling with all the strength of her arm against an impossibly heavy weight. Dimly she could hear Mr. Rinditch come home and slam his door.
“I’ve let myself become excited! I must get back my calm.”
Still wearing the gloves and the lumber-jacket, she went back to her chair.
“At my age, I can’t alter the habits of a lifetime—and when I try, I am pulled two ways at once. I told you in the first place that you had come too late. You oughtn’t to have gone into Mr. Rinditch’s room. He killed you in malice, and I betrayed you—oh, yes, I did!—and now I can’t even pray.”
Miss Paisley’s thoughts propounded riddles and postulated nightmares with which her genteel education was unable to cope. When she came to full consciousness of her surroundings it was a quarter to three in the morning. The electric light was burning and she was wearing neither the gloves nor the green suede lumber-jacket..
“I don’t remember turning on the light—I’m too tired to remember anything.” She would sleep on in the morning, take a day off. She undressed and got into bed. For the first time for more than a year, she fell asleep without thought of the cat.
She was awakened shortly after seven by a number of unusual sounds—of a clatter in the hall and voices raised, of a coming and going on the stairs. She sat up and listened. On the ground floor Mrs. Jenkins was shouting while she cried—a working-class habit which Miss Paisley deplored. A voice she recognised as that of the boilermaker who lived on the top floor, shouted up the stairs to his wife.
“Oi, Emma! They’ve taken him away. Hangcuffs an’ all! Cor!”
Miss Paisley put on her long winter coat, pulled the collar up to her chin, and opened her door.
“What is all the fuss about?” she asked the boilermaker.
“That bookie on the ground floor, miss. Someone cut ’is throat for ’ im last night. The pleece’ve pinched Bob Jenkins.” He added: “Hangcuffs an’ all!”
“Oh!” said Miss Paisley. “I see!”
