“That’s it. Well, it’s not anthropomorphic to say that the cat experiences emotions like we do. It does. Cats have the same brain centre for the same feelings we have. Strange animals. You know, scientists have stimulated some brain sites with electrodes and turned docile tabbies into raging beasts that will attack anything that comes into range. Tiny hormone pellets inserted in the right place can bring a castrated cat back to full sexual vigour.”
He poured them each another glass of wine. She wanted to hear more, but equally she didn’t want to. She listened with a kind of dread fascination.
“There’s a curious irony about the cat.” Alec was well launched now. “It mightn’t exist in Western countries at all if it hadn’t been for the rat. In the Middle Ages it was on the way to extinction. The Church outlawed witchcraft, and cats, of course, were associated with witches. One of the popes, can’t remember which, encouraged the destruction of cats because they were looked on as such powerful allies to the witches.”
Stop it, she wanted to say. Stop it.
“Witch-hunt really came to mean cat-hunt. And they were often burned and drowned with their owners. Punishment for sheltering a cat or caring for a sick cat could range from torture to burning at the stake. And then along came the brown rat and with it bubonic plague, and the cat became the first line of defence. So you see, the cat hasn’t much to thank us for. In fact, you could say that of all the domestic animals it’s suffered most at our hands. Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“But your cat ...”
“It’s not my cat!”
“No, but you know what I mean. It’s a feral cat and that’s something rather special: a domestic cat that has reverted to a state of wildness, hunting its prey just as a lion or a tiger would.
And like a wild animal, it has a territory and a home range, which consists of places for resting and watching and sunbathing and a network of paths and a den — are you sure you’re all right?”
Rachel had risen abruptly to her feet. The wine was making her dizzy. “I must go,” she said thickly.
“Hang on a tick. I’ll get my coat and come with you.”
“No.” She didn’t want him with her, she didn’t want him to tell her anything more. What he had said was disturbing enough.
All the way home through the darkening woods she looked out for a black shape that limped on one of its hind legs, but she saw nothing. That night as she lay awake with the light on she heard the scratching again. She remembered what Alec had said about the cat’s brain, its rages, pleasures and fears. Could it also experience an emotion like the need for revenge? What if it was trying to get into the house?
*
It was.
It crouched at the cellar window and scratched at the wire mesh, trying without success to pull it out of the way, for from the inside of the cellar came the smell of food.
There was a time when the cellar had been the coal-hole, with a door opening onto the back yard. But the door had been bricked up, and a wooden chute fixed below the single window, so that lorries could drive to the rear of the house and the coalmen could make their deliveries by tipping their sacks down the chute. In the late nineteen fifties coal had given way to oil. The cellar had been cleaned and an oil-fired boiler installed. Since the cellar had only one small window through which the coal had been tipped on to the chute, and since fumes from the boiler were said to be dangerous, the window space had not been glazed, but covered in wire mesh. This allowed in air but not rats and mice. The mesh served as no real protection against burglars, so three iron bars had been cemented into the window frame. As an extra safeguard, the door from the cellar into the house could be bolted from both sides.
When Bill had bought the house the cellar was full of junk but Rachel had cleaned it out, distempered the walls and put down lino. Then she had installed a big chest-freezer and a tumble-drier. She had persuaded Bill to put up a series of shelves which she used for storage. They held cartons of toilet paper and kitchen paper, bags of salt, boxes of washing-powder, an array of tinned food as well as bags of dried fruit, packets of shelled walnuts and slivered almonds, a smoked gammon, packets of flour and sugar and a dozen pots of homemade raspberry jam.
It was the smell from these shelves rising on the cellar’s warm air that had attracted the cat. It had come across to the house at night three or four times in the past fortnight, but each time the wire mesh had proved too much of an obstacle.
It was in constant pain now. An infection had set in around the splintered bone in its paw, and it no longer tried to hunt. Instead it ate what carrion it could and rested for long periods in its den. The result was that it was on the edge of starvation. Its range had been more circumscribed as the pain of movement increased: the den, the paddock and the Chaters’ garden formed its world. And in the middle of this world was the house. In all its adult life it had never been inside a house. But briefly, as a young cat, it had lived in one. That had been on the outskirts of Addiscombe, when it had belonged to a woman known as Old Miss Mulgrave. It had been one of the Heinz cats, as the neighbours described them, for Miss Mulgrave had once called them her fifty-seven varieties. She was exaggerating, for at that time she had only seventeen cats. There were to be more later, until the total rose to thirty. What was to be described as the feral cat was a latecomer. Its father was a black tom, its mother a bigger-than-ordinary tortoise-shell, and it had spent its first few months with the horde which inhabited Miss Mulgrave’s house.
Apart from some delivery-men, few people ever saw the old woman. She had wire mesh put over the windows of her house so she could leave them open in summer, when even she became aware of the smell, but the cats could not get out. In effect, she had created a gigantic cage and, identifying herself with her cats, formed part of its imprisoned population.
As the years went by, her only contacts with the outside world were reduced to those whose service she could not do without. One was the local vet, Alec Webb. It was the usual practice in Addiscombe to take small sick animals to his surgery, but Miss Mulgrave always called him to her house. It was he who first noticed the deterioration in her.
“She looks like a Victorian engraving of a witch,” he told his wife. “Thin as a beanpole, hair all over the place, always wears the same dress. She probably doesn’t eat properly and if she doesn’t watch out it’ll kill her.”
At four o’clock one afternoon Miss Mulgrave fell from her chair, striking the side of her face on the black cast-iron fender that surrounded the hearth. Two hours later, which was the cats’ normal feeding time, they came in search of her. They found her on the sitting-room floor, still alive, but unconscious and bleeding from her ear and mouth. The cats mewed and arched their backs and raised their tails and rubbed themselves along her body, but she did not wake. With the black kitten, already the size of a normal cat, in the lead, they roamed the house, searching for something to eat. But all their food was in tins. For two days Miss Mulgrave lay on the floor as life slowly left her. At the end of the second day it flickered briefly and then, like a shadow on the wall when the sun goes, it vanished.
At about the same time the black kitten approached the body warily and began to lick the half-dried blood. The experience stilled no pangs of hunger, on the contrary, the taste made it hungrier than ever so it moved towards Miss Mulgrave again. The other cats followed.
“Christ, you have never seen anything like it!” Alec said to his wife. “The postman found her when he was trying to deliver her pension. He phoned the police and they called me to deal with the cats. They panicked. A black one managed to tear down one of the wire window screens and three or four got out. But the old woman ...”
His wife refused to hear any more.
The cat was less than a year old when it escaped. It stayed in the wild and overgrown garden for some months, living on scraps it could forage from the dustbins of the nearby estate, and all the time it was teaching itself to hunt voles and mice and squirrels. But th
en the house was sold and bulldozers arrived and that was the end of the garden. The cat travelled through the woods, meeting other feral cats and avoiding their territories until it came to the wood above the Chaters’ house. This territory was not already occupied and the cat found a den and lined it with grass and settled down to its new life as a wild thing.
Now that life was over. The injury to its back paw made certain of that. The house at the end of the paddock was the cat’s only means of subsistence and for the first time in its life it was trying to get into a house. It sensed that unless it could, it would die.
7
It was nearly two weeks after her first visit that Celia James arrived on Rachel’s doorstep one evening at about half-past six. Rachel had several times been tempted to telephone her, but she was unduly sensitive about revealing her vulnerability and felt she had to leave a decent interval.
Then, as she was pouring herself the second of her evening drinks, the door-bell sounded, and Celia was outside.
“You look surprised,” she said.
“I’m delighted.”
“Didn’t your ... help ... ?”
“Penny.”
“Didn’t Penny tell you I’d called to invite myself over? I waited for you to ring back and then I thought I’d come anyway.”
“She tends to be forgetful. Come on in.”
It was a damp, raw, winter’s evening and Rachel had been feeling at her lowest. Celia stood in front of the fire, rubbed her hands and then turned, glancing around the room, appraising it. She was beautifully dressed as usual in a camel-hair coat, a white, cashmere, roll-neck sweater, Rive Gauche trousers with gold studs and long tan boots with high heels. As usual, Rachel felt dowdy by comparison. Dressing carelessly was part of living by yourself, she thought. Whom did you have to dress for? And then she realised that Celia also lived by herself.
She had a brown paper bag in her hand and she took out a bottle of champagne. “I thought we needed cheering up,” she said. “I hate this damp weather.”
The cork was difficult to remove. “We need your husband for this,” she said. “How is he?”
“Fine.”
“Lots of letters?”
“Oh, yes. And a telephone call.”
“Lucky you. So — absent friends!” She smiled over the rim of the glass.
The wine was ice-cold and Rachel drank thirstily. Celia talked about village matters, a bring-and-buy sale in the hall, the setting up of a fund to restore the church organ, and then she said, “How’s your cat?”
There it was again. Her cat. “I haven’t seen it for the past few days. But I have a feeling ...” She paused.
“What?”
“I have a feeling it’s ...” She felt the skin on her scalp move and tears rose uncontrollably behind her eyes.
“What on earth’s the matter?” Celia said.
“Don’t take any notice of me — it’s just that ...”
“Can’t you tell me?”
“I’m being silly.”
“Look, I know what it’s like to live alone. Everyone has moments like this.”
“I know it sounds stupid but ... it’s that damned cat. I hit it, you see. In the car. And I’ve done something to its leg. And it sits out there.” She waved at the black night. “Watching. Waiting. They’ve got brains, you know, nearly as big as ours. And they can feel emotions. It’s trying to make me pay for what I did.”
And then she told Celia all about the accident. It came pouring out in minute detail. She told her about Charlie and the wood stove, and giving him beer, and the tattoos on his arms. She told her how he had tried to rape her and she told her about going upstairs and brushing her teeth and washing and hearing the tapping. She told her about the rain and the storm and Charlie’s face at the window. And then about how she had taken him home and had seen the cat, and swerved. She even described the dream.
“And now I hear scratching at night. It’s the cat. At least, I think it’s the cat. I feel as if it’s trying to get into the house. Trying to get to me.”
“My God, you really have been through it,” Celia said. “It’s only your imagination, you know. Has to be.”
But even she, cool and practical, did not sound entirely convinced, Rachel thought. And Alec had made the cat sound so menacing, with this talk of limbic regions and witches, of raging furies and brain sizes.
“Let me pour you another drink,” Celia said.
Rachel shook her head. “I’ve had enough. I’ll get us something to eat.”
“No ...”
“Please! I wanted to call you. I wanted to say come over for an omelette. Now you’re here, please don’t leave.”
They went into the kitchen and she mixed the eggs in a bowl. “How do you like yours?”
“Just with herbs. And runny.”
There was a whine behind them and Celia turned. Franco was in his basket in the back passage.
“Do you think he wants to go out?” she said.
“He’s been out all day. God knows where. He’s taken to wandering all over the place. I worry about him sometimes.”
“Dogs do wander. Bitches tend to stay around the house.”
“He came in just before you arrived. He wouldn’t touch his food. I figured he’d eaten something in the woods.”
“How are you getting on with him?”
“I don’t know what I’d do without him. He’s just what I wanted, a companion. The trouble is, now he’s settled down he gets along with everyone. He’s all over the postman in the morning.”
“I think I saw him earlier today.”
“Where?”
“Up near the Renshaws. He was chasing a cat.”
Rachel stopped what she was doing. “What sort of cat?”
“A dark one. I only saw it for a split second. Now don’t get upset. There are dozens of cats around here. That’s why dogs are put in the world, isn’t it? To chase cats.”
Rachel made the omelette and coffee and they took a tray back into the sitting-room.
“How do you feel now?” Celia said.
“A lot better.”
And she did. It is one thing facing a series of facts yourself, she thought, but quite another to share them. She felt as though a weight had been lifted from her. But this time there was an added emotion: gratitude to Celia for being there, for listening to her.
It was as they were finishing their coffee that Celia said suddenly, “One of the worst things must have been knowing you had to face Mrs. Leech.”
“What? Oh, yes. It was the worst. It was terrible. She as much as told me I’d been sleeping with Charlie.”
“How unpleasant.” Celia poured herself another cup of coffee. “And had you?”
“Had I what?”
“Nothing. A joke in bad taste. But why did she accuse you, in particular?”
“I guess I was all she had. It was hysteria. But I’ve heard the rumours like everyone else. Charlie was the local stud, wasn’t he?”
Celia said nothing, but tightened her mouth in distaste.
The big stove was burning brightly and the room, with its comfortable armchairs and sofas and its thick carpet, was an enclosed world. With Celia’s company it was cosy, warm, familiar.
As they sat in friendly silence Celia said, “You promised to tell me how you met Bill.”
“Did I?”
“Don’t you remember? Last time I was here.”
Rachel was slightly hazy about the last time. She recalled talking about Bill, but she did not remember promising to tell Celia anything.
“Alec said it was a romantic meeting.”
“I suppose it was.”
“On top of a mountain,” Celia prompted.
“Not really a mountain. A small hill, rather ...”
*
It was romantic, she supposed. Not because it was on top of anything, but because of the other circumstances governing both their lives at that time. For her, it was an almost classic case of rebound and so she
was ultra-suspicious. The affair she had been having with Michael had ground to a halt. Thinking of Michael brought California back: the heavy smell of the sea, the ozone that made the evenings thick and salty, almost creamy. They’d had an apartment almost on the beach.
He was with Universal Studios then, writing movie and television scripts. A slight, gentle man who wrote stories of violent action.
The apartment was beautiful, the surroundings were beautiful, Michael was beautiful, she was beautiful, their lives were beautiful — but he was married. Only one thing to weigh in the balance against all the rest; it just happened to be the most important thing. She had lived with him for three years and the last part had been dominated by his absent wife. On paper, Michael could handle a four-car chase through the streets of San Francisco, a crazed gunman holding a child hostage in a New York loft, or a dozen other epic struggles. But when his wife telephoned and said, “If you don’t come home I’m going to cut my wrists,” he went home, even though she had made the threat a dozen times before.
That was how they lived; and who was Rachel to end it? You go with a married man, you take the consequences. She had told herself that over and over. Anyway, Michael had always come back. A few days with ... Martha, that was her name ... a few days with Martha and the children and it was all over for the tenth or the twelfth or the twenty-first time.
She remembered their last Christmas. Everything was running slow for the week between Christmas and the New Year and she and Michael had decided to drive up California One, stopping where they found themselves, eating at the best restaurants, just getting away from Los Angeles, from Michael’s wife, from all the hassle, and living for a while like the other beautiful people. Then on Christmas Eve the telephone rang and it was Martha. And Rachel said, “If you go this time, I won’t be here when you get back.”
And he said, “Sure,” just as he had said the other times when she had threatened to walk out.
“What do you want me to do, let her kill herself?”
“You have to choose, Michael.”
“You know exactly what I’d choose if I could.”
Cat's Eyes Page 8
