Cat's Eyes

by Alan Scholefield

  “I figured I did. I don’t any more.”

  “Listen, I’ll be back day after Christmas. It’s only one day.”

  “I’m telling you. I won’t be here.”

  And so he went and she wasn’t there when he came back.

  She spent Christmas Day packing. She thought of going to a hotel, but to be with, but not part of, the jollifications somehow would have made it worse. So she stayed where she was and did not switch on the radio or TV, but played Mahler’s sad Ruckert songs most of the day and into the night. The telephone had rung three times and she had not answered it. Early the following morning she had left the sleeping city in her car.

  Because she had once travelled with her father out into the Mojave Desert and because it was one of the things she had enjoyed most in her life, she took the same route: through Riverside and San Bernardino. There was snow on the San Gabriel Mountains. Even though she was early, there was a fair sprinkling of cars with skis on racks, all heading for the Sierra Nevadas. She reached Barstow at breakfast time, sunny and ice-cold. She drove down the long main street and had, as she’d had when she had been with her father, a short stack of hot cakes with maple syrup and coffee, but it didn’t do anything except make her feel she had overeaten.

  She went on through Baker and then cut left into Death Valley and had lunch at Furnace Creek. The road was filled with campers. Everyone seemed to be laughing and enjoying themselves and she realised that this was not what she wanted. So she headed over Panamint Pass and stopped at a motel in Lone Pine. She could look out at Mount Whitney through her bedroom window, a great rearing wall of snow and ice. Everything was still and clear and the air cut like a blade.

  In brilliant sunshine the next day she drove back down to Mojave, then through Bakersfield and to the coast through Paso Robles, and spent the night at the Cavalier Inn in San Simeon.

  They gave her a room overlooking the sea and a fireplace that burnt logs of compressed sawdust and she stood on her balcony in the mild evening and looked at the sea and thought, this is what they had planned. She wanted Michael there, she wanted him to light the fire and open a bottle of wine and make love to her. Instead, here she was, looking out at the crashing waves with only the television set for company.

  The following day was mild and sunny and she bought a ticket to see Hearst’s Castle. Built by the multi-millionaire publisher William Randolph Hearst in the twenties, it was on a hill overlooking the Pacific. Her group of tourists seemed to be mainly Japanese. Their guide was a young girl with a spotty face and an arch manner.

  They followed her past an outdoor swimming-pool that Caligula might have designed, to what the guide called the ‘Casa Grande’. She described the paintings and sculptures only in money terms: that cost a fortune, this was worth so many thousands of dollars, that was fabulously expensive. “And wouldn’t it be a great room to play ping-pong in?” she said. Behind her, Rachel heard a voice say, “Christ!”

  Much of the tour was like that, everything expressed in dollars, until they finally came to the great indoor swimming-pool that had been built at a cost of millions, and in which Hearst himself had never swum. The voice behind her, this time, she thought, speaking directly to her, said, “Imagine spending money on a thing like that in the Depression.” She turned and looked up at a tall, moustached man, and realised he must have been behind her throughout the tour. There was something familiar about him. He looked at her, smiled and said, “Hullo.”

  “Hullo,” she said hesitantly.

  “You don’t recognise me, do you?” He had a deep voice and an English accent and was wearing black slacks and a dark blue shirt under a soft tweed jacket.

  “I’m afraid ...”

  “You’re at Paramount.” She nodded. “I did The Volcano for you last year. Wrote it.”

  “Then you’re ... good Lord, you’re Bill Chater!”

  “And you’re the lovely lady at the story conference.”

  “But you ...” she began.

  He touched his moustache. “It’s new.”

  “What brings you here?”

  “I’ve finished working on a script for CBS and I thought I’d see something of California before going home. And you?”

  “Sort of the same.”

  They sat next to each other on the bus which took them back to the car-park. “What did you think of it?” she said.

  “Bloody awful. I’ve never seen anything so vulgar in my life.”

  “You mustn’t be too hard on us. Remember there wasn’t anyone building castles here in the tenth and eleventh centuries.”

  “I keep thinking of the millions of unemployed. The whole landscape was filled with men wandering about, penniless, and here’s old Hearst beavering away at this ghastly monument, spending his money like water. It’s a wonder they didn’t lynch him. Maybe that’s why he built it on top of a hill.”

  It was dusk when they reached their cars. “What now?” he said. “Which way are you headed?”

  “I’ll stay the night,” she said. “I want to drive the coast route in daylight. And you?”

  “I have a booking in Carmel.”

  She held out her hand. “I’ll probably see you again on the lot.”

  “I hope so.”

  She drove back to the motel, had a shower, changed, and had just turned on the early evening newscast when there was a knock at the door. She opened it and saw Bill Chater. He had a large brown paper bag in one hand and a full ice-bucket in the other.

  “Hi!” she said. “I thought you’d be in Carmel by now.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  “I thought about what you said about seeing the coast in daylight. It makes a lot more sense than driving up in the dark. So I checked in here. And then I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have a drink with someone, and there’s an off-licence ... I mean, a liquor store ... across the road. So I bought these” — taking from the bag two long bottles of wine — “Crackling rose, they’re called. Iced. And I thought if you had a couple of glasses ... Do you indulge?”

  “I’ve been known to.”

  He gave her a tumbler of wine, poured one for himself and said, “Isn’t this nice?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t mean only the wine.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  They went on to the balcony and watched the waves and then he came back inside and lit the fire and they sat chatting and drinking. The phrase ‘like old friends’ did not fit them at all, Rachel thought. They weren’t old friends. And that was the nice part.

  They had dinner together and the following day drove up the coast in tandem. She had planned to go through to San Francisco, but he said, why not stop over at Carmel? Why not? She wasn’t going anywhere in particular. So she checked in at the Jade Tree Inn and in the afternoon they sat on the beach on a mild grey day and watched the surfers in their wet suits.

  Again he came to her room and said, “It’s the Happy Hour!” and again he had the iced rose. Again there was a fire to be lit, and he lit it. Again they dined together.

  And so it went on. He wanted to see the vineyards in the Napa Valley and she went to Yountville with him. Then they went to San Francisco and rode in the cable-cars and visited Pier Thirty-Nine and Sausalito and did all the things the tourists did and by that time they were no longer taking separate rooms. She kept saying to herself: “It’s only an affair. I’m on the rebound.” But a couple of weeks later they went down to Mexico and were married, and she never saw Michael again.

  Because she had three months of a contract to work out, she found another apartment and Bill stayed with her there for five weeks, finishing his current novel. Then they discovered she was pregnant and he decided he had better precede her to England and find a house.

  It took longer than he had anticipated, but after several weeks he wrote that he had found a place in Sussex. “It’s a run-down old house, but with potential,” he said. “Anyway, if you don’t like it,
we can always move on. It’s in a particularly beautiful area. The house is about six miles from Addiscombe, a small market town, and Chichester is the nearest city. I’m longing to introduce you to my places. Get moving, darling”

  So she packed up and flew across the Atlantic and moved into the gaunt pile which was to be her home, and now, here she was, Mrs. Bill Chater, a mother, with a new country and a new life, normally as happy as Larry. Thank you, William Randolph Hearst.

  *

  Celia listened to the story with flattering attention and Rachel, warmed by her genuine interest, talked with increasing ease and frankness.

  The only area which she did not touch, because it was, she sometimes thought, the one part of Bill’s former life which had remained closed to her, was his first marriage.

  He had told her, briefly, that he had married Sally when he was just twenty-one, and the marriage had been a failure. When she asked why, he had shrugged and said, “We were too young. Neither of us really knew the other.”

  “Did you and I know each other?”

  “Enough,” he had said. “And we’re older.”

  “Tell me about Sally.”

  An expression crossed his face she had never seen before: closed, withdrawn. He had shaken his head. “It’s in the past, Rachel. It wasn’t a happy time. I’ve done my best to forget it. Don’t make me rake it all over.”

  She had been shaken by compunction. There was a good deal she had not told him about her own relationship with Michael. Everyone had a right to the private areas of life. They had left it at that, and Sally’s name had never been mentioned again.

  Now, as she stopped talking, Celia said, “I understand he had been married before.”

  “Yes,” she said, shortly. “It didn’t last long. It had ended years before he met me.”

  It was eleven o’clock before Celia stood up. “I must go,” she said. “Rachel, why don’t we go up to London together one day? You could use a break and we could do some shopping.”

  Rachel was about to refuse, then she remembered that Penny would be delighted to look after Sophie.

  “I’d love that,” she said.

  8

  She slept more soundly and more securely that night than at any time since Bill had left; nor did she dream. She woke late and went immediately into Sophie’s room. She opened the curtains and saw that the day was bleak and grey and the tops of the Downs were hidden by mist. “We must hurry,” she told the baby. “Penny will be waiting for us. Breakfast when we come back.” As she put Sophie in her carry-cot she remembered Franco, and called him. He was curled up in his basket, with his tail covering his face, and all she could see were his eyes.

  “Don’t you want to go out?”

  The dog did not move.

  She lifted the carry-cot and went out the front door to the car, which was parked in the drive. As she hurried down the steps she felt a sudden spurt of pain in her right knee. The leg gave way. She tried to regain her balance, but the carry-cot’s weight pulled her forward and she sprawled down the stairs and on to the gravel. She managed to keep the cot upright. She had a moment of blind panic before she looked in and saw that the baby was lying on her back gurgling with delight at the novel experience.

  She found she could not stand up. The knee felt like jelly. She sat on the steps and flexed it and massaged it until finally she regain her footing. The knee was sore, but it held her. Recently, feeling her leg was improving, she had begun to drive normally. She could do things that would have been impossible a few weeks ago. Then she’d had to pull herself upstairs on the banisters, now she was able to go up and down with relative ease. It was only these sudden collapses that worried her. They had something to do with abnormal displacement of weight. She assumed that eventually they would no longer occur.

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time she returned with Penny and she took Sophie upstairs to feed her. She had just put down the bottle when Penny shouted. She heard running feet. “Mrs. Chater! Something dreadful’s happened!” She felt a cold hand close over her heart. Penny was standing at the bottom of the stairs, her face creased with worry and fright.

  “It’s Franco!”

  Rachel followed her into the back passage. The dog was curled up in the same position as she had left him.

  “Look!” Penny pointed to the floor near the basket.

  Rachel switched on the light and saw a dark pool of blood.

  She bent down and stroked the golden head. The dog tried to raise it but he was so weak that all he managed was a few inches. She noticed that his tail, where it had been covering his mouth, was also saturated with blood.

  “What’s happened to him?” Penny said.

  “God knows!”

  She found herself wandering back into the kitchen. She stood in an almost catatonic stillness until Penny’s voice brought her back to her senses.

  “Are you going to phone Mr. Webb?”

  “I’ll fetch him,” she said. “You look after Franco.”

  It took her less than ten minutes to return with Alec. He knelt by the basket, lifted the dog’s head, then asked for a torch. She saw that Franco’s blanket was soaked in blood.

  “When did he come in?” Alec said, peering into the dog’s mouth, raising his lips, looking at the gums and teeth.

  “Yesterday afternoon. He’d been out all day. He wouldn’t take his food. I figured he’d already eaten something.”

  “He had. He had eaten Warfarin.”

  Rachel heard Penny draw in her breath. “What’s that?”

  “Rat poison.”

  “I didn’t even think of that! I thought it was just a stomach thing from eating some trash he’d picked up in the woods and that he’d get over it. I didn’t look properly this morning. He was all curled up with his tail over his face like he usually is ...”

  “It’s not your fault,” Alec said. “And it’s not the first time a dog’s eaten Warfarin. Won’t be the last, either. Bloody stuff.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing. It’s too late.”

  “It can’t be too late!”

  “He’s dead.”

  The two women craned forward. “He can’t be!” Rachel said. “I want to show you something.” Alec held the torch and pointed to a cut on the bottom of the dog’s muzzle. The area around it was covered with blood. “That’s what did it.”

  “But it’s only a small cut.”

  “Warfarin’s an anti-coagulant. A rat eats it, starts to bleed internally and goes away and dies. If a dog eats it and gets a cut or a bruise it simply bleeds to death unless it’s checked. The blood won’t clot, you see.”

  “Where could he have got it from?”

  “Anywhere. Farmers use it. There’s no problem about buying it.”

  They went through into the kitchen.

  “He was seen up at the Renshaws yesterday,” Rachel said. “He might have picked it up there.”

  “Perhaps. I’ll call David.” He spoke for a few minutes then put the telephone down. “He has Warfarin down in his corn store, in drain-pipes. That’s how they lay it out as bait, in cut-off drain-pipes. It looks like a fine oatmeal and they put the pipes in corn stores. A rat can get into the pipe to eat it but the pipe is too small for cats or dogs. Sometimes the drain-pipes get shifted and the poison comes out. I asked David if he had seen the dog up there but he wasn’t home yesterday.”

  “What do we do now?” Rachel said.

  “There’s nothing we can do except bury him.”

  They buried the dog in an old rose-bed, where the ground was soft, at the edge of the paddock. Alec found a spade in the tool shed and quickly and neatly dug a hole two feet deep and they put in the body, wrapped in polythene sheeting. He returned as much earth as he could, then placed several large stones on top of the grave. Rachel watched him, saying nothing.

  There was a strong smell of Lysol in the house and Penny had removed Franco’s basket. To Rachel, the place suddenly seemed very empty.

>   “Why did you put the stones on Franco’s grave?” she asked suddenly.

  Alec looked surprised. “Must have been automatic. It’s what we used to do in North Africa when one of our chaps bought it. We’d dig a grave in the sand or in a wadi somewhere and put the body in, and then place stones on top of it so the desert foxes couldn’t dig it up and eat it. I remember once we booby-trapped a desk in a German officer’s billet. Put the bomb in the bottom drawer ...”

  “I know why you put the stones over the grave,” she broke in.

  “I just told you.”

  “You put them there to stop the cat digging up Franco!”

  “Don’t be silly!”

  “You’re lying!”

  Her voice began to rise and Alec twisted his head so his one good eye was fully on her. “Look, Rachel, I swear to you I never thought about ...”

  “It’s true! You know it’s true!”

  “I think you need a drink. We both do. Come on.”

  They went through into the sitting-room and he poured her a stiff gin and tonic. “Drink that,” he said as he helped himself to one. “The sun’s not over the yard-arm yet, but what the hell.” He drank. “Now look,” he said, his burnt-patchwork face trying to arrange itself into an expression of understanding and sympathy. “You’re overwrought and I don’t blame you. But let’s analyse what has happened. Scores of dogs die every year from eating one poison bait or another. It’s simply a hazard of keeping a dog in the country. Just as scores of cats are run over by cars ...”

  “He was with me all last night. I should have noticed something.”

  “He was out all day. He refused his food. That’s not uncommon. You thought he’d eaten something which was making him sick. Just as Sophie sometimes feels sick or off her food. We all do. There’s nothing uncommon about that. Nothing to make you suspicious.”

  “But he was bleeding all the time.”

  “All right. But he lay with his tail over his face — most dogs do, because they don’t like breathing cold air — so you couldn’t see anything. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Celia told me she’d seen him at the Renshaws. He was chasing a cat.”