‘Besides,’ went on Carbonel, ‘I have important things to see to that would not interest you.’
‘How do you know they would not interest me?’ said Rosemary, a little ruffled. It really was difficult to clear away with one hand. ‘Oh, don’t go to sleep, Carbonel! Mummy will be back at any minute, and then you won’t be able to talk to me any more.’
The cat, who had curled himself up on the hearthrug, yawned elaborately. ‘Well, you were not interested enough to ask me what I was doing last night and this morning,’ he said huffily. ‘Not so much as a “Hope you enjoyed yourself”.’ He turned in his paws and closed his eyes to mere golden slits. ‘Besides,’ he added sleepily, ‘you really can’t wash-up with one hand, so you had better put the broom down,’ and he shut his eyes firmly. Not another word would he say.
Rosemary splashed the plates so vigorously that a good deal of the water slopped over on the floor, which made her cross. ‘Really, Garbonel behaves sometimes as though he has bought me, not the other way round.’
But Rosemary was not a sulky child, and as soon as she heard her mother coming slowly across the landing she forgot everything except the fact that they sounded like the footsteps of someone who has not good news to tell.
‘It’s no use, Rosie,’ said Mrs Brown sadly, ‘Mrs Walker won’t hear of having a cat in the house!’
‘Mummy, what shall we do?’
‘Poppet, I said everything I could think of to make her change her mind. I told her how useful he would be for catching mice. But she only sniffed and said there had never been a mouse in the house in her day. I’m so sorry, darling. I’m afraid he will have to go.’
‘But I can’t send him away, not now I can’t!’ said Rosemary, scooping Carbonel up and hugging him fiercely. ‘Darling Carbonel, how could I?’ Two fat tears went rolling down her cheeks and fell with a splash on to the cat’s black fur. He struggled violently, and when Rosemary put him down he stalked off, shaking each paw in turn.
‘If only we had our own little house, you should have half-a-dozen cats,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘I don’t want half-a-dozen cats. I want Carbonel.’
‘Well, use my hankie and cheer up. Suppose we keep him until the morning and see if we can think of something. I never thought I should ever want to live in a house that was full of mice!’ said Mrs Brown. Rosemary was startled to hear Carbonel say ‘Don’t worry, you will!’
She looked up in alarm, but her mother was quietly putting the china away in the cupboard. Then she noticed that when she had flung herself down to pick up Carbonel she had put her hand accidentally on the handle of the broom which was sticking out from where she had pushed it under the sofa. Of course, her mother could not have heard. Rosemary looked sharply at Carbonel, but he was sitting on the hearth-rug, absorbed in washing himself, with one of his hind legs sticking straight up in the air.
‘Will you come and talk to me in bed like you did last night?’ she whispered. Carbonel paused for a moment.
‘Not tonight. I shall be too busy.’
‘And please don’t be cross with me,’ she bent down to whisper, ‘it isn’t fair.’
But her mother had returned and Carbonel did not reply. Instead he lifted his head and with a warm, wet, rasping tongue gave her cheek a little lick. Comforted, Rosemary sat beside him on the hearth-rug and stroked him very gently on the top of his satin-smooth head.
7
Carbonel and Mrs Walker
When Rosemary woke next morning it was not to a feeling of pleasure at the prospect of the visit to Tussocks, but to one of uneasiness. At first she could not think what it was that was worrying her, but as her mind wandered sleepily back over the events of yesterday, it came to her quite suddenly. Mrs Walker would not let her keep Carbonel. And as suddenly she was wide awake and jumping out of bed.
The cat was not in her bedroom. Neither was he in the sitting room, where her mother was getting breakfast.
‘Never mind!’ said Mrs Brown when she saw her daughter’s anxious face. ‘Perhaps it is just as well he should take himself off, if Mrs Walker won’t let us keep him. I have been wondering how on earth we could find another home for him. But go and get dressed, darling. Had you forgotten you are coming with me today?’
Rosemary put on her newest gingham frock with none of the satisfaction that it usually gave her. She tidied her bedroom and made her bed with special care, and all the time she was making desperate plans for keeping Carbonel secretly in the tumbledown rabbit hutch in the yard.
‘But I don’t suppose he’d so much as look at a rabbit hutch,’ she thought, as she smoothed the bedspread with the exactness of thoughtful misery. ‘He would probably be offended at the very idea.’
During a rather silent breakfast, Rosemary was making patterns on her buttered toast with the point of her knife when there was an unmistakable ‘Mew’ outside the door. Rosemary ran to open it, and sure enough, there was Carbonel! He trotted into the room with a smug expression on his face, without so much as a glance at Rosemary. Her mother, who was secretly feeling that it would have been much simpler if the cat had not come back, looked at her daughter’s worried face and reproached herself.
‘Let’s give him some milk, Poppet. But what to do about him I just don’t know! We simply must get ready to go now.’
Rosemary had such a tight feeling in her throat that she did not dare to say anything. She poured out a saucer of milk and was listening to the cat’s rhythmical lap-lap, lap-lap, when there was a knock on the door. Before her mother had time to say ‘Come in!’ Mrs Walker burst into the room.
‘Oh, Mrs Brown!’ she said. ‘It’s a judgement on me for saying you could not keep your cat. I never saw the like!’
‘Good gracious, what has happened? You look so upset! Now do sit down and let me give you a cup of tea. It has not been standing long.’
‘The kitchen!’ gasped Mrs Walker. ‘It’s full of mice, hundreds of them! You never saw anything like it! And me that’s always said that mice is vermin, and there’s only vermin where there’s dirt, and not a mouse in the house in all the fifteen years I’ve been here. Would you believe it? I opened the kitchen door to cook my old man a pair of kippers for ’is breakfast – he’s partial to kippers, Alfred is – and it fair turned me over. I can’t abide them!’
Rosemary, who gathered it was mice that Mrs Walker could not abide, and not kippers, looked at Carbonel. He was tactfully keeping out of sight behind the horse-hair sofa, but she could see that he had finished the saucer of milk and was looking as self-satisfied as if it had been a bowl of cream. He opened his great golden eyes and looked full at Rosemary, and could it be? She was not quite certain, but it almost seemed as if one eye flickered in a wink.
‘I shall never feel easy in that kitchen again,’ said Mrs Walker.
‘But it will be quite all right,’ said Rosemary. ‘You see, we did not get rid of my cat last night.’
‘We were going to see if we could find a home for him today,’ broke in Mrs Brown hurriedly.
Rosemary picked up Carbonel; it needed both arms. ‘But isn’t it a good thing we’ve still got him? Because I’m sure he will get rid of your mice for you.’
‘I think you would find the very fact that there was a cat in the house would keep the mice away,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘Well, he’s a handsome animal, that I will say,’ said Mrs Walker. ‘You can keep him and welcome, if only he’ll get rid of the mice!’
‘Rosie, dear, take him down to the kitchen and leave him there…’
‘Yes, dearie, do! And I’ll give your mum a hand with her dirty crocks; I expect she wants to be getting off to work. I couldn’t stay in the kitchen while…’ Mrs Walker broke off and shuddered.
Carbonel had already struggled out of Rosemary’s arms and was standing expectantly by the door. As her mother said, he might have understood every word. She opened the door and he ran down the stairs so quickly that Rosemary had no time to fetch the broom-stick. So it was an e
ntirely one-sided conversation she held with him on the way down. Explanations would have to wait till later.
‘I don’t know how you did it, but it was very clever of you! And now you can stay with us for always and always! At least, until you have to go away. How glorious!’
They had reached the basement by now, where Mrs Walker lived with her husband. Carbonel was scratching impatiently at the kitchen door. Rosemary turned the handle and looked in. The noise of squeaking was deafening. There were mice all over the place; they were scuttering over the linoleum and running up and down the lace curtains that hid the dismal view of the dust-bins in the yard. They were playing hide-and-seek in the rag rug on the hearth and nibbling the loaf that stood on the table. There was even one peering out of the Coronation mug that held the place of honour on the mantelpiece. Rosemary took all this in in a flash, and at the very same time she remembered something which in the excitement of the moment she had forgotten. She remembered the way in which cats generally get rid of mice. Surely Carbonel was not going to eat them? She shut the door hurriedly and retreated to the bottom step of the flight of stairs with her eyes tight shut and her fingers in her ears. Of course it was silly to expect a cat not to behave like a cat, even if he was a prince. ‘All the same,’ thought Rosemary, ‘there must have been hundreds of them! It seems horrible, because he must have tricked them somehow into coming, and the one in the Coronation mug did look so sweet!’
It seemed hours before she plucked up enough courage to open her eyes and take her fingers from her ears, but really it was only a few minutes. There was complete silence; not a squeak was to be heard. Then from the other side of the door came a faint ‘Mew’. She stood up and walked slowly to the door. Once they had had a cat who caught a mouse now and then. He would eat up every bit except the tail, and that he would present to her mother as a great prize. Would she find…? But wondering only made it worse. She took a deep breath and flung open the door. There was no sign of any movement, not a mouse was to be seen, but where the loaf of bread had been on the trencher were now only a few crumbs. Carbonel stalked past her slowly and with great dignity. Licking his whiskers he mounted the stairs as though it was rather an effort.
Mrs Walker was waiting for them.
‘You ’ave been quick, dearie! Has ’e done it?’
Rosemary nodded.
‘Thank you ever so! Well, it beats me how it happened. Not a mouse in fifteen years and then ’undreds!’
‘I have heard of mice moving in a body from some building which has been pulled down,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘Depend upon it, that’s it!’ said Mrs Walker. ‘Though why they have to pick on my house to come to I really do not see!’
‘It certainly is a most extraordinary thing,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘Oh well, I’ll be glad to have a cat around, Rosie, so I’ll feed ’im while you are gone. I ’ear you are going with your ma today. Well, I must get on with my old man’s kippers.’ And full of smiles Mrs Walker went downstairs.
‘It’s very odd,’ said Mrs Brown when she had gone, ‘but it could not have happened at a better time for us! Just look at that cat!’
Carbonel was lying on the hearth-rug, looking so portly that it was not surprising that he seemed reluctant to curl up in his usual way. Rosemary wondered if perhaps he could not curl up if he wanted to. He lay stretched on his side, purring deeply.
‘You had better go and get ready,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘Put on your better sandals, the ones that have just been mended, and don’t forget a clean hankie.’
When Rosemary was holding the broom-stick and could hear him talk she was always a little in awe of Carbonel, but now he was silent and sleeping like any hearth-rug animal, so without any ceremony she scooped him up in her arms, too sleepy to struggle, and dropped him on her bed. Then she whirled to the wardrobe and fetched the broom.
‘How could you!’ she said, stamping her foot. ‘It was hateful of you!’ Carbonel opened his eyes sleepily, and his purr took on a deeper, slower note.
‘I’ve never had such a meal in my life,’ he said dreamily.
‘Did you eat them all?’ said Rosemary incredulously.
‘Heads, tails, and backbones,’ said Carbonel, ‘and left not a wrack behind! Shakespeare,’ he added graciously.
‘Then I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself! Just for your own ends to eat all those dozens of poor little mice!’
Carbonel opened his eyes very wide.
‘Who said anything about mice? It was the kippers I ate, two pairs of them. They were on the floor, and everyone knows that is where the cat’s food is put. If they weren’t put there on purpose I can’t help that. In any case it was the least she could do, putting me to all that trouble. I had to round up all the mice in Tottenham Grove and then explain what I wanted them to do. It took me all night. I didn’t touch a whisker of them,’ he said with righteous indignation. ‘I’d given them my word, hadn’t I? The only way I could get them to come was by promising a truce for six weeks. Oh, they drove a hard bargain, I can tell you. Six weeks without a mouse! It’s positive cruelty. Now run away and leave me to sleep it off.’ And he curled himself up like a foot-warmer.
Rosemary was filled with a wave of self-reproach. How could she have thought so badly of him? She bent down over the sleeping animal and whispered, ‘I’m sorry I was so silly. Please forgive me.’
But there was no answer, so she put the broom in the wardrobe and tip-toed away.
8
Tussocks
By the time that Rosemary had arrived at Tussocks, Mrs Pendlebury Parker’s house, she had decided that she was not going to think about witches, or broomsticks, or anything magic at all for the whole day. It was really rather a relief. She wondered if the house would be anything like she had imagined it, and what the boy she would have to play with would be like.
The house turned out to be larger even than Rosemary had imagined. It had been built in the reign of Queen Victoria, so her mother said, by Mrs Pendlebury Parker’s grandfather, who had made a lot of money in cotton, and then moved to the south to try to forget how he had made it. The house had towers with blue slate roofs and battlements of stone and very bright red terracotta gargoyles all over the place. Although Mrs Brown said it was ugly, Rosemary thought it was beautiful, and would be a wonderful place to play in. They went to a side door where a cheerful-looking maid in a pink striped dress let them in.
‘You’re to come straight upstairs, Mrs Brown,’ she said. ‘Mrs P’s not up yet. And is this your little girl? Well, if she can keep that young limb out of mischief we shall all be grateful. But when a child is all by himself with nothing to do, it stands to reason there is nothing to do but be naughty.’
Rosemary was far too busy looking about her to listen to the conversation. They walked along several stone-paved passages, up some linoleum-covered stairs, and through a baize door. Here there was no stone or linoleum, but deep red carpet, and the sort of pictures on the walls that Rosemary had only seen in museums. She would like to have stopped to look at them, but she was afraid of being left behind. Presently the maid knocked at one of the doors and when a voice called ‘Come in!’ she opened it.
‘Mrs Brown and the little girl, madam,’ she said.
Rosemary was aware of a very large room with a pale blue carpet and great furry white rugs. In a large four-post bed with an immense blue eiderdown, leaning against a great many pillows, sat a plump woman in a very frilly pink bed-jacket. They walked up to the foot of the bed and Rosemary noticed that the lady was not as young as she had thought at first.
‘So this is Rosemary!’ said Mrs Pendlebury Parker. ‘Come here, child.’ Rosemary went forward, tripping over a pair of slippers that seemed to consist largely of heels and feathers.
‘How do you do?’ she said politely.
‘Not very well this morning… My head, you know. But you look a nice little thing. I knew that your good mother could only have a nice little girl, so I thought it would
be quite safe to ask you to play with Lancelot. Lance, dear, come here!’
There was a movement behind the heavy, blue damask curtains and a boy about the same height as Rosemary came towards them from the wide window-seat. He was scowling hideously, and his hands were pushed down to the bottom of his pockets.
‘Now you two are the same age, so you are sure to be friends!’ said Mrs Pendlebury Parker.
The boy scowled more deeply than ever. It was funny, thought Rosemary. Grown-ups took it for granted that children of the same age must always be friends. She found herself thinking that Mrs Pendlebury Parker and Mrs Walker must be about the same age, and yet it was very unlikely that they would be friends.
‘Now run along and play, dears, and do try to be good children!’
The boy looked at Rosemary, and with a nod of his head motioned her to the door and followed her out.
When he got outside he blew out his cheeks as though he was a balloon letting itself down.
‘She knows I hate it, and she will go on doing it.’
‘Who does what?’ asked Rosemary.
‘Aunt Amabel will call me Lancelot. Just because that was what her father was called – my grandfather, you know – I was called after him, to try to make him forgive Mum. But it didn’t, and so I’m branded with an awful name like that for the rest of my life for nothing.’
‘What had your mother done?’ asked Rosemary with interest.
‘Married my father. He was a poor artist. He still is. Daddy says nearly all good artists are poor until they’re dead. And now I’ve got to play with you.’
‘Well, I didn’t ask to play with you!’ said Rosemary. ‘Besides, it isn’t my fault what your aunt calls you, so I don’t see why you should be cross with me.’
The boy looked at her for the first time, and the scowl relaxed. ‘I suppose it isn’t your fault. I say, you don’t look half so bad as I expected. You can call me John – that’s my other name. Nobody knows about Lancelot at school. Come on! Let’s go into the garden.’
Carbonel: The King of Cats Page 4
