by Doreen Tovey
It said much for the Smiths that, even after that, we still remained friends. They wouldn't even let us pay for the lamp. They did warn us, though, that Sugieh was what they termed an exceptional caller. Eventually they had had to lock her in their spare room, and though James was allowed to visit her whenever he liked and within a couple of days had succeeded in persuading her that there were other things in life besides love – she emerged, they said, as placidly as if it had never happened, drank a jug of milk to cool her throat and went happily off with him to dig holes in the garden – while it lasted they had been quite unable to hear themselves speak.
It was quite a while before we heard her ourselves. After that first effort she went so long without calling again that in fact we began to get suspicious. Those moonlit October nights when she had refused to come in and we had gone to bed without her, lying awake worrying about foxes and badgers until, around midnight, she would come tearing up the stairs bellowing that she hadn't any idea of the time and why on earth hadn't we called her? Had she perhaps gone innocently into the woods and been pounced on, even as she opened her mouth for her first tremulous call, by some feline Don Juan? Or had she – which was much more likely, knowing Sugieh – kept her love pangs to herself and gone deliberately off to look for a tom, realising from her experience with the Smiths that if she let out one squeal while we were around we would lock her up and spoil all the fun?
Sugieh knew, but she wasn't telling. As the weeks wore on and we eyed her more and more suspiciously – there was no doubt at all that she was getting plumper, though that might have been because she was growing out of kittenhood – all she did was smirk coyly and stretch so that we could get a better look. When we asked her sternly what she had been up to, she half-closed her eyes and gave a faint, ecstatic squawk.
Christmas drew nearer, Sugieh still hadn't called, and eventually there was no doubt at all in our minds. While up the lane Father Adams rubbed his hands and prepared gleefully for Mimi's happy event, we shook our heads reproachfully at Sugieh and prepared to conceal her shame.
As it happened we were all wrong. Mimi, to Father Adams's chagrin, had a false pregnancy and produced no kittens at all while Sugieh, tickled pink at the way she had fooled us, came triumphantly into season on Christmas Day, roaring like a lion. It seemed that social occasions had that effect on her. After a feed of turkey – never shall I forget the look of awe on her face when she saw a turkey for the first time; you could see her mentally writing off those pheasants on the spot – a run in the woods to see if there were any more turkeys up there, and a brisk game of snakes and ladders which she won by sweeping all the counters onto the floor, she suddenly threw herself on her back and burst into song. My brother-in-law looked at her in alarm and asked what was wrong. Mindful that there were children present I looked at him meaningly and said Nothing. She got like that sometimes, when she was Excited. Our nine-year-old twin nephews, looking at each other in horror, promptly put aside their snakes and ladders and explained that she was making that noise because she wanted a husband.
The Smiths were right about her being an exceptional caller. Sugieh had always had a powerful voice, even for a Siamese, and her love song was excruciating. By day she followed us round the house screaming and throwing herself hopefully on her back every time we looked at her. At night she thumped round in the spare room, yelling more furiously than ever because, unable to stand the racket at such close quarters, we refused to let her come to bed with us. By dawn on the morning after Boxing Day we could stand it no longer. Charles, loudly damning all Siamese to perdition, took her down and shut her in the bathroom.
Ours is an old place and the bathroom is not only on the ground floor but separated from the original part of the cottage by a two-foot-thick stone wall. When after a while the screams, now mercifully faint, stopped altogether we told ourselves smugly that Sugieh was no fool; she knew when we had her beaten. For the first time in two days we prepared to get some sleep.
A split second later the father and mother of all cat fights started up in the garden, and we nearly went through the roof. 'Sugieh!' I screeched, barely touching ground as I leapt out of bed and down the stairs. 'Quick!' urged Charles – stopping nevertheless to put on his slippers and belt his dressing-gown before pelting after me.
Sugieh was quite safe. She had not, as by this time we suspected her of being perfectly capable of doing, gone through the ventilator or prised the window open with a crowbar. She was sitting in the bathroom window like the queen of a medieval tourney, squinting with smug delight while outside two lusty knights battled for her favours in the polyanthus.
She stayed in season for a week and each night, with unfailing regularity, there was a cat fight outside the bathroom window. A fortnight later she began calling again. We had intended waiting until she was a year old before having her mated, but it was more than flesh and blood could stand. At eleven months Sugieh, with great enthusiasm, became a bride.
She was mated – the maiden lady's tom being in our opinion too flat-faced, and Ajax being unromantically laid up with an abscess in his ear – to a cat called Rikki, at a Siamese cattery forty miles away. Rikki's owners said she was one of the most forward cats they had ever seen. She was also, they said, the loudest. Normally it took about four days to make sure that young queens, who were often nervous, were properly mated, but on the evening of the second day they 'phoned to say there was no doubt at all about Sugieh and would we please fetch her as soon as possible because she was disturbing all the other cats while Rikki, far from being the triumphant male, was padding round his enclosure with a haunted look on his face and jumping every time he heard her voice.
At least, we thought, as we drove wearily home that night with Sugieh in the back still sobbing hysterically for her beloved husband – her owners had told us to keep her indoors for a couple of days or, love-him-forever or not, she might console herself with the farmyard tom and still have mongrel kittens – at least after this was over we should have some peace.
We were always forecasting things like that about Sugieh, and we were always wrong. After the noisiest marriage in the history of the cattery Sugieh embarked on a pregnancy which couldn't have been more involved if she'd read a doctor's book. First, after two days of dewy-eyed dreaming about Rikki – she couldn't waste any more time than that; she only had nine weeks to get everything in – she developed Morning Sickness. Either that or she was suddenly overcome with shame at the thought of her scandalous behaviour at the cattery. The result was, anyway, that she went completely off her food, sat around looking frail and swaying slightly with closed eyes – and finally, with a temperature of 104, had to be driven dramatically through a snowstorm for streptomycin injections.
No sooner did we get her over that – 'When you love animals they make you their slaves,' said the vet gazing sentimentally into her sad blue eyes, but even he couldn't have anticipated the scene when, suddenly recovering her appetite in the middle of the night, she insisted on being fed with crab paste on Charles's pillow – she developed a passion for jam tarts. They had to be jam tarts, though she never ate the jam; and they had to be stolen. If we gave her one she retched realistically, shook her back leg at it and walked away. Left alone, however, she would clear a plateful in a day, stealing them from the pantry and carrying them off to the bathroom, where she carefully ate the pastry rims and left the middles on the floor and Charles absent-mindedly trod them all over the house.
Fired, we imagined, by a desire that her kittens should all be Seal Points like Rikki – a real Yul Brynner of a cat he had been, with massive black shoulders and a wicked, wedge-shaped head – she also drank more coffee than it seemed possible a cat could hold, and, for some unfathomable reason, took to chewing paper; a habit which, the day she ate Charles's Aunt Ethel's telegram, landed us in serious trouble.
Charles's Aunt Ethel, when she decided to stay with members of the family, always announced her impending arrival by telegram; that way the family
had no chance to get out of it. In our case, as we lived, as she was always telling us, at the back of beyond, the telegram also contained the time of the train so that Charles could drive over to the station and collect her.
When, therefore, she appeared dramatically on the doorstep one cold wet night, looking grimly at us over the top of her streaming pince-nez and announcing that not only had she Waited in Vain for a whole hour at the junction but the taxi she had then been Forced to Take had broken down at the end of the lane (it always did for strangers; Fred Ferry had no intention of taxing his springs on our potholes if he could help it), it was obvious that we were for it.
She wouldn't believe we hadn't had the telegram. She had Sent It, she said, and that was that. It didn't help, either, when Charles rang the post office – rather irately, to impress Aunt Ethel – and asked what the devil they'd done with it. The postmaster, who was a man of spirit, said what the devil did we think? Pushed it under the door himself he had, while he was out for a walk, and had his hand grabbed by a blasted cat. Why, he wanted to know, couldn't we have a letter-box, like ordinary normal people?
We did have a letter-box. It was, as the regular postman knew, in the kitchen door. Charles had transferred it from the front door after Blondin nearly decapitated himself one day through sticking his head nosily through the flap and not being able to get it back. If the telegram had been put by mistake under the front door, Charles told the astonished postmaster, only one thing could have happened. Our cat must have eaten it.
She had. While she watched strategically from the top of the stairs and Aunt Ethel dramatically waited for an explanation at the bottom we found the incriminating evidence – a soggy, well-chewed corner of the envelope – under the hall chair.
What happened then was little short of miraculous. Aunt Ethel was just about to storm out in high dudgeon – she had never liked our animals very much since the day Blondin light-heartedly deposited a small warm trickle down her neck while she was dozing in a chair and this, she informed us icily, was the Last Straw – when Sugieh got up and lumbered slowly down the stairs.
By this time she had a figure like a pear-drop, though up till now it didn't seem to have inconvenienced her very much. Only the previous week she had gone across the garden so fast after a bird she had run into a cloche and cut her nose. Not seriously; just enough to send her even more cross-eyed than usual for a few days looking at the scar. She still, too, climbed trees like the wind without any apparent ill-effect on anybody except Charles who groaned and clutched his head every time she banged her – we hoped – valuable cargo of kittens against a branch.
Now, to our utter astonishment, she crept wearily downstairs as if she could hardly drag herself along, looked Aunt Ethel pathetically in the eye and said 'Waaah!'
Maybe her discomfort was genuine. Maybe it was the result of eating that orange envelope. At any rate we had no more trouble that visit. By night Aunt Ethel slept with Sugieh cradled in her compassionate arms. By day she nursed her on her lap, tenderly stroking her ears and telling her what wicked owners she had, to let the poor little darling be taken advantage of like that.
The poor little darling, wallowing in sympathy as only a Siamese can, acquiesced soulfully in everything she said. To listen to her she had never ever wanted to get married, and we had dragged her down to Dorset by the hair of her innocent little head.
We didn't care. For the first time in months – what was more with Sugieh and Aunt Ethel in the house – we had a little peace.
SIX
Enter Four Gladiators
Sugieh had her kittens at the end of March. After a harrowing evening trying to persuade her to have them in a cardboard box lined with newspaper, as recommended by the cat book, while she just as persistently kept getting out of it and marching upstairs flat-eared with indignation at the very idea, they were born just after midnight. On our bed – otherwise, she said, she wouldn't have them at all – while Charles and I sat either side of her, cat book in hand, anxiously awaiting complications.
There were none. Except for the fact that the last one to arrive was half the size of the other three – and that as Charles pointed out to her, was entirely her own fault; he had warned her often enough about rushing up those trees – everything went off quietly, efficiently and speedily.
It was the last time anything was to go off quietly in our house for a long time to come. The next morning we awoke to the depressing discovery that Sugieh, who never did anything by halves, had decided to become the Perfect Mother.
That, while it lasted, was purgatory. For the first few days she hardly left the kittens for a moment. When she wanted food she stood at the top of the stairs and shouted. When we took it up to her she was either back in her basket feeding them as though they were delicate lilies about to fade before her very eyes, or pacing anxiously up and down like a commercial traveller with a train to catch.
The kittens weren't much help either. The only time we did persuade her to come down with us for a while she had hardly had time to cross her eyes at Shorty in the old familiar way before there was a piercing wail from above and she was off up the stairs two at a time shouting look what happened when she left them for a Moment. Now they were being Kidnapped!
Nobody outside a lunatic asylum would have wanted to kidnap that lot, and well she knew it. From the moment they solemnly opened one eye each, days before they should have done, and leered forth at the world like a lot of piratical Fu Manchus it was obvious that they were up to no good. It gave the act a wonderful fillip, though. Much better than the perfect mother, Sugieh was now the perfect mother defending her children from the kidnappers.
Nobody was free from suspicion on this score. When the Rector came to tea she no longer sat on his knee and shed affectionate hairs on his best black trousers. She stayed in the hall giving him sinister looks round the door. When the butcher's boy arrived, instead of running out ahead of everybody else to have a private word about the liver, she glared at him from the window bawling One step Nearer and she'd call the Police.
When the police did come, in the shape of PC McNab bearing a summons for Charles who had, not surprisingly, driven into town one morning in a coma and left the car under a no-parking sign for two hours, she kicked up such a fuss we weren't at all surprised to see McNab bring out his notebook as soon as he got out into the lane and make an entry that undoubtedly related to breaches of the peace. And when Aunt Ethel came for the weekend specially to see the kittens and we brought them downstairs thinking she at any rate would be all right because she was a friend of Sugieh's, Sugieh nearly went mad.
One after another, as fast as she could, she grabbed the kittens by the scruff of the neck and rushed them dramatically back to the spare room. At bedtime every night for the past year she had complained loudly and bitterly that the spare room was a Vile Prison and she might just as well be Marie Antoinette. Now, it seemed, it was the only place in the world where her kittens were safe. When Aunt Ethel followed apologetically after her with the basket and an odd kitten she had found on the stairs Sugieh, standing bravely on guard in the doorway, growled at her so realistically with her tail bushed and the Siamese fighting ridge raised down her back that Aunt Ethel came downstairs faster than I have ever seen her move in her life and caught the next train home.
Even Sugieh, I think, realised she had overdone it that time. Either that or she was tired of playing at perfect mothers. The next morning, anyway, she dumped the kittens in bed with us at seven o'clock as nonchalantly as if she had never heard of kidnappers, went off into the woods and didn't come back until nine. From then on she made it perfectly clear that they were as much our responsibility as hers.
We have since often wondered whether being dropped on their heads as often as those kittens were in the next few weeks had any connection with the way they grew up. Every morning at least one of them went down with a thump as Sugieh leapt madly onto the bed, stuffing kittens into my arms as fast as she could, and though we
wouldn't have gone as far as Sugieh and said that that one was Spoiled – she never bothered to pick up the one she had dropped; just looked at him in annoyance and went off to get another – it was obvious that it couldn't have done them much good. It was significant, too, that the one who got dropped on his head more often than anybody else was Solomon.
Everybody who knows him has at some time or other asked us why on earth we called him Solomon. The answer is that it was his mother's idea of a joke. Knowing full well that we planned to keep a tom out of her first litter as a show cat and to call him – rather brightly, we thought – Solomon Seal, she obligingly produced three toms to give us a choice, watched with intense interest for a couple of weeks as, cat book in hand, we went over their points and debated which we should have – and finally had the biggest laugh of her life when it turned out there was only one we could keep. The one we had written off at the start because he had big feet, ears like a bat and brains to match. All the rest, including the diminutive queen, were Blues.
Solomon, in addition to his other faults, had spotted whiskers. Long before the dusky smudges appeared on his nose and paws to warn us that he was ours for life we had been able to distinguish him from the others by this peculiarity. 'Like an orchid,' said Aunt Ethel, tenderly retrieving him from the coal bucket on her next visit, after she and Sugieh had made it up and Sugieh, dumping her squirming, screeching family into Aunt Ethel's lap by way of a peace-offering, had dropped him overboard as usual. Like bamboo would have been nearer the truth. I have never seen a cat who looked so much like Popski in my life. Bamboo or orchid, it was by his whiskers we recognised him as the one who always fed lying down.
