by Doreen Tovey
After that the sensible birds gave the cottage a wide berth. Any time they had to fly over our territory when the cats were about they zoomed smartly up at the front gate and flew over at ceiling height until they reached the back. The jackdaws persevered for a while but even they gave up when Sheba climbed the chimney stack one day and looked meaningly at them through the cowl. The only bird that came near us when the cats were about – and he disappeared pretty smartly when Sheba looked round the corner – was the blackbird who used to play with Solomon. At least the blackbird was playing, as birds sometimes do – flying low over Solly's head as he crossed the lawn, uttering mocking little cries and perching enticingly on the wall. Solly wasn't. He went after him like a Wimbledon champion, leaping spectacularly through the air with his paws going in all directions.
That, actually, was where the blackbird made his mistake. He had obviously watched Solomon hunting mice in the garden and summed him up as a blockhead who couldn't catch anything. He hadn't seen him indoors, practising with ping-pong balls and flies. Solomon with a ping-pong ball was a joy to watch. Sheba had what Charles loftily described as a typically female way of trying to catch things. When we threw a ball in the air for her she leapt hazily towards it, waved her paws and missed. It was surprising when you considered her prowess with mice – no less surprising than the fact that Solomon, who couldn't catch anything on the ground to save his life, could shoot through the air like an arrow and field anything we threw between his front paws while still in flight.
It was his only talent and he made the most of it. When we wouldn't throw balls for him, or rolled-up silver paper, he went round swatting flies. It was a little disturbing to have a cat continually sailing through the air as if he were Anton Dolin, particularly since he invariably came down again like a bomb, but it got rid of the flies. It also – though the blackbird didn't know it then – made it rather dangerous for little birds to make fun of him. One day, after a particularly good practice with a meat-fly, Solomon went out, leapt smartly into the air, and fielded two feathers out of old Smart-Alec's tail.
We knew the blackbird got away. We saw him with our own eyes, streaking down the valley as if the spooks were after him. Not, however, according to Solomon. He spent the rest of the evening swaggering round the place in a style we knew only too well – Charles called it Podgebelly's panther walk – with his head down, two black feathers sticking out of the corner of his mouth and a look which inferred that if you wanted to know where the rest of the bird was, he had it inside.
When he went to bed that night and the owls began to hoot across in the woods he got up and stalked to the window. There was a time, when he was a kitten, when he was scared of the owls and used to back rapidly under the bedclothes when they started up, but not now. Face pressed to the glass, his camel-like rear hunched threateningly in the air, he told them exactly what he'd do to them if they didn't shut up. Eat them and put their tails with the blackbird's.
Often in the days that followed I remembered Aunt Ethel's prediction that Solomon would grow up not quite right in the head. Watching him leaping round the lawn, shadow-boxing – on the strength of two blackbird's feathers – everything that flew over from a sparrow to an aeroplane, I wondered which of us would end up in a straitjacket first. Solomon or me.
When he went out of the door now it was on his stomach, in case there was one round the corner. When he patrolled the garden – with reproving glances at the potting shed where Sheba, he said, made far too much noise talking to Sidney and frightened them away – it was with the narrowed eye and stealthy tread of the hunter. When he slept before the fire, stomach up to catch the heat, it was no longer the deep, tranquil sleep of somebody with nothing but crab sandwiches on his mind; he caught dream birds so energetically it looked as if he had St Vitus's dance.
They were the only birds he did catch. No live ones ever came within swatting distance again. To make up for it, if there was a dead bird lying around within a mile radius, Solomon brought that home instead.
Sometimes it was very dead – like the crow that must have been shot quite a month before and nearly fell to pieces when Solomon laid it triumphantly on the carpet. We picked that up in a shovel and returned it hurriedly to the woods – better make sure it was off our premises, said Charles; we didn't want anybody thinking Solomon had killed it. Actually I thought Charles was being a bit over-cautious there. Even Solomon's greatest admirer could hardly have believed him capable of shooting a crow with a twelve-bore shot gun. But I said nothing. It didn't make much difference anyway. The next day the crow was back again.
By A Great Stroke of Luck, said Solomon, laying it lovingly on the carpet where it positively vibrated with age, he had gone another way through the woods than was his wont, and there it was under some leaves. Nice, wasn't it? he demanded, licking a limp-looking feather carefully into place and settling down possessively beside it. Almost as good as new. He was going to Keep It For Ever and Ever, he added loudly, looking round to make sure that Charles was listening. But Charles, holding his nose, had already gone for the disinfectant.
After that Charles listened to me and Solomon's trophies went in the dustbin, with the lid hammered on so that he couldn't get them out again. He tried hard enough. He practically did a skiffle act all on his own, scratching frantically at the lid and wailing loudly for his fowl's head he'd discovered on Father Adams's rubbish heap and his pigeon's wing that he'd found up the lane.
Charles said if the crow had been dead a month, the pigeon must have died during the Roman occupation – but smell didn't worry Solomon. The more it reeked, the more ghastly the specimen looked, the better he was pleased. So long, that was, as he had found it himself. If we gave him something that wasn't perfectly fresh – meat bought one day, for instance, and offered to him for supper on the next – he stared at us in horror and said surely we didn't expect him to eat That. Sheba was just as bad. Trying to Poison Us, she would wail, reeling dramatically back at the first unbelieving sniff. After which they would go and sit forlornly side by side on the garden wall, asking passers-by in sad, small voices whether they had any spare food on them, or knew of a good home for two little cats that nobody wanted.
Weekends were the worst. Often by the time we got to Sunday night I was at my wits' end over feeding those animals. I might buy two pounds or more of perfectly fresh meat on Friday – and by Saturday lunchtime, if it was a warm day, they refused to touch it. Fish was out for the same reason. They wouldn't even eat that for Saturday breakfast. Tinned cat food set their ears on edge with horror. Siamese never ate that, they announced. Not even in an emergency. Best tinned beef or veal was acceptable for one meal. After that, that too was out. Siamese, they said, marching sadly out to the wall in dignified procession, needed Variety.
Week after week Sheba, looking so fragile it practically brought tears to my eyes, even though I knew she was putting it on, ate nothing at all on Sundays, while Solomon existed ostentatiously on All Bran. Our hearts sank every time we saw the open cupboard and the tell-tale packet on the floor with the hole hungrily torn in its side – mute reminders of the fact that we Weren't Feeding Them Properly. Wistfully we remembered Blondin – happy as a king with a couple of nuts and a slice of orange... his only vices a passion for trouser buttons and a tendency to stick his tongue hopefully down the spout of the teapot when nobody was looking… With a sigh of regret for the past we went out and ordered a refrigerator.
The day it arrived, a bright, gleaming symbol of their victory in the fight for fresher food for Siamese, Solomon – sometimes it seemed there was no end to the trouble that cat could cook up for us – brought home his biggest trophy yet. Irving himself couldn't have devised a more effective entrance. The men on their knees in the kitchen fixing the wires; myself making a friendly cup of tea; Sheba sitting, wide-eyed and inquisitive, right in front as usual and one of the men asking her jocularly whether she thought it was going to be big enough to keep her mice in; Charles working out how
many bottles of beer it would hold – and suddenly Solomon, his eyes shining like stars above a cloud of feathers, his long thin legs spread wide to avoid the trailing wings, staggering in with a big cock-pheasant.
You could have cut the silence with a knife as he laid it at my feet and cuffed a stray feather off his nose. The men looked at one another under the peaks of their caps. We knew what they were thinking – that they'd happened on a neat little poaching set-up where we used Siamese cats instead of dogs and, poachers being what they were, the sooner they happened out of it again the better.
Charles tried hard to mend matters by explaining about Solomon's habit of bringing dead things home from the woods. Giving the body a nonchalant push with his foot he said Ha! Ha! Like the old crow he brought home he supposed – fell to pieces the moment you touched it. This one didn't fall to pieces. It rolled over with a solid, healthy thud, whereupon Solomon leapt at it with a fiendish yell and warned it to get up again if it dared. The men, scared out of their wits, finished as hurriedly as they could and fled. They hardly spoke another word to us, but as their van leapt away up the lane a hushed voice floated out through the window. No wonder they wanted a refrigerator, it said.
One thing we did know. Wherever Solomon had got the pheasant he hadn't caught it himself. A blackbird's tail-feathers were one thing – but a bird that size would only have had to flap its wings at him and he'd have been up the nearest tree screaming for the fire brigade.
He might have stolen it from somebody's larder. It was equally possible that one of the local game-keepers had dropped it over the gate as a present in passing, as country people, shy of receiving thanks, sometimes do – and that Solomon had simply picked it up and brought it in.
We never knew the answer. For two days it lay hidden under the bath with Solomon trying to batter the door down and Charles alternately saying that it seemed a shame to waste it and that men had been sent to Botany Bay for less. We hoped somebody might drop a clue as to where it had come from, but they didn't. If it had come out of somebody's larder it was, as Charles said, quite obvious that it hadn't got there legitimately either. We dared not make enquiries for fear, if it wasn't a present, of branding Solomon as a poacher. Having spent every waking moment since the day he was born trying to impress people with his toughness it was, after all, only natural for them to believe him.
On the second night therefore – since, quite apart from conscience, we could hardly eat a bird which might (if one followed another line of thought) have died from poisoning, we crept out after dark with the body wrapped in a bag, walked two miles into the hills, and regretfully buried it in a ditch.
FIFTEEN
Solomon's Romance
How nice, people said – watching them march in majestic procession up the garden trouble-bent for Charles's latest batch of cabbage plants, or posed lovingly cheek to cheek in an armchair like a picture on a Christmas card – to have two Siamese cats.
In some ways it was. They were company for each other when we were out – and where, as Solomon said himself, could he have put his head when he slept in front of the fire on winter nights, if it wasn't for Sheba's stomach?
On the debit side, however, the mischief those two led each other into outdid a cage of monkeys. The time Sheba stowed away in Sidney's side-car for instance, and he didn't find her until he got home and then had to turn round and bring her all the way back – she'd never have thought of that on her own. Sheba was a home girl. She rarely went far from the garden herself and any time Solomon went off on one of his jaunts she could be depended on, to his disgust, to be standing gleefully in the porch bawling here he was and were we going to smack his bottom now as he tried to sidle surreptitiously up the path.
He could boast as much as he liked about where he'd been and what he'd done. Sheba wasn't interested. She preferred to stay at home and be Charles's and Sidney's little friend. Until she heard Solomon yelling one day to look where he was now – and when she did, there he was out in the lane sitting on the bonnet of a stationary car. She took one look at him, started to shout for Charles, and changed her mind. She had been good for so long that life had, to tell the truth, become rather boring. Besides, however often she advised it, Solomon never did get his bottom smacked. Instead he was made so much fuss of when he did come back from his wanderings that her prissy little nose was put rather out of joint… Without more ado she joined him on the bonnet of the car.
After that the moment anybody parked a car outside the cottage the pair of them were gone like a flash. To begin with they just sat on the front chatting madly to passers-by. That was bad enough. I nearly wore myself to a shadow rushing out to shoo them off and wipe away the paw marks before the owner returned. Then Solomon discovered that a car has an inside. I remember perfectly the day he found that out. Rushing out to grab them off the bonnet of a big black Humber, polishing away busily at the paw marks as I did so, I suddenly realised that he was staring incredulously at something through the windscreen, and when I looked to see what it was there was an old lady sitting in the back seat, staring equally incredulously back. Grinning weakly – it was all I could think of to do – I grabbed the cats and fled. It was pointless, of course. Solomon, having spotted the old lady, was determined to have a closer look. The moment I put him down on the lawn he was away over the wall again like a shot, this time clinging firmly to the door handle with both paws while he peered intently through the window.
Solomon, when he is determined, has claws like grappling hooks. I just couldn't get them off the door handle, and what with him bawling with rage because he wanted to see the lady, Sheba in her usual strategic position up the damson tree advising me to smack him this time anyway and the old lady practically in a state of collapse thinking she was being attacked by a mad woman and an equally mad cat, I could think of only one thing to do. Holding Solomon firmly round the middle I yelled as hard as I could for Charles. Charles disentangled Solomon. Charles, while I carried Solomon into the house, pacified the old lady. It was a bit difficult, he said – she kept saying that when her son came back from his walk we would hear more of this – until he mentioned that I was his wife. Whereupon, he said – rather puzzled, because he didn't know yet about me rushing out and polishing the bonnet of her car while she was still inside it – she patted his hand, saying poor, poor boy, we all had our troubles and must bear them bravely, and gave him a peppermint.
I swore I'd never get Solomon off a car again. I did of course. I was always dragging him off, from under – and now, if ever he found an open window – from inside other people's cars. Charles wouldn't, so I had to. I dared not open the door, even if it wasn't locked. Charles said people might think we had nefarious intentions. So there, sometimes two and three times a day, I stood dangling a long piece of string through the windows of strange cars, frantically imploring Solomon to be a good cat and come out before the owners returned. I held the string at arm's length and stood as far back from the car as I could. Nobody could possibly have thought I had nefarious intentions, but quite a few must have thought I had a screw loose. Particularly since Solomon never paid any attention anyway, but either lay at full length along the top of the back seat pretending to passers-by that it was All His and he was Waiting for the Driver or else was quite invisible on the floor, nosing around among the parcels.
He knew he was doing wrong. He always nipped smartly out again a split second before the owner returned. But I was terribly afraid that one day he – and I – would be caught. I was afraid, too, that one day he might get in a car without my knowing it and be driven off without the driver knowing it either. Automatically I dropped whatever I was doing and rushed to the front gate every time I heard a car. Then in the end, of course, as I might have expected if I'd stopped to consider how those cats' minds worked, it wasn't Solomon who got carried off, but Sheba.
Far more cautious than her brother, she never risked getting inside a car herself. The most she would do, while I fished frantically for him
with a piece of string, was to sit wide-eyed on the bonnet saying he was naughty, wasn't he, and she didn't know what we were going to do with him. She was longing to try it herself all the same. You could see it written all over her small blue face. So when at last the impulse became too great for her she went, obviously reasoning that she knew Sidney and would be quite safe with him, and sat in his side-car – and, such is the injustice of the world, promptly got abducted for her pains.
Solomon was beside himself with glee when she came back. This time it was his turn to do the shouting, and he made the most of it. Here she was, the Cross-Eyed Wonder Herself, he yelled stalking to meet her as she came, looking rather sheepish, down the path in Sidney's arms. What About Us Smacking Her Bottom For a Change, he roared in a voice that would have done credit to a lighthouse-keeper. He didn't wait for an answer. As soon as Sidney put her down he bowled her over himself, just to show who was who.
Usually, of course, it was the other way round. Sheba did the preliminary explorations and Solomon followed them up and got into trouble. The hole at the top of the stairs, for instance, where the electricity wires went through from the new part of the cottage to the old – Charles had pasted a piece of paper over that and painted it, to camouflage the spot until he had time to fill it in properly. It was Sheba who discovered that there was a gap at the bottom of the paper with an intriguing draught blowing through it – but while she was content merely to squint underneath it was Solomon, bustling up all bluff and bluster, who promptly thrust his paw clean through it, warning whoever was in there that they'd better come out quick or he'd be in after them. What was more he liked the dramatic effect so much that every time it was papered in future he did it again, and whenever I took visitors upstairs I had to explain not only the large hole perpetually edged with torn paper, but why there was usually a large, goofy-looking Siamese shouting threats down it as well.
