by Doreen Tovey
When we had new ceiling-height cupboards built in the kitchen it was Sheba who first ventured cautiously on to the draining board and opened a door with a small, inquisitive paw – but it was Solomon, once she had proved there was nothing there to hurt little cats, who banged them lustily open every day as part of the general routine. When we took them for a walk past the cornfield it was Sheba who first thought of livening things up by jumping on an occasional post and imploring Charles to lift her down – but it was Solomon who had to thunder up and down every one like a circus pony and finally, wild with excitement, jumped off on the wrong side and got lost in the corn.
Whatever was happening, Solomon had to be most important and the only one in the limelight – except when it came to something like having his ears cleaned or his coat combed. Then there never was a cat more willing that Sheba should be first. He sat by with great interest while we worked on her, sniffing at the cotton wool and the saucer of oil, peering knowledgeably into her ears and assuring us that they were absolutely filthy and she couldn't have washed them for months. The moment his turn arrived, however, Solomon was gone. Yelling that we were making a big mistake, he wasn't our cat at all, he dashed desperately from cover to cover, anchoring himself by his claws to the backs of chairs and the edges of carpets. And when at last the deed was done – two little screws of wool turned gently in his ears and a comb passed swiftly through his coat, though, as Father Adams said, from the howls it sounded as if we were sawing the legs off a herd of elephants – he went around with his ears turned sorrowfully down, gazing at us so reproachfully from underneath them that we hated ourselves for hours.
When the winter came and Sheba, treading gingerly out into the first snow they had ever seen, proved that it was quite safe to venture out it was Solomon who every night scratched and rattled at the door, demanding to be let out on the lawn where he tore flamboyantly round in a foot of snow with his tail stuck up like a periscope while she, having done a prim little patrol up the path and back, sat genteelly on the porch cleaning off her paws. In the same way, while it was Sheba who said that winter was a good time for catching birds because we fed them and took to sitting under the lilac every morning with her eyes fixed like sapphire moons on the temporary bird table, it was Solomon who insisted on sitting hopefully on the table itself. Spoiling everything, Sheba wailed when we fetched them in so that the birds could feed in peace, though Solomon insisted that he was disguised as a piece of bread.
There were some things, however, in which they were unanimous. Like not coming in when we called them and not wanting anybody else to live with us. They got quite worried about that at one time. There was, living further down the lane, a pretty short-haired blue queen with amber eyes called Susie, whose one failing was that she loved everybody. She loved dogs, she loved humans, she loved other cats – she even loved the rangy, battle-scarred tom from the farm, as witnessed by the fact that of the squads of kittens she had every year at least nine-tenths were bull-headed and black and white. And one day, to his absolute horror, she fell in love with Solomon.
He tried looking at her. He explained loudly and at great length that he liked beetles better than girls. It was no good. Every time he put his head out of the door there was Susie sitting on the porch, purring like a sewing machine and waiting to rub cheeks. The expression on his face as he walked self-consciously up the garden pretending he didn't know she was tripping adoringly alongside him was priceless. So was the way, if he saw her coming first, he nipped indoors and peered apprehensively round the hall curtains till she'd gone. Eventually she got wise to that, started coming in to look for him, and, passing the feeding dishes on the way and reasoning romantically that Lover Boy would want her to share his jug of wine and loaf of bread like in the poem, took to polishing off the contents on the way.
She was wrong there. Lover Boy wouldn't even have given his grandmother a sniff at the dustbin if he could help it, while Sheba was so enraged she forgot all about being a lady, hid behind the door one day and, for the first time in her life, hit Susie on the nose as she passed.
It didn't help any that we liked Susie and made a fuss of her when she came. Encouraging her to eat his food, wailed Solomon, glowering darkly round the door from a position where he could dodge the moment she started looking lovingly in his direction. Inviting her into our house, complained Sheba, jealously watching her rub against Charles's leg. Why didn't we have her to live with us and have done with it, they demanded indignantly the day they found her washing herself placidly in front of the fire.
That, as a matter of fact, had occurred to Susie herself. The next time she came she brought along a half-grown black and white kitten. After we had put her outside and told her to go home – much as we liked Susie this really was too much of a good thing – she took the kitten into the coalhouse and slept there all night on the paper sack. It wasn't that she didn't have a home to go to. It was just, she purred happily, shepherding her offspring through the back door at seven the next morning in the direction of the feeding dishes, that she loved Solly, and our cooking, so much she had decided to live with us instead.
We spent that day in a state of siege, with the back door firmly shut against the invaders and our two telling them to go home from every window in turn. Eventually it began to rain, and to our relief they went – though we felt terribly mean as we watched the long thin blue rear and the little squat black and white one disappearing sadly down the lane.
Half an hour later, with the rain still coming down in sheets, we heard faint squeaks from outside the back door. We looked at each other in dismay. 'She's got that kitten out there again,' said Charles. 'It'll absolutely drown in all this rain!' Good thing too, said Solomon, lying on his stomach and trying to peer under the door. That might teach it not to eat his food. But the thought of that little shrimp sleeping on the coal all night, getting no breakfast and now shivering out there in the rain all because of Susie's love for Solomon, was too much for us. Defeated we opened the door – and our eyes nearly shot out on stalks.
There in the pouring rain sat not the little black and white waif of the night before, but two beautiful blue kittens with round topaz eyes, their mouths wide open in a tremolo wail. They had obviously been rehearsed. We had never seen them before, but the moment the door opened they raised two perky little tails and marched boldly in. As they did so Susie jumped off the kitchen windowsill, where she had been waiting, and prepared to follow them. They were the very best she had, she explained in her shrill little voice. As we obviously only liked superior cats, could she bring them to live with us instead? It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, saying that she couldn't, and shutting the door in their faces.
SIXTEEN
Three Years' Hard
It is three years now since Solomon and Sheba came into our lives. Sometimes – it is a symptom common among Siamese owners – it seems like thirty. In that time there have been diverse changes in our household. We no longer have Shorty, for instance. He died quite suddenly last year. We felt so guilty in case it was the result of being perpetually knocked off his hook by Solomon and Sheba – though indeed, wedged securely in the armchair in his cage and swearing heartily away with a cat either side of him he always seemed quite to enjoy it – that we sent him to the Ministry of Agriculture for a post-mortem.
When the report came back a weight was lifted from all our consciences. He had, it said – though how he had managed it on birdseed and water was a mystery – died from a fatty heart and enlarged liver. We didn't replace him. With the cats around it didn't seem fair – and anyway his cage had hardly been relegated sadly to the woodshed for more than a week before Solomon, climbing inquisitively over a pile of junk, fell on it and reduced it to a shape which made it, as he himself said after carefully inspecting the damage, quite impossible to keep a little bird in again.
We still have the fish – though their lives too have not been without event. Last winter the biggest of the lot develope
d fungus on his head and gills. For a fortnight, while everybody heroically ate shop cake, he swam sadly round in a special fungus-clearing solution in the pastry bowl. At the end of that time the fungus was still gaining and it looked very much as if we might have to listen to Sheba, who visited him hopefully every day and, when she found she couldn't reach him on account of the cake rack tied over the top of the bowl, strongly advised us to hit him on the head and put him down the drain. In desperation I tried a remedy I found in a book in the public library. Put the fish in a solution of one teaspoonful of common salt to a quart of water, it said, increasing the quantity of salt by an additional teaspoonful each day for four days.
It didn't seem to do our fish much good. Indeed by the evening of the third day he was floating round the bowl on his side, practically at his last gasp. It was Charles who, in a sudden flash of inspiration, realised the truth – that on account of the damp weather the salt we had been using was much more concentrated than usual, and that in consequence we had practically pickled the little chap alive. In a twinkling we had him out of his brine bath and into a bowl of warm, clean water.
But still he floated. Overcome with remorse we sat up till midnight, taking it in turn to hold him upright and steer him round the bowl by his tail until, at long last, our efforts were rewarded and it gave a faint flicker of its own accord. He recovered rapidly and within a short time, the fungus completely cleared, we were able to return him to the tank. The odd thing was that whereas before he had been completely gold, where the salt had acted on the fungus he was now black. He had a black head and gills, black tips to his fins and a black tail. He looked – said Charles, roaring with laughter, much to the disgust of Solomon who knew he was being talked about and immediately put down his ears and sulked – exactly like old Podgebelly. There was another interesting thing. We had never known before whether our fish, swimming somnolently round in their tank, were male or female. They all behaved exactly the same. Not, however, after the salt bath. Within a few days Podgebelly's double, his smart black tail waggling rakishly through the water, was chasing the girls like mad.
Solomon and Sheba have had their ups and downs as well. Sheba, not long ago, was bitten on the tail by one of the local toms. How she – so coy she closed her eyes and practically swooned if you so much as glanced at her, so prim she always looked as if she were wearing mittens and a mob cap – could have let such a mangy specimen of feline manhood come within half a mile of her was a mystery, but even she, I suppose, has her romantic moments. She paid for that one, a week later, with an abscess as big as a tangerine on her tail. True to form she was very brave when we took her to the vet, allowing him to open the abscess and pump a penicillin injection into her rump with an air of fragile martyrdom that practically had him in tears over his hypodermic. He said we must keep the incision open for a week, draining it and inserting a penicillin tube twice a day. With some cats, he said, that could be the devil of a job, but with this little sweetheart – here Sheba closed her eyes and smirked at him; the way, no doubt, she had smirked at the tom before he bit her tail – we would obviously have no trouble at all.
That was what he thought. Sheba and a handsome young vet was one thing. Sheba and ourselves was quite another. He could open an inch and a half of her tail with a scalpel and all she did was languish at him. We only had to pick up the bottle of Dettol and she was streaking up the hill to the Rector's like a comet, yelling to Hide her Quick, we were going to Torture Her.
As if that weren't enough to put up with, Solomon met the same cat a day or two later in the lane, stalked up and stuck his neck out at him like an ostrich – instead of taking to his heels as any normal cat would have done – and promptly got slashed on the cheek. It was only a small cut – but doing Sheba's tail was a picnic to trying to see to that. She, after all, was very small and frail. If we could stop her getting out of the house we could, with Father Adams to help us, usually corner her somewhere and minister to her; even if it was flat on our stomachs under the table like a rugger scrum. But Solomon was so powerful even three of us couldn't hold him still. The cat book said the way to deal with an awkward cat was to clutch him by the scruff of the neck and press him firmly down on the table. But Solomon had so much scruff he could turn round inside it, with the remarkable result that while we were holding him by the back of the neck he was flat on his back waving his paws like a windmill. The only way we could cope with him was for me to drag him round and round the floor on my hands and knees pretending he was a kitten, and getting a dab in with the Dettol when I could.
They had, needless to say, fully recovered by the time the grandfather clock arrived. The man who came to set it up laughed when I asked about having it hooked to the wall so that they couldn't knock it over. No, cats couldn't hurt that old beauty he said, affectionately patting its walnut sides. They'd made things to last when they made he.
They had indeed. That clock, which had come to us on the death of my grandmother's brother, had belonged to my great-great-grandfather, and what with his years in the family shipping business in New York and his son's sojourn as a sheep-farmer on the River Plate it had done some travelling in its time. 'Twice round the Horn and the scars to show it,' great-grandfather used to say, after nostalgia for good old English beer and a couple of Victorian policemen to push him home on a barrow at closing time had brought him home to final retirement in the land of his birth. The scars were still there. Deep chips out of its base where it had slipped its moorings once in a gale and fallen, as great-grandfather himself was always doing, over his sea-chest. Neither great-grandfather nor Cape Horn, however, had ever subjected that poor old clock to the indignities it suffered at the hands of those cats.
The man had no sooner hung the weights, set the pendulum with loving care and departed than they were on it like a gang of demolition workers. Sheba perched on top, sneezing indignantly because she had found a crack that hadn't been properly dusted, and Solomon – expert, from long practice with the pantry, at opening doors – with his head inside watching the works. It superseded all other interests. For a while even the joys of tearing up the stair carpet and sitting on cars were forgotten. When it struck they fell over one another in a mad dash to the hall in case the works were falling out. When I wound it up Sheba hung over the top dabbing at the hands while Solomon, with a triumphant howl, sprang up my back and stood on my head to join her.
I worried when the weights were up in case the clock was top heavy and Sheba, leaping like a spawning salmon from the hall chest, might tip it over. When they were down I was scared of Solomon, whom we usually saw these days as two spidery back legs and a long black tail hanging out of the clock case, getting tangled up in them and being dragged inside. I worried so much that when we went out I took no chances either with the clock or the cats. In addition to tying up the window catches and putting newspapers on the stairs I now tied a piece of rope round the clock case so that Solomon couldn't open it, and dragged a heavy armchair against it so that Sheba couldn't knock it over.
Eventually we found a key for the door and Charles screwed the clock itself to the wall. Not, however, before it had served as another example to the village of our being as mad as hatters. Usually the first thing I did when I got home was to restore the hall to normal, but one night, being particularly tired, I left it. That, naturally, was the night one of the village ladies called to leave a collecting envelope for charity. There was rather an odd look on her face when I explained the avalanche of newspapers at the bottom of the stairs, the rope tied rakishly round the clock and the armchair pushed hurriedly against its middle; particularly since at that moment the cats, busily eating their supper in the kitchen, were nowhere in sight. There was an even odder one when, half an hour later, she returned to pick up the envelope and saw that what I had said was true. One Siamese was squatting like a cross-eyed owl on top of the clock and the other, with his head inside it, was delivering a running commentary on the works.
Not that the villa
ge needed any extra confirmation of their belief that we are cuckoo. They have had quite enough evidence of that in the past three years. Myself on the mornings we have to be away early, for instance, charging up the lane in my dressing gown carrying a cat basket and barking like a dog. I take the cat basket because it is quite impossible to carry two Siamese, squirming like demented eels, together; if and when I am lucky enough to catch up with them Sheba rides home in the basket and Solomon, wailing tearfully about this being The Morning he Wanted to Be a Horse, hangs down my back like a sack. I bark because it does – sometimes – deceive them into thinking there is a dog about and halts them in their tracks. I am in my dressing gown because if I don't start out after them the moment they disappear, by the time I am dressed they are quite likely to be strolling happily through the next village.
It is no good explaining this to people, of course. They just think we are mad. Like the two early-morning walkers on whom I once, still in my dressing gown, descended like Tarzan from the woods. I can see their faces now as I came slithering down the steep, muddy path, grabbing wildly at the passing branches to steady myself and finally, losing my balance, sliding the last few yards to the road on the seat of my pyjamas. I explained that I was looking for a Siamese cat. It didn't help matters at all that at that moment two Siamese cats came ambling elegantly out of the front gate enquiring in tones of pained surprise what on earth was I sitting in the road like that for; they had been waiting in the garden for hours.
