Cats in the Belfry (6 page)

  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

S
ugieh 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.

  We nearly had a fit the first time we saw it – three kittens feeding away for dear life and standing, to get ­a better grip, on the fourth, who appeared to be unconscious. After we had dragged him out three times to give him air, however, only to find that within a few minutes he had disappeared once more beneath the scrum, we began to get suspicious. When we lifted the top layer of kittens and had a look our suspicions were confirmed. While the others squealed and clawed and battled for position on top, the one with the big feet and spotted whiskers lay blissfully underneath, on his back, with the whole bottom row to himself.

  The result of his uninterrupted meals was, of course, that he soon became the biggest kitten of the lot and it was because of this, and the fact that he was Sugieh's favourite, that he was always being dropped.

  When she felt like showing off – and it did, though we hated to admit it, make a charming picture – it was always Solomon that she carted down the lane, smirking blandly over his fat white head at the applause. As, however, the outing was essentially in the nature of a film star pushing her offspring round Hyde Park for the benefit of the photographers she usually dropped him on the path as soon as she got back and left him for us to put away. Sometimes she came over the wall and dropped him in the ditch. Invariably she dropped him when she tried some awkward manoeuvre like leaping onto the bed. As he grew bigger she dropped him more and more. When she carried him upstairs his fat white body bumped solidly against every stair. Aunt Ethel, trying ­fruitlessly to wrest him from Sugieh's grasp on one such occasion, forecast darkly that he would grow up not quite right in the head. She couldn't go wrong there, of course. No Siamese is ever right in the head. Nevertheless it was odd that when Solomon did grow up he had even more peculiarities than an ordinary Siamese – including an overwhelming desire to be dragged round by the scruff of his neck.

  It was incredible, seeing that once Sugieh stopped being the perfect mother she acted more as if she needed a course in child care, how those kittens survived. When they wanted washing she washed them so hard they nearly shot out of their skins. When they annoyed her she bit them so hard they screamed for mercy. All except Solomon, who bit her back and then, when she chased him, rolled over and waved his four black socks so disarmingly that he got an extra feed while the others weren't looking.

  She had no idea of diet at all. At four weeks old, when according to the book we were supposed to start weaning them onto a patent milk food, she said it wasn't good for them and drank it herself. At six weeks, when we were practically going round the bend because – acting no doubt on her instructions – they shut their eyes and mouths firmly the moment they as much as saw a saucer and we despaired of ever weaning them at all, we found her upstairs one morning surreptitiously feeding them with large lumps of rabbit from her own breakfast and watching proudly while they fought over it like tigers.

  She knew quite well that it was wrong. When we lectured her about their delicate stomachs she sat with her ears down, looked at us from under her eyelashes and said it was Solomon. It may well have been, at that. Solomon, who was the one we had worried about most over this feeding business because he was such a big kitten and how he was managing on nothing but his mother's milk we had dared not think, was at that moment standing knee-deep in the middle of the rabbit bowl slurping it back like spaghetti. Solomon, at any rate, was the one chosen – not from malice but because she thought he was so wonderful we couldn't resist him – to bear the blame for everything from then on.

  When she stole one of Charles's best yellow socks and showed the delighted kittens how to chew holes up and down the leg till it looked like a colander it was Solomon – when the reaction set in and she realised what she'd done – who was detailed to bring us the remains while the rest sat in trepidation on the landing, ready to run.

  When we went to the cinema one night and foolishly left them on our bed because it was cold and they looked so appealing cuddled together on the eiderdown it was Solomon – the rest, led by Sugieh, bolted under the bed the minute they heard us coming up the stairs – who was left in small, solitary splendour to explain the row of holes across the top of a brand new blanket. He had a job doing that. There was only one cat whose mouth would have fitted those round wet holes – and she was flat on her stomach under the bed, pretending she was part of the carpet. There was only one cat, too, strong enough to turn back the bedspread and eiderdown and pull the blanket out. Solomon listened, his big bat ears wide with horror, while we told him who she was, what she was, and what we were going to do to her when we caught her. Something obviously had to be done in a hurry if he was going to save Mum from the tanning of her life – and on the spur of the moment he did it. As I held the blanket up, wailing that it was absolutely useless, he bounced forward, his eyes bright with inspiration, and wiggled a fat black paw through one of the holes. That, he said, was the game they had been playing before we came in. That was the very reason Mum had chewed the holes, and it was terrific fun. Why didn't we have a go?

  We were always suckers for that little black pansy face. We did. Within a few seconds the bed was a hilarious mass of kittens charging gleefully up and down the eiderdown and poking paws at us through the blanket while Sugieh, reappearing as if by magic once she knew the danger was past, grabbed Solomon by the scruff of the neck and dropped him lightheartedly off the pillow as a reward.