Cats in the Belfry (8 page)

  How we finished that journey I never knew. We tried going slowly. It made no difference except that it gave passers-by more chance to gawk. We tried going fast – and Sugieh threw herself hysterically under the clutch pedal and nearly killed the lot of us. We put her in the basket with the kittens, thinking they might calm her down, and within fifty yards we had to stop and take her out again before she trampled them to death. Then, no sooner had we got her out and strapped the basket of kittens up again than there was one almighty screech – and Solomon pushed his big, stupid head clean through an airhole and hung there like a stuffed trophy on a wall, choking rapidly and screaming in terror.

  That was one of the worst moments of my life. Even Charles seemed to have gone mad. He leapt out of the car, slamming the door so that Sugieh couldn't follow him, and began frantically turning his pockets out on the grass. He was, he shouted, when I asked what he was doing, looking for a penknife. The only way to rescue Solomon was to cut him out. If he did, I shouted back, he'd kill him. You couldn't get a bee's whisker between Solomon's neck and the basket, let alone a penknife. Look!

  I put out my hand to show him how firmly Solomon was stuck – and Solomon immediately bit my finger to the bone. If he had enough strength to do that, I thought, he had enough strength to stand what I was going to do now. Without more ado I put my hand flat against his face, shut my eyes and pushed. There was a sort of sucking noise and then, with just enough time to bite another finger for luck, Solomon's head plopped back to safety like a cork from a bottle.

  On we went. Dante's
Inferno
on wheels. The hole in the basket plugged with a scarf, me with my hand wrapped in a towel and Sugieh, the cause of it all, still going round and round the car like a spinning top. At Glastonbury we found a basket shop, bought the biggest hamper they had and shut her in it. Now at least she couldn't race round the car. Instead she expended her energy in screaming louder than ever.

  We hardly expected to reach Halstock alive ourselves. We were even more astounded when we reached the kennels and unlocked the baskets. Out, from one, stepped Sugieh, sleek and composed as you like, to greet the Francis's with a gracious bellow. And out, from the other, tumbled four lively kittens fit and fresh as daisies, led by Solomon whom we had expected to find at least a hospital case.

  We left them going up and down the wire of their run like caterpillars. We arranged, however, to ring the cattery later that night to see how they were. Charles said they might be suffering from delayed shock. When I heard him talking to Mrs Francis on the 'phone after dinner, and he gave a suppressed groan, I thought he was right. When he put down the receiver, however, he assured me that everything was quite normal. It was just that Sugieh had spotted Rikki and was busily shouting greetings at him the entire length of the cattery while the kittens – as Charles said, grimly, they would let us down – liked their nice, clean, sparkling earth-box so much they had gone to sleep in it.

EIGHT

C
ats, said Father Adams, leaning dejectedly on our front gate with his hat tilted over his eyes, was the very devil. From which remark we gathered that, despite all his efforts, Mimi was once more in season.

  Three times now she and Ajax had honeymooned uproariously in the attic, and three times Father Adams, praying piously for the patter of tiny paws, had been disappointed. Not only had Mimi failed to outdo the strawberry patch, now the strawberry patch wasn't any good either. A couple of Mimi's earlier suitors had staged a prize fight in it one night to console themselves and trampled all the flowers.

  Father Adams said it had him licked. He wouldn't listen to Mrs Adams's theory that it all arose from Ajax already having a wife and steadfastly refusing – as all good husbands should – to look at another cat. He said she was a silly old fool. Not about Ajax having a wife. All Dr Tucker's patients knew Ajax's wife. She was a slender doe-eyed creature called Andromache who had two claims to fame. Firstly that she had bitten the grocer's boy, which was something a good many housewives who had suffered from his cheek would like to have done themselves. And secondly that she was so fond of Ajax that even when she had kittens, which is a time when most queens will attack a tom on sight, she would let him get into the basket with them.

  Father Adams knew that was right. He had seen it for himself. Hefty, battle-scarred Ajax tenderly washing the ears of his latest batch of offspring while Andromache sunbathed on the porch. Father Adams's comment on that was that he was an adjectival fool. Catch him putting a flannel to any of his kids' faces while his missus sat round sunning her fat rump.

  What Father Adams refused to believe was that Ajax wasn't interested in other females. Cats had more sense, he said. Nobody else believed it either – until a certain strange sequence of events that set everybody wondering. Andromache, coming into season at a time when Ajax was away at the vet's for ear treatment, got out of the pantry window one night and went for a walk with a cat called Nelson who lived at the Carpenter's Arms. It was a fine May evening, with the air heady with the scent of hawthorn and a nightingale singing romantically in the copse. Ajax was miles away with penicillin powder in his ear, Nelson was near at hand and ardently amorous – and nine weeks later there were seven black and white kittens with unmistakably Nelsonian squeaks in the basket on the doctor's porch.

  Ajax didn't help with that lot. Andromache might rub whiskers with him as much as she liked and say of course they were his, silly, it must have been the penicillin – but he knew black and white when he saw it. He knew Nelson, too. He nearly murdered him one night on the roof of the Carpenter's Arms and the next time he went to stay with Mimi there was no nonsense about being faithful to his wife. Six strapping little Ajaxes Mimi had, and Father Adams rubbing his hands with delight; though Mrs Adams rather took the gilt off the gingerbread by continually saying it didn't seem right to her until he asked her what the devil she wanted
him
to do about it. Take the ruddy cats to a Marriage Guidance Council?

  It was, of course, complete coincidence. Mimi just happened to be a cat who didn't mate easily. All the same, as people said, it made you think. At the time when Father Adams was leaning on our gate moaning, however, this extraordinary turn of events was still in the future. We, too, were quite oblivious of the tragedy ahead of us. Our problem just then was to fit Sugieh and her tyrannical family into a normal pattern of living.

  It took an awful lot of doing. When we had visitors to stay, for instance, we could no longer put them in the spare room. Way back when Sugieh was using it as a nursery we had moved the earth-box up there for convenience – and there, like the Rock of Gibraltar, the kittens expected it to stay. After the embarrassing night when Solomon – who was always much too lazy to use the box before going to bed as Sugieh had taught him, and in consequence invariably had to get up in the early hours – practically tore the door down shouting that he had to get in quick while we in turn tried fruitlessly to persuade him that a box on the landing would do just as well, we gave up putting visitors in there. We slept in it ourselves, kittens, earth-box and all, while the visitors had our room.

  We had, too, to be very careful in our choice of guests. It had been one thing to leave Sugieh sitting on the table at mealtimes. We could always nip her off quickly and pretend we didn't know what had come over her – she never did that in the normal way. When, however, a cat and four kittens marched on to the table like a detachment of the Salvation Army as soon as it was laid and grouped themselves solidly round the cruet, it was no good trying to pass that off as an accident. Neither was it any good locking them out in the hall and pretending that was where they usually spent mealtimes. They kicked up such a racket, yelling and banging on the door, that it invariably led to the visitors saying not to shut the little dears out for their sakes and opening the door themselves. Whereupon the little dears would hurl themselves across the room and onto the table with such purpose there could be no doubt even in the dimmest mind as to where they normally sat at mealtimes.

  By the time we had weeded out people who objected to kittens peering interestedly into their plates while they ate, people who were squeamish about Solomon sicking up spiders into their laps – that was the worst of spiders, they had such indigestible legs – and people who objected to playing canasta with kittens chewing the cards or poking experimental paws into their ears, there weren't really many we could invite at all.

  In some ways it was just as well. The place wasn't looking its best just then anyway. The lamp on the side table, for instance, made from a Georgian candlestick and so lopsided it reminded one of a bad Channel crossing. Romantically-minded visitors might like to imagine its having been dropped down some sweeping Regency staircase in a moment of emotional crisis by a lady who looked like Margaret Lockwood, or used as a weapon in a drunken Regency brawl. The truth was that it got bent one day when four kittens tried to jump it at once in a glorious Grand National round the sitting room, and we were never able to straighten it out.

  On the bureau there used to stand a Bristol glass jug, an old toby jug and a china image of a Breton woman spinning. The Bristol jug went west the day after Sugieh brought her family down from the spare room for the first time. When I rushed in after the crash Solomon, sitting on the spot where it had ­once stood and looking down at the remains with eyes as round as saucers – Sugieh and the others were busily looking out of the window at an ant they swore had just gone round the corner – said it fell off all by itself just as he got there, and why had it gone that funny shape?

  We never knew who was responsible for knocking off the head of the Breton spinner. Everybody was at the far end of the vegetable garden busily learning to catch mice when we found her decapitated body lying on the carpet, and when they all trooped back again at lunchtime they assured us they were just as mystified as we were.

  After that we took the precaution of putting our one remaining treasure – the toby jug – on the floor when the kittens were around, but we might just as well have left it where it was. Seeing that the top of the bureau was now a nice clear space the gang took to sitting on it
en masse
while they decided what to do next and one day, what with the blue boys having a practice fight while they waited, Solomon saying he ought to sit in front because he was most important and his sister furiously refusing to budge otherwise she couldn't see Charles, the whole lot fell off, landed on the jug like a bomb, and that was the end of that.

  Wherever we looked we were surrounded by evidence of our decline and fall. The hide chair in the corner, draped with a tattered car rug. Not to protect it from the kittens – we had long given up hope of that; when they wanted to sharpen their claws they just turned back the rug and got down to it – but to conceal the fact that the stuffing now stuck out in tufts, like some strange African hairdressing style. The patch on the carpet where Solomon sicked up the day he ate two cream cakes at a sitting – and another where Charles dropped the coffee pot the day the she-kitten, who was still hardly bigger than a mouse, lovingly climbed his leg inside his trousers instead of out.

  Aunt Ethel was cross about that. Charles ought to have more self-control, she said, and I ought to know better than to give a kitten that age cream cakes.

  That was a joke if you like. From the day Solomon found his way onto the table for the first time by the simple expedient of clambering up the curtains and falling off when he got to food level there had never been any need to give him anything. What he fancied he took. The trouble was, what he fancied wasn't always good for him.

  Prawns, for instance. Offer Sugieh a prawn and she would close her eyes and say we knew she never ate anything. Offer it to the blue boys and they took one sniff and fought harder than ever. Offer it to the she-kitten, who was so fastidious we wondered she didn't want all her meals sent down from the Dorchester, and she said it was dirty and buried it under a rug. Offer it to Solomon – offer him even a sniff of a prawn's whisker – and, his black face shining with eagerness and his small pink tongue licking nearly up to his eyebrows, he would follow you to the ends of the earth.

  Solomon liked garlic sausage, liver sausage, All Bran and string. The first time we saw a piece of string vanish into his mouth, followed by an almighty hiccup which nearly lifted him off the floor, we rang the vet in a panic, but he sighed wearily and said not to worry, particularly if it was Solomon whom he always referred to as the Gannet. Just let nature take its course. It did – then and all the other times we found him eating string, surrounded by an admiring audience of kittens who watched his big act as if he were the star turn at the circus – which, of course, was just what he imagined himself to be. But it never failed to scare us stiff. I was afraid he'd choke and Charles colourfully imagined it winding round his inside like the string on an outboard motor. It took years off us when he made the exciting discovery that he could now get a ping-pong ball right inside his mouth and gave up string-eating to be an Alsatian dog instead.