More Cats in the Belfry (21 page)

  Most people's septic tanks overflow round the inspection cover. At the cottage it came up under the sitting-room floor. When, some years earlier, we'd had our downstairs bathroom moved upstairs, the plumber hadn't sealed off the old pipes as thoroughly as he should have done and, when there was a backfire the water rose up through them. It had happened once before, and Charles had sealed the end of the main pipe thoroughly, never dreaming any of the other pipes could be unsealed. When I spotted a large damp patch on the carpet one Sunday night, however, I knew what it was at once. This time, judging by the patch's situation, it was coming up the old washbasin pipe, which had been covered over with tiles.

  I'd deal with it tomorrow, I thought, being a bit of a handywoman. Change the tap washer, have the septic tank pumped out, take up the tiles and reseal the pipe... Simple it seemed until next morning, when the stopcock wouldn't turn off the water supply: it, too, needed a new washer. The tap went on dripping. I dared not take off its top, with the stopcock still full on. The local plumber's wife said he was round the bend dealing with people's burst pipes and there wasn't a hope of his coming for days. The septic tank emptying service couldn't come till Tuesday. The Water Company, whom I rang in desperation, said they didn't deal with washers or inside stopcocks, but they could give me another plumber's name from their list.

  When I rang it, his widow said he'd died six years previously, she had frozen pipes herself and she'd been waiting for a plumber for a week. At that point I began to get anxious. Particularly when, belatedly putting a bucket under the drip, I found it was filling at the rate of two gallons an hour. 48 gallons a day, not counting what I normally used. No wonder the septic tank was full up! I fitted a length of hose to the tap, running it out to the snow-covered lawn. That would take care of things till I could get a plumber, I thought. No need to bother with buckets.

  Not having a proper tap connection, I used the emptying hose from an old single-tub washing machine, leading it over the sink edge to the main hose so that the drips could trickle away easily. I relaxed that evening, watching TV, thinking how clever I'd been – only to go out at nine o'clock and find the kitchen floor flooded. The end of the hose on the lawn had frozen solid, the drips had built up behind, and the pressure had pushed the other end off the washing machine hose, which was hanging over the edge of the sink.

  I mopped up the mess and put the bucket back to collect the drips. I didn't go to bed that night. I dozed in an armchair, Tani and Saphra on my lap, the kitchen timer at my elbow timed to go off every hour. When it did, the three of us erupted like Vesuvius, Tani hid under the sofa, and I trudged out to the frozen wastes of the garden to empty the bucket. Life seemed at its lowest ebb.

  Not quite, it wasn't. That came next morning, when the tank-emptying people phoned to say their vehicle had broken down with all the work it was doing and they couldn't come till Wednesday. I rang the Water Company again, who said they were sorry, I'd have to get a plumber myself. They could give me a number... I told them about the six-year-old number they'd already given me and they changed their minds. They could send a man to turn off the water at their own outside stopcock till I
could
find a plumber, they offered. Anything, I said, weeping down the mouthpiece with gratitude. I couldn't tote buckets hourly through another night.

  Their man came that afternoon, couldn't find their stopcock which was somewhere under the ice outside the garden wall, and while he was searching for it fell in the stream. With his feet wet, he too altered his mind. He changed the kitchen tap washer in minutes – ­happening to have one with him in the car, he said; said he'd locate the Company's stopcock when the weather was better, and drove off at top speed to dry out. I tottered indoors and gazed at the cause of it all, stretched out peacefully, paws twitching, on the Snoozabed with his head on Tani's stomach. Nobody would ever believe it, I decided.

Spring brought the daffodils out in the valley. A vast yellow sheet of them flowing down the opposite hillside, where Charles and I had planted them years before. A sea of the paler wild variety rioting in the field beyond the cottage, where Annabel was buried, and in the Reasons' wood further down the lane. It was called Daffodil Valley even before our time, on account of the wild ones, and people still came to see them and stare over the gate at Saphra, regarding them with his Sherlock Holmes look from the other side.

  It was Saphra who solved the riddle of the man in the big hat. Our mysterious visitor was even more in evidence now. At weekends he seemed to be going up and down the lane continually, and it was then that the solution half dropped on me. He must have heard about its being called Daffodil Valley, and he either was an amateur poet or was hoping to be taken for one. I bet the book he was huddled over was Wordsworth, I thought. And sure enough one morning Saph squirmed under the gate, marched up to him, and looked enquiringly up at the hat. The man, bent over his book, saw Saphra at his feet and stooped to pat him, closing the volume abruptly.
The Poems of Wordsworth
I saw in gilt letters on the spine and reported it to Poppy as soon as he'd gone. He was a poet, or that way inclined: not a spy in disguise as Fred Ferry had insisted whenever the question cropped up. What was there to spy on round here? I'd asked on one occasion. 'Durin' the war they used to put decoy lights up on Black Down,' Fred informed me darkly. What that had to do with it I couldn't think, but Fred always was a one for drama.

  I started gardening – weeding the borders, cutting the grass. I spent hours up by the cat-house, digging between the herbaceous clumps, while Saphra watched intently from the corner of the run. He knew what I was doing, and every day, when I let them out after I'd finished working, he'd make straight for the border and dig an enormous hole himself. It was easy in the earth I'd just turned over, and Saph didn't believe in unnecessary exertion. Sometimes, when he'd finished, he wetted in the hole. Sometimes he dug it simply for the sake of doing what I did. Tani, whom I have never known to dig a hole in her life (ladies always use Litter Trays, according to her), usually walked straight down the path and into the cottage while this was going on. On one occasion, however, she went deliberately in the other direction; up the path and past him towards the garage. He stopped to watch her, forgot what he was doing, and when she'd gone past left his excavation and started after her. Recollecting himself at the edge of the lawn, he turned back, and was digging the hole deeper – he always believed in going down to his elbows – when she sauntered tantalisingly back past him again. He kept his eyes on her as he dug – and was so traumatised that he actually started moving towards her like a miniature plough, paws scooping out the earth as he went.

  Sometimes I wondered whether that cat was in his right mind. He always seemed to dig his holes inordinately deep – but invariably after he'd sat on them, gaze fixed on the distance, busily thinking Higher Thoughts, they'd be filled to the brim like miniature ponds. Sitting on a hole, too – it seemed it had to fit his bottom exactly, and sometimes it didn't, and he had to move away and dig another. He could have written a book on
Digging Holes for Cats
. I reckon it would have rivalled
The Specialist
.

  Cat-befuddled as usual, a week or so later I once more went up to London for a Siamese Cat Club meeting. It meant getting up early to drive to Bristol to catch the London train. Getting up even earlier to give the cats their exercise in the garden before I went, otherwise they'd have raked everything out of the bedroom cupboards while I was away. It was six-fifteen in the morning when I opened the door to take them out, and nearly leapt out of my gumboots with surprise. There, milling about in the yard like a crowd in a fairground, was a pheasant cock and ten attendant hens.

  The local pheasants had been coming to me for food for years. The cats knew them, and realised they were too big for them to catch. They – Tani and Saph – would walk round the corner of the cottage and up on the path one behind the other, chittering under their breath at any odd pheasant that happened to be on the lawn, but gazing straight ahead pretending not to see it, which would presumably have undermined their superiority.

  The thing was, the current dominant cock – ­after an absence of several weeks during which he was probably occupied in courting displays in some secluded clearing in the forest – had been coming in the past few days with two or three hens, guarding them, standing back and watching over them proprietorially while they ate with the air of having brought them to his own special restaurant, then shepherding them away again over the wall and into the woods. He came back on his own when he wanted a meal himself – presumably it was infra dig to eat with his wives. I had wondered, though, whether two or three hens was the extent of his harem. And now, at six-fifteen in the morning, here was the answer. He had ten of them!

  He looked, I thought, rather embarrassed that I had discovered his secret. The hens looked hopeful for a general handout. Tani and Saph, faced with such a mêlée and unable to do their no-seeing act past that lot, dived into them without delay. Hen pheasants went up in all directions, lumbering into the air like jumbo jets, their wide-spread wings frustrating any attempt by the cats to stop them, while the cock stood his ground, flapping his own wings defiantly, his neck stretched tall, bawling raucous defence calls. I waved my arms shouting 'Stop it!' till the yard was cleared, and the cats continued sedately on their way up the path, smug expressions on their faces, Saph stopping to spray the wall at the top of the steps to remind the pheasants Who was Who round here...

  Small wonder that I had little time to get myself ready. That in due course I shot off in the car to drive to the station with hastily snatched-up earrings stuffed in my handbag. Small wonder either, when I got to the hotel where the meeting was being held and attempted to make myself presentable, that I discovered I'd brought one gold stud earring and one of those brass-topped, double­-pronged paper fasteners; the sort used for putting through holes in piles of papers. I didn't use it as an earring, but I might as well have done. Nobody in that Siamese-benighted audience would have noticed it.

  Back to the valley, and within days there was another crisis. It was breeding time for the foxes and a vixen, hunting for food for her cubs, had on two consecutive days taken one of the Reasons' ducks. They disappeared in the late afternoon, a cloud of white feathers on the Reasons' lawn showing what had happened, and until Janet could get someone to put the survivors in early on a regular basis I offered to do it for her. All I had to do was call them if they weren't in sight, she said, rattle the feeding bowl which she'd leave ready filled with corn, and they'd come straight from wherever they were and make for their house.

  Maybe that was what they did when she called them – I'd heard the cacophony of goose and duck voices that greeted her when her car went down the lane in the early evening – but when I went out and banged the bowl at three in the afternoon there was dead silence. I banged again. I shouted. 'Coo-coo' was the only thing I could think of, not having had the sense to ask Janet what she called them, but still there was no reply. 'Coo-coo-coo' I bellowed again, which made a change from being heard bawling 'Tanny-wanny-wanny' or 'Saffy-waffy', but I doubt whether it persuaded anybody within hearing distance that I was less than three-quarters round the bend. And then Gerald and his wives came marching in single file down the hill, round the corner and into the pond, making a terrific show of drinking, washing and flapping their wings, and followed seconds later by the three surviving ducks. Which raised a problem, because Janet had said I need only put the ducks in; the geese could take care of themselves till she got home. But the geese were between the ducks and their house, and since Gerald chose that moment to start mating with them all I could do was stand and wait for him to finish.

  Most embarrassing it was, a goose underneath, Gerald on top, Gerald falling off, the pair of them rolling about in Rabelaisian abandon in the pond, then Gerald determinedly climbing back on top again. I explained why I was there to a girl going by on her horse, not wanting her to think I was a voyeur. I doubt whether she believed me. I explained again to a woman I'd never seen before who came drifting along picking up sticks and informed me, apropos of nothing, that she was a countrywoman.

  I was waiting to put the ducks in because two had been taken by foxes, I said. 'Ah... foxes,' she chirruped brightly. 'Do you ever hear the young foxes calling in the night? I always remember hearing them when I first came to live in the country.' I refrained from saying that what she'd heard was a vixen screaming for a mate, in case she thought I had a one-­track mind, but felt bound to contradict her when she started talking about hearing weasels screaming when they were caught by a fox. Foxes didn't catch weasels, I told her. That noise was a weasel killing a rabbit. 'Oh, is it?' said the would-be countrywoman airily.