More Cats in the Belfry (6 page)

  'Managed' was the operative word. She was lively as a cricket, looked about sixty, and ran local affairs, as my grandmother had done before her, as if she were the Queen Mother. Her particular friend was a much younger woman who lived a few doors away and whose name was pronounced like mine but spelt Dorine.

  Every day, while Dorine was at work, Louisa would go down to let her two cats, Norton and Petal, into the garden for exercise, get them in again in due course, and generally see that all was well. Dorine, in turn, came up for a chat with Louisa every evening and acquainted her with what was going on in the rest of the road and her own activities, which were not inconsiderable. To help cover the expenses of her big old house, in addition to her full-time job she regularly took, as boarders, two or three students who were on special courses at the nearby polytechnic. They had their lunch at the college and went home at weekends, and thus fitted in well with Dorine's own schedule. She gave them comfortable accommodation, had only to provide them with breakfast and an evening meal five days a week and she and Louisa monitored their welfare between them. Louisa, for instance coped on the odd occasion when she went down and found one of the students still in bed, suffering from a cold or a stomach ache and needing cosseting. Dorine dealt with the reprobate who said he didn't like cats and was caught one day aiming a kick at Norton. He was reported to the college and transferred forthwith to other accommodation. Even so, when I found one of Louisa's pantry shelves loaded one day with bottles of tomato ketchup and Louisa said she was hiding them from Dorine's students, my mind did boggle slightly. Dorine had, it seemed, come up the previous evening breathing fire and slaughter, clutching a bagful of bottles and declaring that this lot (her current quota of students) were really the end. They wanted tomato sauce on everything – even the gourmet meal with wine which she gave them once a week when her boyfriend came to supper – and she wasn't going to have it, so would Louisa keep them for her so she could say with truth that she didn't have any in the house?

  She added vengefully that she'd put an air-freshener in their bedroom and they'd been searching for that, but they hadn't found it and never would. She'd put it there because one of them smoked heavily and the bedroom smelled ghastly. Why had they wanted to find it? Louisa asked. Because they didn't like the smell of it, said Dorine. Where had she hidden it? In the smoker's mattress – there was a little tear in the cover and she'd put it inside. Louisa telling me all this, was practically crying with laughter, never realising how peculiar, at times, her own actions were.

  Another of her neighbours, Edward, was a bachelor of about my own age. I had known him since we were children, and after his mother died he had turned part of his house into a very comfortable flat and let the rest. He had a daily woman to clean for him; Louisa kept a motherly eye on him and made him cakes; and Dorine, as another remunerative sideline, did odd bits of washing and mending for him. So I was considerably taken aback one day when Louisa said that Edward had asked her to ask me to dye his bathroom curtains for him. Pale blue towelling they were, but they'd got rather washed out. He fancied them a dark brown and he'd be very grateful if I'd do them.

  Why hadn't he asked Dorine? I wondered. Was it...? We were about the same age and now both alone in the world... But no it couldn't be, I told myself. He was a confirmed bachelor; I certainly wasn't interested and Louisa knew it. So, out of friendship, I did them. Actually I was quite good at dyeing things: Louisa had probably mentioned it to him, I decided. And the curtains turned out beautifully.

  I took them back, Louisa and I went across to the flat and hung them while Edward was out, and I drove beatifically home with the thought of a good deed well done – only to have Edward ring me as soon as I got in, apologising so profusely I could practically see him sweating on the other end of the line. He couldn't understand why Louisa had asked
me
to dye his curtains. 'Never would I have dreamt of it,' he kept protesting. 'Never would I have dreamt of it.' He had meant her to ask Dorine down the road, he explained, and why on earth she'd thought he meant
me
...

  I could understand it. Our names sounded the same, and if anyone was going to misconstrue a thing it would be Louisa, who spent her life confusing words and pronunciations. It was around that time that England played the Cameroons in a World Cup football match and Louisa kept enthusiastically telling me, and everybody else she encountered, that she'd been watching the match against the Macaroons on television. She also persisted in calling rudbeckias rudybeckias, referred to her newly acquired microwave, in which she constantly produced her most ghastly failures, as her microphone and generally pulverised the English language in a manner that reminded me of my grandmother – her mother – who, when I was young, used to speak of Hitler as Herring Hitler and Stalin as Old Stallion. Funnily enough, Louisa had never done it when she was younger. Was it a family trait that developed with age? I speculated apprehensively...

  I sorted out the confusion of the towel­-dyeing, anyway – to my satisfaction if not entirely to Edward's, who went on apologising every time we met for weeks – and returned to my chief preoccupation at the time, which was to see whether I could get the two cats used to the caravan with a view to one day taking them with me on holiday.

  When Charles was alive we had planned to do it with Saska and Shebalu. We never got as far as actually taking them. We did try a few days' practice camping in our own caravan field, but that proved so disastrous, and confirmed our neighbours' impression that we were odd even for this village to such a degree, that we eventually abandoned the idea. But Saska was older now, and Tani was such a timid little thing, and I, on my own, would find them such good company on short holidays (I imagined, seeing in my mind's eye the three of us strolling along the sands of my favourite Cornish cove and curled up reading cosily by lamplight in the caravan at night)... and so I started taking them up to the caravan with me when I went up to air it. They would sit side by side in the doorway, gazing out at passing riders like a couple of gypsy cats – they only needed spotted handkerchiefs and dangling earings – or Tani would investigate the ground-level cupboards while Saska, as he'd done in the old days, would climb up to see whether there was a way out through the skylight (why, since the door was open, it was difficult to imagine, but Saska never lost his penchant for imitating Houdini)... and one summer morning, when the swathes of grass I kept cut, like an L-shaped lane, to facilitate towing the caravan in and out were backed shoulder-high with masses of rose-bay willow­-herb, moon-daisies and golden rod that had wandered over the wall from the cottage garden, they disappeared. The cats, I mean. Completely.

  I couldn't believe it. One minute I had my head in the cupboard under the sink checking the emergency candles. The next, withdrawing it as I did every few seconds to assure myself that they were still in the doorway, I realised that they were gone.

  I dashed out and gazed wildly round the field. Nothing but that solid backcloth of vegetation, like an enormous herbaceous border gone wild, into which they must have disappeared. Unless they'd gone out to the lane... I rushed to look along that. There was no sign of them. Back to push like a frantic swimmer through the rose-bay willow-herb and golden rod towards the line of trees and rising hillside at the back, wildly calling their names, but there was no sign of them. They could have been a matter of feet away but in that tangle I wouldn't have seen them. On as far as the trees themselves, up and running along the barer hillside, where there were still tracks trodden flat by Annabel. Nothing. But I knew, there would be adders about in the sunshine. Seeley had, as a kitten, been bitten by one up there. I stamped heavily as I ran, to scare them away, and tried not to think of it. On, everywhere I could think of, but there was no sign of them.

  In the end I had to give up searching and wait in the cottage with all the doors open, hoping that they'd come home by themselves. They always did, Father Adams had said when I met him down in his part of the lane while I was hunting. They don't always, of course. Seeley had gone out that morning all those years before and never been seen again. So when blaming myself for taking my eyes off them for even for a second, wondering where they were and what had befallen them, I turned away from the kitchen counter where I was half-heartedly making a cup of coffee an hour later and saw them marching one behind the other towards the sitting-room door without so much as a glance at me, I couldn't believe it. Where had they been? I demanded, falling on knees to scoop them up and hug them. Just looking around, according to Saska, who was the lead as usual, trying to give the impression of having hardly been away five minutes. Keeping an eye on
him
, according to Tani, who was marching hard on his heels. Gosh, I wouldn't
believe
where he'd taken her.

  I jolly well would. I decided that taking them away in the caravan was out, and made up my mind to watch them even more closely from then on. And what with doing that, and answering letters, and observing events in the valley, the summer passed.

  I was getting more letters than usual.
Waiting in the Wings
had recently been published, and so many people were writing to tell me that it mirrored the way they had felt after losing someone dear to them, or a beloved animal. The book had helped them, they said, and many of them went on to recount their own stories of strange occurrences that had led them to believe that the people or animals they had lost had survived physical death and were waiting for them somewhere on the sidelines.

  The incident that impressed me most happened when I was talking to a woman at a meeting in London – a down-to-earth no­-nonsense type who was in the legal profession and bred Siamese cats as a hobby. She, too, told me how much she'd liked
Wings
and I told her I'd thought that she, of all people, would think I was batty. 'But it did all happen,' I assured her. 'And my husband really did see Solomon's ghost.'

  She believed it, she assured me, looking straight at me. She was certain that people, and animals, went on. She was sure that when any of her cats died, or had to be put down their spirits stayed with her for several days before they left her. She could sense them. There was only one who hadn't, she said, a Siamese male whose original owner had died. When, many years later, the cat had to be put down because of an incurable complaint, he'd only stayed with her for about an hour.

  'But why?' I asked. 'Where do you think he went?'

  'After all I'd done for him,' she said mock-indignantly. 'Off to find his original owner, of course.'

  It wasn't like that when, a year after I lost Shebalu, Saska died too. I had no sense of his staying near me afterwards. All I knew was one of the greatest friends I'd ever had, the last of the animals I'd shared with Charles, had gone, and Tani and I were alone.

S
aska was only eight when he died of an obscure stomach tumour. My then vet, unable to track down what was wrong with him, had referred him to the Bristol University School of Veterinary Science at Langford, not far from home. They have a special feline research station there which diagnosed a bacterial infection of the colon, but that turned out to be a red herring. By the time the real cause of his illness revealed itself nothing could be done, and he had to be put down.

  It hit me as I had thought nothing ever could again after Charles's death. In the end, feeling absolutely flattened, I went to my doctor and she, knowing me, slapped shut her prescription pad and said 'What you need is another Siamese kitten. As soon as possible.' So I came straight home and rang Pauline Furber.

  Once again Pauline had no kittens available herself, but there was a breeder at Yeovil whose queen had been mated to Pauline's Bardy, Saska's half-brother. The kittens were ready for sale and Pauline and I went down to see them.

  When we were ushered into the sitting-room in Yeovil, there, as one comes to expect in the homes of Siamese breeders, were kittens hurtling in all directions. Up curtains, over chairs, falling like plopping plums through the tops of table lampshades and charging in a yelling, furry posse around the floor. An elegant blue-point queen was strolling about in the midst of the mêlée, ostensibly bawling for order but if I knew anything about it probably egging them on. There was also a large child's playpen lined with chicken wire against one wall with a chicken wire lid and, in a cage on a board across one end of the lid, an African Grey parrot which was sitting against the bars with its head cocked sideways down at the kittens saying 'Go on, then! Go on! Go on!'

  He'd helped bring up the kittens, said the breeder, and seeing my glazed expression – I'd heard a lot of odd Siamese stories in my time and met a lot of odd Siamese owners, but this, I thought, took the biscuit – she explained. She had a part-time job and, when she was away from home, she put the kittens and their mother in the playpen so they couldn't get into trouble. It was never for very long and the parrot was good company for them. He talked to them and they nattered back. 'Especially that one,' she said, pointing at a solid-looking young seal-point who was zooming round the room at a rate of knots, batting the rear end of one of his blue-point sisters as if she were a hoop. He, she said, spent a lot of time, even when he wasn't in the playpen, sitting on top of it, close to the cage, conferring with Sinbad.