Cats in May

by Doreen Tovey

  The last we’d heard of them they were thinking of moving. Three months they’d had him. In that time he’d wrecked the furniture, eaten a hole in an eiderdown, nearly been built into a compost heap and got himself locked up at the police station for vagrancy. Not in an ordinary cat cage, either. Got hisself out of that like Houdini, in an hour, said the sergeant. When they went to fetch him home—his report sheet said he’d been found wandering in the street at 1 a.m. and picked up by a patrol car—he was sitting triumphantly in a cell.

  Added to that their left-hand neighbours weren’t speaking to them because he kept going in and frightening the baby and their right-hand neighbours were complaining about the state of their garden. They were looking, they informed us in their last sad phone call, for a place in the middle of Exmoor or the Sahara, where he could operate without landing them in jail as well.

  If, as somebody else suggested, we’d thought of adopting an ordinary kitten—just to take the edge off them, they said, and so much more manageable than a Siamese—we had the example of the Rector to put us against that. Recently—inspired, according to him, by the devotion of our own two cats—he had acquired a couple himself. Not Siamese. Solomon had once fallen out of a tree on to his head and nearly frightened him out of his rectorial collar, and the inspiration didn’t go as far as that. His kittens were Hardy, a sleek black tom, and Willis, his charming black-and-white sister. Most appropriate they looked too, sitting in clerical dignity on top of the Rector’s wall—until one day he noticed they were developing rather big ears.

  He couldn’t have been more alarmed if they’d started sprouting horns—and with equally good cause. Since Ajax, the doctor’s Seal Point tom, had been brought over to mate with Father Adams’s Mimi he had developed rather a penchant for our valley. Nowadays we quite often met him sauntering hopefully down the lane—and if, following her operation, Mimi herself was no longer interested when he called, there were other cats who were.

  His progress through the valley was like Alexander’s march through India—in Ajax’s case littered not with fair hair and Grecian noses but with kittens with big ears. They also inherited a marked propensity for trouble. Three of them were already locally notorious. One who was privately owned had eaten six fish out of a fishpond; one at the Post Office had torn up some postal orders and eaten the stamp account; and one at the garage was refusing to let dogs get out of cars. His place it was, he said belligerently; all his including the petrol pumps, and he’d do them if they did.

  It was to guard against such a contingency happening to him that the Rector got his kittens from a farm three miles up the valley—but it was no use. Ajax, he said, gazing at Hardy and Willis despairingly while their ears practically grew before our eyes, had progressed further than he thought. He had indeed. Faithful to their ancestors, developing their heritage in a style suitable to their surroundings—Hardy had so far been sick on a canon and marooned on the church roof, and Willis had bitten the curate’s hat.

  By the time we went on holiday we still didn’t know what to do about our pair. We’d had one idea that had helped a little. We’d bought them a tortoise called Tarzan, and for a while that really seemed to work.

  It was wonderful to look out of the window, see them slow-marching with Tarzan across the lawn, and realise there was no need to shadow them—that ten minutes later, even if we wanted to go to town, they wouldn’t be on the other side of the village or chasing somebody’s chickens round a field. Just a few inches further on, peering intently under his shell.

  It was marvellous to find that bringing him indoors at night obviated the yelling and wrestling that usually went on. That instead of pushing one another off the bureau or Solomon howling because Sheba was looking at him they were peacefully side by side under the table, united as a team of research scientists and still looking under his shell. It was cute, too, to see them when it rained. Sitting in the porch watching with interest while he pottered across the grass and taking it in turns, when he stopped, to rush out into the downpour, make sure his engine was still under his bonnet and, with a few encouraging prods to his rear, start him moving again.

  So cute, in fact, we failed to realise he wasn’t half getting some exercise for a tortoise, and when one day, taking advantage of the cats being in for lunch, he nipped athletically up the path and disappeared we were taken by surprise. We couldn’t find him anywhere—not even helped by Solomon. Neither could we replace him. By that time, according to the pet shop, the tortoise season was over.

  So, promising ourselves that next year we’d get another and keep him on a leash or something, we gave up the search and went to Spain on holiday. Parking Solomon and Sheba once more at the cattery and determined to enjoy ourselves.

  We did too, except for one or two little mishaps. Like my ordering iced beer en route at Biarritz, for instance, and getting—even the waiter looked surprised when he brought it—beer and ice cream. Like Charles losing his shirt at San Sebastian, which is typical of the way things happen to us. One minute we were sunbathing on the beach saying how peaceful it was and why couldn’t life always be like this, and the next the tide had swept in, whipped it off his chair and carried it out to sea. And there was everybody getting excited and shouting, the beach policeman looking fixedly at Charles and twirling his walking stick—because there is a rule in Spain about men going round without shirts on—Charles marching back to lunch trying to look nonchalant in a towel and everybody laughing … All it needed to be just like home was the cats bringing up the rear. There was, too, the affair of the Prado. We’d already had one or two little difficulties with the language. Like Charles going into the shower at our first hotel, for instance, pulling the chain marked Calido—thinking, he said, as any sane and normal person would that it meant ‘cold’—and nearly going through the roof when it turned out to mean ‘hot’. Like our deciding to see a pelota match and running like mad up and down the front at Santander—to discover, far too late to see the encounter, that the frontone mentioned on the placards didn’t mean the front at all, but was the place—like golf course in English—where they actually played the game.

  By the time we got to Madrid we’d given up going by guesswork or trying—Charles’s favourite occupation—to work it back to the Latin. We’d got ourselves a phrase book and a map. Which was how, not being at our best at reading town maps either, we came to make the mistake about the Prado.

  Emerging from the Metro into the Plaza de la Cibeles, struck by the majesty of his surroundings—the magnificent statue of the lady with the lions, the imposing splendour of the Alcala Gate and the notice which said Paseo del Prado—Charles, who is himself something of an artist, grew suddenly solemn. Impressively he marched me into the tremendous building on the corner. Rose-coloured, Gothic—housing, he informed me as we respectfully mounted the steps, the finest art collection in Europe. He’d have known it anywhere.

  The trouble with me is I always believe him. Walking on tiptoe, scared almost to breathe in this hallowed Mecca, I was just about to ask the way to the Goyas when I noticed that the people leaning confidently over the polished counters were not, in fact, getting information about pictures. We were in the Madrid General Post Office. They were buying stamps.

  Eight

  Fire Down Below

  No sooner had we returned from Spain than Charles caught the chimney on fire—which was one way, at any rate, of letting people know we were back. The Rector said as soon as he heard the fire engine he guessed we were home again.

  It was a pity really, because it was the result of the first spring clean the bureau had had for years. Sorting through the post that had accumulated while we were away Charles had stuffed most of it in a pigeonhole, hammered the top down to show it who was master, and was just turning away when the hinges broke and the cover fell off.

  Something, he announced, surveying the avalanche of papers, catalogues, and home-handymen magazines that poured like a mountain torrent on to the floor, would have to be
done about this. Whereupon—refreshed by his holiday, filled with a determination that from now on things were going to be more orderly around here—he did it. Threw one or two catalogues on the fire, mended the hinges with a couple of paper clips, shovelled the rest of the papers back in through the top, went to bed—and next morning we had a phenomenon. No fire in the grate, but from the garden the cottage appeared to be steaming up the valley like the Queen Mary.

  We caused some excitement in the village that day. First on the scene was the postman, who said some people did have ’em didn’t they and advised us to call the brigade. Next came the milkman, who said if he was us he wouldn’t. His cousin was in that lot, he said, and he knew what they’d be like if they got going. Hoses down the chimney. Fireplace wall knocked out before we could look round in case it was a beam. Ladders straight through the roof of the conservatory we’d just put up at the side of the cottage—damfool place to build he too when you come to think of it, he commented amiably, swivelling his head back towards Charles. If he were us, he said, he’d get somebody local to sweep the chimney first in case ’twas only burning soot—and then if it didn’t stop fetch out the brigade.

  Close on his heels we got a small boy in a cowboy hat, standing on our gate with his trousers nearly falling off with excitement. And finally, thanks to the milkman who’d obligingly made him his next port of call, we got Father Adams. Carrying a set of brushes and determined to do it himself.

  I tried to dissuade him, but it was no use. He had a tale about the fire brigade too. Didn’t want what happened to his sister Minnie up in Essex did I? he demanded sternly. Called ’em because her oil stove caught on fire, rushed out to meet ’em when they came, door slammed behind her—and before she had a chance to tell ’em the back door was still open, he said, dropping his brushes dramatically in the fireplace, they had their hatchets out and was going at it like kangaroos!

  I didn’t. Neither, on the other hand, did I want Charles and Father Adams sweeping the chimney. But that was what I got.

  Tempers became a little frayed during that operation. Father Adams got a bit touchy when, having sent Charles out to see if the brush was through the pot—because, he said, he’d now screwed on fifteen rods and if our chimney was that high he was a Dutchman—Charles came back to report that it was not only out, it was drooping over the roof like a dying sunflower, with a whole crowd of people watching it from the lane. Silly lot of bs, said Father Adams, hauling it in again as fast as he could. Serve ’em right if it fell on their silly great heads and knocked their silly great brains out.

  I didn’t exactly howl with laughter when he and Charles went up on the roof and poured a couple of buckets of water down the chimney for safety’s sake—carefully stuffing a couple of sacks in the grate before they started so the water wouldn’t run out into the room, then marching triumphantly back removing the sacks, and letting it.

  And Charles was quite stricken when I complained. For heaven’s sake what was a drop of water compared to having hearth and home on fire? he demanded, striding manfully through it in his gumboots to peer up the chimney and see if it was all right now.

  Nothing at all. Except that two hours later just when I’d got it all cleaned up and was wondering if I had the strength for lunch, hearth and home caught on fire again.

  We got the brigade that time. All it was was soot—caught by burning paper—smouldering on a ledge halfway up the chimney, and all they did, after checking it with a mirror, was brush it off with special brushes and hose it down. After a cup of tea, and comforting us with the information that in about five years the ledge would build up and probably catch on fire again but not to worry, just ring the old Brigade, they went. Leaving us, if you counted ten and took a broad, calm, practical view of things with hardly any more mess than when Charles and Father Adams did it the first time. As Charles said, at least we knew it was well swept.

  It was wonderful, after all that, to be driving down to the cattery next day to collect the cats. Good old English air, said Charles, taking deep breaths of it as we went along. Good old Sol and Sheba. Didn’t it seem marvellous to be fetching them home again?

  It certainly did. Always, when we were going on holiday, we spent the last few days beforehand saying if we had to put up with them a moment longer we’d go clean round the bend. Always, when we drove down to Halstock with Solomon howling sorrowfully in his basket and Sheba apparently reciting poetry in hers, we said if we had to listen to them for another mile we’d go mad. And always, the moment we got back to the empty cottage and saw the poignant little reminders of their life with us, we felt unaccountably sad.

  There were so many little reminders. The marks on the sitting-room wall, for instance—juicy and slightly spattered—where Solomon caught gnats on summer evenings. Similar marks in the spare room where Sheba, not to be outdone, sat on top of the door and slapped her lot to death on the ceiling. The staircarpet—new last year, but you’d never have thought it; not after four happy little pairs of feet had given it an all-over mohair effect and in one spot, on the top tread, two happy little pairs of feet (Solomon’s) had ripped a hole clean through to the underfelt. The bath, which if it were cleaned ten times a day (and sometimes it very nearly was) could still be depended on to have a trail of footprints wandering nonchalantly round the edge and at the bottom resemble nothing so much as an elephants’ water-hole …

  By the time I’d done a tour of remembrance, emptied their deserted earth boxes and put away their feeding bowls, I was practically in tears. By the time we were actually on holiday, with distance lending enchantment as, oddly enough, it always does with Siamese cats, we saw them as perfect little angels. We could hardly wait to get news of them—to make sure they hadn’t pined or caught chills or died of sorrow. Which, since we never booked our hotels in advance and the people who kept the cattery had to write to us Poste Restante, added a few more complications to life.

  Whatever else we miss when we go abroad, we certainly know the Post Offices. There is one in Florence, under an old grey arcade, which we haunted so persistently I swear they took Charles for Dante’s ghost. There is one in Heidelberg where, when the polite young man said ‘Nein’, we went down to the river—Solomon and Sheba were five months old then and we were sure they’d died of broken hearts—and mentally threw ourselves in. There is one in Paris which smells—or it did when we were there last—distinctly of overripe cheese. Where, holding handkerchiefs to our noses, we argued for days that there must be a letter for us, and when it did arrive the clerk was so relieved he shook hands with us under the grille …

  The message, of course, when it did find its way to us, was always the same. ‘S. and S. well, eating like horses and not missing you a bit.’ After which, feeling as if Mafeking had been relieved, we went and had a drink.

  It was nice coming back to the cats. Even when we turned in at the gate of the cattery and heard two familiar voices busily bellowing the place down we didn’t flinch. Even when we saw they weren’t the homesick little creatures we had envisaged—when Solomon stalked the length of their run to inform the Siamese in the next chalet that if he said that again he’d dot him one, and Sheba lay happily in Mrs Francis’s arms informing us she was staying on here because she liked the food—we were still glad to see them.

  What with the fire, all the sun we’d been having and this absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder business, we were in fact in that bemused state of mind in which people buy Siamese cats. If anyone doubts that there is such a state I can only quote the case of someone I knew—in her fifties, she was; an old maid living alone whose only interest was taking care of herself. She went to bed every night at half-past eight even when she had visitors (if they overstayed she politely sent them home). She rested for an hour after lunch with her feet up and a bandage over her eyes to keep out the light. And her house was so spick-and-span that every ornament in the place had a little felt mat under it, cut exactly to shape, to prevent it marking the furniture.


  If she wasn’t bemused when she bought a Siamese, I don’t know who was. Something came over her, she said, when she saw his little black face mewing pathetically at her through a pet-shop window. Actually he wasn’t mewing but bawling away like a town crier, as she realised when she went into the shop and got on the same side of the glass. Something had certainly come over her, though. She bought him just the same. She doesn’t go to bed at half-past eight now; she’s still trying to get Lancelot in off the tiles at ten. She doesn’t rest after lunch—she can’t, she says, for worrying what Lancelot is up to. She doesn’t have little felt mats under her ornaments any more; she hasn’t got any ornaments. What she has got is Lancelot. And—though admittedly she worships the ground he strolls on—she still doesn’t know how it happened.

  If that could happen to her, you can imagine how we were affected when, going into the Francises’ kitchen for coffee that night before our journey back, we were confronted by an entire family of Siamese kittens.

  Entrancing it was, to people who either didn’t know Siamese or—like us—were still suffering from the Spanish sun. Kittens dangling from the door handles. Kittens diving off the stove. One sitting thinking by a saucepan and another blissfully asleep in a little doorway cut in the cupboard under the sink.

  That, explained Mrs Francis, hauling him out while two more who had been queuing outside dashed precipitately in, was the way into their earth box and he wasn’t asleep at all, he was doing it purposely. That, she said, as there was a resounding crash from upstairs followed by the sound of a wardrobe apparently being trundled across the room and pushed through a window, was another lot playing with a rabbit foot. Locked in her office, as they were a slightly older family, to prevent them from murdering this set.