As soon as I re-opened the bedroom door the cats erupted through it like greyhounds out of a starting trap, pelting down to resume their vigil at the window. I got into bed and started to read while I waited for them to come back again. They didn't usually stay down there very long. I had a book called The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern by Lilian Jackson Braun, the writer of a series of American whodunnits whose hero is a seal-point Siamese called Koko, who helps his journalist owner solve some extremely baffling murders. In this one the Danish Modern that Koko ate was not, as I'd expected, some kind of pastry he'd taken a fancy to, but a style of furniture whose upholstery he persisted in chewing, not only ruining it in the traditional Siamese manner but thereby providing valuable clues which eventually solved the mystery. He was also in the process of acquiring a female Siamese companion who was to become his accomplice in further adventures.
As if two masked Machiavellis of my own were not enough, I was absorbed in the machinations of this other pair. I read and read. Tani came up and sat upright on the bed waiting for Saphra to join her: she will never settle for the night without him. I read on. Saphra still didn't appear. There must be something riveting outside the downstairs windows, I thought detachedly...
I must have fallen asleep. Suddenly I woke up, still clutching the book. Somebody was hammering on the front door. I looked at the alarm clock. Ten past three in the morning. The bedside lamp was still on. Tani and Saphra were curled up asleep beside me.
Mind working like clockwork... maybe it was would-be intruders, seeing the light and pretending a breakdown to gain an entry: never open the front door to anybody after dark was my motto... I slipped out of bed and through the bedroom door, closing it so that the cats couldn't follow me, crept into the spare room without putting on the light, opened the window and called out 'Yes? Who's there?'
A torch shone upwards on to a peaked cap and checked hatband and a voice replied quietly 'Police.'
They were after somebody! They wanted my assistance! Just as I'd been reading in The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern. How could I help them? I enquired, in unruffled control of the situation. They'd known the right one to come to. I hadn't been on the Parish Council for fourteen years for nothing.
'Are you all right?' asked the policeman, still very quietly.
Puzzled, I said 'Yes.'
'Only all your lights are on and all your curtains are pulled back,' he went on. 'Your neighbours noticed it when they drove down the hill a while ago and they were worried and rang us. Are you sure everything's all right inside?'
I leaned out and looked down. The policeman was right. Light was streaming out across the lawn from all three sitting-room windows. Behind me it was shining out through the bedroom window too – naturally, as I'd fallen asleep with the bedside lamp on. To the right, the hall light illuminated the yard and fishpool. Seen from the road down the hill, it must have looked as if a space ship had landed. I had a good idea how it had happened, too, but I kept my counsel for the moment, just in case. 'If you wait a moment, I'll come down and look around,' I told them.
I opened the bedroom door, grabbed my dressing gown, shut the door once more on the cats and crept downstairs. The policeman and his companions, who'd been out in the lane reporting back to base from the squad car presumably in case they needed reinforcements – were now positioned outside the middle sitting-room window. I opened it, the picture of calmness and confidence, and said 'All's well so far. I'll just look round the back of the cottage.'
'You're sure you wouldn't like us to do it?' asked the first policeman.
'No, I'll be all right,' I said. Leaving them no doubt thinking what a courageous female I was, I inspected the kitchen and lobby beyond it, peered up the newly cemented path with a torch... I was certain there'd be nothing there and there wasn't... and back I went to the policeman. 'Everything's all right,' I assured them. 'I fell asleep reading. I've had a heavy day and must have overlooked the other lights. And' – my voice dropped at this: I didn't know how they were going to take it – 'I've got Siamese cats who like to look out of the windows at night and I always pull the curtains back so they can.'
Their faces were a study. I could see it even in the semi-darkness. I bet they'd never heard anything like that before. 'Glad everything's all right, then. Goodnight,' they chorused weakly and retreated to the squad car, no doubt to phone the station again and wonder whether the sergeant would believe it.
The lights were on at the Reasons' cottage down the lane, too. I phoned them, though it was still not four in the morning. They were probably up and wondering, I thought. And sure enough they were. They'd been to a birthday party, said Janet. Peter had come up with the dog when they got in, and had thrown gravel at my bedroom window, but I hadn't answered so they'd phoned the police in case... I thanked them for doing it, went back to bed, and told the cats it was all their fault and Bill's. Theirs for insisting on looking out of the windows at night and Bill's for making me help unload the cement mixer. My back would never be the same again, I informed the world in general and the bedroom ceiling in particular, and what the police, and now the neighbours, would think...
I stayed awake the rest of the night worrying about it and next day, believe it or not, I did it again. Went to a local seaside town to do some shopping, took a picnic lunch to eat in the car on the front, sat listening to the news on the radio afterwards – and the next thing I knew, there was a policeman tapping at the car window asking if I was all right. He and his mate had noticed me with my head on the steering wheel as they drove past, he said, and they wondered if I felt ill.
Only tired, I told them. I hadn't had much sleep the previous night. I didn't tell them about the cats, but I had no doubt that there were two police stations in Somerset that day where I went down in the records as an Incident. With either O for Odd or P for Peculiar against my name. Not, as it should have been if there were any justice in this world, SC for Siamese Cats. A week or so later, too, I looked out of the cottage window and saw yet another police car pulled up outside. I wondered what I'd done this time – went out to see, and it was a young policeman who said he was new on the beat and wanted to get acquainted with the valley. I've often wondered since if he was really checking whether I was still showing signs of strange behaviour.
My neighbours would probably have assured him that I was peculiar. Always had been. Even Poppy Richards, I was sure, thought I was slightly odd. I was going up the hill in the car one morning when I met her driving down the other way. There wasn't room for us to pass each other, so she drew to one side in a gateway and flashed her headlights for me to go on – which I did, only to spot a blackbird in the road ahead of me, pottering about picking up bits.
It made no move to fly away. Other than Miss Wellington's doves, birds don't around here. They know that no-one in the valley would hurt them. There are pheasants in the forest who congregate on the woodshed roof like sparrows, and flutter down around my head like homing pigeons when I go out to give them corn. I couldn't wait, though, as I normally would have done, for the blackbird to move at its leisure. Poppy Richards was waiting to come down. So I hooted – something Charles had always told me to do, faced with a non-moving bird. They didn't like sudden noise, he said, and would straightaway take off like rockets. The blackbird did, twittering angrily at my colossal cheek. Blasted Woman Driver, it was probably saying. Poppy Richards wouldn't have noticed the blackbird, though, not as far away as she was. Only that I hooted loudly, zoomed up the hill and passed her, hand half-raised in acknowledgment but looking straight ahead. I couldn't look at her – I was going round the corner, where there is rock sticking out of the bank, but that presumably didn't occur to her. That evening she appeared on my doorstep, extremely frosty-faced, asking what she'd done wrong. 'Nothing,' I said, explaining that I'd been hooting at a bird, but I felt sure she didn't believe me.
A curt nod and a 'Goodnight then', and she was gone, slamming the gate as she went. It was a pity, because there was something I w
anted to ask her. Something which had me extremely curious.
For quite a while I'd noticed a man going past at weekends, wearing a beard and a wide-brimmed hat like a Bohemian artist and his head bent over a book. A most unusual sight because most people came to the valley to enjoy its beauty and he wasn't looking at it at all. Also, the going is rough past the cottage, with pot-holes and ankle-turning stones. If he really was reading poetry or the classics, as he obviously thought anyone who saw him would think, he'd have fallen flat on his face long before. More likely he was doing it for effect, surreptitiously looking down past the book at the ground – but to what end could he be doing something so ridiculous? And going up the side lane to Poppy's cottage – was he calling on her? She'd been a teacher. Was she running some sort of literary circle in the village of which he was an enthusiastic member?
I longed to know, and now she was annoyed with me and I couldn't ask her. Well, things would sort themselves out, I decided. I shut the door and went back to the sitting-room and the log fire and the cats, which combination gave cause for further development.
Charles, it will be remembered by my readers, had gone in for growing cobnuts, mostly eaten by Lancelot, our resident field mouse, but this winter Lancelot hadn't put in an appearance. Either age had caught up with him and he was now playing a mouse-sized harp or he'd found better quarters for the cold weather. Anyway, there was the nut harvest, for once unclaimed, across in the wood. I went over and gathered a big basketful, beating the squirrels by a whisker: they moved in next day with much squirrel-barking to herald their arrival and buried the rest of the crop in the lawn.
I spent about twenty minutes that evening, reading and eating cobnuts, before Saphra decided he ought to try them too. Wanted Some, he wailed, standing against my knee and touching my hand with his paw. 'You wouldn't eat these,' I said, holding a shelled one out to him and expecting him to reject it. He took it, ate it with gusto and immediately demanded more. He, said Tani, sitting by me with her tail wrapped primly round her feet, was Bonkers. Cats weren't monkeys. They didn't eat nuts.
He did. Not only that, when I got tired of cracking them for him and instead threw one in its shell for him to chase, he ran after it, carried it back to the hearthrug, cracked it with his teeth, his head held sideways – then dropped the whole thing on the rug, sorted out the kernel from the shell and ate it.
It became quite a party piece with him that winter – all the more so because his audience laughed to see him do it. When Dora and Nita came to lunch one day and afterwards I laid out a line of cobnuts on the rug to show them, thinking Saph would take what he wanted and it would save me giving them to him one by one, he obliged by cracking them along the row one after the other, eating the kernels as he went. 'How did you teach him to do that?' asked Nora, astounded. It was all his own idea, I said.
He and Tani had lots of ideas between them. Sometimes their perspicacity shook me rigid. Was it, I wondered, because I was alone with them so much, and noticed their behaviour more? Or was it – a theory that occurred to me more than once – that cats were becoming more intelligent with each generation, and therefore gradually becoming more dominant?
I was provided with further evidence in support of my hypothesis just before Christmas. I wanted to see an American Civil War serial on ITV called 'North and South'. The first episode ran from 8 to 10 p.m. I was allowed to watch that one in peace. It was when subsequent episodes were shown at 10.30 p.m., after the news, that I became aware of disapproval.
The cats and I normally went to bed around eleven o'clock. When we didn't – when I sat there sometimes till after midnight, taking no notice of their efforts to remind me of the time – boy, did I get the treatment! Saph pacing round the room like a Victorian father, looking at the hall door. Tani informing me from the back of a chair in a cracked soprano that if I wasn't Careful I'd go to the Dogs. The pair of them sitting side by side in front of me trying to hypnotise me into switching off and heading for the duvet-under which, it seemed, Everybody ought to Be by eleven o'clock.
I found myself feeling guilty. Actually apologising. Sitting on the edge of my chair telling them it was nearly over. Several times I gave in and switched off before the end. Who, I asked them sternly, was boss around here? Two supercilious squints supplied the answer. I had made my bed, now I must lie on it. With them under the duvet, of course.
Christmas came. Saph was entranced. He hadn't seen Christmas decorations before. He poked the prickles on the holly, gazed riveted at the glass balls and glittering tinsel (hanging from spruce branches threaded through the big wrought iron ceiling candelabra: I dared not have a Christmas tree with him around). He stared entranced at the swags of cards strung on ribbons round the walls – to stop him scattering them as he'd been doing when I first set them out in the windowsills and on the dresser and bureau. I put things in funny places, didn't I? he said.
I did indeed, but I couldn't hang the parcels on the walls to protect them from him. Those I had to pile on the table, and remember I only have the one large living-room. Remember, too, how interested he was in the boxes in the bedroom cupboards. The parcels, to him, were boxes, and he dealt with them in the same way. Pushed them off the table with his paw, looked over to see if they'd come open when they fell, got down and tackled them with teeth and claws if they hadn't... Tani sitting on the table saying Nothing was Anything to do with her, but intensely interested just the same. One of the parcels contained, not a present, but a new telephone I'd ordered through the post. It arrived marked FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE. I heard the bump of that one going down from the other side of the closed kitchen door, and rushed in to pick it up. To tell the truth, I'd been in a hurry when I dumped it on the table or I'd never have left it there. It was all right. It was heavily padded and intact, but it took me a time to open it. Saphra was disgusted. He was even more disgusted when he found it was a telephone. Ought to have been something to eat, he said.
Some of the parcels were, which was one reason why he was so interested in them. Addressed personally to him and Tani from people who'd come here during the year, they contained cat biscuits and packets of Cat Treats and Cat Love. Presents of catnip mice, too: he could have opened a shop with those. And one of them contained a catnip adder, coiled in a Camembert box – a present from a woman in Exeter who had heard the story of the adder on the radio and had managed to find a lifelike length of diamond-patterned cotton for the adder's skin.
I keep it now in the bureau. It is too unusual – and startling – to leave lying around. But when Saph first had it he was entranced. He would swagger round the garden with it – me in attendance of course – pretending he was carrying his Trophy. And there, one morning, Miss Wellington came down the lane and saw him. From outside the gate, at a distance, she let out a scream that rocked the valley. 'An adder!' she screeched. 'Quick! He's got an adder!' And, forgetting in her concern that adders aren't around in December, she came rushing to the rescue, slid on one of the loose stones she was always worrying about, and fell flat on her face. I picked her up, helped her into the cottage, and administered brandy – watched by Saphra who'd followed us in and was sitting by her sniffing the air hopefully; a little brandy wouldn't go amiss with him after that scream, said his expression. Fortunately Miss Wellington was quite unscathed. She'd been wearing a woollen headscarf and a heavy coat. 'You and those cats put years on me, though,' she protested, giving Saph the lick off her finger he expected.
They put years on me, too. Take what happened on Christmas Day – this time entirely due to Tani. I'd been invited to lunch with Dora and Nita and their friends, as I had been every Christmas since Charles's death. I was also going to call en route on Jonathan and Delia, the neighbours who'd been such a help to me when he died and who now lived some three miles away. If I left at eleven, I decided, I'd have time for a chat with them before pressing on to Dora and Nita and the turkey. So I took the cats out for a good long session in the garden to make up for leaving them, telling t
hem we'd have a cosy evening together.
Saphra, as usual, was the one I shadowed, keeping him in sight at every step. I'd put them in their garden house at ten, I thought – the heater was already on. That would give them another hour outside while I changed, and filled their hot water bottles and litter trays. Tani was nowhere in sight, but I didn't worry about her. It only needed a call when I wanted her.
And then at ten o'clock, when I called Tanny-wanny-wanny, no Tanny-wanny appeared. I went round the garden, looking in all her hunting spots. Rushed into the cottage and searched that – having first pushed Saphra through the door of the cat-run and shut it. I didn't want him vanishing as well. There was no sign of her indoors, however. Not even on her sanctuary chair. I ran out again, stood on the path by the cat-run and blew a mighty blast on Charles's scout whistle, guaranteed to bring her back from any secret lurking-place at the double in the normal way. No slender, ghost-white cat appeared this time. Only a worried black-faced one, coming through the pop-hole to meet me with a look of pathetic loneliness on his face.
Almost immediately the front gate clicked and Miss Wellington materialised – obviously on her way up to Poppy's cottage, gift-wrapped parcel in hand. Had I heard that whistle? she demanded. As detachedly as possible I said I had. Coward that I was I'd long determined I'd never admit to blowing it to bring the cats home. People would be positive I was scatty.
More Cats in the Belfry Page 14