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.
FIFTEEN
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 t
op 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.
She went on gathering sticks. I got over the fence and headed for the pond. The geese made off when I waved a branch at them, but the ducks immediately tried to follow them. I was jumping backwards and forwards over the fence like a retriever and had herded two ducks into their shed and was trying to round up the third, which was rushing about like a demented hen, when the woman came drifting back. 'What about trying it with a carrot?' she suggested helpfully. I didn't tell her that ducks don't eat carrots but I was beginning to wonder about the countrywoman business.
It was mating time everywhere just then. A Siamese-breeding friend I hadn't heard from for ages rang to tell me of the trouble she was having with her Golden Burmese male. She'd gone to buy a queen the previous year, she said, but while the breeder was actually making out the pedigree this absolutely gorgeous kitten walked up and looked at her, and she fell for him and bought him instead. She'd heard that the Burmese-Siamese cross was wonderful, and had the idea of using him as a stud with her Siamese queens. The trouble was, he was now a year old and he still didn't know what was expected of him. At first he used to hide when the queens started calling, so she took him to her vet to have him checked. The vet had up-ended him, pronounced that he had the biggest balls he'd ever seen on a cat, and said there was nothing wrong with him. Give him time and he'd work it out, he said.
She was on hand when daylight did start to dawn. One of the queens was calling, rolling on the floor yelling, waving her paws, Claude looking on in mystification – when suddenly the penny dropped. His face cleared. He knew what was wanted. He got down, threw himself on his back, and rolled as well. Waving his paws in the air, bawling and looking backwards over his head at the queen. He did it now whenever the girls came on heat – and that was all he did. He had such a limp paw, too, and she was wondering... Was it because she'd called him Claude?
I was in the middle of laughing when a thought suddenly struck me. Some while before, Pat had told me that Luki had a habit of rolling on his back, waving his paws and peering backwards at her chocolate-point girl, Sahra. Pat described it as Luki trying to look alluring. Sahra, she said, always looked more horrified than allured. I'd told her that Saphra often did the same thing with Tani, and Tani usually slapped him on the nose. Why should our respective boys try to look alluring? I wondered now. Could they possibly be odd like Claude?
I needn't have worried. A few days later we had an incident that proved who was the man about the cottage. It was a hot day, and I'd propped the cat-house window open so that Tani and Saph could sunbathe on the shelf inside. Going past on my way up to the garage I saw Tani sitting on the shelf, for all the world like a mediaeval princess at a tourney, gazing at the knight wearing her favour in the jousting ring below; and down in the jousting ring – the paved run of the cat-house – crouched Saphra, one paw upraised at something hidden behind a clump of grass. I was in there in an instant, grabbing him. Behind the grass, head up and hissing, was an angry adder.
I rushed Saph down to the cottage, tossed him in, shut the door and ran back armed with a spade. There was no need to rescue Tani. She was still sitting in the window, watching calmly with her paws tucked under her, knowing that at that distance she was safe. The adder was still there, head up and watching me, tongue flickering in and out. I dealt with it regretfully but firmly. Adders have now been declared a protected species but they weren't at that time – and how else can one deal with an adder in a cat-run? From its size I reckoned it was the one that escaped Jeanine McMullen and myself the previous year. Probably it had wintered under the cat-house, which is on bricks; grown bigger; had come out to bask in the sun and, in the way of snakes, would have gone on doing it, a constant and predictably fatal danger to the cats, if I hadn't happened past and been suspicious.
It was the final lesson as far as Tani was concerned, at any rate. She is nobody's fool. The next evening I was out on the lawn with the pair of them, dragging a piece of rope around for them to chase. Saph, in his element, was jumping on it wildly, rushing away with his ears flat and coming back to jump on it again. Tani, who had possibly seen the adder come out from under the cat-house and recognised the same sinuous movement in the rope, hardly touched ground as she belted round the corner and into the cottage. It was Saphra's business to deal with snakes, she said. He was the he-cat round here.
Meanwhile, more cats were appearing in the valley. There were new people in the cottage up by the forest gate, Tim and Margaret, and they had a lilac-point girl called Suki. Suki, they said, was shy, and nervous of meeting people, but they used to take her for walks further up the valley, by the stream, and she soon began to explore the neighbourhood on her own. I went round the cor
ner of the cottage one day and saw what I thought was Tani sitting bolt upright on the path outside the cat-house looking down at me, while Saphra was sitting inside looking out at her. 'How on earth did you get out?' I asked in astonishment, making a move to pick her up – and she turned and shot out under the gate and up the bridlepath. She wasn't Ours, bawled Saphra when she had gone – which was now patently obvious. 'Ours' was a pair of pyramid ears and two crossed eyes peering Chad-like over the cat-house windowsill. From the inside, of course.
Tim and Margaret, seeing my two together and thinking Suki was perhaps coming down to sit by their house for company, decided she ought to have a friend of her own and got a seal-point kitten called Cleopatra, who turned out to be of Killdown descent and related to Saphra. I warned them they were in for trouble, and they got it.
It took, as it usually does, a little while for the two cats to accept each other and then I began to get reports about Cleo turning out to be a minx and having an effect on Suki. Suki still went off on expeditions of her own – down to my garden and up to Poppy Richards, where she used to go into the cottage and pretend it was hers and scared Miss Wellington nearly out of her wits one day when she went in and met a large white cat, like a ghost, gliding silently down the stairs. But at home the two of them were playing together. Cleo was stealing Suki's food. More important, Suki – who'd all her life been a Good girl like Tani (maybe it's inherent in lilac queens) – was stealing Cleo's, and belting about the place like a kitten herself. Obviously the experiment was a success.
More Cats in the Belfry Page 16