by Gabriel King
Outside, he gave the kitten to its mother. The black and white lay on her side staring into space, suckling her family. Fire had stripped raw the left side of her face. Her mouth gaped open on that side in an unintentional snarl. She was quivering a little with shock but ignoring it. That was only her body. She waited until the last kitten had wormed its way to a nipple, then said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion,’ he told her.
‘Well, I can’t call her that,’ she said. ‘She’s a female.’ After a pause she said, ‘You sound a bit of a toff to me. Come ‘round in front of me, I might be able to see you there. No. Ah well.’
‘In any case I am a Norwegian Forest Cat.’
‘I don’t know what that is. You sound like a bit of a toff. I suppose I could call her Rags.’ She tried to moisten her lips with her tongue. ‘The other one died then,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Six out of eight isn’t bad.’ She let the silence grow between them.
After a time he asked, ‘Will you be all right?’
She laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They look stupid, but they’ll take care of me.’
The human beings were still staring up at the house in disbelief. One of them had wrapped the other in a scorched blanket. Sometimes they put their arms around one another and looked disbelievingly from the cats to the flames and back again. They looked at the blowing snow. The man shook its head and said, ‘I turned everything off, I know I did.’ The woman said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ It began to cry. There they stood, awkward and shy – the way human beings often are – in front of the disaster they had made.
‘If you’re sure—’ said Ragnar.
‘Oh, I’m sure.’
‘Because I am looking for someone. She also needs my help.’
‘Go on,’ said the black and white. ‘You go on. I’ll be all right with them.’
‘Well then. Good-bye.’
She lifted her head as if she could watch him go. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘You could call the kitten ‘Cottonreel,’’ Ragnar suggested.
‘The other one was definitely dead, was it?’
‘Yes.’
After that, he walked and walked. He walked as hard as he could. He crossed the river by a bridge. He crossed it back again. He welcomed the bitter wind that sprang up to blow the snow into his smarting eyes. Whenever he thought of the black-and-white cat, he was filled with an energy he couldn’t control. Something about her courage – which was not courage but some blind determination of the organism – made him quicken his stride. Awed and elated, raw with misery and anger, he was trying to outdistance the knowledge of life, which is also the knowledge of death. Ragnar Gustaffson walked and walked to leave the burning house behind. But he had not eaten anything for two days, and not even a cat as sturdy as the Norsk Skogkatt can go on forever. Not even a king can march without food. He had lost his friends. Tired and hungry and trembling in the wake of events, he had no idea where he was. He felt his legs go from beneath him.
In that exact moment he remembered his dream of Pertelot, and understood what his life to date had been trying to tell him.
He thought, And what if I am a father?
He tried to rise. Nothing happened. He looked up, and the stars were spinning.
*
He woke suddenly, much later. It was still night, but the snow had let up. The moon was bright but low. Not far away above the flat river valley, set on its own among wide avenues and terraced lawns separated by broad shallow flights of steps, stood an elegant white mansion, its tall windows and roofed portico limned with snow. Ah, thought Ragnar, who despite his situation felt oddly warm and relaxed. ‘A house. Good.’ It took longer to get there than he had expected because he kept falling over on the way.
The terraced lawns were furnished with balustrades and urns. Many leaden statues – life-size human figures, naked or draped, alone or in groups – cast precise moon shadows. In places a thin mist lay across the snow between these figures, so that they looked as if they had waded out into water up to their knees and then stopped in wonder to look around them. Ragnar approached them with a sudden lightness of heart, but fell asleep again before he got there. When he next woke the mist had risen further, so that it reached up to the thighs of the statues. They didn’t seem to care. They stood around, looking more or less intently toward the elegant house.
Strange! Ragnar thought.
As he watched, one of them moved. It seemed to shake itself out of a dream, look around in surprise. ‘Oh dear!’ it said clearly. And then, ‘Damn!’ It shivered, bent down quickly, and from out of the milky fog around its legs fished a pink toweling bathrobe. It wasn’t a statue after all, but an elderly woman. ‘Damn cold!’ it said. ‘Woo.’ It was frail but still tall and straight. Its long gray hair fell thickly around its shoulders. Its skin had a dignified luminous whiteness in the night. It belted the robe quickly, looked around, shrugged. ‘Oh well,’ it said, and made off toward the house.
Ragnar, warm and comfortable, his eyes already beginning to close – so that there came up on his eyelids a dream of sunshine flickering on water – thought nothing of it. But he must have made some kind of noise, because the next thing he knew the woman had come back and was kneeling beside him in the snow, quietly extending its fingers for him to sniff. He couldn’t get up, but he could lean forward a little and touch its hand with his nose. After that, he closed his eyes again. They were both surprised, when the woman reached cautiously down and picked him up, to hear him purr loudly.
*
‘So,’ she said, ‘who are you, you splendid animal, and how did you get in this condition?’
She had fed Ragnar Gustaffson on cod – poached with a little milk and butter, very good – and given him a drink. She had washed him gently in lukewarm water, tutting over his scabby front paws and wasted limbs; dried him with a towel; then gently brushed out some of the lesser tangles in the Skogkatt coat. She had dressed his burns with ointment. On Ragttar’s part nothing had been required but that he sleep a little more, then finish the fish. For a cat who had so recently returned from the edge of hypothermia, he felt remarkably strong and well. He jumped up on the sideboard and began, ‘That is, as you would say, ‘a long story.’’
‘The first thing to learn,’ she interrupted, picking him up and setting him on her lap, ‘is to stay off the furniture.’
He didn’t hear her. He had fallen asleep again. In the next few days he would sleep twenty hours out of twenty-four.
*
Her house was full of rooms. There were six or seven on every floor, connected by long corridors and broad staircases. Large old chairs inhabited them, grazing alongside overstuffed chintz sofas, leather stools, and glass-fronted cases full of ancient porcelain and stuffed birds. The old lady had upholstered them years ago in brocade and velvet, favoring deep greens and petroleum blues, russet browns. The morning sun glanced off a hundred mirrors and onto a scatter of dusty brass objects – coal scuttles, fenders, fire irons, little brass lizards that seemed to flicker with movement. The rooms smelled of dust. They smelled of mice. One of them smelled sharply of turpentine and new wood. It was a narrow room but very tall. A window at one end reached from floor to ceiling. There were no curtains. Light poured in across a floor of bare gray boards onto the easel in the middle of the room. There the old lady went in the mornings to work.
‘You aren’t welcome here,’ she informed Ragnar. ‘Cat fur and oil paint don’t mix.’ And she pushed him out of the door.
‘Meeargh,’ said Ragnar.
‘No.’
In the end, though, she did let him in, and while she worked he watched the garden birds or slept the morning away on an old brocade cushion by the window. In this room the old lady wore a paint-spattered white overall. She did her hair up with a piece of silk or chenille. She painted the same picture again and again. It was a view of a young man’s head taken from two or three very small, brownish
photographs pinned to the easel. They were curled with age.
*
In her parlor was a polished round table covered with silver frames of every size and description. They were full of the young man’s photograph too. She sat in there in the afternoon, and at four o’clock ate buttered toast or crumpets by the fire. She fell asleep with Ragnar on her lap. One evening she woke up with a gasp. It was six o’clock. The room was lit only by the dwindling coal fire, which cast faint shadows and glimmered in the brass fender.
‘Joseph!’ she said, with a laugh.
‘I thought he’d come back with me,’ she told Ragnar. ‘I thought this time he would.’ For a moment she was as full of delight as a girl. ‘Oh, Royal,’ she said. ‘Can we meet the people we once loved? In dreams? After death? I’m sure we can! We can go back to all the things we’ve done.’ She sighed. She said, ‘I loved him so.’ And then in a quite different voice, ‘That man completely overshadowed my life.’
Ragnar yawned. He stretched one foreleg out in front of him in the firelight and extended its claws. Then he got up, shook himself, and jumped off the old lady’s lap. ‘I love someone,’ he told her. ‘And as soon as I am strong again, I must find her.’
*
The old lady treated him well. He was always warm. When he watched the snow flurry across the garden, it was from the right side of the window once more. But she had her disadvantages. Oh, she called him ‘my little lion.’ But she seemed more frightened than proud of his energy and liveliness – and sometimes quite angry with it. One morning, leaping up onto the kitchen table to say hello to her, he knocked over the milk jug.
‘You silly cat! You silly, bad cat!’
*
Snow whirled across the terraces in the dark afternoon, curdling the brown air and settling on the heads of the statues like a white fur hat. In the morning the lawns were a dazzling fresh expanse, across which hopped a single thrush like a bird in a painting. Ragnar spent his time staring out of the studio window. He ate only half his breakfast.
‘Dear me, Royal!’ said the old lady. ‘Don’t you like cod after all?’
She was amused.
‘How can a cat not like fish?’
While she worked, she talked about Joseph.
‘You would have liked him. Royal—’
‘I am looking for someone too. I go south because that is what I feel inside. You know?’
‘And he would have loved you.’
‘I’ve walked a long way already. The world is a bleak place. Cats only have other cats.’
‘He loved cats with a passion. He drew them to him with that marvelous voice, those marvelous hands. When he stroked them they couldn’t resist.’
‘I go south and keep looking for her. I hear her say the things she used to say. ‘Rags, you are exasperating.’And, “Come here this instant!”’
‘None of us could resist him.’
Joseph’s portrait filled the walls of the room. He looked out from canvas after canvas, old and dull, fresh and new. His face was sharp yet placid. His hair, a darkish brown tending to chestnut at the sides, curled gently into the nape of his neck. His eyes were a musing green. The old lady had painted them so that they looked at you wherever you sat. They had a lazy, amused expression. They weren’t quite so gentle as his face.
‘His friends said he filled his pockets with catnip to attract the cats.’ She laughed. ‘What did he fill them with to attract us?’ she asked herself. ‘What indeed!’ She sighed and put down her brush. ‘Well, Royal, my little lion—’
‘The world is a bare place without her, and now I have something new to wonder about.’
‘Shall we try you on haddock for lunch?’
‘What if I am a father?’
*
That night Ragnar watched her make her way down the stairs, open the back door, and go out into the garden. Her eyes were wide open. She was fast asleep. She wore only her pink wrap, and her feet were quite bare. Her skin already had a translucent waxy look, as if in anticipation of the cold. She often got up like this – especially if she had been agitated during the day – found her way down the stairs, and walked across the lawn to stand and hold a dialogue with the statues. These conversations were diffuse and full of vague regrets. She took up a listening posture, as if she could hear the statues’ reply.
‘How could you, Joseph?’ she would plead. ‘I would never have done that to you.’ She added, ‘You were always a torment.’
And then suddenly, after a pause of almost five minutes: ‘My, but we did have fun, didn’t we?’
Ragnar looked out across the lawn. The surface of the snow, silvered by frost and thaw, frost and thaw, shone like water in the strong moonlight. Everything looked very clear, but so cold. The old lady’s misty breath hung about her own shoulders. Suddenly, she began to take off her wrap.
*
Despite himself, he slept, and he dreamed; and what he dreamed woke him very suddenly. The hearth was cold. The room was chilly. Ragnar was so disoriented he barely recognized it. His heart pounded. Noises had followed him out of the dream – a kind of leaden, sickly buzzing in his ears, human shouts, and behind both a distant panicky caterwaul that for some reason he associated with Pertelot. A voice repeated over and over, ‘Not the kittens! Not the kittens!’
It was his own.
After a moment or two he was himself again – or imagined he was. He stretched. He sat down and licked one hind paw. Then he went over to the window and pushed with his face at the velvet curtains for a while until he found the gap between them. He had a look out. He blinked. Terraces stretched away down to the water meadow in the distance, where he could just see a sketchy line of willows. Moonlight slipped away across the snowy lawns, slithered off the slick of ice that glossed each balustrade and urn. Everything looked frozen and fixed, although one of the statues seemed to have fallen down, and lay at odds among the others, its arms thrown out. Ragnar looked closer. It wasn’t a statue. It was the old lady. In a flash he was across the room, down the stairs and, with the weight of his seventeen pounds, pushed open the door.
She had a slight, puzzled smile, as if she had not quite expected to fall. She lay beneath a statue with a young man’s face. It was the face of Joseph. It was the face she had been trying to paint. At the same time, it was neither of those things, but the face of a human being, individual and in the end unreadable. A half smile lay on its lips. Its eyes were a little cruel. It was sure of itself; it was unsure. It was proud of itself; it was a little ashamed. It had put catnip in its pocket to attract cats. It had been alive, and now it was dead. It had loved the old lady in its way. Did she know this? Perhaps. After all, she had a smile on her face too. She looked less cold than sculpted, and her body had a strange, transparent grace.
‘Dreams are sometimes worse than nothing,’ said Ragnar. ‘Best is to find what you are looking for.’ He sat for a while, staring intently into her face. She showed no sign of moving. Eventually he said, ‘I’m going to find Pertelot Fitzwilliam now. You would have liked her, and she would have liked you. She is brave enough to be out there while I sit in your house with you and eat your very nice food. I miss her. My nights are full of her. My dreams urge me on.’
The memory of his dreams made him get up.
‘Good-bye,’ he said. ‘Thank you for taking care of me.’
He walked away from the house without looking back. Over in the east, above the line of willows, the day was beginning. Later, the sun might spill itself in a kind of golden, rosy-orange shimmer across the icy lawn; for now it was only a tremulous graying of the sky over there, which picked out the features of the waiting statues. It lighted an eye, the corner of a smile.
*
Compelled by a knowledge he couldn’t explain, he went southward, and the weather began to improve. He woke beneath a hawthorn hedge one morning to the steady drip of water. All around him was melting snow! White gulls wheeled and called above the plowed fields in a sky a bright, aching blue. The ai
r was sluiced and splashed with sunshine. Through every bar of light that penetrated the hedge a million drops of water seemed to flash and fall. He was already soaked, but he felt heartened. He felt hungry.
His luck changed with the weather. Wherever he went, there was food for him. Housewives left it to cool on windowsills. Housecats left it unfinished in nice ceramic bowls on clean back doorsteps. Off its guard in the sunshine, it wandered into his welcoming clutch at roadsides and at the base of hedges. He liked the mice best. Moles he tried to leave alone. Some of them were as determined as the Troll Cat itself, and a lot angrier.
There were dawns – frosty, iconic, heartbreaking. Mornings so windy the crows had to climb out of the air and into the branches of the trees. Afternoon sunlight like crystallized sugar down the side of a blackened telegraph pole. He loved to travel now. He was sure he would find her. He thought he smelled her sometimes in the lanes, a resinous Egyptian perfume so intense – so bizarre – it couldn’t belong among the drab smells of this northern winter. He expected to come upon her around the next corner. Or the one after that. Instead, he came upon new companions, new vistas. He spent a night in a barn with a tiny but well-tailored female named Treslove, who soon told him hopefully that she was no better than she should be. ‘If you like Egyptians, darling, you can always call me ‘Cairo.’’ He fell in, then out, with a couple of muddy young marmalade toms – brothers on the Old Changing Way – out for rats and anything else they could find. He walked for two days with a traveling cat from Calderdale who never stopped talking about Stilton cheese.
Then, at the turn of a lane where a disused track went off by the side of a wood, he was attracted to a flicker of light among the couch grass, thistles, and young sloes. It was like finding a glittering glass marble between the tangled stems. But as soon as he put his nose in to sniff it, he realized he was looking into something. Or somewhere. Some vaguely seen but very real place, where – things – rushed to and fro. Were they animals? Wait! Were they cats? That was where Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion, a King in his time, had his first glimpse into the wild roads – a strange, secluded, rural little tunnel in the matted grass, where farm cats had hunted voles a hundred years. Entranced, he watched their shadows pouncing to and fro under the changing light. Why not? he thought. I should see this too. I should try all these things! Then – because he was the King, and he had no fear – he had slipped inside and been welcomed. He thought he heard a whisper, a shiver through every branch and pathway: At last! Then the ghost winds took him up and propelled him south.