by Doreen Tovey
I invited her in and let her give it to him herself. I couldn't think what else to do. How, after what I'd said in good faith in the shop, could I have told her the truth? That he'd now got an obsession about green plastic netting and had abandoned fresh greenstuff for that?
I might as well have done. You should have seen the look on her face when he backed, ears flat, away from the watercress. Trying to feed him that stuff, he wailed. She think he was potty or something?
Obviously she now thought I was, and we were sure he was, which probably made some sort of equation. Even allowing for Siamese being different, however, his passion for netting was most odd.
It started with our bringing home a half-hundredweight of onions in a green plastic sack which we'd bought at the local Saturday market. We'd happened to meet Tim Bannett there and he'd just bought two sacks himself. Next year, when he was better organised, he told us, he was going to grow his own. Meanwhile, as the next best thing, he was buying them in bulk. Liz was going to string these like the Breton onions – it told you how in the self-sufficiency book and they'd look good hanging up near the jars of honey. With their home-made wine on the shelves, he added, and the box of apples we'd given them... There was a sort of Virginian pioneer's Thanksgiving look on his face.
There was one on Charles's, too, as we also drove home with a sack of onions. Tim was right, he enthused. The big porch outside the kitchen, which we'd recently had built to take gum boots and anoraks and the freezer, would make an admirable winter store. A couple of sacks of potatoes; one of flour; these onions; his cob-nuts when he harvested them. There was something in this self-sufficiency business – it gave one an independent, let-'em-all-come feeling.
It did indeed. I began to have visions myself. Big stone jars of pickles; a neatly-stacked winter woodpile – not the last-minute odds and ends we frenziedly sawed up now. Perhaps we could get one of those big pine dressers for the kitchen, I said. I rather liked them. It would go well with our red-tiled floor and the strings of onions. We had our old oil-lamps, too, which we'd used before we got electricity at the cottage. I could get those out and polish them. They'd look really right on the dresser.
So long as I didn't want to actually use them, said Charles. We'd had enough of groping round in dimness before. He had other things to do this winter.
So, dreaming our dreams, we drove home with our sack of onions and stacked it proudly against the wall in the porch – only to find Sass chewing at the mesh a few minutes later as if it was his one hope of getting to Mecca.
It couldn't have been the smell of the netting which attracted him. That was over-powered by the onions. It wasn't the onions either. When I offered him one he ignored it. It was then that it struck me it might be the colour of the netting – green like the grass and the watercress. Experts say cats are colour-blind and see only in shades of grey. I wondered, though – could Sass be different? It was a theory I put to Charles a few days later after an incident in the orchard.
By this time, worried by Saska's preoccupation with the sack (Charles having come up with the thought that the dye in the netting might be poisonous), we'd moved it up to the spare-room-cum-study as the one place our gannet couldn't get at it. I write up there, it is a very small room and the smell of onions is hardly like that of violets – but, as Charles said, which was more important? Sass, indubitably. I put up with the onions.
So this particular day I was upstairs working, Charles was in the orchard, Shebalu was asleep downstairs (four years older than Sass, she insists on senior rights occasionally) and Sass, bereft of company, was busy bawling the place down. I could tell by the rise and fall of the howling that he was wandering from room to room. Presently there was silence. A creak on the stairs. I waited for it – the sound of sniffing at the door jamb. Then the hiatus which I knew from long experience with Siamese meant he was peering under the door.
His bellow when it came was like the foghorn on the Lizard. He knew I was In There! he roared. He could See Me! Why didn't I Let Him In? What was in there he wasn't supposed to know about?
I could stand the foghorn. I'd had long experience of that, too. What I couldn't stand was when he started chewing the carpet. I carried him over to Charles who said of course he'd have him in the orchard – he was so intelligent he was always a delight to be with. 'Couldn't she be bothered with you then?' I heard him ask as the two of them made their way up through the gooseberry patch. Sass gave a man-to-man 'Wow!'
I went back to my work. For a while all was peace and silence, then I heard footsteps thumping up the stairs. It was Charles, clutching Sass. His face was scarlet. Did I know, he said, what this cat of mine had done? Gone straight up an apple tree – right to the top – and chewed a whacking great hole in the net!
The apple trees are netted to keep off the birds, whom we like but who devastate our crops. The nets are expensive and Charles had spent ages putting them on, manoeuvring them carefully with a pole to cover all the branches. Admittedly this was autumn and the birds wouldn't start in till the spring, but 'A brand new net!' groaned Charles. 'And now I've got to take a ladder up and mend the hole with string. That blasted cat must be bonkers.'
It was then I pointed out that the nets were green, like the onion sack and the watercress. Perhaps he was a breakthrough, I said; a cat who recognised colour. Charles said breakthrough was the right description for him, the way he'd gone through that fruit net. But why should he get fanatical about things that were green, not brown or white or blue?
Maybe when he saw Shebalu eating her grass clump with such reverence, I said, he thought he should eat everything that colour to be on the safe side. Maybe it was some sort of Siamese ritual, like that business of his with the rug. (The rug is a story with many facets. I'd better tell that one later.) The more I saw of Sass, I confessed, I wondered whether he was superstitious.
Charles looked at the cat we were talking about. Sass never wasted time. Having done his stuff with green netting for the day he was obviously practising for his next encounter with Polly. Back arched, tail stuck out like a teacup handle, he was advancing across the room at absolutely nothing. He stiffened, feinted, jumped aside, spun round... advanced sideways at nothing again. He didn't know about superstitious, said Charles. If I asked him, that cat was nuts.
Five
We first realised we had a strain of unusual mice in the Valley when we were returning from a walk one day with Annabel.
I was in front, going ahead to open the Forestry gate, Charles was coming behind with his four-legged girlfriend, when what I thought was an autumn leaf skittered across the track in front of me and came to rest at the bottom of the bank. It moved again as I got near it and I saw that it was a field-mouse. Chestnut brown, small – the size of a half-grown oak leaf – and making no attempt whatever to get away. Maybe it was injured, I thought, stooping to pick it up and put it where Annabel wouldn't tread on it. (I'll pick up anything with gloves on except an adder; another thing I've grown used to over the years.)
It wasn't injured, however. It was sitting up on its haunches eating grass seed, turning the tassel like a corn-cob in incredibly tiny paws, ignoring me completely as if I were some sort of local tree. By the time Charles came up it had finished that grass head and moved a foot or so up the bank, where it selected another which it sat up and nibbled while it looked interestedly down at Annabel.
'Perhaps it's got concussion,' I whispered to Charles. Never had I seen an outdoor mouse so confident. Charles studied it closely.
'Nothing wrong with that one,' he said. 'It's just not afraid of anything.'
Neither was the one I saw next day eating bird crumbs by the cotoneaster in the yard. It was sitting nonchalantly with its back to me and didn't even turn round as I passed. It wasn't the mouse we'd seen in the lane. This one was definitely larger. There was the same air of insouciance, however – the obvious lack of fear. I wondered if they came from the same litter.
That afternoon the cotoneaster mouse w
as taken into custody by Shebalu. I shouted when I saw her creeping up on him but he determinedly took no notice. She carried him indoors, moaning horribly between her teeth as is her wont when she's announcing that she's caught something. That in itself would frighten most mice to death – it shakes even me when I hear it. But the moment she put it down to give a louder bellow for Sass (never around, said her expression, when he was Wanted) the mouse got up and, while she still had her mouth open, nipped quietly into the kitchen.
I hoped he'd go straight through it and out into the yard but instead he went into a cupboard. Not, we realised when we knew him better, because he was scared and seeking refuge. He was busy summing up the prospects. That was in October. That mouse, soon to be known as Lancelot (because, phonetically, that was what he did to Charles's nuts), stayed with us till the following spring, resisting all our attempts to expel him. He moved his headquarters at times but we always knew where he was. We had only to look for the cats.
It was they, the first day, who told us he was in the cupboard. They were camped hopefully outside it. Sass with not the least idea why he was there – he'd never yet seen a mouse – but copying Shebalu, trying to look intent, though his ears did wander occasionally. I shut them in the living-room and turned out the tins and packets. Sure enough there was the mouse in the last corner. I put on a glove, reached out a hand – he jumped over it and disappeared behind me.
He was under the cooker, according to Shebalu, whom I fetched out to say where he'd gone. He could actually See Him, said Sass, peering under with one eye. Apparently the mouse saw Saska, too. He shot out and into another cupboard. Only to check that he had an escape route, though. Having done so he came back and went under the cooker.
There, shuttling between cooker and cupboard with the waste bin sheltering his passage (we put it there on purpose to give him protection from the cats) he lived contentedly for several days and might indeed have spent all winter... there were only cleaning things in that cupboard and I kept the doors of the others firmly closed... if it weren't for the fact that I began to have a conscience about him. It seemed hardly the life for a field-mouse.
I started to put down crumbs for him. They were definitely gone each morning. After a couple of days, though, I had another thought. What could he be getting to drink? I put down a saucer of water and he certainly made use of that. From the splashings on the floor next morning he'd either fallen in it or had a bath.
He was obviously happy now, the only snag being that we had to keep the cats out of the kitchen in case they caught him. Not only was it difficult – sometimes I wondered if they got through the door by thought transference, the way I'd be sure I'd shut them on one side only to find them next minute on the other – but also it didn't seem fair. Sass in particular adored the kitchen. He couldn't get up to the work-tops yet, owing to his inability to jump, but he liked to sit out there and savour the smells and think about what I might be going to give him next.
Ergo, one night I laid a trail of crumbs out to the porch and put Lancelot's water saucer out there as well. That he'd transferred headquarters was confirmed next morning when the cats went straight to the refrigerator. He was Under There, said Shebalu, putting her nose to the bottom. Eating, Sass solemnly informed us, putting his nose down there as well. He was indeed. Lancelot had found El Dorado. Charles's harvest of cob-nuts.
Charles had brought them in and put them in the porch in a big plastic bin with its lid off, so that any damp would evaporate and not rot them. I had wondered about mice at the time, but he said they couldn't climb the bin-sides. What he hadn't reckoned with, however, was that Lancelot was no ordinary mouse. Not for him trying futilely to climb the plastic. He'd gone up the leg of the table we had out there and launched himself downwards into the bin. To get out again, of course, he had only to drop off over the edge, the bin being filled to the top. Judging from the trail of nuts leading to the refrigerator he'd been working a transfer system all night.
Charles was so impressed he said he was welcome to share the nuts. He certainly was a clever little chap, getting away from Shebalu like that and proving himself so resourceful. Which wasn't what he said when he looked at his duffel coat one day (we'd noticed the cats had been sniffing suspiciously below it) and discovered that while Lancelot might eat nuts under the refrigerator by day, that certainly wasn't where he spent his nights. He'd chewed big holes in the duffel, carried the resultant wool into one of the pockets, and constructed a neat, soft bed suspended on the wall, safe from frost and patrolling cats.
It wasn't what I said either, a week or two after that, when Lancelot and Charles between them caused chaos at the cottage.
It began with our buying a caravan. Why we bought it I will explain later. As you may guess, it was connected with the cats. Suffice it for the moment to say that we'd bought a second-hand caravan – in November because it was then that we saw the one we wanted. We'd been looking for one since September and this was the first one that fitted the bill. And because it was in superb condition and had until then been kept undercover in the winter, Charles said we would keep it undercover too. A little beauty like that deserved it, he said, patting it affectionately on the side. When I puzzledly enquired where, he said the shed next to Annabel's stable. My heart sank with a thud when I heard it. You should just have seen that shed!
We'd owned it for nearly twenty years and from the moment we'd bought it, along with the orchard, Charles had used it as a store for things that might one day come in handy. Not things of any value, like the heavy roller, for instance, which we'd used once in twenty years and was kept in the garage. (Charles was always saying This Spring he'd roll the lawn, but somehow he never got round to it.)
No. The shed, which was open-fronted, contained a sort of magpie's nest of bits and pieces. The load of stone removed when we had the fireplace opened up, for instance. (Charles had said it would cost a fortune to buy that lot; we'd be glad of it for repairing the walls.) Earth excavated when we had the extension put on the cottage; according to Charles it was good topsoil. (Dump it in the shed, he'd told the builder at the time; later he'd spread it on the garden.) Soot, stored undercover to keep it from being de-natured by the rain. The remains of a load of mushroom compost, left there for the same purpose. Bags of sand. A mêlée of metal poles and wire, which we'd once used as an enclosure for Annabel and had never been able to untangle.
Somewhere in the depths was an old-fashioned folding bed-spring Charles had destined, years before, for a garden frame. In one corner were several reserve sacks of coal, hidden behind an old door. Eight heavy scaffolding planks were stacked at the rear – we'd used them to whitewash the cottage that summer. Surmounting everything else, the top of the magpie's nest, was our winter supply of kindling. Apple-tree prunings, sycamore branches, put there diligently by Charles. One reached it by standing on a convenient mound of earth there hadn't been room for inside. To stop the kindling cascading down, which it tended to do when one tried to pull out a piece, it was held in place by loops of rope fastened to the crossbeam at random intervals. 'Nonsense,' said Charles, when I complained that it looked like Steptoe's yard. That's part of country living.'
Now he was suggesting clearing it and I should have jumped for joy. Being me, I was worrying about what we were going to do with it. 'Absolutely nothing to it,' said Charles. 'We'll have it cleared in half a day.'
Maybe so if we'd hired a bulldozer and put that lot where it deserved, on the local rubbish tip. But Charles insisted on removing it bit by bit, as if we were delving for jewels. Ten bags of manure – you'd have thought they were jewels, the reverence with which he carted them away. Must have matured for years, he said. They'd be worth their weight in gold on the rhubarb.
Coal to the conservatory. Kindling to Annabel's stable. She snuffed and snorted at it with displeasure. Stacking That Stuff in Her Place, she said... she wasn't going to have Those Planks. She did have them, propped across the back of her stable wall, and snorted her annoya
nce all the louder, banging her feeding bowl about at night to show what little space she now had. There was enough room in there for six donkeys, Charles told her, and it would keep her much warmer in winter.
It needed to. It was the coldest winter we'd had in years and it took us a fortnight to clear that shed. Lugging out the stones, cold enough to have come from a glacier, pickaxing the solid heaps of earth, trundling it off in a barrow with ice-cold handles whose frozen wheel would hardly turn. Normally we would have had plenty of assistance, but for some reason all our neighbours seemed to have been suddenly struck with palsy. Tim Bannett had flu. Father Adams had arthritis – it had come on when we told him about clearing the shed. As for Fred Ferry, he'd come past the first morning, clumping stolidly along as is his wont. 'Whass doin' in there?' he'd stopped to enquire, and when we'd told him he looked astounded and said 'Never!'
'Thought theest was leaving that lot for they blokes what digs up the past,' he said. Fred prides himself on his subtle sense of humour. When I suggested maybe he could help us – we'd pay him at the usual rates – I fancied the humour faded slightly, but he said 'Ah. I'll see. I'll let thee know,' and trudged on up the hill. When he came down again he was limping too. He said his knee trouble had suddenly cropped up again. It always does when Fred needs an excuse. We knew when we were beaten.