by Doreen Tovey
Once, while I counted, he went round twenty-six times non-stop. Charles said he was probably jogging. It wasn't as simple as that, I said. I reckoned it had become another of his compulsions.
It certainly had. We had a performance every evening. Round and round and round. It went beyond exercise, beyond merely copying Shebalu – you could tell it by his expression. If he didn't go round and round like that, Something Terrible would happen.
That was bad enough. Eventually it even affected Charles, who said there ought to be an Outward Bound course for cats. He knew one cat who'd be on it like a rocket, he said, before he had us all going round in circles. But Sass then developed another compulsion and worked the two of them together.
It involved going up the bookcase and it was also started by Shebalu, of whom I was beginning to have my suspicions. She knew Sass wasn't a good climber. She knew he had this thing about having to copy her. So every single night without fail she would leap to the top shelf of the bookcase and sit looking down at him expectantly for his reaction, which was to erupt from chair or hearthrug as if she'd pressed a button and start worrying about getting up there himself.
Another cat would have ignored the challenge. Pretended it didn't matter. In similar circumstances Solomon used to go off and climb something simpler to satisfy honour – usually Charles's dressing-gown behind the bedroom door, which was known as Solomon's ladder. Not so Sass. From the expression on his face, if he didn't make it up the bookcase the haunts would get him. So I'd help him up. I couldn't win, of course. He'd then sit there and worry about coming down again – silently, as is usual when Sass is in a crisis, but you couldn't fail to know he was up there doing it. For one thing there was Shebalu, now back on the hearthrug herself, looking up interestedly as if he was about to jump from a skyscraper. For another, every now and again he'd put a paw on the top of the standard lamp and peer anxiously down through the shade. 'Not through there!' I'd yell and rush to stand on a chair so that he could get down via my shoulder...
Once a night was enough for the bookcase routine but within minutes of completing that he'd remember the other thing that kept off the haunts and he'd be off on his trek round the settee. If he saw us watching him he stopped and lurked, but the moment we looked away, on he went, round and round, as if he was on a treadmill. The only guaranteed way to break the sequence was to open the door to the kitchen, through which he'd vanish quietly on his next trip round to see if there was anything to eat.
Did I think he was mental? Charles sometimes asked. Not from the way he nipped into the kitchen, I said.
It was odd, all the same. He did other odd things, too, though they didn't impinge quite so much on our nerves. The business of moving pens and pencils and paintbrushes around, for instance, took place after we'd gone to bed. At first it was just an odd pencil which I'd find lying tooth-marked on the rug in the morning. I'd pick it up and put it back in the vase on the Welsh dresser, commenting that Sass was being a retriever again.
Charles, whose hobby is painting, keeps his brushes and pencils in that vase, on hand for the moment of inspiration. He didn't mind Sass taking one pencil – in fact he regarded the tooth marks with affection. Strong little teeth. He certainly gripped things tightly. Funny little chap, wasn't he? he said.
He didn't say that when, as was inevitable with Sass, there was a build-up in the operation. When we began to come down in the morning to find brushes and pencils strewn around as if our dark man had been distributing largesse. They were scattered across the carpet. They were poked under rugs and cushions. Some of them we didn't find for days. He began to hide my pens, too, which I have a habit of leaving on a shelf of the bookcase. Sometimes I couldn't find a thing to write with.
It had become another of his compulsions. One which occupied a lot of time. He took to sitting on the Welsh dresser when he thought it was our bedtime, willing us to go upstairs so he could start. As if he were waiting for the coast to be clear before he started running the brandy barrels, said Charles. Perhaps he'd been a smuggler in a previous incarnation.
Charles was still reasonably light-hearted about it when he made that remark, though he was getting a bit concerned about his chewed-up brush handles. Pencils he didn't mind so much but paint-brushes were expensive, he said. What was more, it wasn't hygienic.
Rather more hygienic than Sass's next development, which was to start putting the brushes in his earthbox. At that point the project came to a sudden end in a strong smell of Dettol and references to one-way tickets to Siam. The vase joined the onion sack upstairs in the verboten room and Sass was most upset, though he showed no sign of it during the day. Only after we went to bed that night did our dark man, normally so silent, start howling... great, soulful howls that announced he'd been doing his Best. He hoped he wouldn't be blamed for falling down on the brush ritual. He'd have gone on moving them for Ever and Ever. If anybody's whiskers were going to fall out, it ought to be that Rotten Old Charles's.
Hating to hear him howling so disconsolately – besides which he kept us awake – we compromised by leaving a selection of removables on the dresser. Pencils he'd already chewed. Old pens that needed refills. A broken wooden curtain ring that Sass immediately adopted as his favourite talisman. His other treasures were moved only during the night, but his ring appeared constantly during the day. Hooked from under the piano. Tossed in front of us to beguile us into playing with him. From time to time, when he thought it necessary, laid reverently in his earthbox. There were times, particularly when he was carrying it round the settee, when he looked like a South Sea Islander with a nose-ring doing a war dance. What did it matter, however, so long as it kept him happy and we were the only ones who knew about it? Letting anyone else see him was a different matter. It would have been added evidence of our oddness. Meantime the thaw came and spring arrived, heralded by Annabel getting a dose of colic.
It would have been understandable if it had happened while we were snow-bound and she couldn't go into her field – when she spent the day alternately eating hay in her stable and looking out over her tiny half-door. Charles had made it specially to fit her height, so she could get her head over the top. Even so she kept bawling about how bored she was and that she wanted to go out. So every day we took her for a walk up the hill, where a track had been trodden in the snow.
Annabel loved it. The people who lived at the top gave her sweets and fondled her ears. She had her photograph taken standing importantly by a snowman. Always one for effect, this was when she behaved at her best, with a daily captive audience. She plodded along behind me being Annabel Going To The Klondike, walking obediently in my tracks. She made no attempt now, as was her usual practice on walks, to nip my bottom and then mockingly shake her head, her mouth wide open in a disparaging donkey laugh which held all the more meaning for being silent.
One afternoon, encouraged by Miss Wellington, we tried to take her out on to the main road. She was sure it was possible and it would set such a good example, she said, if our dear little donkey could do it.
We tried, not by way of an example, but to see how far we could go over the drift. We might have got through – it had packed like ice on top and Annabel is as sure-footed as a mountain goat – but the wind had come up, loose snow was blowing sideways off the fields, and we walked into a veritable blizzard. Without altering pace for an instant our four-footed friend turned round and started back. Annabel believes in looking after Annabel – no setting examples for her. We emerged like a set piece sculptured in ice, white from head to foot. People said it looked most spectacular and photographed that little incident too. We often wondered what they captioned it in their albums. 'Pioneers en route for the Yukon', or 'The queer lot who live in the Valley?'
They'd certainly have thought us queer if they'd seen us when Annabel had colic, but fortunately that took place in the dark.
It was the day after it started to thaw. As I say, it would have been understandable had it happened during the snow, when she
mostly stood in her stable eating and shouting complaints and got very little exercise. But the snow was clearing fast. We'd been able to put her on the hillside behind the cottage, where her donkey paths had turned to slush and the grass was showing through.
Whether she got a chill, whether she ate grass with ice in it, whether Miss Wellington paid her a surreptitious visit and fed her with too many apples – the fact was that when Charles put her in her stable for the night and tipped her bag of bread and carrots into her bowl (we carry the bag ahead of her, rustling it to coax her to follow, otherwise she is likely to disappear deliberately in the wrong direction), instead of tucking into it she stood there with her head down, sighing and looking mournful. Urged by Charles to eat, she buckled at the knees, lay down and closed her eyes. Then she began to roll and kick her legs and Charles came running for me. It takes two to deal with Annabel when she has colic.
A horse or donkey, rolling in pain, can twist its intestines and die. You have to get them on their feet as fast as possible. Annabel may look small but she is apparently made of cast iron. It was like trying to lift a tank. When we got her up she sagged at the knees and immediately tried to go down again. We half carried her out to the lane, where we put her bridle on her and forced her to walk up and down. It is the recognised treatment for colic, but doing it by torchlight, in a lane deep with slush and with the rain beating down, it looked more as if we were slave-driving some helpless little donkey than doing our best to revive her. We must have looked absolute rotters.
After one car had passed us with slow deliberation, its occupants giving us dirty looks, we took her in on the cottage lawn for privacy. There, in familiar surroundings, she refused to walk at all. She lay on her side and closed her eyes, obviously resigned to leaving the world. At this stage we realised that our outside light was on and we were now more noticeable than ever. Spotlit, she lay there in the pouring rain with Charles and me trying frantically to heave her up. 'Whass be doin' now?' enquired a voice from the darkness. 'Thee dussn't half get up to some capers.'
It was Father Adams. He'd seen our torch light bobbing about in the lane and had come up to see what it was. He helped us lift Annabel, helped rub her down with sacks, helped massage her rotund white stomach. There have been many occasions when we've been grateful for Father Adams's inquisitiveness and this was definitely one of them. 'Why dussn't try her with a peppermint?' he said at length. ''Tis what the Missis always gives I.'
It hadn't occurred to us. We hadn't any peppermints anyway, but I did have a bottle of peppermint essence. Fervently hoping I was doing the right thing, I poured some on some bread and offered it to her. Whether it actually did the trick... whether she was feeling better anyway... she turned wanly away, turned back again as she caught the smell... Annabel is fond of peppermints. She took the bread, chewing it languidly, with none of her usual gusto, but so long as she could eat at all, you could bet that Annabel was going to live. She ate another piece. We took her into the lane again and marched her up and down the hill by torchlight. This time there was no faltering. We went up and down for quite a while on the advice of Father Adams – to make sure, as he put it, that her guts was properly unknotted. We must have looked even scattier, walking up and down the hill by torchlight, leading a donkey with nothing wrong with her, apparently just for the fun of it. Not that it really worried us. The main thing was, Annabel was all right.
We put her back in her stable. She started on her hay at once and we went down to the cottage to change our soaking clothes. Sass and Shebalu, curled together in the armchair, opened one eye each as we went in. Where had we been? asked Shebalu's expression. Out on a night like This? Was it time for supper? queried Sass's lifted nose. Was I going to get their hot milk?
It was far too early. Only half-past seven. Charles commented on how contented they looked. They didn't overeat and get colic, he said with feeling. And if they did, their gut wouldn't get twisted. They wouldn't lie on the lawn like stranded whales while we got soaked to the perishing skin...
No. They had more subtle methods of getting our attention. Even as he spoke Shebalu got up, yawned, and leapt lightly to the top of the bookcase. Sass, on cue, sat up himself and immediately started looking worried.
Charles groaned, then brightened. Spring was on the way, he said. We'd soon be getting the caravan on the road. Before that, I reminded him, we had a cat house to put up... Charles groaned even louder.
Nine
The cat house was part of our security plan. The remembrance of Seeley's disappearance was always with us and, to guard against the same thing happening again, either Charles or I was always with Sass and Shebalu when they were out and it took up a great deal of time.
We ought to have a house and run for them, I kept saying. They could be out in it in good weather, enjoying the sunshine, while we got on with other things. We'd still accompany them on walks, of course, and watch over them while they hunted, but we wouldn't be continually panicking in between because they'd managed to vanish in a row of cabbages.
Charles, agreeing, said he'd put up a cat house himself. It would only take a couple of weeks. The question was, two weeks from when? He already had three major jobs on hand on which he spent an hour or so in turn when the spirit moved him. That way, according to him, they got done before one realised it. One day there they were – finished.
The conservatory wasn't for a start. He'd been renovating that for years. People sometimes asked, seeing him on the ladder, whether he was putting it up or pulling it down. Fencing the field beyond the cottage was another of our projects. We'd bought it as an additional paddock for Annabel. Charles had so far put one side fence up really expertly, but it wasn't much use without the others. Thirdly – the item which had top priority at the moment – he was building a dresser in the kitchen.
That, I must admit, was entirely my own fault. The previous autumn, when we'd measured the kitchen for the pine dresser I'd fancied when we brought home the sack of onions, it was to discover that a normal-sized dresser was too small and would look silly and one of the big ones would be far too long. In an unguarded moment I'd thought of the old sideboard out in the woodshed, stowed there years before by Charles. I measured it. It fitted the space exactly. If we used that as a base, I said – faced it with pine-cladding, tiled the top, built pine dresser shelves above it – it would look like a super Swedish-style dresser and make some room in the woodshed into the bargain.
Charles, fired with enthusiasm, said he'd enjoy doing that. Wasn't I glad now he'd kept that dresser? The pine-cladding part wouldn't take more than a week. He'd have the whole thing finished by Christmas.
He might have done if it weren't for the fact that Charles is the world's top perfectionist. When, for instance, he found that the sideboard was veneered he insisted on removing all the veneer before he started. Why I couldn't imagine, since pine-cladding was to go on top of it, but Charles said when he did a job he did it properly. Stripped of the veneer, there were cracks to be filled in and rubbed down. Again I couldn't think why, until Charles explained that the finish was now so perfect it would be a pity to pine-clad it at all. He would varnish it instead, to bring out the grain, which would be quicker and he could start on the top part even sooner.
Unfortunately the varnish turned it a peculiar red colour so he reverted to the idea of pine-cladding. He also decided to give it a new back, and new shelves inside. New bottoms to the drawers, too, while he was at it. I didn't want them sticking, did I? he asked when I said but that would take ages.
Oh boy, I said, just give me the chance! Thinking I'd be able to store things in the sideboard from the start, as soon as we'd brought it inside I'd agreed to moving the old kitchen cabinet out to the porch to give Charles more room to work in. I now trudged miles a day carrying cups and plates and cutlery, leaving trails of sawdust behind me, while Charles sawed inspiredly away as if he were Sheraton and the cats played games through the empty drawer holes. Never mind about them sticking. Give me j
ust one drawer I could actually use, and I'd stand on my head in celebration.
Add a cat house to the list? Not on your nelly. We, I said firmly, were going to buy one. Even so the thought was with me that, even if we bought the house itself – there were plenty of wooden sheds with windows on the market – Charles would still have to build a run around it and we'd have Project Number Four under way. At which point, while I was wondering whether my nerves would stand it, the Francises decided to close their Siamese boarding cattery at Low Knap.
Probably the best-known Siamese cattery in England – at one time it was said to be unique in Europe – it is nearly thirty years since Dr and Mrs Francis set the standard for modern cat boarding. Individual houses – separated, not in rows; large, individual runs; complete disinfection when a boarder moved out, even down to the blow-lamping of the earthboxes. Infra-red lamps over beds that were deep-sided and private, cushions to sit on in the windows – there were Siamese who'd boarded there for as long as three years while their owners were over-seas.
That in itself was a tribute to the proprietors. Siamese are peculiar creatures. Some catteries refuse to take them at all, saying they are more trouble than any other type of cat. The Francises, knowing this, specialised in the Oriental breeds, boarding only Siamese, Burmese and Havana. It was like visiting a top racing stable to walk past the runs, seeing an aloof-looking aristocrat in each. In some cases there were two or three aristocrats from the same household, lying there like a pride of lions, gazing with disdain at the rest of the world but keeping a hopeful eye open for the Francises.