A Comfort of Cats (18 page)

  Goodness, I said, nearly sobbing down the phone. Who had more right to him than they did? His owner's cousin and her friend, who had found him and saved his life? I could only give thanks that they had done and kick myself for not insisting that night on leaving the doors of the rooms open and putting food and water down, so that Franz might have come out from his hiding place to have it.

  He lives the life of Riley in Bristol now. He bosses Mrs Laye's cousin's cat, Jamie, around unmercifully and has completely taken over the household. He likes chicken and carrying things round in his mouth and is the image of Sass. Mrs Laye, I know, would be happy for him. I hope she would think, too, that Charles and I did our best – though I shall always feel sick at the thought that we'd gone into the house where he must have been all the time and had been unable to find him.

It was a long while before I could think of Franz without turning cold at the thought of his ordeal. But life goes on, bringing humour as well as sadness and, while it was still winter, Dora and Nita came to supper and we had a little light relief.

  They arrived in a gale. They always arrive spectacularly. Once they came when it was snowing. Another time the stream was on the verge of flooding and they had to paddle up the path. This time it was a gale and they were practically swept into the cottage – where, the fire having been perfectly all right until half an hour before, smoke was now billowing in big black clouds out of the chimney and rolling relentless around the room.

  When it does this, it is always when we have visitors. I remember it happening once when some people were coming to see the cats and I'd lit the fire to set the rural background. It set the background all right. One shouldn't open a window to let smoke out – it only draws more down – but if you only have one reception room and you can't see across it and the air is filled with floating smuts... one
must
open the windows, said Charles, opening all three of them, whereupon the smoke poured lustily out.

  At that moment the visitors arrived. They got out of the car and just stared. It must have looked odd – smoke pouring out of all three front windows like a Mississippi steamboat and Charles waving a welcome to them through the smog. Even more odd when they came inside. Because of the open windows it was like the Arctic and another lot of smoke had just belched down, and the cats were on their stomachs under the table with their ears down flatly refusing to come out. The visitors didn't stay long, which was a pity, because half an hour later the wind had dropped. It didn't drop the night Dora and Nita came to supper, however. It darned well stayed with us all night.

  We put up with the smoke at first. Dora and Nita are very resourceful – both were Guide Captains for years. When I apologised they said not to worry – don't forget they were used to camp fires. The thing to do was to get
below
the smoke, because it rises. Suiting their action to the words, the pair of them lay down on the hearthrug, Charles stood opening the window in short bursts and I, holding on to the cats to stop them diving through it, wondered why it always had to happen to us.

  Eventually it became obvious that the gale wasn't going to abate and that the only thing to do was to let the fire down. Charles said right-ho, he'd just fetch the electric one – at which point the lights went out. This is another favourite happening when we have gales or visitors – our electricity comes by overhead cable and if it isn't that the wind has brought the wire down or lightning struck the transformer, somebody has probably been reversing outside in the lane and knocked down the pole with their car.

  In this case it was the cable down and the electricity was off all night. Fortunately we were having a cold supper. We ate it by candlelight, warmed bleakly by a paraffin stove, while I tried to boil a saucepan of water for coffee on what was left of the fire. There wasn't much, but what there was made the water taste of smoke. I made the coffee. We sat there drinking it – Dora and Nita, of course, were by this time upright. I just happened to look across at our big oak table, on which I'd placed lighted candles in candelabra – a present from Elizabeth Linington, an American writer, which goes most effectively with our decor – and there was Sass, just about to touch one of the candles with his stretched out nose.

  I yelled. He jumped. So did everybody else.

  'He's burnt himself,' said Charles. Nonsense, I said; he wouldn't be so stupid. But he jolly well had. For weeks he had a pink scar on his nose where he'd put it against the candle.

  What was more, our friends were going to a party the following night. They had to wash their hair next morning to get the smell of the smoke out. Dora, wanting to wear the same long tartan skirt, said she'd hung it out on the line for hours but it had still reeked of smoke. She'd hopefully sprayed it with air-freshener, but it hadn't really helped. She'd had to explain to the people she sat next to about having come to supper with us. Funny, she said. She only had to mention our names and the other people said 'Say no more.'

  I wonder sometimes whether having Siamese cats creates the atmosphere for untoward happenings, even when the cats are only remotely involved, or whether it is that people prone to such occurrences inevitably become the owners of Siamese cats.

  Take, for instance, my friend who had the Siamese that got roaring drunk on sherry. When she bought her first Siamese kitten there were no such things as plastic bowls and the breeder told her to get a large enamel pie-dish or roasting tin to serve as an earthbox. She went to the hardware shop. The man showed her two sizes of dishes. No, she shook her head; those were too small. Halfway up the ladder to where there were some more stores on a high self he called down 'Is it for a turkey?'

  'No,' she called back, 'for a cat.' The shop was full of customers. Mia is Swiss by birth. She said that though eventually somebody began to laugh, for a moment all those English people looked at her in stunned silence, obviously wondering whether it was right about foreigners eating cats.

  Take, again, the story of a Tabby Point Siamese called Oliver, who belongs to a friend of mine in Oxford. Oliver developed rhinitis and the Vet prescribed a disposable plastic syringe, graduated into six doses, with which Marjorie had to put medicine into his mouth. By the time it got to the third dose, Oliver had had enough. He bit the business end off the syringe and swallowed it.

  Panic-stricken, Marjorie rushed him to the Vet who laughed till she cried when she heard the story. She said the syringe end would probably pass right through and do no harm but in case there was any trouble, here was another syringe containing liquid paraffin and if necessary Marjorie should give him one dose. Marjorie said she came away with a dismal picture of his biting off that one, too, and starting an endless cycle of swallowed syringe ends. Fortunately, however, the first end reappeared and she didn't have to give him the paraffin... Which is but one small incident in the life of a sober Doctor of Literature who is owned by a Siamese.

  Take, once more – just to show it isn't only in England that people are ruled by their cats – a story told me by Elizabeth Linington of what happened to some friends of hers one Christmas. She lives in California, they live in a small town halfway across America. Ringing them in mid-December she heard a woeful story of how Christmas was going to be a disaster because all the local supermarkets were out of a certain brand of turkey cat-food which was the only kind their ten-year-old cat would eat. He'd gone on strike and they had visions of him starving. The supermarkets wouldn't be having fresh supplies in until the New Year. How could they have a happy Christmas?

  Elizabeth went to her own supermarket in California. They had the turkey cat-food there all right. She bought two cases and despatched them by air – there is an internal airmail service in America. She phoned other friends who lived nearer the couple and got them to send consignments as well, in case hers didn't get through as it was so near Christmas and there might be a delay in the mail.

  On Christmas Eve she rang them again, certain that by this time the cat-food would have reached them and there'd be two happy people and one contented cat blissfully awaiting Christmas. The cat was contented. The food had got through. It was the husband, Wilbur, who answered the phone. Cathy had her leg in plaster, he said. She'd broken every bone in her ankle and it wouldn't be right for months. It had had to be set under general anaesthetic... What? No, she hadn't slipped on the ice. She'd gone to open a tin of the turkey cat-food and had fallen over the cat.

  Elizabeth herself has two Siamese and thereby hangs another tale. When I first knew her she lived in Los Angeles and owned a Havana and a Burmese cat. Fergus and Robin were quite a handful and one or other of them was always giving her a fright by staying out. She sat up the whole of one night, I remember, waiting for Fergus to come home, passing the time by writing me a detailed account of what was going on. The times at which she went out to call him, the places she searched, including the lonely nearby schoolyard at midnight...

  Elizabeth writes detective stories under her own name and also as Dell Shannon and Lesley Egan. Anyone who has read them can imagine what her report was like. It would have done credit to her famous detective, Luis Mendoza. At 8.30 in the morning Fergus returned, the case was closed and Elizabeth mailed the full report to me. There was another occasion when Robin was ill and the competent, no-nonsense crime writer, who was at that time in the middle of a book, lay for hours on the floor feeding him with raw steak under her bed, that being the only place where he would eat. They certainly were a handful. I'm sure she didn't believe it when I told her they weren't nearly as bad as Siamese.

  In due course Fergus and Robin died. Elizabeth wrote that she was getting a dog – one she could exercise on a lead. It would be a good thing to have a guard-dog in times that were growing so troublesome and she wouldn't have to be always hunting, heart in mouth, for absent cats.

  She acquired Star, a Keeshond, who carried her feeding bowl round in her mouth and barked fiercely on the recorder tapes Elizabeth sent me. It didn't seem right for her not to have cats, though, and when she moved two hundred miles north to Arroyo Grande – to a bungalow with an acre of ground for Star to roam in, which she enclosed with a high wire fence – it wasn't long before she was talking of getting a couple of kittens, now that she had a safe place.

  She spoke of getting a couple of unwanted ones from the stray animals' pound in town. She was going in next day. Guess what? she enquired the next time I had a tape from her. She'd just got two Siamese! She'd heard of this breeder, she'd just called to have a look at them, she'd come home with Penelope and Pandora... Much as I was pleased to hear she'd got Siamese, which I always felt would be Elizabeth, I nearly had a fit when I thought of them in her new house which from the photographs she sent was quite magnificent.

  The beautiful kitchen and dining-room; the antique chairs upholstered in white velvet; others in champagne-striped satin; the champagne carpet (Star has small feet); the long blue velvet curtains in her bedroom. She'd really gone to town in planning it all, and now she'd introduced Siamese cats!

  Actually she seems to have achieved miracles. The velvet chairs still appear in photographs. Goodness knows how she's preserved them since there are invariably two cats sitting smugly on them looking as though they've owned them for years. But the kitchen soon had to be partitioned off with transparent amber panels; people who design open kitchens don't know about Siamese cats. Three cat-trees now appear in the photographs, too, of a type which could only be found in America. Not a log nailed to a board and wrapped round with a piece of carpet such as we have for Sass and Shebalu. These consist of a series of shaggy-covered platforms like miniature diving-boards, alternating up a centre pole which is almost the height of the room and which grips the ceiling by means of a chromium tube containing a spring so that cats going up it can't knock it down.

  There is a royal blue cat-tree in Elizabeth's bedroom, two amber ones on the porch... Originally the patio, it was cased in to make a porch where Penny and Pandora could play in safety, Elizabeth having visions of their otherwise scooting across the acre of garden and climbing the fence if they got the chance.

  Rattan screens covered the window apertures... The cats didn't go
through
them? I thought when I heard it. Sure enough, on her next tape Elizabeth said she'd been on the phone one day and had seen a Siamese looking in at her through the study window. Fancy, she thought idly... those new neighbours must have a Siamese too... and then she suddenly realised she was looking at Pandora. She called a builder to put in permanent windows immediately, which turned the porch into a proper room, and now of course it has had to be rated, all on account of the cats...