A Comfort of Cats (7 page)

  Maybe not, said Charles, but it would be worth it in the long run. That caravan was a little beauty. Think of us going off to Cornwall and Scotland in it. Taking the cats. Maybe even taking Annabel. In the
caravan
? I said incredulously. Charles said he didn't see why not.

  Changing the subject, he said (he could see I was about to raise objections to the idea of the caravan doubling as a horse-box)... talking of self-sufficiency... he'd been talking to Tim after we'd got the caravan in. Had I heard about him and the graveyard?

It dated from the days when this was a mining area. In the late 1700s, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, there was a tremendous demand for calamine, which was used with copper to make brass. Our hills contained particularly good calamine – the finest, some said, in Europe – and miners came into the district from Wales, Cornwall, Yorkshire, building their own cottages in the Valley by the stream, or straggling higgledy-piggledy up the hill.

  By the 1890s the calamine had run out, however, and the miners moved away. To Australia. To the Klondyke. A few of the less adventurous became farm labourers. Eventually most of the cottages fell into decay, helped on by the local Squire on whose great-grandfather's land the miners had squatted in the first place and who now, when a cottage became empty, took the roof off and left the walls to crumble so that the land could revert to his pheasants.

  When we came to the Valley there were only four cottages still standing in it, though there were more at the top of the hill. Up there, too, was a heap of stones which according to tradition had once been the miners' chapel and adjoining it a bramble patch surrounded by a crumbling wall – a small enclosure, about thirty feet by forty. It was said to have been the chapel graveyard, though nobody was really sure about it.

  Prior to our coming the estate had been broken up and the chapel ruins sold as a site for a bungalow. The enclosure, however, had been excluded from the sale and left sleeping beneath its brambles, and thus it stayed until a stone fell off the wall and Miss Wellington started to worry.

  Miss Wellington was always worrying. Everlastingly, monumentally, and with disaster as her lodestar at the end of it. When it snowed, for instance, she worried about people getting their cars up out of the Valley. When the cars were all up and parked safely at the farm, from where the track out to the main road was usually easy, Miss Wellington would immediately start worrying about the hill being cleared so that the cars (though she didn't own one) could get down again. When we first had Annabel she worried about her being lonely and pleaded with us to let her have a foal. On the two occasions when Annabel was thought to be
enceinte
(actually she was having everybody on) Miss Wellington immediately started panicking in circles in case anything should go wrong. When the stone fell off the graveyard wall, needless to say, it afforded endless permutations for worrying.

  The whole thing might fall on somebody, she said. Father Adams pointed out that as it was only three feet high they'd have to be lying down before it could. 'Unless 'twas old Fred comin' home from the Rose and Crown,' he added. 'I've seen he afore now on his hands and knees.' It was a joke of course, but Miss Wellington didn't take it that way. The wall
was
on Fred's route home from the Rose and Crown. From that time on, when he was going past at closing time – needless to say on his feet – he was apt to have a torch shone on him from Miss Wellington's gateway while she waited for him or the wall to fall down.

  Came the spring and she thought up another worry. There could be adders in there, she said. So there could. This is adder country and nobody underestimates the possibilities. But it wasn't likely, as she colourfully imagined, that while the three-foot wall had contained them like a snake-pit (conveniently overlooking the broken gate which had stood ajar for years) the moment one stone was off they'd come leaping over in their hordes, attacking people in all directions. Particularly Fred Ferry, one gathered, coming past on hands and knees.

  She complained to the Parish Council. So did everybody else. They'd had enough of Miss Wellington and the wall. The Council lobbed back a speedy statement explaining why they couldn't replace the stone. If they did, they said, they'd be accepting responsibility and if any more stones fell off, they'd be liable if anybody got hurt and the cost would go on the rates.

  They would, they added placatingly, try to find out whose responsibility it
was
. Father Adams said we could write that lot off then. He'd heard that one before. They'd send somebody a letter, wait for a reply, chew it over at a meeting six months later... 'Took 'em two years once to get a seat on the green,' he reminisced. ''N then they put 'n up back to front. Cemented 'n so people sat with their legs stickin' uphill. Took another two years to get 'n turned round.'

  How right he was. The following winter, with letters to the Rector, the Church Commissioners and the local Methodist headquarters behind them, the Council wrote a final abortive missive to some obscure sect in Wales, announced that they had now explored every avenue – and, following a frost, two more stones fell off.

  Miss Wellington nearly had a fit. She envisaged the wall coming down like an avalanche – all three feet high of it, with Fred Ferry underneath, needless to say. She envisaged it alternatively happening in a snowstorm and cars running into it, with bodies strewn Excelsior-like on the ice. To try to placate her somebody replaced the stones (anonymously, not to incur responsibility) – and then, suddenly seeing it as a solution to his problems, not the least of which was that he was Miss Wellington's neighbour, Tim Bannett suggested that he should clear the graveyard and use it as an extension to his garden.

  The Parish Council gave their approval as being a way of getting it looked after – carefully pointing out, of course, that permission wasn't really theirs to give. Miss Wellington was delighted. Tim and Liz were her two ewe lambs. The rest of the village was equally happy that somebody else had taken on the job – for nothing, moreover – which only went to show how stupid people could be. Until it suddenly dawned on them that Tim had got some land for nothing.

  He hadn't really. He wasn't laying claim to the graveyard. He was only going to use it as an allotment in return for keeping it in order. But he'd got the use of it and they hadn't. They'd let
land
slip through their fingers. From under their very noses – and to a comparative newcomer, too. Half the village promptly said 'twas sacrilege and he shouldn't be allowed to use it. The other half claimed that by rights it ought to be theirs. Their forefathers had lived next door, or had owned land opposite or adjoining. Fred Ferry said his granddad used to graze sheep in there.

  How that made it his by rights, or was more respectful than growing vegetables in it, derived from logic clear only to Fred. On one thing he and the rest of the village were united, however. They wouldn't, they told each other at every opportunity, fancy eating anything grown in
there
.

  Tim, presumably with thoughts in that direction himself, ordered several loads of topsoil. To keep everybody happy he decided also to avoid the corner where there were mounds. In fact there were only two, the rest of the ground had obviously never been turned, but in a village you never can win.

  He did everything he could. Rather than have the topsoil tipped in soullessly from a lorry he had it piled in his driveway and wheeled it reverently across by wheelbarrow. When he was over there working he always took off his hat. In order that people could see where the mounds were and appreciate that he was respecting them he heaped them even higher and planted daffodils on top. All he got for his trouble was that when strangers spotted the unmistakable outlines and stopped to consider the matter over the wall, there was always somebody on hand, strategically placed so the Bannetts could hear them, to expound the ethics of the affair. That young folk nowadays had no sense of what was decent and proper; that if the truth were known the plot really belonged to them; that they wouldn't fancy eatin' any of they cabbages... and to speculate what, by current values, the graveyard was worth as land.

  The other thing that occupied the village that winter was working out why we'd bought a caravan. That we were going to sell the cottage and travel abroad was one of the rumours that came back to us. That we were going to start a caravan park was another. Even the closest of our local acquaintances – Tim, Father Adams and Fred Ferry, who knew we'd bought it so we could get away in it when the fancy took us and, we hoped, take the cats – had their own opinion as to how the venture would work out. The caravan might have come down the hill all right, they informed us regularly. They'd bet us anything we liked we'd never get it
up
.

  That, however, was a problem for the future. Meantime we had a more immediate one with Sass. Following an unfortunate oversight on my part he'd reverted to his neurosis about wool. Not just chewing holes in it, as many Siamese do (cat psychologists say it's because they're lonely), but treating it with hostility; not in any circumstances to be slept on; and if he got the chance he used it as a lavatory.

  It stemmed from the evening we brought him home as a kitten and introduced him to Shebalu. We put him in a cage-fronted basket, thinking he'd feel safer speaking to her from in there. Unfortunately instead of approaching him with caution, as Seeley had done to her when she was a kitten (adult cats are normally more afraid of strange kittens than the kittens are of them) Shebalu had put her nose to the bars, sworn horrible oaths and threatened to eat him, and Sass, unable to escape, had had diarrhoea on his blanket.

  It was that, I felt sure, which had given him his thing about wool. It was obvious from the first that he was a cat who thought and you could practically see what he was thinking. In this new house you used wool as a lavatory – wasn't that what had been there when he'd had the accident in his basket? Furthermore he'd better continue to use it if he wanted to propitiate the cat-gods. Wasn't that the obvious reason why he'd survived such a ferocious attack by the Enemy?

  Obviously fearing further attack, Sass wetted everything woollen he could find in the days that followed. The fresh blanket I gave him that night. The nest of sweaters I put for him on our bed. He'd have wetted a sweater with Charles inside it one night – Charles happened to be quietly snoozing – if I hadn't spotted the look on his face and whipped him away before he could do it.

  Long after Shebalu had accepted him and he slept in her arms at night as if he were her own, his phobia about wool remained. Give them a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel and they lay against it like Botticelli angels. Put it in a woollen cover or wrap it in a sweater and Sass worked like a beaver all night. Next morning, inevitably wetted, that being part of the ritual, sweater and bottle would lie discarded on the floor and Sass would be regarding us with the air of Sir Galahad after a vigil. He'd kept off the bogeyman but Only Just said his earnest, round-eyed expression. Shebalu, having had to sleep bottleless all night, would be watching us direly from another chair. It was all her fault, we told her. Scaring him the way she had. We'd never had this trouble with any other kitten.

  Eventually, by keeping wool away from him, we cured him of his fetish about wetting. When there wasn't anything woollen around he used his box with an untroubled mind. There was just one rug in the sitting-room which apparently was some sort of touchstone and which we had to cover with a rubber sheet – weighing it down with two earthboxes and an array of ornaments otherwise Sass would lift it up and perform religiously underneath.

  Other than that we'd got him out of it. We even got him round to sleeping on a blanket – with a hot water bottle under it moreover, which with Sass was really something. And then I made my unfortunate mistake. Shut him in our bedroom without an earthbox – with a nest of sweaters and a hot water bottle on the bed.

  It was the result of all the double-checking we'd got the habit of over the years. To lock wardrobes, for instance, to keep our blue-eyed demons out, and then go back and have another look to see we hadn't locked them inside instead. To turn off the electricity at the mains before we went out in the car (Solomon used to poke at wires and switches)... and then, halfway up the hill, reverse speedily back again, unable to remember whether we'd done it or not. In this case I'd gone up to check that the hot water bottle wasn't leaking. It had dripped a little when I screwed it up and if it did that on the sweaters, Sass might get ideas...

  That thought was actually in my
mind
, so how, having checked the bottle and patted their heads, I could have absentmindedly closed the bedroom door on them, leaving them with innocent expressions, cut off completely from their earthboxes...