Cats in the Belfry (2 page)

  It was a shaken Father Adams who came down to see us the following Sunday with Mimi, once more quiet and demure, padding sleekly at his heels. He said his wife had got a book about cats out of the library last time she was in town, and according to that Siamese queens couldn't be mated till they were twelve months old. If they had to put up with this caper for another six months, he said, with the blasted cat shouting her head off for a tom every few weeks and people knocking on the door and complaining about the noise, it would drive him clean up the pole.

  We knew how he felt. We had troubles of our own. Since we saw him last we had acquired Sugieh, and the first thing she had done on entering her new domain was to race up the curtains just like he said, hurl herself like a minute, jet-propelled bomb at the birdcage, and frighten Shorty out of his last remaining tail feather.

  She'd had no effect at all on the mice. Only the night before they had chewed a hole in the bag of the vacuum cleaner and when I switched it on a couple of pounds of dirt had gushed out all over our new cream Indian carpet. I was still wondering how I was going to get it up.

TWO

S
ugieh fell in love with us the moment she saw us. It was most embarrassing because we had made up our minds to have a Seal Point like Mimi, and when the breeder said all the Seal Point kittens had gone but perhaps we would like to see the two Blue Points that were left it was understood that we did so merely out of interest.

  Unfortunately nobody had told Sugieh that. Her brother, who was as good as sold to a woman who had already bought one of the Seal Points and was coming back for him later if her husband agreed, took one look at us when we went in, strolled off into a corner and started to chew the wireless flex. Sugieh, however, was quite certain we had come for her. She sat there on the hearthrug like a small girl with her suitcase packed ready to go on holiday – her eyes screwed tight with anticipation, her paws pounding up and down like little pistons. When I got down on my knees and spoke to her she opened her eyes for a moment – blue as periwinkles they were, and completely crossed with excitement – greeted us with a squawk that was astounding, considering her size, and screwed them up tight again, waiting for the treat.

  Her owner asked if we were intending to breed Siamese ourselves and when we said we were she remarked – just by way of interest, of course – that Sugieh's blue blood was only on her mother's side. Her father was a pure Seal Point, and if she in turn was mated to a pure Seal Point when she grew up, her kittens would be Seal Points as well. Though of course, she said, Blue Points were becoming very popular. Some people thought they had gentler dispositions than the Seal Points, and they were very beautiful. Which reminded her – before we went we really must see Anna.

  She opened the door and shouted for Anna at the top of her voice. There was an answering bellow from some distant part of the house, and after a sufficient interval had elapsed for a dignified, unhurried descent of the stairs, Anna appeared.

  A Siamese that has apparently just had a blue rinse is, at first sight, something of a shock, and this one reminded me irresistibly of a film star who had married into the aristocracy and gone on from there in a big way. Her legs were long and slender as a gazelle's. Her eyes, which were lighter than those of a Seal Point, glittered like jewelled almonds. She walked as if she owned the earth. If the breeder had reckoned that the sight of Anna would help to sell us Sugieh she was right – but not on account of her beauty. It was the expression of complete hauteur, once she had looked us over, with which that cat swept past us and over to the corner to kiss her son, who was going to a home where they could afford two Siamese.

  Not for anything, after that, could we leave Sugieh to be looked down on as the Cinderella of the litter. When we left she went with us, accompanied by a supply of yeast tablets, a bag of minced rabbit and a pedigree bigger than herself which said her father's name was Caesar. That, incidentally, was why we named her Sugieh. We had intended to call her Scheherazade but – though Anna didn't really
marry
the King of Siam – we decided not to complicate history any more than it was already.

  Sugieh herself was so happy that that night, for the first and only time in her life, she rode home in the car without a murmur. She ate her supper down to the last crumb. Even the attack on Shorty was only to show us how in future she was going to defend us against All Creatures, great and small. She loved us so much that when at last we went to bed, shutting her in the spare room for Shorty's sake with a hot-water bottle and a brand new cat basket to herself, she was heartbroken at the separation. She wailed and screamed and howled, shouting that she was all alone and wanted her mother. She got down and cried under the door so that we could hear her better, and dragged in the end of the rug off the landing, ripping at it in a frenzy that would have done credit to Lady Macbeth. When at last it seemed that there was to be no reprieve she gave a final tragic 'Mow-wow-wow' which trailed sadly off into the darkness. Then there was silence.

  Immediately we began to worry. Supposing she lay by the door all night and caught a chill? Father Adams said Siamese cats died if they caught a chill. Supposing she was dead already? That silence, after the bedlam of the past half hour, was horribly unnatural. We didn't approve of cats sleeping in the bedroom, and we weren't going to start now. All the same… supposing…

  Charles was the first to break down. After ten minutes frantically straining his ears to hear some sound from the next room he got sheepishly out of bed muttering that, after all, we had a lot of money tied up in that cat. When we opened the spare-room door she was curled up in her basket, having apparently fallen asleep from exhaustion – though it struck me that there was a decided smirk on her face. Charles, being a man, didn't see that. He saw, as he was meant to, only that she looked small and pathetic lying there in the basket, and said – as he was supposed to – that perhaps, for the first night at any rate, we ought to have her in with us. Tenderly he carried her in and deposited her in the crook of my arm where, with a happy sigh, she fell asleep again at once. Charles, with a clear conscience, flopped into his own side of the bed, pulled the clothes over his head and went to sleep himself. Only I stayed awake. I stayed awake because all night long, dreaming nostalgically of Anna, she kept smacking her lips hungrily and loudly right in my ear.

  We rose next morning to a pouring wet day and another crisis. Sugieh hadn't used her earth-box. The breeder had advised us, as Sugieh wasn't yet used to a garden, to continue using an earth-box until the weather was better, and we had obligingly provided her with our biggest enamel baking dish filled – as the garden was absolutely sodden and Father Adams said Siamese cats got chills from using damp earth-boxes – with a bag of Shorty's sand. We had shown it to her the night before and she had affected not to see it, which was understandable because Siamese cats are very refined and we had only just met. But now it was morning and Sugieh had been with us twelve hours, and still the sand in her box was as untrodden as the Sahara.

  All through breakfast Charles and I kept darting out into the hall and dibbling our fingers encouragingly into the sand. Sugieh darted too, and dibbled happily with a small blue paw. But she wouldn't get into the box. When the time came for us to leave for town I was frantic with worry, for we wouldn't be back until evening and by that time, I felt sure, Sugieh would have burst.

  When we got home that night the box was still unused and Sugieh was sitting firmly on the floor. Unburst, but obviously reluctant to move. We were halfway through supper, anxiously wondering whether we ought to call the vet, when Charles had his inspiration. Perhaps, he said, she didn't like sand. It was still raining, so we tried her with sawdust. She didn't like that either. In desperation we cast Father Adams's theories to the wind, filled the box with mud straight from the garden, and put that in front of her. The result was miraculous. With one yell Sugieh was in the box and had flooded it to high-water mark. Supper forgotten, Charles dashed out into the rain at top speed, refilled the box, and offered it to her again. There was no false modesty about Sugieh. She leapt into it once more, raised her small spike of a tail and speedily reseated herself, thanking heaven at the top of her voice that we had at last realised Mother had taught her it was Dirty to use anything but Earth.

  That was that crisis over. But there were plenty more to follow. There was the first time she went into the garden, for instance. The path was bad enough – she grumbled all the way out that the gravel was hurting her feet – but when we put her down on the lawn and the stubbly grass prickled her paws for the first time she let out one shriek and fled straight up my leg, swearing something had bitten her. She did the same when she saw her first dog, only this time she went on up over my face and stood on my head for extra safety, bawling at him just to try to get her
now
, that was all.

  It was most discouraging. Blondin used to do that too, when he was frightened. One old man I know nearly signed the pledge on the spot the night he met me in the lane just after closing time and saw a squirrel yelling defiance at him from the top of my head with his tail bushed out like a flue brush. All the thanks I got, too, for assuring him that it really was a squirrel and not the first sign of DTs, was that he made a gate-to-gate tour of the village telling everybody I was potty. What they would say when they heard I went round now with a screaming cat on my head I shuddered to think.

  When Sugieh's feet toughened up and she began to venture outside on her own we had more trouble. The first time she went into the garden unaccompanied she climbed up to the garage roof, slid down the back slope and fell into the water-butt. She got out by herself, stalked into the house stiff-legged with indignation and delivered such a harangue, while green, stagnant water dripped steadily off her tail onto our poor Indian carpet, that Charles slunk out in self-defence and made a cover for the butt on the spot. Unfortuntately the next time she went into the bathroom and saw Charles lying in the bath she remembered her own narrow escape, gave one horrified yell, and plunged in to the rescue. Charles had his eyes shut at the time and when Sugieh landed on his stomach screeching like a banshee it frightened him so much he leapt up and nearly stunned himself on the first-aid cabinet, which had been fixed over the bath in the first place to keep it out of Blondin's reach.

  After that Sugieh fell into the bath so often trying to save us from drowning that we had to tie a notice to the taps reminding us to lock the door before we turned them on. Then – presumably to counteract the effect of getting wet so much – she took to standing, when she talked to us, with her rear bang up against the electric fire. Twice she caught the tip of her tail alight, though she was so busy lecturing us she never noticed it. On each occasion Charles threw himself across the room in a magnificent rugby tackle and put out the flame before it touched her skin, but he said it was bad for his heart at his age, and it wasn't doing mine much good either. In the end we had to buy small-mesh guards that completely spoiled the look of any room they were in, and tie them to every fire in the house with string.

  Worst of all was the problem of food. When she lived with Anna, Sugieh had, it seemed, eaten her prescribed two cereal meals, two meat meals and four yeast tablets a day with meek obedience. But not with us. As from the second day, by which time she had summed us up as a couple of suckers and dead easy to handle, she refused to eat any more cereal. When we had liver, which she was supposed to have not more than once a week, or bacon which she wasn't supposed to have at all, she sat on the breakfast table, no matter who else was there, and dribbled like Oliver Twist. On the other hand she ate rabbit – which was good for her and so cheap at that time that the butcher looked pained if I asked for less than a pound – only when the spirit moved her, so that I was for ever tipping dishes of turned-off meat into the lane for the benefit of less fortunate little cats. Needless to say as soon as the less fortunate little cats arrived Sugieh went out, elbowed her way through the crowd and scoffed the rabbit with such gusto that one old lady practically wore a groove in the front path coming in to tell us that our dear little cat was eating scraps in the lane, and did we think perhaps we didn't give her enough to eat?

  She condescended to eat a little steak occasionally, but even then it had to be tossed to her piece by piece, and aimed so that it landed directly in front of her. If it dropped so much as an inch beyond her reach she ignored it. If it fell on her fur she ran upstairs and hid under the bed, screaming that we had hit her. If we put down a whole plateful of food at any time she shook her back leg delicately in the gesture she used to indicate she had finished with her earth-box and walked away with her ears sleeked back in horror at our grossness.