Cats in the Belfry (7 page)

  It wasn't the only reward she gave him. I nearly fainted on the spot when after supper that night he marched proudly into the living room with his spotted whiskers sprouting on one side as exuberantly as a gorse bush – and the other side completely bare. He was only eight weeks old then and we thought they had dropped out as a result of eating too much rabbit. We didn't know Siamese mothers sometimes did that to their favourite kittens when they were particularly pleased with them.

  The vet told us – rather shortly, we thought, seeing that he was supposed to like Siamese cats – at half past eleven that night.

SEVEN

A
few days after that the Smiths brought James to tea for the first time since the kittens were born and Solomon assaulted him. We should have anticipated something like that. Ever since the loss of his whiskers, which he seemed to regard as some sort of accolade, Solomon had been quite unbearable. Head of the Family he said he was, and though the head of the family was more often than not seen disappearing ignominiously round a corner on his back to have his ears washed, it was obviously asking for trouble to have a strange cat in the place.

  The snag was, we couldn't ask the Smiths
without
James. They took him everywhere from the post office to the rectory garden party. If they didn't, they said – and as Siamese owners ourselves we quite understood – he kicked up hell, and the neighbours complained.

  I bet he wouldn't have complained if he'd known what was coming to him that afternoon. I can see him now, stalking elegantly up the garden path in his bright red harness and stopping every now and then to smell the wallflowers. Sugieh greeting him at the door. A little suspiciously, perhaps – but then Sugieh always greeted people suspiciously; it made social occasions so much more interesting. The pair of them walking side by side into the living room where, said Sugieh, her family was simply
dying
to meet him. And the awful moment when Solomon, his one-sided whiskers simply bristling with hate, shot out from under the table, drew himself up to his full six inches, and spat.

  Before it had even started our polite country tea party was bedlam. Sugieh, screaming that he had Attacked her Son, pitched into James. James, who hadn't done a thing but wasn't stopping to argue, took off through the cucumber sandwiches. And Solomon, completely beside himself with excitement, bit Mrs Smith in the leg.

  Long after James had been driven home shaking like a leaf and we had swept up the remains of the Copeland bowl that used to stand in the window, Solomon was still telling us about Mrs Smith's leg.

  'And after that I bit
James
,' he chanted, sitting on the kitchen table where we were wearily cutting up rabbit for their supper. 'And then I chased him up the
curtains
. And then I bit him
again
…'

  Actually he hadn't done anything of the sort. It was Sugieh who bit James. The moment Mrs Smith screamed Solomon had dived under the bureau like a rocket with the rest of the kittens and all we had seen of him for the next twenty minutes was a pair of eyes as round as marbles gazing dumbfounded at the devastation. That, however, was Solomon all over. To add to our other troubles he had turned out to be a feline Walter Mitty.

  We usually locked the kittens in the hall when we got their food. Four of them clinging to his legs like Morris bells and Sugieh drooling hungrily in his ear were, as Charles said the day he cut his finger with the chopping knife, more than any man could stand. When the dishes were on the floor, however, and the hall door was opened, it was no ordinary litter of kittens that trooped forth to supper. It was a sheriff's posse with Solomon in the lead. Ears flat, tails raised, they drummed in a solid body through the living room, along the passage and into the kitchen, with Sugieh hard behind charging as enthusiastically – if a little self-consciously – as any of them.

  One day the garden door happened to be open as well and Solomon, whose two ambitions in life were to Eat and Be Out, had absent-mindedly galloped the posse out into the yard before he realised it. Father Adams, who was passing at the time, was loud in his admiration of the way in which he skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, turned, and with a mighty roar led the charge hot-foot back to the feeding bowls. If he'd been a hoss, he said, the little black'un would have made a mighty fine hunter.

  Solomon remembered that. The time was to come when he thought he was a horse, and, a pretty fine dance he led us. Meanwhile he was busy being head of the family, and a fine job he made of that too.

  In the mornings, when the posse tore out of the front door and up the damson tree so fast it hurt your eyes – half of their time they spent in the damson tree spying down through the leaves at unsuspecting passers-by and the other half they spent with their noses pressed to the hall window complaining there was somebody interesting going by Right This Moment and now they'd Missed Him – it was always Solomon who led the way, shouting This Morning he'd be first at the Top. It was always Solomon, too, who after an initial leap big enough to take him clean over the roof, was left clinging desperately to the trunk about two feet up yelling to us to Catch Him Quick, he was feeling Giddy.

  The only time he ever did get to the top – we imagined he must have been carried up bodily by the rush of kittens behind him – he was so overcome with excitement when the Rector went by that he fell out on to his head. Neither of them was hurt, though the Rector – red in the face and the nearest I ever knew him to swearing – said if we
had
to give him a Biblical name it should have been Beelzebub, and after that whenever he came to call he always used to stop at a safe distance and look up into the damson tree before opening the gate. He needn't have worried. Solomon never did it again. Our little black-faced dreamer, though he woke the whole household at five every morning shouting to hurry up and let him out, he knew he could make it This Time, couldn't climb for toffee.

  We were always rescuing him from somewhere. If it wasn't from the damson tree it was, more often than not, from the fourth bar of the five-barred gate which led into the lane. Sugieh, who had an eye for effect, was always encouraging her family up there. The idea was obviously to present people walking through the woods with a tableau of Mother and Kittens on a Gate that would absolutely stun them. Very effective it would have been too, if only Solomon had been able to make it. When visitors came past, however, Solomon, wailing with mortification, was always completely and hopelessly stuck on the top bar but one while Sugieh, instead of smirking at them with coy, half-closed eyes from a nest of cuddly kittens as planned, lay flat on her stomach frantically trying to hook him up with her paw.

  Failing to climb the damson tree never worried Solomon a scrap, but for some odd psychological reason not being able to get on top of the gate did. In the end he gave up trying. When the other kittens hurled themselves up the gatepost with squeals of delight, to balance-walk across the top with their absurd tails raised like little raft-masts and shrieks of excitement as every now and then somebody slipped and dangled dangerously by one paw, Solomon would stump off all by himself and sit on top of the cotoneaster.

  It was a
cotoneaster horizontalis
, it reached quite three feet up the coalhouse wall, and Solomon solemnly sitting on the top of it trying to look as if he had conquered Everest was absolutely heart-rending. Even the other kittens felt sorry for him. One day when Sugieh issued her clarion call to come and be pretty on the gate they all went up the cotoneaster with Solomon instead. Unfortunately Solomon wasn't expecting them and in the heat of the moment he fell off and sprained his paw. Whatever happened, he just couldn't win.

  The one thing in which he did surpass the other kittens – other than having the biggest feet and the largest appetite – was his voice. Being Siamese, of course, they all had enormous voices. Even the she-kitten, who was much quieter than her brothers and given to periods of silent contemplation on top of the curtain rail, occasionally startled visitors by emitting a cracked soprano 'Waaaaah' from ceiling level when struck by some particularly profound thought.

  Solomon, however, even as a kitten, had a voice only to be compared with a bullfrog. And he never stopped talking. We used to hear him sometimes talking in the middle of the night. When we went in to see what was wrong – we never ignored noises in the night since the time we found Blondin hanging behind a door, trying to suffocate himself in the sleeve-lining of a coat – there, invariably, were the other three kittens snoring away peacefully like little white angels, Sugieh lying on her side with one eye open, obviously wishing him to the devil – and Solomon, bolt upright in the basket, talking to a spider on the wall.

  Solomon loved spiders. When he found one too old or infirm to get away he ate it noisily with his mouth open – a habit he had inherited from Sugieh – talking and chewing appreciatively at the same time. It took us quite a time to discover which kitten it was who gave an ecstatic 'Woohoohoo' at intervals while eating rabbit, like a small damp train going through the Rockies, but in the end that turned out to be Solomon too.

  He had a vocabulary all his own, which for our own good we quickly learned to understand. A black head appearing round the living room door when we had company and uttering a small but urgent 'Wooooh' meant he was sorry to intrude but the earth-box was dirty, and he wanted it changed in a hurry. Solomon didn't like dirty earth-boxes. A raucous 'Waaow' accompanied by banging noises from the kitchen as he tried valiantly to open the pantry door meant that he was hungry. Loud and prolonged wailing from somewhere up on the hillside behind the cottage meant that Solomon, after setting out with the others all bluff and bustle and Head of the Family, had once more got left behind and ­wanted to be rescued. The only time he couldn't talk was when he was feeding from Sugieh and if he opened his mouth he lost his place. Then, instead of talking, he waggled his big bat ears so frantically he looked as if he were about to take off.

  Solomon, of course, wasn't the only one with character. It was just that as he was the only Seal Point, and we were going to keep him, we naturally noticed him more. His two blue brothers had meanwhile already decided on their careers. They were going to be all-in wrestlers. They were so alike, those two, even we couldn't tell them apart until Solomon bit Sugieh's tail one day and in a fit of pique she decided he wasn't her favourite kitten any more and chewed the whiskers off one of them instead; and they were quite inseparable. Theirs was a peculiar sort of affection, however, as you might expect with a mother like Sugieh. When you came across them they were never sitting lovingly cheek to cheek like the kittens you see on Christmas cards. They were always locked in a close embrace trying hard to kick the daylights out of one another.

  Their sister had decided on her career, too. She, when she left us, was going to be a vamp. She was already practising hard on Charles and the boy who did the garden. At night she spent long periods sitting on Charles's knee, gazing into his face with half-closed eyes and swaying with passion when he looked at her. At weekends, while Sidney cut the grass or hoed the potatoes, she languished determinedly round his neck and caused him to slow down his 3/6 per hour output by fifty per cent in case she fell off. She held long, intimate conversations with both of them which ceased abruptly when I appeared – and the net result was that when any reference was made to putting the kittens up for sale Charles and Sidney, with their girlfriend preening herself complacently in the background, looked at me as if I were a Gorgon.

  There were, however, still a few weeks before we needed to think seriously of selling the kittens. In the meantime, with a sense of relief mixed, on my part, with considerable foreboding, we had arranged to go away for Whitsun. The foreboding arose from the fact that, not liking to ask the Smiths to take them after that catastrophic tea party, we had booked Sugieh and the kittens in at the cattery where she had been mated. It was a place run specially for Siamese, where they would have their own chalet and an enormous run to themselves. Undoubtedly they would be happy there. The only snag was that it was forty miles away.

  I worried about that. I worried so much that every morning for a week I woke up at the crack of dawn sweating at the very thought. Charles, of course, was as optimistic as ever. Somebody had told him it was possible to get tranquillisers for cats. He would get one, he said, from the vet. He would give it to Sugieh himself. The kittens could travel in a basket on the back seat, and Sugieh would doze quietly on my lap all the way to Halstock. It was as simple as that.

  It might have been if he'd asked for a tranquilliser for an elephant. For the first twenty minutes of the journey indeed we did have perfect peace, with Sugieh dreamily gazing over my shoulder at the passing trees and nothing but a gentle scuffling from the back. Then the effect wore off, and in a second we were back in our usual state with those cats. Complete pandemonium. Sugieh was tearing round and round the car like a greyhound screaming not only had she been Kidnapped, she'd been Drugged and where were her precious Children; Charles was shouting to get hold of her for Pete's sake or she'd have us in a crash; the kittens, entering enthusiastically into the fun, had their faces pressed to the airholes of the basket screaming Here they Were, Mum! In here! and I was quietly howling my head off.