Kiss Kiss (19 page)

Louisa, holding a dishcloth in her hand, stepped out of the
kitchen door at the back of the house into the cool October
sunshine.
      
“Edward!” she called. “
Ed-ward!
Lunch is ready!”
      
She paused a moment, listening; then she strolled out onto
the lawn and continued across it—a little shadow attending
her—skirting the rose bed and touching the sundial lightly
with one finger as she went by. She moved rather gracefully
for a woman who was small and plump, with a lilt in her walk
and a gentle swinging of the shoulders and the arms. She
passed under the mulberry tree on to the brick path, then
went all the way along the path until she came to the place
where she could look down into the dip at the end of this
large garden.
      
“
Edward!
Lunch!”
      
She could see him now, about eighty yards away, down in
the dip on the edge of the wood—the tallish narrow figure in
khaki slacks and dark-green sweater, working beside a big
bonfire with a fork in his hands, pitching brambles on to the
top of the fire. It was blazing fiercely, with orange flames and
clouds of milky smoke, and the smoke was drifting back over
the garden with a wonderful scent of autumn and burning
leaves.
      
Louisa went down the slope towards her husband. Had she
wanted, she could easily have called again and made herself
heard, but there was something about a first-class bonfire that
impelled her towards it, right up close so she could feel the
heat and listen to it burn.
      
“Lunch,” she said, approaching.
      
“Oh, hello. All right—yes. I’m coming.”
      
“
What
a good fire.”
      
“I’ve decided to clear this place right out,” her husband
said. “I’m sick and tired of all these brambles.” His long face
was wet with perspiration. There were small beads of it
clinging all over his moustache like dew, and two little rivers
were running down his throat onto the turtleneck of the
sweater.
      
“You better be careful you don’t overdo it, Edward.”
      
“Louisa, I do wish you’d stop treating me as though I were
eighty. A bit of exercise never did anyone any harm.”
      
“Yes, dear, I know. Oh, Edward! Look! Look!”
      
The man turned and looked at Louisa, who was pointing
now to the far side of the bonfire.
      
“Look, Edward! The cat!”
      
Sitting on the ground, so close to the fire that the flames
sometimes seemed actually to be touching it, was a large cat
of a most unusual colour. It stayed quite still, with its head
on one side and its nose in the air, watching the man and
woman with a cool yellow eye.
      
“It’ll get burnt!” Louisa cried, and she dropped the dishcloth
and darted swiftly in and grabbed it with both hands, whisking
it away and putting it on the grass well clear of the flames.
      
“You crazy cat,” she said, dusting off her hands. “What’s the
matter with you?”
      
“Cats know what they’re doing,” the husband said. “You’ll
never find a cat doing something it doesn’t want. Not cats.”
      
“Whose is it? You ever seen it before?”
      
“No, I never have. Damn peculiar colour.”
      
The cat had seated itself on the grass and was regarding
them with a sidewise look. There was a veiled inward expression
about the eyes, something curiously omniscient and
pensive, and around the nose a most delicate air of contempt,
as though the sight of these two middle-aged persons—the
one small, plump, and rosy, the other lean and extremely
sweaty—were a matter of some surprise but very little importance.
For a cat, it certainly had an unusual colour—a pure
silvery grey with no blue in it at all—and the hair was very
long and silky.
      
Louisa bent down and stroked its head. “You must go home,”
she said. “Be a good cat now and go on home to where you
belong.”
      
The man and wife started to stroll back up the hill towards
the house. The cat got up and followed, at a distance first, but
edging closer and closer as they went along. Soon it was alongside
them, then it was ahead, leading the way across the lawn
to the house, and walking as though it owned the whole place,
holding its tail straight up in the air, like a mast.
      
“Go home,” the man said. “Go on home. We don’t want you.”
      
But when they reached the house, it came in with them, and
Louisa gave it some milk in the kitchen. During lunch, it
hopped up onto the spare chair between them and sat through
the meal with its head just above the level of the table, watching
the proceedings with those dark-yellow eyes which kept
moving slowly from the woman to the man and back again.
      
“I don’t like this cat,” Edward said.
      
“Oh, I think it’s a beautiful cat. I do hope it stays a little
while.”
      
“Now, listen to me, Louisa. The creature can’t possibly stay
here. It belongs to someone else. It’s lost. And if it’s still trying
to hang around this afternoon, you’d better take it to the
police. They’ll see it gets home.”
      
After lunch, Edward returned to his gardening. Louisa, as
usual, went to the piano. She was a competent pianist and a
genuine music-lover, and almost every afternoon she spent an
hour or so playing for herself. The cat was now lying on the
sofa, and she paused to stroke it as she went by. It opened its
eyes, looked at her a moment, then closed them again and went
back to sleep.
      
“You’re an awfully nice cat,” she said. “And such a beautiful
colour. I wish I could keep you.” Then her fingers, moving
over the fur on the cat’s head, came into contact with a small
lump, a little growth just above the right eye.
      
“Poor cat,” she said. “You’ve got bumps on your beautiful
face. You must be getting old.”
      
She went over and sat down on the long piano stool but
she didn’t immediately start to play. One of her special little
pleasures was to make every day a kind of concert day, with
a carefully arranged programme which she worked out in
detail before she began. She never liked to break her enjoyment
by having to stop while she wondered what to play next.
All she wanted was a brief pause after each piece while the
audience clapped enthusiastically and called for more. It was
so much nicer to imagine an audience, and now and again
while she was playing—on the lucky days, that is—the room
would begin to swim and fade and darken, and she would see
nothing but row upon row of seats and a sea of white faces
up-turned towards her, listening with a rapt and adoring
concentration.
      
Sometimes she played from memory, sometimes from music.
Today she would play from memory; that was the way she
felt. And what should the programme be? She sat before the
piano with her small hands clasped on her lap, a plump rosy
little person with a round and still quite pretty face, her hair
done up in a neat bun at the back of her head. By looking
slightly to the right, she could see the cat curled up asleep on
the sofa, and its silvery-grey coat was beautiful against the
purple of the cushion. How about some Bach to begin with?
Or, better still, Vivaldi. The Bach adaptation for organ of the
D minor Concerto Grosso. Yes—that first. Then perhaps a
little Schumann.
Carnaval
? That would be fun. And after
that—well, a touch of Liszt for a change. One of the
Petrarch
Sonnets
. The second one—that was the loveliest—the E major.
Then another Schumann, another of his gay ones—
Kinderscenen
.
And lastly, for the encore, a Brahms waltz, or maybe
two of them if she felt like it.
      
Vivaldi, Schumann, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms. A very nice
programme, one that she could play easily without the music.
She moved herself a little closer to the piano and paused a
moment while someone in the audience—already she could
feel that this was one of the lucky days—while someone in the
audience had his last cough; then, with the slow grace that
accompanied nearly all her movements, she lifted her hands
to the keyboard and began to play.
      
She wasn’t, at that particular moment, watching the cat at
all—as a matter of fact she had forgotten its presence—but as
the first deep notes of the Vivaldi sounded softly in the room,
she became aware, out of the corner of one eye, of a sudden
flurry, a flash of movement on the sofa to her right. She
stopped playing at once. “What is it?” she said, turning to the
cat. “What’s the matter?”
      
The animal, who a few seconds before had been sleeping
peacefully, was now sitting bolt upright on the sofa, very
tense, the whole body aquiver, ears up and eyes wide open,
staring at the piano.
      
“Did I frighten you?” she asked gently. “Perhaps you’ve
never heard music before.”
      
No, she told herself. I don’t think that’s what it is. On
second thought, it seemed to her that the cat’s attitude was
not one of fear. There was no shrinking or backing away. If
anything, there was a leaning forward, a kind of eagerness
about the creature, and the face—well, there was rather an odd
expression on the face, something of a mixture between surprise
and shock. Of course, the face of a cat is a small and
fairly expressionless thing, but if you watch carefully the eyes
and ears working together, and particularly that little area of
mobile skin below the ears and slightly to one side, you can
occasionally see the reflection of very powerful emotions.
Louisa was watching the face closely now, and because she
was curious to see what would happen a second time, she
reached out her hands to the keyboard and began again to
play the Vivaldi.
      
This time the cat was ready for it, and all that happened
to begin with was a small extra tensing of the body. But as
the music swelled and quickened into that first exciting
rhythm of the introduction to the fugue, a strange look that
amounted almost to ecstasy began to settle upon the creature’s
face. The ears, which up to then had been pricked up straight,
were gradually drawn back, the eyelids drooped, the head
went over to one side, and at that moment Louisa could
have sworn that the animal was actually
appreciating
the
work.
      
What she saw (or thought she saw) was something she had
noticed many times on the faces of people listening very
closely to a piece of music. When the sound takes complete
hold of them and drowns them in itself, a peculiar, intensely
ecstatic look comes over them that you can recognise as easily
as a smile. So far as Louisa could see, the cat was now wearing
almost exactly this kind of look.
      
Louisa finished the fugue, then played the siciliana, and all
the way through she kept watching the cat on the sofa. The
final proof for her that the animal was listening came at the
end, when the music stopped. It blinked, stirred itself a little,
stretched a leg, settled into a more comfortable position, took
a quick glance round the room, then looked expectantly in her
direction. It was precisely the way a concert-goer reacts when
the music momentarily releases him in the pause between two
movements of a symphony. The behaviour was so thoroughly
human it gave her a queer agitated feeling in the chest.
      
“You like that?” she asked. “You like Vivaldi?”
      
The moment she’d spoken, she felt ridiculous, but not—and
this to her was a trifle sinister—not quite so ridiculous as she
knew she should have felt.
      
Well, there was nothing for it now except to go straight
ahead with the next number on the programme, which was
Carnaval
. As soon as she began to play, the cat again stiffened
and sat up straighter; then, as it became slowly and blissfully
saturated with the sound, it relapsed into that queer melting
mood of ecstasy that seemed to have something to do with
drowning and with dreaming. It was really an extravagant
sight—quite a comical one, too—to see this silvery cat sitting
on the sofa and being carried away like this. And what made it
more screwy than ever, Louisa thought, was the fact that this
music, which the animal seemed to be enjoying so much, was manifestly too
difficult
, too
classical
, to be appreciated by the
majority of humans in the world.
      
Maybe, she thought, the creature’s not really enjoying it at
all. Maybe it’s a sort of hypnotic reaction, like with snakes.
After all, if you can charm a snake with music, then why not
a cat? Except that millions of cats hear the stuff every day of
their lives, on radio and gramophone and piano, and, as far as
she knew, there’d never yet been a case of one behaving like
this. This one was acting as though it were following every
single note. It was certainly a fantastic thing.
      
But was it not also a wonderful thing? Indeed it was. In
fact, unless she was much mistaken, it was a kind of miracle,
one of those animal miracles that happen about once every
hundred years.
      
“I could see you
loved
that one,” she said when the piece
was over. “Although I’m sorry I didn’t play it any too well
today. Which did you like best—the Vivaldi or the Schumann?”
      
The cat made no reply, so Louisa, fearing she might lose
the attention of her listener, went straight into the next part
of the programme—Liszt’s second
Petrarch Sonnet
.
      
And now an extraordinary thing happened. She hadn’t
played more than three or four bars when the animal’s
whiskers began perceptibly to twitch. Slowly it drew itself
up to an extra height, laid its head on one side, then on the
other, and stared into space with a kind of frowning concentrated
look that seemed to say, “What’s this? Don’t tell me.
I know it so well, but just for the moment I don’t seem to be
able to place it.” Louisa was fascinated, and with her little
mouth half open and half smiling, she continued to play, waiting
to see what on earth was going to happen next.
      
The cat stood up, walked to one end of the sofa, sat down
again, listened some more; then all at once it bounded to the
floor and leaped up onto the piano stool beside her. There it
sat, listening intently to the lovely sonnet, not dreamily this
time, but very erect, the large yellow eyes fixed upon Louisa’s
fingers.