A Comfort of Cats Read online

  Two

  Father Adams's standard comment when he looks at Sass is 'Theests 'ant 'alf got a rum 'un there.' Coming from the oldest and most omniscient of our neighbours, who never misses a thing that happens in the Valley and remembers our cats and their idiosyncrasies as far back as Sugieh's addiction to tracking down courting couples up on the hill, Solomon's belief as a kitten that he was a horse and the time Sheba got marooned up the telephone pole, that is saying something.

  He is right, however. Rum Sass certainly is – in his appearance, in the things he does and in the uncanny way he has of looking at people. At first sight the intensity of his gaze strikes one as comical. At second glance one wonders. Who is the wiser – he or you? What does he know? What can he see? What is he thinking?

  It is partly the shape of his face. Longer, narrower, with higher cheek-bones than any cat we have ever had, and a chin so pointed he looks like an Elizabethan philosopher. 'Look at the length of his head,' his breeder sighs every time she sees him. 'If ever a cat was born to be a champion...'

  He isn't one because, for all his Brain of Britain look, he got his tail bent as a kitten. Nobody knows how. He wasn't born like it. It isn't the now rarely seen throw-back Siamese kink which, when it does occur, is always towards the tip of the tail. At a month old he was perfect, his breeder Pauline Furber told us – then one day, suddenly, he appeared with this right-angled bend near the base. Whether he'd caught it in a door, or somebody had bitten it... certainly it couldn't have happened by itself. The Vet said the cartilage was damaged and it couldn't be splinted or operated on, being only a scant inch from his bottom. So there he was, the hope of the litter, with a tail like the starting-handle of a car.

  It was at this point that we had rung Pauline Furber seeking a successor to Seeley, and she said she had just the kitten for us. He was an absolute character. Stuck out a mile from all the others. His only fault was that he had this bend in his tail...

  I have told this part of the story before, too. How I discounted him at once. Our cats had always been perfect, I told her. It wouldn't seem right to see a crooked tail around the place. How we went, instead, to see the other kittens she had for sale – Saska's twin brother and four from a younger litter. Saska was there as companion to his brother – a role he'd so far fulfilled by hitting him in the eye. The younger kittens, however, were nowhere in the personality stakes next to Sass. His brother sat there with one eye shut like a woebegone small Lord Nelson. Guess who was swaggering round like Superman, bent tail raised at triumph stations? Guess who we brought home with us that night, much to the disgust of our blue girl? Guess who is now her inseparable companion, the delight of our hearts – and the most noted cat in the district for his peculiarities?

  We wouldn't have thought it possible. Our other cats, vigilant though we had always been with them, had nevertheless had a certain amount of freedom which enabled them to get into trouble. The daily look-round on their own before breakfast, for instance, which on occasion they extended to going half round the village, or the times when we took them for walks in the forest.

  Mostly they followed at our heels but there had been times when they digressed. Up trees where they got stranded. After those courting couples. Vanishing suddenly into the undergrowth and worrying the daylights out of us. We'd call them, implore them, practically stand on our heads peering under brambles for them... afraid, if we left them, of people with guns or prowling foxes.

  Somebody would usually happen by in due course to enquire what we were looking for and, being told a couple of Siamese cats, would inform us that there was one up that tree back there, or they'd just seen one go into our donkey field, or – as happened more than once – that there were two of them sitting right behind us. Would those be the ones? Though they didn't appear to be lost. They looked as if they'd been there for ages...

  These days it was different. Since Seeley's disappearance Shebalu always wore a collar and lead when she was out. The lead was a twenty-foot nylon cord, admittedly, and didn't restrict her movements but one of us was always there to grab it if she looked like taking off. Sass was too small for a collar yet. He'd have looked – being Sass he'd have undoubtedly seen to it that he did look – like a particularly hard-done-by cherub in a chain gang. In due course he, too, would have one. We couldn't risk losing a cat again. For the moment, though, there was no need. Like all young kittens he was nervous of the outside world and didn't want to venture far. His main concern was to keep close to us or Sheba.

  Neither did there seem any need for a collar and lead when, as his legs began to lengthen like spindly brown pipe-cleaners, I started to take him up on the hillside behind the cottage. He was still a baby, crouching when a jay flew over; leaping spectacularly at butterflies, batting cautiously, pretending they were dangerous, at fir cones lying in the grass. Shebalu, full as only a Siamese female can be of the fact that she'd been Longer With Us than He Had, Hadn't She, and Knew This Hillside Better Than He Did, Didn't She? and anyway we Liked Her Better, sat by my side importantly, wearing her collar and lead as though they were an Egyptian queen's insignia, far too superior to play games with little kittens. So it was that I started throwing fir cones to give Saska something to chase after. Nobody was more surprised than I was when he picked them up and brought them back.

  I threw them further away. Still he retrieved them – belting down the hillside with the speed of a greyhound and racing straight back up again carrying the cone in his mouth. He would put it down in front of me and watch it intently, ready to chase it again. It was always the exact one I'd thrown for him, too. If there were several lying around when he got to the end of his run, he would sniff round like a police dog till he found the one that had the right scent on it. The only time he was ever foxed was when the cone bounced, on its way down, into the middle of a very large gorse bush. After circling the bush for ages with a worried look on his face, he eventually came back hopefully with a piece of donkey dropping.

  While I thought Sass's retrieving act clever and encouraged him in it, there were some people who couldn't believe their eyes. Fred Ferry, Father Adams's perennial sparring partner, was the first outsider to see the performance as he clumped, knapsack over shoulder, along the lane one afternoon. From the way he stopped, watched incredulously for several minutes and then quickened his pace along the lane, I knew the news wouldn't be long in spreading and sure enough Father Adams appeared within seconds.

  Father Adams knows us well enough by now not to bother with the usual village ploys when he wants to see what we are doing. No whistling a dog, washing mud off his gum boots in the stream that runs past the cottage or picking blackberries in our hedge for him. He just stands there, arms folded, and stares. He was there on that occasion when we came down at the end of the session and so saw the finale that Fred Ferry, not wanting to be thought lingering, had missed: Sass running ahead of me with his pine cone in his mouth, through the back gate, and putting it carefully down on the lawn.

  'Well, if th'old liar weren't right for once,' said Father Adams. 'I 'ouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself.' And off he went to add his bit to the story – about our new cat carrying home things in his mouth like a retriever with a stick.

  Alas, before long we had to give up the games on the hillside. It should have been safe. The area was fenced. We grazed Annabel, our donkey, up there. Beyond the fence was thick, untracked pine forest that nobody ever wandered through. It was well away from the bridle path, too, where I now never took the cats. In the old days we walked along the path often, but after the lesson of Seeley... Supposing, said Charles, I was halfway up the track with them and met a dog?

  You can't win, of course. When it comes to being born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, man has nothing on Siamese cats. There we were minding our own business up on the hillside one morning, Shebalu pursuing her favourite pastime of biting the heads off daisies, Sass busily occupied stalking beetles, Annabel grazing companionably close at hand
to make sure she wasn't left out of anything, when out of the forest and through the top fence charged three large black Labradors.

  It was like one of those animated dioramas. Shebalu went up a tree. Annabel took off across the hillside, bucking wildly in defence of her rear. She needn't have worried. Sass, an eye-catching target in his kitten whiteness, fled straight down the hillside towards the cottage, and the dogs, tongues lolloping, went after him.

  So did I. So did Charles, running madly across from the orchard. So did the woman, frantically blowing a whistle, who came clambering over the fence in my rear. Charles reached the yard ahead of the Labradors and barred them from coming through the gate. Where was Sass, though – conspicuous by his absence, last seen streaking like a comet down the hill?

  Upstairs under our bed, as a matter of fact. I always leave the cottage doors open when I'm out with the cats – from past experience one never knows when they'll need a quick retreat. When we'd located him and satisfied ourselves that he wasn't hurt we went out to talk to the woman. We'd often seen her around before, instructing the dogs to sit in the roadway, walking on up the hill herself, then calling or whistling them to come on. Giving them obedience training, obviously, but what on earth she'd been doing in the woods...

  Training them as gun dogs, according to her. She and her husband did a lot of it. The business out on the road was to get them to stay where they were put. The next step was to take them where there were likely to be distractions and teach them to still stay put till they were told. To this end she'd taken them into the forest, instructed them to 'sit' when a rabbit hopped out on to the path ahead—and the trio, deciding she couldn't possibly have meant it, had immediately shot off in pursuit. The rabbit must have given them the slip behind a tree and, pelting on, they'd spotted Sass.

  'They wouldn't have hurt him,' the woman assured us with airy confidence. 'By instinct they retrieve without harming their quarry.' I don't know about that. I had a vision of Sass being carted back to her in one of those big black mouths and went weak at the knees. So it was that though she never brought the dogs to the Valley again – her confidence being obviously not as strong as she made out – for a long time I didn't take Sass up on the hill again, either. I never knew what might come out of the forest.

  Instead I threw things for him to chase on the lawn – pine cones, pieces of stick and, as the summer advanced, small fallen apples from the tree in front of the conservatory. Sass himself devised the refinement to this one. If people's eyes popped to see him running back to me with sticks and fir cones, they positively goggled to see him carrying small apples by their stalks.

  Fred Ferry, not ordinarily an animal lover, was entranced. 'Theest couldn't half train he to be useful,' he kept saying. As a poacher's assistant I imagined, knowing Fred, who didn't carry that knapsack for nothing. He was equally intrigued when I told him that Sass drank. Anything from orange juice to whisky.

  Most Siamese like sherry, of course. One belonging to a friend of mine downed a whole glassful once. She put it on the floor by the side of her chair while she was having a quiet half-hour with the paper and when, after a while, she picked up the glass and found it empty she thought she must have drunk it without realising she had – until she saw the culprit weaving across the room with his legs crossed, just before he collapsed on the floor. Luckily her husband is a doctor. He said to lay him on the bed and leave him, and sure enough after an hour or two he recovered. If it had been us, we would have had to call the Vet. I can just imagine telling him one of our cats was drunk. That, I can hear him saying, is all he'd been waiting for...

  With that example in mind, anyway, we always warn friends to watch their glasses. Siamese are forward enough without encouraging them in their drinking habits, and in any case it is bad for their kidneys. A finger-lick of sherry is all our cats have ever been allowed – until Sass appeared on the scene and, almost before we knew it, there he was sitting persuasively on people's laps, bent tail at an angle behind him, hooking at their glasses with a determined paw and scoffing anything he could get.

  Orange juice we don't mind about – though I have no doubt he thinks it's something stronger. People with more potent drinks are permitted to give him only a single finger-lick – and no more than two guests in an evening at that. Even so, from the way he sizes up the gathering, longing written all over him, one paw going out like a grab-hook for a practised yank at the glass, you'd think Charles and I kept Bacchanalia every night with that cat as one of the party. Actually we hardly drink at all. Seeing Sass, nobody would believe it.

  Fred, as I say, was entranced when I told him about this. An ardent cider aficionado himself, he said Sass was a regular li'l wonder. I thought he was, too, watching him dashing about the lawn, diving head first into flower beds and nettles, retrieving apples with unerring accuracy and bringing them back to me like a dog. So much so that I got lax about always keeping close to him, Sass laid his plans accordingly, and one day, chasing an apple I'd tossed near the gate, he ran past it and over the wall.

  He was across the road and up into the wood like a flash. So was I, in determined pursuit. But it took time to haul myself up the steep, slippery bank and by the time I'd got to the top he had vanished. Up through the trees I raced. How often had I done this chasing after Solomon. In those days, though, I could tell myself he always came back in the end. Now there was the frightening thought of Seeley.

  I crashed through the wood, emerged on the lane at the top of the hill, went running past cottages and bungalows along to the end. There was no sign of him anywhere. No reply to my frantic calls. Only the sound of doors opening behind me as people came out to peer over their gates, and tap their heads at each other, I shouldn't wonder. Outside the Rose and Crown a thought came to me. Sass and his liking for drink. It was summer and the door was open. If he'd sniffed alcohol he might well have gone in.

  Plucking up courage, I went in myself. 'I suppose a Siamese cat hasn't come in here?' I asked the gathering in general. Silence swept the bar in a sort of wave. The customers looked at me oddly. 'He's run away and he likes drink,' I said. The silence settled even deeper.

  He obviously hadn't been there. I backed out, hot all over. Siamese land you in situations like that. I knew what those people were thinking. To add to my chagrin as I dashed back down to the Valley – the Forestry track being the next place to look for the truant – I suddenly saw him coming out of Fred Ferry's back door with Fred in attendance close behind.

  Where had he been? In the Ferry kitchen, proving what I'd said about his drinking sherry. 'Walked in like he was the Squire and owned the place,' said Fred. 'I thought thee usn't mind if I give he a drop.'

  Actually I did, but what was the use? 'Only give it to'n off me finger, like theest said,' Fred assured me. And Sass had licked his finger with enthusiasm and stood on his hind legs and sniffed hopefully at the bottle.

  When Fred told that one up at the Rose and Crown – in which direction he departed as soon as Sass and I left him – the customers would realise I'd had some reason for thinking he might be there, but I bet they still put me down as barmy.

  Three

  There was one consolation. Charles and I were no longer considered the village's sole eccentrics. We had strong competition from the Bannetts.

  I have mentioned them before. Tim with his ginger beard. His wife Liz, who wore long skirts and dangling earrings. Their family of tortoises and turtles who each slept in a bedroom slipper in front of the sitting-room fire. They'd moved into the cottage next to Miss Wellington and were by this time living the rural life in earnest. Not as we do, simply because we like it and would hate a town existence. They are of the conviction, popular among the young, that when civilisation falls apart – they expect it to happen daily – the only solution will be to live off the land and they might as well get in training for it.

  They began by keeping chickens and bees. Tim being of an artistic as well as a practical bent, the chickens were not as other p
eople's chickens. They were exotics – Oricanas and Marrons, funny little birds with ruffs and topknots, who laid arsenic-green and bitter-chocolate coloured eggs, which the locals immediately decided must be poisonous. Actually they were delicious, but only we and the Bannetts ate them. The rest of the village regarded them as akin to toadstools.

  The bees were normal bees, but people who keep bees always seem odd somehow. They wear strange clothes, for instance – in Tim's case a white boiler suit topped with a wide-brimmed yellow straw hat in which, with a black veil hanging from it, draped around his beard, he looked like a Victorian butterfly-collector bound for the Amazon or the Reverend Dodgson off on a picnic with Alice long ago.

  Bee-keepers do odd things, too. In Tim's case the two pictures which come most outstandingly to mind are of him standing in his bee-outfit in the lane one morning apparently rooted to the spot, saying 'Ow! Ow! Ow!' to himself in a voice that was muted yet fraught with anguish (he later explained that he'd been trying not to antagonise still further some bees that had got through a hole in his boiler suit and were stinging him, but they were obviously antagonised enough already so he gave up and went home at the double)... and of his lying on a chaise longue in his garden one day, right in front of the bee-hive, wearing only denim shorts and with a swelling bee-sting on his nose.