Solomon did tend to watch people. Knowing his concern for his stomach he was probably only making sure they weren't eating something behind his back but I appreciated that to an outsider the sight of a Siamese sitting bolt upright in a doorway that had been empty a moment before, looking like a feline Fu Manchu-cum-Judge Jeffreys, and Little Did They Know, said his expression, what he'd seen them Doing before they spotted him... I quite appreciated that it put one off a bit.
I explained that he liked watching people and his wail was only by way of conversation – he was probably enquiring what was for supper and did she have an odd biscuit on her. It was no use. The following week the Breton woman's head fell off while Mrs Pearson was on the other side of the room dusting the mantelpiece, and while she was standing there rooted to the spot thinking the spirits must have done it (it seemed she hadn't realised that the head was stuck on and I'd never thought to tell her) from the doorway, to add to the effect, came that straight-from-the-graveyard wail...
As usual she'd gone before we got home but that night she came back to see us. She knew we wouldn't believe her, she said. We'd think she'd broken the ornament. It wasn't because of that, though, that she was giving us her notice. When it came to our having ghosts as well as Siamese cats...
In vain we plied her with sherry and explained about the figure being broken already. Her nerves wouldn't stand any more, she said. She was going to work at the mushroom farm.
She did too, joining the happy band of local ladies who were picked up by private bus on the green in the morning and wafted off to a village three miles away where, cutting mushrooms to music in long rows of steaming sheds, they could talk to one another all day, with no ghosts, Siamese cats or other people's muddles to dismay them and, feeling as liberated and avant-garde as their town sisters, bowled back in the afternoon several pounds better off with a bag of mushrooms for their husbands' teas. It thus being impossible to get a replacement for her – everybody worked at the mushroom farm – I went back to doing the housework myself and the state of the cottage slipped steadily downhill.
Solomon ripped a hole through the staircarpet. Working industriously away in the hall Sheba, his sister (we kept the two of them after Sugieh died), converted an entire hide armchair to suede. The pair of them swung like cuckoo-clock pendulums on the curtains and chased over the pale green covers in the sitting-room till they were more of an elephant grey...
I washed the covers, of course. I was eternally washing them, much to Solomon's approval. With every wash they shrank still further and as he was now banned from the hall (we'd had to replace the staircarpet and were trying to keep him away from it) he'd transferred his exercises to the chairs instead and the tighter the covers fitted, the better.
When he'd reduced them to the state where even Charles noticed they had holes in them we replaced them with heavy-quality stretch nylon. Easier to wash – but the cats' claws didn't, as the salesman assured us they would, slide over them. They latched into them like fish-hooks and within weeks we had laddered stretch astrakhan. What did we do, therefore, when at fourteen and a half our dark man died of kidney trouble, leaving us with an ache in our hearts and the stuffing hanging out of the lounge suite? We decided to get another boy as much like Solomon as we could.
Siamese have that effect on people. Noisy, destructive, imperious to the point of autocracy – one look from those compelling blue eyes and they have you in bondage for life. I wouldn't put it past them to have decided to have eyes like that deliberately – to set them apart from other cats and stop people in their tracks. Add to the eyes the Oriental mask, those long thin legs, that tail like a taper, the voice like a rusty saw, the air of aristocracy... the knowledge that, despite such innate superiority, Solomon had loved us with all his heart, as dearly as we loved him...
To heck with the furniture. We went out and got Seeley. If he wrecked the staircarpet – there were more important things in life.
As a matter of fact he didn't. One thing we can vouch for after all our years of Siamese cat-keeping is that, though they are universally destructive, even the most basic of their Machiavellian traits varies according to the cat. All of them claw things like Welshmen playing harps, for instance, but while Solomon practised pizzicatos on the staircarpet, Seeley did his on the draught-proofing round the doors. Ours is an old cottage, draughts whizz in like Atlantic gales and the door-surrounds are, or rather were, fitted with foam-rubber stripping – which Seeley, any time he was shut out of a room or just simply mad about something, ripped out with impassioned fervour and scattered in pieces over the floor.
Seeley was four when he went out one morning for his pre-breakfast look-round and was never seen again. I have told his story before. I shall never, ever, forget the months of fruitless, heartbreaking searching. Even now, more than three years later, wherever we go we look at every Siamese we see. We still cherish the hope that if – which is one of the possibilities that might have happened that nightmare Sunday morning – he climbed into a stationary car and was carried away by accident, one of these days we might still find our dear dark bumble-head again.
When he'd been missing for four months we could stand it no longer and got Saska, our present Seal Point boy. We had Shebalu, of course, the Blue Point girl who'd succeeded Sheba some two years previously, but for things to be right there had to be a set of gangling, spider-thin brown legs racing up the stairs, vanishing round corners or disappearing at top speed from the scene of any domestic crime as well as four slightly smaller blue ones – and anyway Shebalu missed Seeley as much as we did.
Revel she might in coming to bed with us for company, sleeping with her head on my shoulder, no longer being pushed aside by someone who took it for granted that he always had Number One Place – but she still never ate without glancing to see if he was eating beside her; never went out without stopping to scan the hillside or look expectantly up the garden for a cat who never came.
So we got Saska. He didn't waste time on the draught-proofing. From the beginning he was a kitten who worked things out. His reasoning was simple. Clawing at doors would get you nowhere. Tunnelling under them was the obvious way. We now have carpets with rounded corners where he hooked them up in front of any door that thwarted him and, when he found he couldn't burrow underneath, chewed them vengefully, with his head turned sideways, as determinedly as a dog.
We also have vinyl protective pieces that fit over the corners of the carpets. A little late in the day, but they do prevent further erosion – except when anyone special is coming and we whip the vinyl pieces off. They look rather odd and people might think us eccentric so I expose the chewed-up corners, laughingly explain about Saska's idiosyncrasy, shut him and Shebalu out into the hall when it's time to eat so they can't climb over people's plates. And what do I see – what do I know I will see – when, the food cleared away, I open the door to allow them to rejoin the party? Two cats sitting bolt upright on the other side of it and, with the vinyl obligingly removed, a bite more chewed off the carpet. Sass the Indomitable has struck again.