The cottage, as I say, looks rather different nowadays. We have these odd-looking vinyl corner-pieces. Our sitting-room carpet is a mottled tan. Not so aesthetically pleasing as the red one but it doesn't show muddy paw-prints, or the spots where they splash their supper milk, or the places where – being great ones for Better Health for Cats – having eaten enough grass to sink a battleship, they come in and sick it up with gusto on the floor.
We have a settee and armchairs in hide-grained vinyl now. It looks like leather, people comment on its being saddle-backed – gives the room quite a ranch effect, they say. Maybe it does, but this is an English cottage. I sigh for my pale green covers of former days. Vinyl can be wiped, however, and the cats never attempt to claw it – which sounds incredible, but is absolutely true. Some people say it's the smell of it, others the slippery texture – the fact remains that whereas they will strop on leather or fabric like tempestuous impresarios, for some peculiar reason vinyl is taboo.
I wish I could say the same about woodwork. Sass, for instance, can jump like a Mexican bean. When we take them over to the orchard he soars spectacularly over the bars which block the entrance – up, over and down from standing, to the astonishment of all who see him, while Shebalu clambers primly over them like one of the Pirates of Penzance girls over the rocks. Indoors, however, it is she who leaps without a second thought five feet up to the back window of the living-room – the high one that looks out on to the hillside where Annabel and her friends the magpies roam. And what does Sass the Indomitable do when, seeing her craning her neck at something that appears to be interesting, he decides to join her in the window sill? He clambers laboriously, as he did when a kitten, up the back of one of our antique carved chairs.
Then it was delightful, watching him heave his small white body up the pattern of acorns and dog-roses like a climber ascending the Matterhorn, invariably losing his nerve halfway up and bawling for a leg-up over the top. But when the tallest cat we have ever had, who, standing on his hind legs, now reaches a good three-quarters of the way up the chair-back before he even starts, still clambers babyishly up the carving, still bawls for help because he's stuck and has, into the bargain, left a permanent trail of scratches over the acorns to mark his passage...
What, I sometimes ask, will they think of to ruin next? Why do they always pick on something that might one day, if they hadn't mucked it up, have been valuable? Why on earth, with all the experience we've had, do we go on having Siamese cats? Then I see Sass's blue eyes looking at me out of that anxious, pointed face – and I pick him up and hug him. That is my answer.
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.