Tempers became a little frayed during that operation.
Father Adams got a bit touchy when, having sent Charles out to see if the brush was through the pot – because, he said, he’d now screwed on fifteen rods and if our chimney was that high he was a Dutchman – Charles came back to report that it was not only out, it was drooping over the roof like a dying sunflower, with a whole crowd of people watching it from the lane. Silly lot of bs, said Father Adams, hauling it in again as fast as he could. Serve ’em right if it fell on their silly great heads and knocked their silly great brains out.
I didn’t exactly howl with laughter when he and Charles went up on the roof and poured a couple of buckets of water down the chimney for safety’s sake
– carefully stuffing a couple of sacks in the grate before they started so the water wouldn’t run out into the room, then marching triumphantly back removing the sacks, and letting it.
And Charles was quite stricken when I complained. For heaven’s sake what was a drop of water compared to having hearth and home on fire? he demanded striding manfully 80
Cats In May_Insides.indd 80
Cats In May_Insides.indd 80
15/03/2006 16:49:58
15/03/2006 16:49:58
Fire Down Below
through it in his gumboots to peer up the chimney and see if it was all right now.
Nothing at all. Except that two hours later just when I’d got it all cleaned up and was wondering if I had the strength for lunch, hearth and home caught on fire again.
We got the brigade that time. All it was was soot – caught by burning paper – smouldering on a ledge halfway up the chimney, and all they did, after checking it with a mirror, was brush it off with special brushes and hose it down. After a cup of tea, and comforting us with the information that in about five years the ledge would build up and probably catch on fire again but not to worry, just ring the old Brigade, they went. Leaving us, if you counted ten and took a broad, calm, practical view of things with hardly any more mess than when Charles and Father Adams did it the first time.
As Charles said, at least we knew it was well swept.
It was wonderful, after all that, to be driving down to the cattery next day to collect the cats. Good old English air, said Charles, taking deep breaths of it as we went along.
Good old Sol and Sheba. Didn’t it seem marvellous to be fetching them home again?
It certainly did. Always, when we were going on holiday, we spent the last few days beforehand saying if we had to put up with them a moment longer we’d go clean round the bend. Always, when we drove down to Halstock with Solomon howling sorrowfully in his basket and Sheba apparently reciting poetry in hers, we said if we had to listen to them for another mile we’d go mad. And always, the moment we got back to the empty cottage and saw the poignant little reminders of their life with us, we felt unaccountably sad.
81
Cats In May_Insides.indd 81
Cats In May_Insides.indd 81
15/03/2006 16:49:58
15/03/2006 16:49:58
Cats in May
There were so many little reminders. The marks on the sitting-room wall, for instance – juicy and slightly spattered
– where Solomon caught gnats on summer evenings.
Similar marks in the spare room where Sheba, not to be outdone, sat on top of the door and slapped her lot to death on the ceiling. The staircarpet – new last year, but you’d never have thought it; not after four happy little pairs of feet had given it an all-over mohair effect and in one spot, on the top tread, two happy little pairs of feet (Solomon’s) had ripped a hole clean through to the underfelt. The bath, which if it were cleaned ten times a day (and sometimes it very nearly was) could still be depended on to have a trail of footprints wandering nonchalantly round the edge and, at the bottom resemble nothing so much as an elephants’
waterhole…
By the time I’d done a tour of remembrance, emptied their deserted earth boxes and put away their feeding bowls I was practically in tears. By the time we were actually on holiday, with distance lending enchantment as, oddly enough, it always does with Siamese cats, we saw them as perfect little angels. We could hardly wait to get news of them – to make sure they hadn’t pined or caught chills or died of sorrow. Which, since we never booked our hotels in advance and the people who kept the cattery had to write to us Poste Restante, added a few more complications to life.
Whatever else we miss when we go abroad we certainly know the Post Offices. There is one in Florence, under an old grey arcade, which we haunted so persistently I swear they took Charles for Dante’s ghost. There is one in Heidelberg where, when the polite young man said ‘ Nein’, we went down to the river – Solomon and Sheba were five months 82
Cats In May_Insides.indd 82
Cats In May_Insides.indd 82
15/03/2006 16:49:58
15/03/2006 16:49:58
Fire Down Below
old then and we were sure they’d died of broken hearts
– and mentally threw ourselves in. There is one in Paris which smells – or it did when we were there last – distinctly of over-ripe cheese. Where, holding handkerchiefs to our noses, we argued for days that there must be a letter for us, and when it did arrive the clerk was so relieved he shook hands with us under the grille…
The message, of course, when it did find its way to us, was always the same. ‘S. and S. well, eating like horses and not missing you a bit.’ After which, feeling as if Mafeking had been relieved, we went and had a drink.
It was nice coming back to the cats. Even when we turned in at the gate of the cattery and heard two familiar voices busily bellowing the place down we didn’t flinch. Even when we saw they weren’t the homesick little creatures we had envisaged – when Solomon stalked the length of their run to inform the Siamese in the next chalet that if he said that again he’d dot him one, and Sheba lay happily in Mrs Francis’s arms informing us she was staying on here because she liked the food – we were still glad to see them.
What with the fire, all the sun we’d been having and this absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder business, we were in fact in that bemused state of mind in which people buy Siamese cats. If anyone doubts that there is such a state I can only quote the case of someone I knew – in her fifties, she was; an old maid living alone whose only interest was taking care of herself. She went to bed every night at half-past eight even when she had visitors (if they over-stayed she politely sent them home). She rested for an hour after lunch with her feet up and a bandage over her eyes to keep out the light. And her house was so spick and span that 83
Cats In May_Insides.indd 83
Cats In May_Insides.indd 83
15/03/2006 16:49:58
15/03/2006 16:49:58
Cats in May
every ornament in the place had a little felt mat under it, cut exactly to shape, to prevent it marking the furniture.
If she wasn’t bemused when she bought a Siamese I don’t know who was. Something came over her, she said, when she saw his little black face mewing pathetically at her through a pet-shop window. Actually he wasn’t mewing but bawling away like a town crier, as she realised when she went into the shop and got on the same side of the glass. Something had certainly come over her, though. She bought him just the same.
She doesn’t go to bed at half-past eight now; she’s still trying to get Lancelot in off the tiles at ten. She doesn’t rest after lunch – she can’t, she says, for worrying what Lancelot is up to. She doesn’t have little felt mats under her ornaments any more; she hasn’t got any ornaments.
What she has got is Lancelot. And – though admittedly she worships the ground he strolls on – she still doesn’t know how it happened.
If that could happen to her you can imagine how we were affected when, going into the Francises’ kitchen for coffee that night before our journey back, we were confronted by an entire family of Siamese kittens.