Sheba was so mad these days she didn’t care who she spat at. She spat at us, she spat at Sidney, she spat at the milkman. Most of all, however, apart from Samson, she spat at Solomon. Whether she decided that as they were so alike they must be related we never knew, but Solomon, creeping round these days like misery on wheels, left home twice and had to be fetched back from the woods.
Samson left home twice, too. The first time we found him up an apple tree with Solomon sitting a few feet below and Sheba, growling angrily at the bottom, threatening to saw it down and do the pair of them. The second time, with Samson missing and Sheba slinking back down the lane with her back up, I dashed off after him only to be informed by the small boy I met halfway up that he’d shot him. It was 94
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The Great Siamese Revolution the one in the cowboy hat, armed this time with a catapult, who seemed these days to be in on all our misfortunes. If he had, I assured him, tearing on up the lane, I’d come right back and shoot him. And his grandfather, whoever he was, I yelled as a tearful voice called after me that if I did he’d tell his Granfer.
I didn’t discover who Granfer was that day. Samson –
shot, fortunately, only in Wyatt Earp’s fertile imagination
– was still alive. Almost out on the main road, with his fur stuck up like a crew cut to scare off wolves and his small black tail hoisted to give him courage. Determined, he said
– trembling like a leaf when I picked him up, and struggling to get away – never to come back again.
But for Charles Sheba would have had a jolly good hiding when I got home. There was no doubt that she had deliberately driven Samson away. There was no doubt, either, of her rage when she saw him again. She spat so hard when we went in she nearly blew her teeth out.
Once and for all, I said, shutting Samson in the hall for safety, that cat would have to learn her place round here.
It was Charles who said she didn’t mean it. It was Charles who, in spite of the fact that she’d done nothing but spit at him for the past week, gathered her lovingly into his arms and said she was his little friend. It was, I am afraid, nothing but poetic justice that in the battle that took place a few seconds later, Charles was the one who came off worst.
Solomon, who all this time had been sitting in the yard eating the bacon rind I’d thrown out for the birds (he never touched it in the normal way but it came in handy now he was practically Starved, particularly when it pitched between the paving stones and he could put on a heart-95
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rending display hooking it pathetically out with his paw) suddenly ambled in. He was an absolute genius at appearing at awkward moments – and he’d certainly chosen one this time.
Sheba – eyes crossed, hackles up, wild with fury at the reappearance of Samson – took one look at him as he came in, leapt from Charles’s arms and charged. Solomon, scared nearly out of his wits, rushed for the hall door – only to find it was shut and Sheba had him cornered. In less time than it takes to say, the cat fight of the year was raging in our sitting room, with Charles and I trying desperately to part them and Samson screaming his head off in the hall.
Sheba won the first round. She bit Solomon on the paw.
Sheba also won the second round. As I dived to separate them she bit me in the hand. The third and final round went unquestionably to Solomon. As Charles, grabbing the first piece of cat he could find, hauled him bodily from the fray Solomon – back to the wall and frenziedly battling everything in sight – caught him a clanger on the nose.
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TEN
The Defeat of Samson
We were a sorry sight as we trudged up the hill next morning to fetch the papers. Charles with sticking plaster on his nose, I with sticking plaster on my hand, and Solomon limping three-leggedly along in the rear. Like the Retreat from Moscow said the Rector, opening his window in greeting as we passed, and which of us was meant to be Napoleon?
Alas, it was no laughing matter. Charles, from what I could gather, was expecting to die of blood poisoning at any moment. Back in the cottage Samson, quivering like an aspen, was locked in our bedroom for safety, while Sheba
– vowing vengeance on everybody and, from the peculiar bumping noises we could hear when she stopped for breath, apparently busy dynamiting the airing cupboard – was 97
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imprisoned in the bathroom. We only had Solomon with us because when he saw us starting out he’d roared so hard about his foot and leaving him to be massacred we were afraid somebody might call the police. Now, as Charles said disgustedly, he was putting on such a show limping along behind us somebody’d probably call them anyway.
Charles was thoroughly annoyed with Solomon.
Particularly the way he was showing off. Who hit him on the nose he’d like to know? he demanded as we passed the Post Office, and why the hell couldn’t he be carried like a normal cat, if he was hurt? Whereupon for at least the sixth time since we started out Solomon, one paw suspended pitifully in the air, stopped to inform him reproachfully that it was an Accident, he’d meant it for Sheba, and if we were ashamed of him exercising his poor, bitten foot we’d better put him in a home.
It was at that point in our affairs that Dr Tucker came out of the Post Office and asked what was the matter. He wasn’t our personal doctor, but he did happen to be the owner of Ajax. And as he said, what with the pair of us patched with plaster and Solomon howling his head off in the middle of the road he certainly knew a Siamese crisis when he saw one.
So we told him. All about the sulking and the fighting and Sheba being Guy Fawkes and the fact that, unable to stand it any longer, we had arranged to return Samson to the breeder that afternoon. We were particularly sad about that. We had grown very fond of Samson in the short time he had been with us and Samson, when he could spare the time from worrying about Solomon and Sheba, was obviously fond of us too.
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The Defeat of Samson We felt we had failed in our handling of the cats – and that, though she was kindness itself in saying how sorry she was and agreeing to take him back, was undoubtedly the opinion of the breeder. Her kittens, she told us when we rang her up, often went to homes where there were other cats – even other Siamese – and after the initial settling-down period there had never been any trouble with them.
The inference was that if we had given it a little more time and been firmer with our own two specimens – though how we could have done that, short of putting them in balls and chains, we didn’t know – we wouldn’t have had any trouble either.
Dr Tucker soon put us right on that score. Nothing, he said, could have altered the situation. It arose from the fact that Solomon and Sheba were twins and had been brought up together. They had a much greater affinity, he said, than kittens raised together but coming from different families –
and though in time they might have come to tolerate Samson it would only have been an armed truce. Never would there have been the affection that, despite their feuds and battles, our two held for each other. Never the fun, either. In due course Solomon and Sheba themselves might – as they had already begun to do – have grown completely apart. In any case, he said, glancing professionally at Solomon who all this time had been sitting in the road with the owlishly innocent expression he always adopted when people were talking about him – in any case, with Solomon so jealous and Samson being another tom, eventually Solomon would have started to spray.