When she stole one of Charles's best yellow socks and showed the delighted kittens how to chew holes up and down the leg till it looked like a colander it was Solomon – when the reaction set in and she realised what she'd done – who was detailed to bring us the remains while the rest sat in trepidation on the landing, ready to run.
When we went to the cinema one night and foolishly left them on our bed because it was cold and they looked so appealing cuddled together on the eiderdown it was Solomon – the rest, led by Sugieh, bolted under the bed the minute they heard us coming up the stairs – who was left in small, solitary splendour to explain the row of holes across the top of a brand new blanket. He had a job doing that. There was only one cat whose mouth would have fitted those round wet holes – and she was flat on her stomach under the bed, pretending she was part of the carpet. There was only one cat, too, strong enough to turn back the bedspread and eiderdown and pull the blanket out. Solomon listened, his big bat ears wide with horror, while we told him who she was, what she was, and what we were going to do to her when we caught her. Something obviously had to be done in a hurry if he was going to save Mum from the tanning of her life – and on the spur of the moment he did it. As I held the blanket up, wailing that it was absolutely useless, he bounced forward, his eyes bright with inspiration, and wiggled a fat black paw through one of the holes. That, he said, was the game they had been playing before we came in. That was the very reason Mum had chewed the holes, and it was terrific fun. Why didn't we have a go?
We were always suckers for that little black pansy face. We did. Within a few seconds the bed was a hilarious mass of kittens charging gleefully up and down the eiderdown and poking paws at us through the blanket while Sugieh, reappearing as if by magic once she knew the danger was past, grabbed Solomon by the scruff of the neck and dropped him lightheartedly off the pillow as a reward.
It wasn't the only reward she gave him. I nearly fainted on the spot when after supper that night he marched proudly into the living room with his spotted whiskers sprouting on one side as exuberantly as a gorse bush – and the other side completely bare. He was only eight weeks old then and we thought they had dropped out as a result of eating too much rabbit. We didn't know Siamese mothers sometimes did that to their favourite kittens when they were particularly pleased with them.
The vet told us – rather shortly, we thought, seeing that he was supposed to like Siamese cats – at half past eleven that night.
SEVEN
Solomon the Great
A few days after that the Smiths brought James to tea for the first time since the kittens were born and Solomon assaulted him. We should have anticipated something like that. Ever since the loss of his whiskers, which he seemed to regard as some sort of accolade, Solomon had been quite unbearable. Head of the Family he said he was, and though the head of the family was more often than not seen disappearing ignominiously round a corner on his back to have his ears washed, it was obviously asking for trouble to have a strange cat in the place.
The snag was, we couldn't ask the Smiths without James. They took him everywhere from the post office to the rectory garden party. If they didn't, they said – and as Siamese owners ourselves we quite understood – he kicked up hell, and the neighbours complained.
I bet he wouldn't have complained if he'd known what was coming to him that afternoon. I can see him now, stalking elegantly up the garden path in his bright red harness and stopping every now and then to smell the wallflowers. Sugieh greeting him at the door. A little suspiciously, perhaps – but then Sugieh always greeted people suspiciously; it made social occasions so much more interesting. The pair of them walking side by side into the living room where, said Sugieh, her family was simply dying to meet him. And the awful moment when Solomon, his one-sided whiskers simply bristling with hate, shot out from under the table, drew himself up to his full six inches, and spat.
Before it had even started our polite country tea party was bedlam. Sugieh, screaming that he had Attacked her Son, pitched into James. James, who hadn't done a thing but wasn't stopping to argue, took off through the cucumber sandwiches. And Solomon, completely beside himself with excitement, bit Mrs Smith in the leg.
Long after James had been driven home shaking like a leaf and we had swept up the remains of the Copeland bowl that used to stand in the window, Solomon was still telling us about Mrs Smith's leg.
'And after that I bit James,' he chanted, sitting on the kitchen table where we were wearily cutting up rabbit for their supper. 'And then I chased him up the curtains. And then I bit him again…'
Actually he hadn't done anything of the sort. It was Sugieh who bit James. The moment Mrs Smith screamed Solomon had dived under the bureau like a rocket with the rest of the kittens and all we had seen of him for the next twenty minutes was a pair of eyes as round as marbles gazing dumbfounded at the devastation. That, however, was Solomon all over. To add to our other troubles he had turned out to be a feline Walter Mitty.
We usually locked the kittens in the hall when we got their food. Four of them clinging to his legs like Morris bells and Sugieh drooling hungrily in his ear were, as Charles said the day he cut his finger with the chopping knife, more than any man could stand. When the dishes were on the floor, however, and the hall door was opened, it was no ordinary litter of kittens that trooped forth to supper. It was a sheriff's posse with Solomon in the lead. Ears flat, tails raised, they drummed in a solid body through the living room, along the passage and into the kitchen, with Sugieh hard behind charging as enthusiastically – if a little self-consciously – as any of them.
One day the garden door happened to be open as well and Solomon, whose two ambitions in life were to Eat and Be Out, had absent-mindedly galloped the posse out into the yard before he realised it. Father Adams, who was passing at the time, was loud in his admiration of the way in which he skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, turned, and with a mighty roar led the charge hot-foot back to the feeding bowls. If he'd been a hoss, he said, the little black'un would have made a mighty fine hunter.
Solomon remembered that. The time was to come when he thought he was a horse, and, a pretty fine dance he led us. Meanwhile he was busy being head of the family, and a fine job he made of that too.
In the mornings, when the posse tore out of the front door and up the damson tree so fast it hurt your eyes – half of their time they spent in the damson tree spying down through the leaves at unsuspecting passers-by and the other half they spent with their noses pressed to the hall window complaining there was somebody interesting going by Right This Moment and now they'd Missed Him – it was always Solomon who led the way, shouting This Morning he'd be first at the Top. It was always Solomon, too, who after an initial leap big enough to take him clean over the roof, was left clinging desperately to the trunk about two feet up yelling to us to Catch Him Quick, he was feeling Giddy.
The only time he ever did get to the top – we imagined he must have been carried up bodily by the rush of kittens behind him – he was so overcome with excitement when the Rector went by that he fell out on to his head. Neither of them was hurt, though the Rector – red in the face and the nearest I ever knew him to swearing – said if we had to give him a Biblical name it should have been Beelzebub, and after that whenever he came to call he always used to stop at a safe distance and look up into the damson tree before opening the gate. He needn't have worried. Solomon never did it again. Our little black-faced dreamer, though he woke the whole household at five every morning shouting to hurry up and let him out, he knew he could make it This Time, couldn't climb for toffee.