She was right, too. No sooner had we reached the bottom than there was another almighty yell from upstairs. Only this time it wasn't triumph. Solomon, marooned at a dizzy height of six feet and unable to work out how to utilise the dressing gown for the descent, was issuing the old familiar call for somebody to rescue him quick, he couldn't get down.
Shortly after that Solomon gave up his campaign against dogs. One of them chased him up a tree and Solomon, for the first and only time in his life, went right to the very top. Six feet up would have done, but Solly wasn't taking any chances. Right to the top Mum had always said, and right to the top he went. Unfortunately he chose a forty-foot fir tree on a sloping hillside, and we had to call out the fire brigade to get him down again. 'Looks like a liddle star on a Christmas tree, don' 'ee,' said the man who worked the winch, gazing tenderly up through the branches to where old Bat-Ears, clinging panic-stricken to the tip, swayed sadly to and fro against the evening sky. That wasn't what the man who had to go up the ladder said. He said if he was us he'd keep him in a cage. It taught Solomon a lesson, though. He never hunted dogs again. He took up chasing cats instead, and Sheba came down out of the damson tree and joined him.
Their chief quarry was a tortoiseshell called Annie, who lived with an old lady further down the lane. Sugieh, as a kitten, had had a sort of Topsy and Eva friendship with Annie, and although they didn't have much to do with one another after they grew up and Sugieh realised she was a Siamese, Annie often used to sit on our garden wall watching the kittens play. Not, however, after Solomon had issued his edict about no cats being allowed to look in either. Any time we saw Annie after that she was playing the lead in a sort of Willow Pattern procession that went past our front gate about a dozen times a day. Annie first, flat on her stomach and looking hauntedly over her shoulder; Solomon, on his stomach too, with his spotted whiskers bushed out like a walrus, slinking stealthily along behind like a musical comedy spy; and Sheba, carefully avoiding the puddles and looking to see if Charles was watching, bringing up the rear.
They had no mercy on anybody. Well, hardly anybody. When Mimi turned round one day in the lane, saw them slinking along behind her and gave them a cuff each alongside the ear, they decided to make an exception in her case, seeing that she was a Siamese too. But there was nothing soft about them the day they found a stray tabby queen and her kitten sheltering, after a heavy night's rain, under a row of cloches in the garden. When I, touched by the sight of the tiny, homeless kitten asleep on the bare earth, took out some bread and milk and put it under the cloche they stared at me incredulously. Didn't I know, they said, that these were Dangerous Characters? In Our Garden? Probably going to Eat All Our Food? Probably got Fleas too, added Sheba, who was getting more like her mother every day. The moment the mother cat, unnerved by their awful threats, slunk out at the far end of the cloches and over the wall, Solomon and Sheba went into action. In through the near end they marched, growled fiercely at the kitten – Sheba with her cloth cap look and crossed eyes for good measure – and ate his bread and milk. That showed him, by Jove. He took off as fast as his small white paws would carry him, screaming frantically for his Mum. We never saw him again.
Nemesis caught up with them in the end, of course. At least it caught up with Solomon. Sheba was up a tree at the time. She kept telling him the black and white tom from the farm was one of those nasty cats Mum had warned them about, but he wouldn't listen. Jack the Giant-Killer he said he was, and as fast as I brought him back to the safety of the garden, back, to sit in the lane and spit, he went.
When the tom, after staring at Solomon incredulously for nearly an hour, said he didn't believe it and strolled off into the woods Solomon was beside himself with triumph. Long after he had followed his quarry up into the undergrowth we could hear him telling the world how valiant he was, and how All the Cats, Even the Ones as big as Elephants, were afraid of him.
A few minutes later there was a hideous scream and the pair of them bounded out of the woods like shots from a gun. To our amazement – for from the noise we thought he'd murdered Soclass="underline" Sheba, indeed, was as high as she could get in the damson tree saying now she was our only comfort she'd better take special care of herself – the tom was in the lead. We caught just one glimpse of him as he hit the road before streaking off up the hill in a cloud of dust, and he looked as if he had seen a ghost. The funny thing was, Solomon was in exactly the same state. Though he didn't appear to be damaged in any way he fled indoors and hid under the bed.
Later that night, a sad little Solomon indeed, he crept out to take a saucer of milk and we discovered what had happened. It couldn't have happened to anybody but him. Trying to spit, talk and look fearsome at the same time he had bitten clean through his own tongue. It didn't inconvenience him in any way, though it healed as forked as a lizard's. It would have taken a lot more than that to stop Solomon eating or talking. But it stopped him chasing the tom. Any time the enemy appeared in sight after that – proceeding very warily because he thought Solomon had beaten him and he didn't want another meeting – we knew exactly where to find the giant-killer. In our bedroom, hiding under the eiderdown.
ELEVEN
Beshrewed
Sometimes we wondered what we had done to deserve those cats. Take, for instance, the American we met in Florence. It was all very well for her to stand in front of Lippi's portrait with her hands clasped in ecstasy, declaiming Browning's poem about him at the top of her voice. It was all very well for her to feel so deeply about Savonarola she nearly passed out at the first sight of St Mark's. She had time for such things. She wasn't so addled by a pair of slant-eyed tyrants that she'd booked her train reservations for the wrong day. She wasn't still suffering from the effects of the latest trip to the cattery with Sheba bawling to Charles to Spare Her every inch of the way and Solomon eating car rugs as hard as he could go. Her cats knew how to behave themselves.
She had three of them, all Siamese. In winter they lived graciously in a New York apartment and never dreamed of trying to tear the doors down to get out. In the summer, together with a Boxer, a 'cello, a sewing machine and her husband, who was a member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, they drove in an estate wagon up to Maine where they spent three happy months hunting in the New England woods.
They were simply wunnerful on the trip, she said. The only snag was that as it was a five-hundred-mile journey they had to stay at a motel overnight, and while dogs were allowed in motels they never knew how the proprietor might react to cats. They had overcome that, she said, by having three wicker travelling baskets made to look – we admired the touch – like Gladstone bags. When they arrived at the motel the cats were popped into the bags, cautioned to be quiet, and carried in with the luggage.