Charles had indeed. He had been painting the eaves of the cottage, perched on the sloping hall roof, on a ladder that had a cracked leg and was – despite Father Adams's warning that he knew several blokes who had killed themselves like that – suspended by faith and a piece of ancient rope from the chimney stack. Charles's own version of what happened was that he was just reaching up to put on the last brushful of paint, thinking to himself (he was given to making up tense little dramas to amuse himself while he worked) 'And at that moment, just as he reached out for the final handhold, there was a sharp crack of breaking rope and he fell like a stone into the abyss below' – when the rope did break. Not with a sharp crack. It unravelled slowly and sadistically before his very eyes as he stood helplessly on the top rung. He didn't fall into any abyss either. He landed on the hall roof with a thump that shook the cottage to its poor old foundations. When I rushed out, convinced that I was a widow at last, he was sitting despondently on the roof in a pool of pale blue paint while, standing side by side on top of the coalhouse, craning their necks like a couple of spectators at a Lord Mayor's Show, Solomon and Sheba anxiously enquired what he wanted to do that for.
Charles said I might not believe it, but as he slid down the roof after the crash he had seen – actually seen – that pair gallop down the path and scramble up on to the coalhouse as if it were a grandstand. I believed it all right. So often in trouble themselves, there was nothing they liked better than sitting smugly by, tails wrapped primly round their front paws and expressions of pained incredulity on their faces, when somebody else was in the soup. I remember once when a dog chased a neighbour's kitten up the electricity post outside our garden wall. Solomon was hardly in a position to talk, after the incident of the fire brigade, while Sheba had lately developed her mother's habit of demanding to be rescued by Charles from every tree she came across. It made no difference. While Charles and I tried to solve the problem of getting a ladder safely balanced against the rounded post, they sat side by side at the foot, their necks stuck out like giraffes to emphasise What A Long Way Up She Was, their eyes round as bottle tops, yelling encouragingly up at her that she was Very Silly To Do A Thing Like That and They Didn't Suppose We'd Ever Get Her Down Again. The fact that no sooner had Charles rescued the kitten than he had to go up again to fetch Solomon, who had meanwhile climbed the ladder himself by way of an experiment and was now stuck halfway up bellowing his own head off, was quite incidental. It still left Sheba at the bottom nattering away happily about what a long way up he was and she didn't suppose we'd ever get him down either.
It was inevitable, of course, that their rubber-necking would one day lead them into trouble. It happened at a time when we had new neighbours in the next cottage and Sol and Sheba, consumed with their usual curiosity, were going up every day to see how they were getting on. We warned the people not to encourage them. Disaster, we said, would unfailingly follow. Solomon would wreck their stair carpet or raid their pantry and Sheba would either go up their chimney or fall down their lavatory. They wouldn't listen. They hadn't met any Siamese before and they were fascinated, they said, by the way our two marched one behind the other down the garden path, greeted them with an airy bellow and proceeded to inspect the place as if they owned it. Which, so far as we could see, made it entirely the Westons' own fault when they tried to fill their water-butt during a drought by means of a hose-pipe sneaking illicitly through the delphiniums and lupins to the kitchen tap and Solomon and Sheba promptly gave them away to the entire village by sitting on the outhouse roof, gazing wide-eyed down at the bubbles, and loudly inviting passers-by to come and see what they'd found. Father Adams, who was one of the people who did – years ago his grandfather had lived in the Westons' cottage and that, according to country politics, really gave him more right to walk up the front path than the Westons themselves, who were newcomers from town – said old man Weston turned all the colours of a shammylon when he saw he'd been found out. He hadn't been there long enough to know that practically everybody else – certainly Father Adams – filled their water-butts in exactly the same way, and for days he went round hardly daring to look anybody in the face. Which, as Aunt Ethel said the day Solomon ate her guinea pot of beauty cream, just showed the folly of having anything to do with Siamese at all.
We never managed to get the better of them ourselves. Every time we thought we had them weighed off, up they came with something new. Mouse-catching, for instance. No sooner had we got used to the routine of Sheba catching them and Solomon slinging them round our heads for hours than Sheba, feeling that Solomon was getting too much limelight, decided that she'd better tell us when she caught a mouse in future, so there would be no mistaking it was hers. The first time Solomon heard her coming under the new system, moaning like a travelling air-raid siren, he said it was ghosts and hid under the bath and we had an awful job to coax him out; but it wasn't long before he, in turn, thought up an even better gimmick. He ate the mouse. Not quietly, in a corner, but noisily on the hearthrug, leaving us the head and tail as souvenirs. The next thing was that Sheba ate a mouse too, but her stomach wasn't as strong as Solomon's and she went straight out and sicked it up on the stairs. And so, as Charles said, life went on.
There was a period, just after Sugieh died and the kittens were beginning to feel their feet as individuals, when if we had visitors we just couldn't move for them, sitting solidly in people's laps, licking their iced cakes when they weren't looking, investigating their handbags and chatting to them under the bathroom door. They liked people so much that when we shut them in the hall one night because one of Charles's friends had a dark suit on and wasn't very fond of cats anyway they climbed the curtains, got out through a transom window which we didn't know was open, and appeared suddenly with their small smudgy faces pressed to the window of the sitting room, gazing wistfully in like orphans of the storm.
A great success that was. Everybody cooed over them and gave them ice cream and Charles's friend went home with a suit that looked as if it were made of angora. The next time they were shut out on account of visitors Solomon, remembering the ice cream, promptly jumped out of a window again. This time, however, as all the hall windows were shut, old Bat Brains went upstairs and jumped out of the bedroom window. One visitor fainted on the spot when she saw him coming down, but he landed in a hydrangea and was quite unharmed. The only thing was that now Solomon had discovered that he could open windows by putting his fat little bullet-head under the catches and pushing them up, in addition to spreading twelve copies of The Times on the stairs any time we shut them out, we now had to tie up all the window catches with string as well.
Though the cats drove visitors nearly mad with their attentions when they first arrived, however, if anybody stayed after eleven o'clock things were very different. Then, retiring to the most comfortable armchair (if anybody was sitting in it they just squeezed down behind him and kept turning round and round till he got out; it never failed), they curled up and ostentatiously tried to go to sleep. Tried was the operative word. Any time anybody looked across at the chair there would be at least one Siamese regarding them with half-raised head, one eye open and a pained expression that clearly indicated it was time they went home, Some People were tired. If this had no effect, in due course Solomon would sit up, yawn noisily, and subside again with a loud sigh on top of Sheba. Few visitors missed that hint. Solomon yawned like fat men belch – long, loudly and with gusto. What was most embarrassing, though, was the way – after lying for hours as if they'd been working all day in a chain gang – they suddenly perked up the moment people did start to go. It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd just politely seen them off at the door, the way Sugieh used to do. These two sat in the hall and bawled to people to hurry up – and as we shepherded people to the front gate they could be seen quite plainly through the window, hilariously chasing one another over the chairs by way of celebration.