That was what we thought. As we rounded the corner we met him marching across the lawn. ‘It couldn’t have been him in the tank,’ I said. And then I saw the mud on him and his woebegone expression.
He must have been stalking birds on the garage roof.
We’d spotted him up there several times incognito behind a branch of the plum tree. He’d presumably jumped at one; landed on the wire-netting which covered the tank for safety; his weight must have taken him, wire and all, down into the tank... initially he must have plunged into the foot of stagnant water at the bottom and then, scrambling onto the crumpled wire, he’d used it as a springboard to jump himself out. Even then he was lucky to have made it, with the wire sagging beneath him as he sprang. What would have happened if the tank had been half full of water and the wire hadn’t been there for him to climb on, it turned us cold to think.
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We pulled ourselves together, however. One has to, with Siamese cats. Charles got some planks for a temporary cover for the tank. I took our adventurer indoors and cleaned off the mud as best I could. And five minutes later, when I was telling a telephone caller what had happened... ‘How on earth you two stay sane... ,’ she said.
‘Oh, we take it all in our stride,’ I demurred, with what I hoped was light-hearted nonchalance... Seeley decided it was time for the finale to the act. Coming out into the hall, so I shouldn’t by any chance miss the performance, he crept pathetically to the foot of the stairs, sat down and began to heave. As I couldn’t possibly put the phone down, either... or at least not fast enough to get to him in time – there I sat, trying hard to continue sounding nonchalant, while before my very eyes he sicked up mud all over an Indian rug. The only white one we had and why that horrible cat had to choose it...
So we’d realise what he’d Been Through, said Seeley, sitting fragilely by the side of the evidence. Gone right down into the Mud, he had. People who had Siamese cats ought to be careful how they Looked After them.
Letting him eat that spider and now we’d let him fall in the tank...
We had another performance the day after Sheba died.
She’d been such a negative companion to him in the last few months, I don’t think as yet he’d really missed her. We’d taken him to bed with us that night, in any case, so he hadn’t had to sleep alone. It was undoubtedly complete coincidence that he went off next morning and wasn’t seen again for hours.
That wasn’t the impression he gave Mrs Pursey, however. She and Farmer Pursey lived in a bungalow 31
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on the hill now, while their son and his wife I and small daughter lived along at the farm. And when she looked out of one of her windows and saw Seeley sitting in a flower-bed looking wistfully back at her, her heart went out to him in an instant.
She rang us up. She knew he shouldn’t be so far away, she said, and that we’d be worrying about where he was.
And when I thanked her and said I’d come straight up, I couldn’t think why he’d gone up there... Perhaps he was missing Sheba, she said, and had come up to see her cat for company.
I doubted it. Possibly he’d followed Whisky up through the woods in the first place, but, having spotted somebody doing something inside a window, that was the great attraction. Seeley was just busy nosey-parkering.
I saw what she meant when I went up to fetch him, however. There he sat huddled under a dahlia. Scared to come out now he knew that he’d been spotted and with such a forlorn expression on his face one might well have taken him for a cat in mourning.
Couldn’t think how he’d got up there, he assured me plaintively, riding on my shoulder down the hill.
He’d just looked round and there he was... That lady was making a bed Downstairs, he commented, his voice becoming noticeably more confident the nearer we got to the cottage. Had I ever seen anybody do that? I loved him, didn’t I? He rubbed his head against my face. He bet I was worried when I thought I’d let him get lost...
I certainly was. There I’d been panting round the district like a grampus... all the paths lead upwards out of the Valley and I’d kept coming hopefully back down to the cottage and having to climb up the hillside again...
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And all the while, at the back of my mind, was the thought that we couldn’t have lost him as well... not with Sheba only just gone from us... surely Fate wouldn’t be so unkind as that...
She hadn’t been. All the same, carrying him in and dumping him on the kitchen table, where he immediately started to complain to Charles about people not looking after him and he hadn’t had his breakfast... ‘We’d better get a kitten as soon as possible,’ I said. ‘She might help to keep him at home... and we ought to have two, just in case...’
So we set out on the search for Sheba’s successor. We had no thought this time of getting a kitten that looked like her, as we’d done with Solomon. With him it had been possible. He’d been a seal-point and a typically handsome one at that. It had taken a month to find his double but at last we’d succeeded – with Seeley, who was so like Solomon he even had his spotted whiskers.
But there weren’t so many blue-points about and in any case Sheba hadn’t been typical. She was pretty, but in a homely, round-faced sort of way. She’d never have been a prize-winner. We were never likely to find a kitten who looked like her and we knew it was a waste of time to try.
Prepared, nevertheless, to have to wait for weeks to get our new girl, what with blue-points being scarce and they were sure to be even more so when we wanted one, to our surprise we found her within a week.
My Aunt Louisa, watching the papers for us, rang us in great excitement with the advertisement. True she was so excited she’d mislaid her glasses, couldn’t read the breeder’s telephone number and hopefully gave us several 33
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combinations which she said might be the right one, but luck was with us. The first one we tried hit the jackpot.
Luck was with us again, too. We’d already answered one advertisement to find that the only female had gone.
The rest of the little darlings, said their owner (there’d been a pause in the conversation at this point as, judging by the sound of it, she removed a little darling who’d been sitting on her head bawling his credentials down the receiver at me himself)... the rest of the little darlings
– all five of them – were boys. Was I sure I wouldn’t like a boy? she enquired hopefully. We already had one, I said sympathetically. We were looking for a girlfriend for him, to try to keep him at home.
The breeder I’d rung now had three blue-point girls, however. Three girls and a boy, she said. We were the first to ring and we could have our choice.
Their father and grandfather were both Champions of Champions... Not to worry about that, I said. We were on our way.
Within an hour we were in town. It was just the background we’d hoped for. The loving home that produces a good-tempered Siamese (invariably egotistical, of course, but one can’t have everything); the queen was the family pet, so that the kittens had been brought up in the house... they’d even let her have the kittens because they thought they’d be good for her psychologically, not with the idea of breeding for profit. Once in kitten she’d been given the best of food... properly balanced, too, since the breeder was a nurse... and there was the result, suddenly displayed before us, as Mrs Hinks opened the door and the kittens poured into the room.