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We took Seeley to bed with us instead, leaving the new arrival downstairs with a rug and hotwater bottle on the settee. She followed us to the door when we went out and it wrung our hearts to close it on her, yet what could we do in the circumstances? Certainly we couldn’t leave Seeley down there thinking we didn’t want him.
Did I think she’d find her way back to her bed? asked Charles, lying awake in the darkness and worrying about her. Of course she would; she’d be crying if she couldn’t, I said. My own worries revolved around that non-inoculation.
But she hadn’t gone back to the settee. Just inside the living room door, on the bottom shelf of the Welsh dresser, was a polystyrene tile which Charles, who is fond of painting, had been experimentally using as a lightweight palette. And on that, curled up in the middle of the paint pans like a little mink ball on a plate, we found her asleep in the morning.
She couldn’t have done more to win Charles’s heart if she’d gone out into a snowstorm wearing a shawl. Gosh, she was a brave little thing, he said. Tucking herself up like that, as near to us as she could get. And she hadn’t cried once... that showed what spunk she had. Did I realise how intelligent she was, too, to have discovered that polystyrene was warm instead of sleeping on the wood of the dresser?
I lifted my eyes heavenwards and went out to get breakfast and Seeley, raising his tail at an angle that obviously expressed the same sentiment, departed for his walk. We were welcome to her, he said.
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routine. Giving her a snarl like a Bengal tiger as he passed through the living room first thing in the morning, just to show her who was who about the place, he then forgot about her for the rest of the day.
He had his walk, breakfasted in the conservatory, took his siesta beneath the vine leaves as he’d always done with Sheba. When I let him out later, too, there was no suspicious rushing indoors to see if she’d gone.
He’d go up into the orchard to talk with Charles or entice me up to play with him on the hillside, diving exuberantly into the clumps of dried grass and charging up successions of trees as though kittens just didn’t exist. Only when evening fell and he came back into the cottage did the cloud of her presence descend upon him. And then – ‘TCHAAAH!’ he would spit, like a lorry-driver releasing his air-brakes, and go and sit disgustedly on the table.
He sat there for four nights following like a sailor on a raft in a sea of sharks. Right in the middle, in case he fell off, and barricaded, for extra safety, behind a transistor radio and a wooden candelabra. To give him confidence I used to arrange his defence works for him and there he crouched, like a settler besieged by Indians, occasionally peering over the stockade to see what the enemy was doing.
It might have helped had the enemy been interested in him – as, when he was small, he’d been so persistent in his pursuit of Sheba. This one, however, was made of different stuff. Pausing only to arch her back like an inch-worm when she caught him peering at her...
she didn’t bother to spit at him now; it obviously frightened him a whole lot more when she did such 41
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things in silence... she played and scampered and ate at ground level as if he didn’t exist.
It was the eating that finally began the breakthrough.
We’d thought Seeley had a big enough appetite, but Shebalu, as we’d decided to call her... Sheba for old times’ sake and Lu in honour of Louisa who’d found her for us... Shebalu, despite her breeding, ate like Oliver Twist. ‘Nmmm-nmmm-nmmm-nmmm’ she hummed as she gobbled through her food and Seeley, creeping cautiously to the edge of the table on the second night (on account of as yet the enemy hadn’t attacked) could hardly believe his eyes.
She couldn’t hold that much, he wailed incredulously…
retreating hastily behind the transistor as she paused in her eating to look up at him. Not only did she hold it, however. When she’d finished she went out to the kitchen and brought in the dishmop by way of a savoury course.
She’d discovered it during the day. I’d already taken it back about a dozen times and the sight of her determinedly dragging it in again was by this time part of the scenery. Not for Seeley, however, who’d been absent in the conservatory, and when she appeared stumbling along with the mop-handle between her legs like a miniature hobby-horse he so far forgot himself as to get down off the table for a closer look.
Neck extended, eyes like organ stops, he watched from behind a chair as she sat down and began to chew it.
Then I took it away from her and he departed once more for his raft.
It was a start, however. He ventured more and more often to the edge of the table. The third night he 42
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actually got down twice and looked at her from behind the coal-scuttle. Even so it was a far slower process than his get-together with Sheba had been and on the fourth night, exasperated by his eternal peering round chairs as if gremlins were after his toes, I decided to put an end to it.
I built him a newspaper hide – something which Seeley, with his love of thinking himself invisible, has never been able to resist. He couldn’t resist it now. He got inside, crouched, and watched, as he thought, unseen.
In a moment up pranced Shebalu and poked in an inquisitive blue paw. And, after a pause long enough to think out a dozen chess-moves, out came a cautious, very large black one. The moment she touched it he leapt as if he’d been stung, of course, but that was just reaction.
Within no time they were taking it in turn to hide in the paper while the other one, highly excited, dodged and threatened outside.
It wouldn’t have worked had we tried it the first night.
Probably the success of it, even now, lay in the fact that they were playing in anonymity, without actually seeing each other. And after a while they forgot about staying under cover, and eventually Seeley gave Shebalu a lick...
a very shamefaced one; obviously it was much beneath his dignity; but he shut his eyes and pretended it wasn’t him... and there we were. Mission accomplished.
We still had to be careful, of course. Not to make a fuss of her when he was around, in case it made him jealous.
Not to let them eat together, otherwise she cleared her plate at the double and then started in on his. The odd thing was that he let her. Until Sheba’s death he had 43
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been the extrovert... young, exuberant, avid, grabbing all the food in sight without a thought for Sheba. And now, within a week, here he was sitting paternally by while a kitten tucked into his rabbit.
She was Little, he said, shutting his eyes at me when I told him how silly he was. We had to look After her, he added, moving back a couple of paces so she could get at his plate more easily. And so, to preserve the balance, we fed them separately. She in the hall, he in the living room, and even then she only had to yell through the door when she’d finished and he’d leave something on his plate, quite obviously for her.
No doubt about it, he was a changed cat. The day after their get-together Charles came in to report that he’d actually seen Seeley spraying. Up in the Forestry lane against a bramble, he said, with a determined look on his face. Within no time, too, we saw him chasing the cat from down the lane... not wandering affably after it as he’d always done before but seeing it out of the garden, quite obviously repelling invaders.