A torch shone upwards on to a peaked cap and checked hatband and a voice replied quietly 'Police.'
They were after somebody! They wanted my assistance! Just as I'd been reading in The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern. How could I help them? I enquired, in unruffled control of the situation. They'd known the right one to come to. I hadn't been on the Parish Council for fourteen years for nothing.
'Are you all right?' asked the policeman, still very quietly.
Puzzled, I said 'Yes.'
'Only all your lights are on and all your curtains are pulled back,' he went on. 'Your neighbours noticed it when they drove down the hill a while ago and they were worried and rang us. Are you sure everything's all right inside?'
I leaned out and looked down. The policeman was right. Light was streaming out across the lawn from all three sitting-room windows. Behind me it was shining out through the bedroom window too – naturally, as I'd fallen asleep with the bedside lamp on. To the right, the hall light illuminated the yard and fishpool. Seen from the road down the hill, it must have looked as if a space ship had landed. I had a good idea how it had happened, too, but I kept my counsel for the moment, just in case. 'If you wait a moment, I'll come down and look around,' I told them.
I opened the bedroom door, grabbed my dressing gown, shut the door once more on the cats and crept downstairs. The policeman and his companions, who'd been out in the lane reporting back to base from the squad car presumably in case they needed reinforcements – were now positioned outside the middle sitting-room window. I opened it, the picture of calmness and confidence, and said 'All's well so far. I'll just look round the back of the cottage.'
'You're sure you wouldn't like us to do it?' asked the first policeman.
'No, I'll be all right,' I said. Leaving them no doubt thinking what a courageous female I was, I inspected the kitchen and lobby beyond it, peered up the newly cemented path with a torch... I was certain there'd be nothing there and there wasn't... and back I went to the policeman. 'Everything's all right,' I assured them. 'I fell asleep reading. I've had a heavy day and must have overlooked the other lights. And' – my voice dropped at this: I didn't know how they were going to take it – 'I've got Siamese cats who like to look out of the windows at night and I always pull the curtains back so they can.'
Their faces were a study. I could see it even in the semi-darkness. I bet they'd never heard anything like that before. 'Glad everything's all right, then. Goodnight,' they chorused weakly and retreated to the squad car, no doubt to phone the station again and wonder whether the sergeant would believe it.
The lights were on at the Reasons' cottage down the lane, too. I phoned them, though it was still not four in the morning. They were probably up and wondering, I thought. And sure enough they were. They'd been to a birthday party, said Janet. Peter had come up with the dog when they got in, and had thrown gravel at my bedroom window, but I hadn't answered so they'd phoned the police in case... I thanked them for doing it, went back to bed, and told the cats it was all their fault and Bill's. Theirs for insisting on looking out of the windows at night and Bill's for making me help unload the cement mixer. My back would never be the same again, I informed the world in general and the bedroom ceiling in particular, and what the police, and now the neighbours, would think...
I stayed awake the rest of the night worrying about it and next day, believe it or not, I did it again. Went to a local seaside town to do some shopping, took a picnic lunch to eat in the car on the front, sat listening to the news on the radio afterwards – and the next thing I knew, there was a policeman tapping at the car window asking if I was all right. He and his mate had noticed me with my head on the steering wheel as they drove past, he said, and they wondered if I felt ill.
Only tired, I told them. I hadn't had much sleep the previous night. I didn't tell them about the cats, but I had no doubt that there were two police stations in Somerset that day where I went down in the records as an Incident. With either O for Odd or P for Peculiar against my name. Not, as it should have been if there were any justice in this world, SC for Siamese Cats. A week or so later, too, I looked out of the cottage window and saw yet another police car pulled up outside. I wondered what I'd done this time – went out to see, and it was a young policeman who said he was new on the beat and wanted to get acquainted with the valley. I've often wondered since if he was really checking whether I was still showing signs of strange behaviour.
My neighbours would probably have assured him that I was peculiar. Always had been. Even Poppy Richards, I was sure, thought I was slightly odd. I was going up the hill in the car one morning when I met her driving down the other way. There wasn't room for us to pass each other, so she drew to one side in a gateway and flashed her headlights for me to go on – which I did, only to spot a blackbird in the road ahead of me, pottering about picking up bits.
It made no move to fly away. Other than Miss Wellington's doves, birds don't around here. They know that no-one in the valley would hurt them. There are pheasants in the forest who congregate on the woodshed roof like sparrows, and flutter down around my head like homing pigeons when I go out to give them corn. I couldn't wait, though, as I normally would have done, for the blackbird to move at its leisure. Poppy Richards was waiting to come down. So I hooted – something Charles had always told me to do, faced with a non-moving bird. They didn't like sudden noise, he said, and would straightaway take off like rockets. The blackbird did, twittering angrily at my colossal cheek. Blasted Woman Driver, it was probably saying. Poppy Richards wouldn't have noticed the blackbird, though, not as far away as she was. Only that I hooted loudly, zoomed up the hill and passed her, hand half-raised in acknowledgment but looking straight ahead. I couldn't look at her – I was going round the corner, where there is rock sticking out of the bank, but that presumably didn't occur to her. That evening she appeared on my doorstep, extremely frosty-faced, asking what she'd done wrong. 'Nothing,' I said, explaining that I'd been hooting at a bird, but I felt sure she didn't believe me.
A curt nod and a 'Goodnight then', and she was gone, slamming the gate as she went. It was a pity, because there was something I wanted to ask her. Something which had me extremely curious.
For quite a while I'd noticed a man going past at weekends, wearing a beard and a wide-brimmed hat like a Bohemian artist and his head bent over a book. A most unusual sight because most people came to the valley to enjoy its beauty and he wasn't looking at it at all. Also, the going is rough past the cottage, with pot-holes and ankle-turning stones. If he really was reading poetry or the classics, as he obviously thought anyone who saw him would think, he'd have fallen flat on his face long before. More likely he was doing it for effect, surreptitiously looking down past the book at the ground – but to what end could he be doing something so ridiculous? And going up the side lane to Poppy's cottage – was he calling on her? She'd been a teacher. Was she running some sort of literary circle in the village of which he was an enthusiastic member?
I longed to know, and now she was annoyed with me and I couldn't ask her. Well, things would sort themselves out, I decided. I shut the door and went back to the sitting-room and the log fire and the cats, which combination gave cause for further development.