Charles, it will be remembered by my readers, had gone in for growing cobnuts, mostly eaten by Lancelot, our resident field mouse, but this winter Lancelot hadn't put in an appearance. Either age had caught up with him and he was now playing a mouse-sized harp or he'd found better quarters for the cold weather. Anyway, there was the nut harvest, for once unclaimed, across in the wood. I went over and gathered a big basketful, beating the squirrels by a whisker: they moved in next day with much squirrel-barking to herald their arrival and buried the rest of the crop in the lawn.
I spent about twenty minutes that evening, reading and eating cobnuts, before Saphra decided he ought to try them too. Wanted Some, he wailed, standing against my knee and touching my hand with his paw. 'You wouldn't eat these,' I said, holding a shelled one out to him and expecting him to reject it. He took it, ate it with gusto and immediately demanded more. He, said Tani, sitting by me with her tail wrapped primly round her feet, was Bonkers. Cats weren't monkeys. They didn't eat nuts.
He did. Not only that, when I got tired of cracking them for him and instead threw one in its shell for him to chase, he ran after it, carried it back to the hearthrug, cracked it with his teeth, his head held sideways – then dropped the whole thing on the rug, sorted out the kernel from the shell and ate it.
It became quite a party piece with him that winter – all the more so because his audience laughed to see him do it. When Dora and Nita came to lunch one day and afterwards I laid out a line of cobnuts on the rug to show them, thinking Saph would take what he wanted and it would save me giving them to him one by one, he obliged by cracking them along the row one after the other, eating the kernels as he went. 'How did you teach him to do that?' asked Nora, astounded. It was all his own idea, I said.
He and Tani had lots of ideas between them. Sometimes their perspicacity shook me rigid. Was it, I wondered, because I was alone with them so much, and noticed their behaviour more? Or was it – a theory that occurred to me more than once – that cats were becoming more intelligent with each generation, and therefore gradually becoming more dominant?
I was provided with further evidence in support of my hypothesis just before Christmas. I wanted to see an American Civil War serial on ITV called 'North and South'. The first episode ran from 8 to 10 p.m. I was allowed to watch that one in peace. It was when subsequent episodes were shown at 10.30 p.m., after the news, that I became aware of disapproval.
The cats and I normally went to bed around eleven o'clock. When we didn't – when I sat there sometimes till after midnight, taking no notice of their efforts to remind me of the time – boy, did I get the treatment! Saph pacing round the room like a Victorian father, looking at the hall door. Tani informing me from the back of a chair in a cracked soprano that if I wasn't Careful I'd go to the Dogs. The pair of them sitting side by side in front of me trying to hypnotise me into switching off and heading for the duvet-under which, it seemed, Everybody ought to Be by eleven o'clock.
I found myself feeling guilty. Actually apologising. Sitting on the edge of my chair telling them it was nearly over. Several times I gave in and switched off before the end. Who, I asked them sternly, was boss around here? Two supercilious squints supplied the answer. I had made my bed, now I must lie on it. With them under the duvet, of course.
Christmas came. Saph was entranced. He hadn't seen Christmas decorations before. He poked the prickles on the holly, gazed riveted at the glass balls and glittering tinsel (hanging from spruce branches threaded through the big wrought iron ceiling candelabra: I dared not have a Christmas tree with him around). He stared entranced at the swags of cards strung on ribbons round the walls – to stop him scattering them as he'd been doing when I first set them out in the windowsills and on the dresser and bureau. I put things in funny places, didn't I? he said.
I did indeed, but I couldn't hang the parcels on the walls to protect them from him. Those I had to pile on the table, and remember I only have the one large living-room. Remember, too, how interested he was in the boxes in the bedroom cupboards. The parcels, to him, were boxes, and he dealt with them in the same way. Pushed them off the table with his paw, looked over to see if they'd come open when they fell, got down and tackled them with teeth and claws if they hadn't... Tani sitting on the table saying Nothing was Anything to do with her, but intensely interested just the same. One of the parcels contained, not a present, but a new telephone I'd ordered through the post. It arrived marked FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE. I heard the bump of that one going down from the other side of the closed kitchen door, and rushed in to pick it up. To tell the truth, I'd been in a hurry when I dumped it on the table or I'd never have left it there. It was all right. It was heavily padded and intact, but it took me a time to open it. Saphra was disgusted. He was even more disgusted when he found it was a telephone. Ought to have been something to eat, he said.
Some of the parcels were, which was one reason why he was so interested in them. Addressed personally to him and Tani from people who'd come here during the year, they contained cat biscuits and packets of Cat Treats and Cat Love. Presents of catnip mice, too: he could have opened a shop with those. And one of them contained a catnip adder, coiled in a Camembert box – a present from a woman in Exeter who had heard the story of the adder on the radio and had managed to find a lifelike length of diamond-patterned cotton for the adder's skin.
I keep it now in the bureau. It is too unusual – and startling – to leave lying around. But when Saph first had it he was entranced. He would swagger round the garden with it – me in attendance of course – pretending he was carrying his Trophy. And there, one morning, Miss Wellington came down the lane and saw him. From outside the gate, at a distance, she let out a scream that rocked the valley. 'An adder!' she screeched. 'Quick! He's got an adder!' And, forgetting in her concern that adders aren't around in December, she came rushing to the rescue, slid on one of the loose stones she was always worrying about, and fell flat on her face. I picked her up, helped her into the cottage, and administered brandy – watched by Saphra who'd followed us in and was sitting by her sniffing the air hopefully; a little brandy wouldn't go amiss with him after that scream, said his expression. Fortunately Miss Wellington was quite unscathed. She'd been wearing a woollen headscarf and a heavy coat. 'You and those cats put years on me, though,' she protested, giving Saph the lick off her finger he expected.
They put years on me, too. Take what happened on Christmas Day – this time entirely due to Tani. I'd been invited to lunch with Dora and Nita and their friends, as I had been every Christmas since Charles's death. I was also going to call en route on Jonathan and Delia, the neighbours who'd been such a help to me when he died and who now lived some three miles away. If I left at eleven, I decided, I'd have time for a chat with them before pressing on to Dora and Nita and the turkey. So I took the cats out for a good long session in the garden to make up for leaving them, telling them we'd have a cosy evening together.
Saphra, as usual, was the one I shadowed, keeping him in sight at every step. I'd put them in their garden house at ten, I thought – the heater was already on. That would give them another hour outside while I changed, and filled their hot water bottles and litter trays. Tani was nowhere in sight, but I didn't worry about her. It only needed a call when I wanted her.