Twenty years back Mrs Binney would have disowned Bert and written off Shirl as a brazen hussy, if not a daughter of Jezebel, but as they were only emulating what went on on the telly, and even, if rumour was to be believed, in some of the yuppy-owned big houses around the district, what, Mrs B. demanded of her neighbours, not without a touch of pride in her Bert's being among the avant-garde, could she do about it?
It was none of my business. Indeed, what with the dress, the violet hairdo and the piano-playing I began to wonder about her own intentions towards Mr Tooting. Did she see herself as Thoroughly Modern Maude, sharing his bungalow as Shirl shared the caravan with Bert? And if so, with her being a member of the Mothers' Union and Mr Tooting a churchwarden, what would the Rector say?
For the moment, at any rate, it made my life considerably easier. She gave up coming down the hill quite so often to bemoan the condition of the cottage garden or tell me that I'd never raise Tani – and Tani, almost magically, started to thrive.
She still had nervous diarrhoea at the drop of a hat but Pauline's vet, whose practice was twenty-five miles away from me but worth the journey because he had Siamese cats himself and understood them, prescribed charcoal and kaolin granules to mix with her food. That controlled the diarrhoea and she started to put on weight.
She started to stand up to Saska, too. When he was indoors, where he didn't have to keep up his public image of an Eminently Superior Prince from Siam, he had a habit of trying to frighten her, when he thought I wasn't watching, by lowering his head, flattening his ears and stalking round her in a menacing circle while she crouched at bay on the carpet. Then one day I saw her, instead of crouching, lying on her side with one long back leg extended stiffly against him, fending him off like somebody using a boat-hook, and one front paw outstretched ready to hit him. As he moved round her she revolved correspondingly, as if on a pivot, so that she was always facing him, and when he couldn't find a point from which to pounce on her he gave up and pretended he was just passing by en route for food.
That was another thing. Fortified by the charcoal and kaolin she began to bolt her own meals and then start eating his, and I had to feed them separately so that he got his share undisturbed. So it was that one morning I came down, gave Saska his breakfast in the sitting-room and Tani hers in the kitchen, nipped out into the yard to change their litter trays, pulling the back door, which had a Yale lock, behind me to stop her following me – all part of a Siamese cat-owner's routine – and realised, even as I slammed it, that I'd locked myself out.
Normally I kept a spare key in the woodshed, but the previous day I'd gone out in the car, tossed my handbag on to the back seat after shopping and found, when I got home, that its contents had fallen out on the car floor. I'd gathered them up, put the car away and come down to the cottage to discover that the back door key wasn't in its usual place in my handbag. I thought it must be still on the floor of the car, decided to leave it until next day, and used the spare key from the woodshed instead.
That was the one now marooned indoors on the kitchen dresser – along with the car keys, so that I couldn't go up and look for the original door key on the car floor either.
Panicking about what the cats might do if left where they were – they normally expected to go out into the garden directly after breakfast – I fetched a ladder and a screwdriver, climbed on to the sloping hall roof, thankful that for once nobody was about to ask what I was doing, and crawled up it to the spare room window. Joy oh joy! As I thought! I'd left the casement slightly ajar for air when I'd cleaned it a few days previously. I raised the catch with the screwdriver, climbed in and belted downstairs – passing a puzzled Saska who had just finished his breakfast and couldn't make out why I'd come in through that door when I'd gone out through the other one, and a claustrophobic Tani who'd been marooned in the kitchen without anybody for company and didn't like it – shot out into the yard to fetch the litter trays which I knew they must by now be in urgent need of – and realised immediately that I'd done it again. Slammed the door behind me without thinking and locked myself out.
There was no point in trying the spare room window this time. I'd fastened the latch properly when I got in. I moved the ladder and tried the boxroom window over the kitchen. No go. Charles had long ago secured that one against intruders and I had kept it like that, with wire wound round the latch and bar. I climbed down and called to Tani through the back door keyhole to be a good girl. I wouldn't be long getting back to her, I said. I'd Better Not Be, she screeched back with the promise of imminent stomach upset in her voice. Where was Saska? Where was her BOX? she demanded in a rising soprano.
I rushed round to the sitting-room window and instructed Saska likewise. Where was Tani? Was I taking her out Without Him? he bawled, standing on the window sill with his tail raised threateningly against the curtain.
'Oh no!' I wailed aloud. 'Don't let him do that!' Saska had an unfortunate habit of spraying when he was upset about anything. I hadn't any idea whom I was asking. I didn't suppose the Almighty would be greatly concerned at my being locked out of the cottage through my own stupidity or the prospect of Saska spraying up the curtains. I often asked Charles for help when I couldn't find things or was in a predicament and it was surprising – sometimes to the point of being uncanny – how often the situation resolved itself. But I couldn't expect Charles to help me over this. And judging by Saska's tail the matter was urgent.
I ran down the lane to the Reasons'. Father Adams wasn't on the phone. Janet Reason had already gone off to her job at the nearby airport. Peter was just getting ready to leave himself. Could I use their phone to ring the police? I asked, explaining what had happened. When I rang the local police station, however, an answering machine informed me that it wasn't manned, and I should dial 999 if there was an emergency.
It was an emergency as far as I was concerned, I told the voice that answered when I did, explaining that if someone could come and open the car for me I could get the key of the cottage. I was given the number of Taunton police station, where they said they only had a few car keys. I'd better try the AA; they'd give me the number. There a female voice said I'd got their Travel Bureau, which didn't open until nine o'clock. What did I want? I told her, including the urgency about the cats' litter boxes. She was most sympathetic. Wouldn't they hold on? she asked, passing me swiftly to Emergency, who said someone would be me within an hour.
An hour! I tottered back up the lane, imagining the mayhem Tani might commit in the kitchen, and Saska against the sitting-room curtains, in that time. When Peter drove past a few minutes later, leaning out of his car window to ask was I all right, because I'd told him I was going back to wait for the AA, I was once more up on the hall roof, tapping away hammer and screwdriver.
'Fine,' I answered, more brightly than I felt. 'Had a sudden idea. Almost in. Any minute now.' It was something I'd seen Charles do on odd occasions when we'd been locked out – and sure enough, even as I spoke somehow I'd tapped the window frame enough for me to jolt the catch loose, insert the screwdriver, lift it up… and I was in again, downstairs, giving the cats clean litter boxes. In the Nick of Time, Tani announced, jumping into hers with evident relief, while I put the key in the outside lock so it couldn't happen again.
Now I just had to ring the AA and say there was no need for them to come. In my agitation I couldn't find their number in the phone directory. I decided to open the car now that the car keys were available, get the number from the AA book, which was in the door pocket, and retrieve the other back door key that had been the cause of all the trouble. I couldn't believe it when I couldn't find the key on the car floor. I phoned the AA, turned out my handbag once more in desperation and there, after all the panic, it was. Hidden in a corner, where it must have been all the time.