THE NEW BOY
Elek Books edition published 1970
Bantam edition published 1994
This edition published 2006 by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
Copyright © Doreen Tovey 1970
All rights reserved.
The right of Doreen Tovey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.
Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK
www.summersdale.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain.
ISBN: 1-84024-517-4
ISBN: 978-1-84024-517-2
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Also by Doreen Tovey: Cats in the Belfry
Cats in May
Donkey Work
Life with Grandma
Raining Cats and Donkeys
Double Trouble
Making the Horse Laugh
The Coming of Saska
A Comfort of Cats
Roses Round the Door
Waiting in the Wings
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ONE
There was nothing, that last summer, to warn us of the sadness that lay so short a while ahead.
True, Sheba had been ill the previous autumn. ‘Kid ney trouble’ the Vet had diagnosed after examining her. And when he told us gently that she was now an elderly cat, that her kidneys were very much enlarged but that with treatment and careful diet we might, if we were lucky, have her with us for another year – we were numbed at the prospect of the future without her.
For thirteen years life in our West Country cottage had been dominated by a pair of Siamese cats: Sheba, the clever one; tiny, blue-pointed and as fragile as a flower: Solomon, her noisy brother; seal-pointed, huge, our bumble-footed clown.
Every inch of the place held a memory of them doing something. Sheba playing tag with us on the coalhouse roof 7
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The New Boy
on a summer’s night, for instance. Hanging over the edge bawling she was Here, we weren’t to go in without her or the Foxes might Get Her – and then, as we reached up to lift her down, retreating light-heartedly to another corner saying Ha! ha! That one fooled us, didn’t it? She wasn’t afraid of Foxes…
Or Solomon, dark-backed and seemingly as unmoving as a doorstop, peering stolidly through the gate when he knew we were keeping an eye on him. Always the adventurer was Solomon. Never within our boundaries if he could help it and, on the oc casions when we had to go out and were watching him like security guards to make sure he didn’t get away (wipe a plate – out to check on him; put away a jug – out to check on him again), there he’d be sitting by the gate. Very ostentatiously With Us. Not a thought in his head about moving. Why on Earth, enquired the set of his back view, were we watching him Like That? And waiting, as well we knew, to vanish like Siamese lightning the moment we took our eyes off him.
One day, of course, we would have to lose them. The one disservice animals render us is that they don’t live as long as we do. But cats live longer than dogs. We’d heard of Siamese of twenty and more. And not only had our two, until Sheba’s illness, gone through life with the enthusiasm of eternal kittens, but it seemed such a little while since they had been young.
I could reach out, it seemed, and almost touch them like it.
Going down the lane at three months old with their mother and their brothers in the wheelbarrow ... all the others in the wheelbarrow that is, and Solomon tagging tearfully along behind. Lying on our bed at six months old, when 8
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Sheba had recently been spayed and, when we switched on the light wondering at the peculiar snicking noises, there was Solomon, mortified at being discovered, helping her by trying to bite her stitches out. The first time we took them to the Siamese cattery at Halstock after their mother had died and, as we left, they’d sat side by side in their big paved run, wistfully watching us go. They had the tips of their tails crossed, like children holding hands to give each other cour age. They’d done that, said Mrs Francis, every time they sat out in their run.
Thirteen years had slipped by since then like May mist blown by the wind. The cats were seven when we acquired an eleven months’ old donkey and now Annabel was seven herself. As wayward as ever and there was no need to worry about her age, thank goodness. Donkeys live to twenty at least, and we had been told they could live to forty.
I worried about the cats, though. Being the world’s worst pessimist I always had done. I worried when they were ill.
I worried when they were out of sight. When Solomon was out of sight, at any rate, for Sheba very rarely strayed. I ran like a deer at the sound of a cat-fight, in case the loudest, most urgent of the howls should be (as they usually were) Solomon, having started the fracas, bawling for me to come to the rescue. Sometimes I ran when it wasn’t a cat-fight
– bursting through the door, shouting ‘SOLOMON!’ as I went, only to find that it was the boy who lived on the hill practising bird-calls, or visitors to the Valley calling their dogs.
Embarrassing though it was, it didn’t really bother me. I would have gone to the ends of the earth to rescue Solomon.
To rescue any of them, if it came to that – but particularly 9
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Solomon, who was not only more likely to be at the ends of the earth than any of the others, but because for me he was something very special.
I had never, for a moment, taken him for granted. In thirteen years I had never once seen him come round a corner or into a room with that dawdling, elegant walk of his, without marvelling at the perfection of his beauty. He had the proud, high-boned features of the East from which he came. His face shone like dusky silk. And if his slanted, sapphire eyes had faded a little with the years, they were the most loving, communicative eyes I have ever encountered in a cat.
Beyond all that, he was my friend. If Charles went down first in the morning it was Solomon who came flying up the stairs, stropping an exuberant strop on the stair-carpet by way of exercise and then, if I didn’t acknowledge his presence, bumping his head against the door edge until I did and raising his tail in affectionate greeting. Sheba, who was Charles’s friend, would be out with him inspecting the garden, but Solomon would wait while I dressed, walk down with me, and only then go out.
If I were missing of an evening – washing my hair, perhaps, and then drying it in the bedroom – it would be only a little while before there was a creak as he pawed back the heavy living-room door, or, if it were latched, the sound of his demanding that Charles should open it, and up he’d come again. His face bright with joy because he’d found me – and wasn’t it Nice, his expression demanded, to be, he and I, together?
It was indeed, but sometimes I thought with a pang of the future. Nineteen or twenty, we told ourselves, but already 10
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he and Sheba were thirteen. What grief was I storing up for myself when we lost him and what would I do when it happened?