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The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 50

25/05/2006 14:24:43

Doreen Tovey

I’d spent ranging the hills for Solomon when he, too, had vanished Siamese-fashion into thin air.

‘I think I’ll build a cage,’ Charles announced after a while of heavy thinking. Not a small one, he explained, but a run

– well, rather like a fruit cage. So we could put Seeley in it when we wanted to be sure where he was.

‘What about the bees?’ I said, having visioned up another danger. Seeley going up to a beehive and trying to look inside.

We planned the cage, discussed the bees, consid ered Annabel. Seeley mustn’t be allowed to get into her field, said Charles: just imagine her hoof coming down on him… I hadn’t got round to that one but I imagined it now, all right. Also on the agenda was put ting covers on all the water-butts. And the foremost problem of all, of course

– introducing him to Sheba.

It was morning before we slept. Sheba, not know ing what was coming to her, snuggled cosily on my shoulder.

Eventually, not very sure of what was coming to us, either, though we imagined we’d covered all the immediate eventualities, we went to sleep too.

We got up at seven, unbolted the kitchen door, went out into the yard for a breath of country air before embarking on the trials of the day – and one eventuality we hadn’t foreseen immediately presented itself. Seeley went out ahead of us and fell straight into the fishpond.

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SIX

So there we were, once more towelling down a drip-ping wet cat on the kitchen table. ‘Just like Solomon,’

said Charles reminiscently. It was, too, except that when Solomon had caused a commotion by falling in the fishpool all those years before, he’d been chasing a hare and had gone in at full gallop, while Seeley merely toddled innocently across the yard, mounted the log in front of the pool that had been one of Solomon’s stropping posts and, with his head turned firmly to the left taking his first wide-eyed look at the lawn, meanwhile continued in line ahead and simply plopped straight in.

It was amazing how sometimes – as at the moment we’d first seen him, for instance – he could look such a big kitten with such long and gangling legs, while another time

– like going across the yard – he could look so very small.

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Doreen Tovey

Toddling was the only word for it, on those fat little black-socked paws.

If we’d thought Sheba was likely to be won over by his smallness, however, we were very much mistaken. We dried him off, gave him some breakfast, had some ourselves to give ourselves strength for the ordeal. Then, feeling something of a traitor now that the moment had come, I brought Sheba down from the bedroom. All those years with Solomon, I thought, and now how were we going to upset her?

She didn’t attack him, as we were half afraid she might do. She simply gave him a haunted look, then turned and went back upstairs. She stayed up there all day, hunched pathetically on the bed. It wasn’t her home any more, she informed us, when we tried to coax her down. We’d brought in another cat to sup plant her. She was going to stay upstairs now and Die.

That brought home the passing of the years more clearly than anything. She and Solomon had been four when we’d previously tried to introduce a kitten to the cottage. As a playmate for Solomon the idea had been, because Sheba was already rather prissy and Solomon got bored at times.

Sheba had soon put paid to that little plan. Boadicea leading the Iceni had had nothing on her campaign against Samson.

She’d spat at him, sworn at him, spied on him sinisterly through windows… she’d had a fight with Solomon, too, and bitten him in the paw… Half a chance and he’d Like that Kitten, she screamed, pitching into poor old Fatso. And then she’d begun to spit at Charles and me and we’d had to take the kitten back… That was another reason we’d been apprehensive about having Seeley. With Solomon – yes, 53

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The New Boy

we’d have said it might have worked. But with Sheba, we still remembered Samson.

We hadn’t expected this dispirited attitude, though. We brought her down once more. She was our very best girl, we assured her, stroking and making a fuss of her. She looked at Seeley with the expression of a defeated deer.

She wished she was with Solomon, she said, as she crept upstairs again.

It was Seeley who broke the ice in the end and in that the Fates must have been with us. Had we chosen a kitten bred in the usual way – brought up by its mother in maternal seclusion; never having seen another adult cat; never realising there were such things as other cats – he would probably have been terrified of Sheba. In his case, however, he’d been brought up with three adult cats in permanent resi dence, a father who came and went in the style of a commuting stockbroker… Grown-up cats had no terrors for Seeley, who had learned long ago that their growls were worse than their bites and they would never hurt little kittens… well, so long as the little kitten didn’t try his luck too far, anyway…

So when we brought Sheba down again, shutting the door this time so she couldn’t creep back upstairs, and, finding herself unable to escape, she put her head down at him and did a sinister, slow-motion snarl that would have frightened the daylights out of a bull-moose, he simply hurled himself at her with squeals of delight and told her how pleased he was to see her. Gosh, she was Nice. He’d like her for his Friend. What was her Name? he was obviously asking.

From the expression on her face Sheba was equally obviously refusing to tell him. She ate little cats like him, she 54

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Doreen Tovey

informed him threateningly. That was all she did, though.

Threaten. And, since he refused to be intimidated, stage two of their introduction consisted of Sheba sitting round in attitudes of beleaguered desperation while Seeley, his face abeam with adu lation, sat determinedly beside her.

He tried so hard to copy her, it was absolutely priceless.

If Sheba sat upright, he – all eight important inches of him – sat upright too. If Sheba squatted on the corner of the table with her paws tucked resignedly under her

– there beside her, imitating her as hard as he could go, squatted Seeley with his paws tucked under him. It was no good her retreating under the table, either, and hoping that that would show him how much she hated his company. Two shakes of a kitten’s tail and he was under the table too. Nice under here, he said, sitting as close to her as he could get. Sort of cosy and secluded and being-in-a-cave-like, wasn’t it?

It was beginning to have an effect on her. We could tell that when she gave up snarling at him and started the staccato chittering she used for put ting the wind up birds. This was supposed to be extremely frightening, as she emphasised by stretch ing out her neck and flattening her ears at him, but we hadn’t had her all these years for nothing. Our Sheba was beginning to waver.

Estimates had varied as to the time it would take them to become friendly… from four days to a fortnight to Miss Wellington’s determined forecast of Never. They first met on a Monday morning. It was in fact exactly two days later, on Wednesday morning, that Seeley clambered determinedly up the stairs and into our bedroom where, having exhausted all other methods of shaking him off, 55