It was then that we finally decided to get a kitten. The other things we’d been pondering over… Sheba’s liking for being our only cat at night… whether, at her age, she’d accept a kitten… whether, when it came to the point, we could accept one ourselves so soon after Solomon’s death…
we must take a chance on these. The main thing was to get her a companion. Otherwise we might lose her, too, of grief.
The Vet, when we consulted him, said it was the best thing we could do. So did the Francises, who are experts in the ways of Siamese. Miss Wellington; said she was sure it wouldn’t work and she didn’t’ know how we could. With mixed feelings, and with Solomon’s pedigree, we set out on the search.
We took his pedigree, and a photograph of him as a kitten, because we wanted one as nearly like him as possible. So many people had said we could never replace him. ‘You’ll get another one and love him,’ they said from their own experience. ‘Just as much, but in a different way. It will never be the same, of course. It never can be. There are never two characters alike.’
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There were going to be two alike if I had anything to do with it. I didn’t want a different character. I didn’t want the things I’d loved in Solomon to become part of the past. I wanted a cat who’d be Solomon again for me. So identically that in time it would be impossible to tell the difference.
If we found a kitten who looked like him, I reasoned… if possible one with the same family tree… then surely there was a chance of their being alike in their ways? Charles said
‘Well, we could try.’
It was much more difficult than I’d thought. For one thing it was October now and there weren’t many kittens about, since most breeders aim for the November cat shows and the Christmas market. And for another, it was fourteen years since we’d bred Solomon and fashions in Siamese had changed. They were breeding them smaller now, with tiny marten faces. Solomon wasn’t at all like that. I was looking for a cat with big ears, big feet and spotted whiskers, I kept telling people. They looked at me as if I was mad.
We saw some intriguing households on our travels, anyway. There was one way out in the backwoods of Gloucestershire, for instance. Remote, up a cart-track – one could imagine an owner taking refuge up there on account of it being safe. On account of there being no neighbours to see her in her more berserk moments, too, we decided.
This was obviously someone with experience of Siamese.
How much experience we realised when we got out of the car and saw the notice – ‘Sorry, no more kittens’ on the door-handle. We knocked in case she might know of another breeder, but there was no answer. Instead, an indignant-looking Siamese appeared in the window and glared at us and we could appreciate why the owner had 37
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gone out. ‘Sold all my kittens and left me Without Any,’ the mother informed us. ‘Just wait till she gets Back.’
There were plenty of kittens at the next place we visited
– and there was also Oscar. He had a faint look of Solomon about him, but he had a bulbous nose. His points were coppery, too, instead of the dark seal ones we were looking for. There was something attractive about him, all the same.
There is something about all Siamese, of course. Oscar, nose and all, was in the room to start with, warming himself in front of the electric fire. When the dining-room door was opened in walked Mum – fashionably small and with a pedigree that would have done credit to the Pharaohs.
When the kitchen door opened, six gleefully squealing kittens hurtled in from that direction, making like circus tumblers for the electric fire. They climbed it, they poked paws at it, they hid behind it except for one who climbed the television set and sat on top. Mum – named Sophia –
posed on her owner’s knee. Oscar, who was the last one left over from a previous litter, bounded among the kittens like an overgrown Alsatian, matching his long-legged lollop to their little scuttlings. In a moment the room was alive with cream-coloured happiness. I wished we could have bought the lot.
The kittens were too young to leave their mother, though. Only six weeks old and they should have been at least ten. And Oscar was six months old – too big for Sheba, we decided. If he jumped on her he’d knock her flat and she’d never like him. Any kitten would grow up to be heavily exuberant, of course. But we ought to inure her gradually – as it were, from the shallow end. They all 38
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had those bulbous noses, too. It was like being in a picture gallery of Habsburgs. Even the tiniest, most fragile of the kittens viewed the world from behind a huge, dark-copper Habsburg nose.
It wouldn’t do, we reluctantly decided. Even if Sheba took to Oscar (which we were pretty sure she wouldn’t, though we liked him a lot ourselves)… Even if we waited a month for one of the younger kittens to be ready (which we didn’t want to do) we could never, with a nose like that, imagine we were back with Solomon. He liked Us, said Oscar, sitting determinedly down in front of us. I liked him too, I said, picking him up and hugging him. I hoped he’d find a good home. I could have loved him. But always I would have remembered another cat…
So many places we visited, only to be disappointed. At one house we did see a cat who looked like Solomon so much so that my heart missed a beat when I saw him. Alas, he was an unwanted neuter the people had adopted. Their queen, who was in kitten, was one of the small ones.
A formerly unwanted neuter, I should have said. He’d belonged to some people who’d decided to emigrate and they’d advertised in the paper to give him away. Luckily the Pitmans, who loved Siamese, had applied for him. For all his former owners cared he could have gone to anybody.
He’d loved them, though, that was the pity. Two days after the Pitmans adopted him he disappeared. The Pitmans guessed he must have made for his old home, but, when they enquired, his former owners said they hadn’t seen him.
‘Didn’t want to see him,’ said Mr Pitman angrily. ‘All they were interested in was their blasted boat to Australia.’
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So, when Sappho did turn up at his old home, having crossed main roads and a railway line and somehow forded a river, the people he’d walked twelve heartbreaking miles to see took him back to the Pitmans again, dumped him out into the pouring rain and drove away. That was what the Pitmans thought must have happened, anyway. It was the only way they could account for the fact that, three days after Sappho disappeared, they heard a cat crying in the garden and when they opened the door, there he was, soaking wet and with raw and bleeding paws. He might, as Mr Pitman said, have walked back to his first owners. But he’d have stayed around them, however much they didn’t want him. He wouldn’t have come back again.
He’d had pneumonia after that and by the time the Pitmans had pulled him through he didn’t want to leave them. There was a dog there to boss around, and Samantha the Siamese queen, and a family who seemed as if they wanted him…
He ruled them now as if they’d always been his people.
He lay there loftily in the best armchair looking at us just like Solomon, while they told us about his achievements.
How he went to bed with them at night, for instance.
Sleeping between her and her husband with his head on the pillow, said Mrs Pitman, while Samantha slept as good as gold in the airing cupboard.