Afterwards, I could have simply asked him. I was thirteen. But thirteen was a still hesitant age. And best not to ask was my instinct. And not the best of times, patches of jaundice-like make-up still on my cheeks. Best just to listen to his obvious brave fib, and nod.
“Mummy’s very sorry. She’s feeling under the weather. Such lovely weather too, such a lovely evening…But you were wonderful, Paulie. A star! They really should have given you a bigger part.”
That summer was the first year we didn’t go to Craiginish. And that confirmed it. By then I knew there was a “situation,” an ongoing situation. Ours was not any longer a happy home or a happy family, though it had been. And from now on I’d have to play a part and quite a big one, I’d have to polish and refine my acting skills, since the situation, if not carefully contained and managed, might be damaging to a judge’s reputation.
Meanwhile, a former yellow fairy, I took a bus to the law courts to see a man in red robes.
There you are, I was a fairy once, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Picture that. I had little wings. It’s midsummer now, though it’s raining, but all of you are dreaming. Your dad, when I told him, certainly tried to picture it. He said he wished he’d been there. He said he was jealous of my dad, even though my dad can’t have been so happy that night. He said he wished he could have seen your mum when she was Mustardseed.
20
OTIS CAME BACK, he simply came back. That’s the plain fact, and the mystery of the matter — as mysterious as his sudden departure.
It’s easy to scoff at the pet-owners of this world, at the cooing Mrs. Lamberts, until you become one yourself. Sometimes you see, even in these hard-edged times, those poignant scatterings of notices, on trees, on lamp-posts, pleading for information, exuding despair. You never seem to see them being put up, as if that has to be done furtively in the dead of night. Nowadays they’re run off on computers and copiers, there may even be an unhelpful inset photo, but once they always seemed to be hand-copied, a labour of love, in agonised blue biro.
“Have You Seen Our Budgie Archie?”
We scoffed once. Mike scoffed, with the full force of his biological schooling (but I think those snails of his had become his sort-of pets). He called it the anthropomorphic fallacy. An escaped budgerigar in Herne Hill, now which way would it fly — south, to Tulse Hill and Australia? And as if “Archie” would be written all over it, as if even a budgerigar was going to say, “Yes, I’m Archie.”
“I don’t rate Archie’s chances,” your dad said. In those very streets which one day he’d comb at first light, in his cat-suit.
And we came preciously, repentingly close to preparing such a batch of plaintive notices ourselves, restrained only by the thought that it might already be too late. The mockery of all those “Missing”s if Otis was actually dead. And then what do you do? Go out again and solemnly, scrupulously take each little notice down?
But Otis came back. After nearly three weeks, he simply came back. We’ll never know the story, we could hardly ask him. But then the story is perfect anyway in its barest summary: he disappeared, he came back. Has any better story ever been invented? But yes there has, since this is where your story really begins.
It was a Sunday morning, about ten o’clock. We were in the kitchen. The weather was damp and dull, a little threatening, but the back door was resolutely and hopefully half-open. And then there he suddenly was, like a precisely realised wish. A barely believable scuffling sound outside — more laboured and protracted, perhaps, than as we remembered it. But there he was, hesitantly pacing the kitchen floor, as if it might be a trick. As if he might be a trick. But he wasn’t.
It was Otis, certainly, though it also wasn’t Otis. He was thin and weak and bedraggled, his fur had lost its shine. He seemed as amazed to see us again as we were to see him. It was as if he’d wriggled free, only that morning and only in the nick of time, from some terrible sticky end. He couldn’t explain. We’ll never know.
But how little it takes to transform the world. Misery to joy. Even the feeble flick of a cat’s tail, even the shaky tread of four paws. We held him in our arms again. He weighed less, he weighed so much more. He managed a little reconnective purr.
“Straight to the vet’s tomorrow morning,” I said. A rather peremptory way of marking this miraculous moment — already the brisk, emotion-quashing mother. But Mike agreed. Both of us were oddly practical and bustling. Shouldn’t we have just wept? But the fact is, now it was so wonderfully over, we half wanted to pretend that this nearly three-week desertion had never occurred. It was some weird and not very excusable aberration on our part, perhaps. We fed him. The tins were still there. There was his basket and cushion in the corner. Nothing had changed. We wanted the eclipsing illusion that he’d never been away and we’d never become, meanwhile, the bedraggled and diminished creatures we’d turned into.
But how little it takes. By the afternoon, the day had turned conspiringly, blissfully wet. Steady, set-in rain, like this rain falling now. How malign and bleak that rain would have seemed with Otis still gone. But we went back to bed. I almost said “all three of us.” We hadn’t done this for nearly three weeks, let alone on a wet Sunday afternoon. And Otis, it was not difficult to see, needed his bed too. He was with us again, if not quite with us as before. He curled up exhaustedly on one corner of the duvet, while we went thankfully, irresistibly about things. Even asleep, he worked his magic.
That was late April. Of course, we came to understand that things weren’t, exactly, as they’d been. That Sunday afternoon was like a little separate island of reunion in the falling rain. Otis was back, but he was a shadow of himself and, even with loving care and feeding up, there was still a phantom absence. Again, I don’t really mean my poor dad, barely two months dead as he was. Guess who I mean.
I went along to the vet’s that Monday morning. I had work to do, I was still involved in the Bassano studies, among other things, but I called in and made excuses. I didn’t say, “It’s about my cat.” We might both have gone, but these were the days when Tim Harvey had stepped aside. Your dad couldn’t deputise for himself and an issue was being put to bed that week. There’s a curious phrase, “being put to bed.” Perhaps I felt, in any case, it was my particular duty, as — a mother. I’ve said it twice now, haven’t I? The whole thing was suddenly pretty obvious, or it must have looked so to our vet.
Who wasn’t Nokes, who’d moved on, but a new man, Fraser, whom we’d never had to deal with before. Nokes, it’s true, I’d never much liked. He was like some jaded GP: mid-fifties, a gruff, conveyor-belt approach. No bedside manner. You wondered if he really liked animals. On the other hand, it needs to be said, we got Otis from Nokes, which is how we got you.
Fraser was around forty and reminded me a bit of Doctor Pope — without the psychedelic ties. But the most important thing was that Otis seemed to purr instantly, trustingly under his hand.
“I’m Alan,” he said, having shaken my hand. “And this is…?”
“Otis.”
“Otis. Nice name. Hello, Otis. It looks as though Otis has been in the wars.”
I explained.
“It happens,” he said. “Cats do these things.” I’d heard those words before. “Some go missing for months. But all’s well that ends well. I’d say Otis is going to need some looking after.”
His hands were feeling Otis for hidden injuries, and Otis went on purring.
“After the late-great, I assume?”
Of course, I had to tell him, with a little flutter of embarrassment and without further embellishment, that he was right. He said there weren’t any rules that he knew of for naming cats.