Cats In The Belfry

FIFTEEN

Solomon's Romance

How nice, people said – watching them march in majestic procession up the garden trouble-bent for Charles's latest batch of cabbage plants, or posed lovingly cheek to cheek in an armchair like a picture on a Christmas card – to have two Siamese cats.

In some ways it was. They were company for each other when we were out – and where, as Solomon said himself, could he have put his head when he slept in front of the fire on winter nights, if it wasn't for Sheba's stomach?

On the debit side, however, the mischief those two led each other into outdid a cage of monkeys. The time Sheba stowed away in Sidney's side-car for instance, and he didn't find her until he got home and then had to turn round and bring her all the way back – she'd never have thought of that on her own. Sheba was a home girl. She rarely went far from the garden herself and any time Solomon went off on one of his jaunts she could be depended on, to his disgust, to be standing gleefully in the porch bawling here he was and were we going to smack his bottom now as he tried to sidle surreptitiously up the path.

He could boast as much as he liked about where he'd been and what he'd done. Sheba wasn't interested. She preferred to stay at home and be Charles's and Sidney's little friend. Until she heard Solomon yelling one day to look where he was now – and when she did, there he was out in the lane sitting on the bonnet of a stationary car. She took one look at him, started to shout for Charles, and changed her mind. She had been good for so long that life had, to tell the truth, become rather boring. Besides, however often she advised it, Solomon never did get his bottom smacked. Instead he was made so much fuss of when he did come back from his wanderings that her prissy little nose was put rather out of joint… Without more ado she joined him on the bonnet of the car.

After that the moment anybody parked a car outside the cottage the pair of them were gone like a flash. To begin with they just sat on the front chatting madly to passers-by. That was bad enough. I nearly wore myself to a shadow rushing out to shoo them off and wipe away the paw marks before the owner returned. Then Solomon discovered that a car has an inside. I remember perfectly the day he found that out. Rushing out to grab them off the bonnet of a big black Humber, polishing away busily at the paw marks as I did so, I suddenly realised that he was staring incredulously at something through the windscreen, and when I looked to see what it was there was an old lady sitting in the back seat, staring equally incredulously back. Grinning weakly – it was all I could think of to do – I grabbed the cats and fled. It was pointless, of course. Solomon, having spotted the old lady, was determined to have a closer look. The moment I put him down on the lawn he was away over the wall again like a shot, this time clinging firmly to the door handle with both paws while he peered intently through the window.

Solomon, when he is determined, has claws like grappling hooks. I just couldn't get them off the door handle, and what with him bawling with rage because he wanted to see the lady, Sheba in her usual strategic position up the damson tree advising me to smack him this time anyway and the old lady practically in a state of collapse thinking she was being attacked by a mad woman and an equally mad cat, I could think of only one thing to do. Holding Solomon firmly round the middle I yelled as hard as I could for Charles. Charles disentangled Solomon. Charles, while I carried Solomon into the house, pacified the old lady. It was a bit difficult, he said – she kept saying that when her son came back from his walk we would hear more of this – until he mentioned that I was his wife. Whereupon, he said – rather puzzled, because he didn't know yet about me rushing out and polishing the bonnet of ­her car while she was still inside it – she patted his hand, saying poor, poor boy, we all had our troubles and must bear them bravely, and gave him a peppermint.

I swore I'd never get Solomon off a car again. I did of course. I was always dragging him off, from under – and now, if ever he found an open window – from inside other people's cars. Charles wouldn't, so I had to. I dared not open the door, even if it wasn't locked. Charles said people might think we had nefarious intentions. So there, sometimes two and three times a day, I stood dangling a long piece of string through the windows of strange cars, frantically imploring Solomon to be a good cat and come out before the owners returned. I held the string at arm's length and stood as far back from the car as I could. Nobody could possibly have thought I had nefarious intentions, but quite a few must have thought I had a screw loose. Particularly since Solomon never paid any attention anyway, but either lay at full length along the top of the back seat pretending to passers-by that it was All His and he was Waiting for the Driver or else was quite invisible on the floor, nosing around among the parcels.

He knew he was doing wrong. He always nipped smartly out again a split second before the owner returned. But I was terribly afraid that one day he – and I – would be caught. I was afraid, too, that one day he might get in a car without my knowing it and be driven off without the driver knowing it either. Automatically I dropped whatever I was doing and rushed to the front gate every time I heard a car. Then in the end, of course, as I might have expected if I'd stopped to consider how those cats' minds worked, it wasn't Solomon who got carried off, but Sheba.

Far more cautious than her brother, she never risked getting inside a car herself. The most she would do, while I fished frantically for him with a piece of string, was to sit wide-eyed on the bonnet saying he was naughty, wasn't he, and she didn't know what we were going to do with him. She was longing to try it herself all the same. You could see it written all over her small blue face. So when at last the impulse became too great for her she went, obviously reasoning that she knew Sidney and would be quite safe with him, and sat in his side-car – and, such is the injustice of the world, promptly got abducted for her pains.

Solomon was beside himself with glee when she came back. This time it was his turn to do the shouting, and he made the most of it. Here she was, the Cross-Eyed Wonder Herself, he yelled stalking to meet her as she came, looking rather sheepish, down the path in Sidney's arms. What About Us Smacking Her Bottom For a Change, he roared in a voice that would have done credit to a lighthouse-keeper. He didn't wait for an answer. As soon as Sidney put her down he bowled her over himself, just to show who was who.

Usually, of course, it was the other way round. Sheba did the preliminary explorations and Solomon followed them up and got into trouble. The hole at the top of the stairs, for instance, where the electricity wires went through from the new part of the cottage to the old – Charles had pasted a piece of paper over that and painted it, to camouflage the spot until he had time to fill it in properly. It was Sheba who discovered that there was a gap at the bottom of the paper with an intriguing draught blowing through it – but while she was content merely to squint underneath it was Solomon, bustling up all bluff and bluster, who promptly thrust his paw clean through it, warning whoever was in there that they'd better come out quick or he'd be in after them. What was more he liked the dramatic effect so much that every time it was papered in future he did it again, and whenever I took visitors upstairs I had to explain not only the large hole perpetually edged with torn paper, but why there was usually a large, goofy-looking Siamese shouting threats down it as well.

When we had new ceiling-height cupboards built in the kitchen it was Sheba who first ventured cautiously on to the draining board and opened a door with a small, inquisitive paw – but it was Solomon, once she had proved there was nothing there to hurt little cats, who banged them lustily open every day as part of the general routine. When we took them for a walk past the cornfield it was Sheba who first thought of livening things up by jumping on an occasional post and imploring Charles to lift her down – but it was Solomon who had to thunder up and down every one like a circus pony and finally, wild with excitement, jumped off on the wrong side and got lost in the corn.

Whatever was happening, Solomon had to be most important and the only one in the limelight – except when it came to something like having his ears cleaned or his coat combed. Then there never was a cat more willing that Sheba should be first. He sat by with great interest while we worked on her, sniffing at the cotton wool and the saucer of oil, peering knowledgeably into her ears and assuring us that they were absolutely filthy and she couldn't have washed them for months. The moment his turn arrived, however, Solomon was gone. Yelling that we were making a big mistake, he wasn't our cat at all, he dashed desperately from cover to cover, anchoring himself by his claws to the backs of chairs and the edges of carpets. And when at last the deed was done – two little screws of wool turned gently in his ears and a comb passed swiftly through his coat, though, as Father Adams said, from the howls it sounded as if we were sawing the legs off a herd of elephants – he went around with his ears turned sorrowfully down, gazing at us so reproachfully from underneath them that we hated ourselves for hours.

When the winter came and Sheba, treading gingerly out into the first snow they had ever seen, proved that it was quite safe to venture out it was Solomon who every night scratched and rattled at the door, demanding to be let out on the lawn where he tore flamboyantly round in a foot of snow with his tail stuck up like a periscope while she, having done a prim little patrol up the path and back, sat genteelly on the porch cleaning off her paws. In the same way, while it was Sheba who said that winter was a good time for catching birds because we fed them and took to sitting under the lilac every morning with her eyes fixed like sapphire moons on the temporary bird table, it was Solomon who insisted on sitting hopefully on the table itself. Spoiling everything, Sheba wailed when we fetched them in so that the birds could feed in peace, though Solomon insisted that he was disguised as a piece of bread.

There were some things, however, in which they were unanimous. Like not coming in when we called them and not wanting anybody else to live with us. They got quite worried about that at one time. There was, living further down the lane, a pretty short-haired blue queen with amber eyes called Susie, whose one failing was that she loved everybody. She loved dogs, she loved humans, she loved other cats – she even loved the rangy, battle-scarred tom from ­the farm, as witnessed by the fact that of the squads of kittens she had every year at least nine-tenths were bull-headed and black and white. And one day, to his absolute horror, she fell in love with Solomon.

He tried looking at her. He explained loudly and at great length that he liked beetles better than girls. It was no good. Every time he put his head out of the door there was Susie sitting on the porch, purring like a sewing machine and waiting to rub cheeks. The expression on his face as he walked self-consciously up the garden pretending he didn't know she was tripping adoringly alongside him was priceless. So was the way, if he saw her coming first, he nipped indoors and peered apprehensively round the hall curtains till she'd gone. Eventually she got wise to that, started coming in to look for him, and, passing the feeding dishes on the way and reasoning romantically that Lover Boy would want her to share his jug of wine and loaf of bread like in the poem, took to polishing off the contents on the way.

She was wrong there. Lover Boy wouldn't even have given his grandmother a sniff at the dustbin if he could help it, while Sheba was so enraged she forgot all about being a lady, hid behind the door one day and, for the first time in her life, hit Susie on the nose as she passed.

It didn't help any that we liked Susie and made a fuss of her when she came. Encouraging her to eat his food, wailed Solomon, glowering darkly round the door from a position where he could dodge the moment she started looking lovingly in his direction. Inviting her into our house, complained Sheba, jealously watching her rub against Charles's leg. Why didn't we have her to live with us and have done with it, they demanded indignantly the day they found her washing herself placidly in front of the fire.

That, as a matter of fact, had occurred to Susie herself. The next time she came she brought along a half-grown black and white kitten. After we had put her outside and told her to go home – much as we liked Susie this really was too much of a good thing – she took the kitten into the coalhouse and slept there all night on the paper sack. It wasn't that she didn't have a home to go to. It was just, she purred happily, shepherding her offspring through the back door at seven the next morning in the direction of the feeding dishes, that she loved Solly, and our cooking, so much she had decided to live with us instead.

We spent that day in a state of siege, with the back door firmly shut against the invaders and our two telling them to go home from every window in turn. Eventually it began to rain, and to our relief they went – though we felt terribly mean as we watched the long thin blue rear and the little squat black and white one disappearing sadly down the lane.

Half an hour later, with the rain still coming down in sheets, we heard faint squeaks from outside the back door. We looked at each other in dismay. 'She's got that kitten out there again,' said Charles. 'It'll absolutely drown in all this rain!' Good thing too, said Solomon, lying on his stomach and trying to peer under the door. That might teach it not to eat his food. But the thought of that little shrimp sleeping on the coal all night, getting no breakfast and now shivering out there in the rain all because of Susie's love for Solomon, was too much for us. Defeated we opened the door – and our eyes nearly shot out on stalks.

There in the pouring rain sat not the little black and white waif of the night before, but two beautiful blue kittens with round topaz eyes, their mouths wide open in a tremolo wail. They had obviously been rehearsed. We had never seen them before, but the moment the door opened they raised two perky little tails and marched boldly in. As they did so Susie jumped off the kitchen windowsill, where she had been waiting, and prepared to follow them. They were the very best she had, she explained in her shrill little voice. As we obviously only liked superior cats, could she bring them to live with us instead? It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, saying that she couldn't, and shutting the door in their faces.