Cats In The Belfry

FOUR

Trouble in the Valley

That summer our quiet country village resounded to a host of noises it had never known before; the loudest and most consistent of which were the shrieks of startled pheasants running for their lives and the clatter as the bottom fell out of Shorty's cage.

Why Sugieh had to chase pheasants when we lived practically next door to the gamekeeper we never knew, but it was typical of her. Anything for a sensation. She only had to hear the slightest rustle in the copse across the road and she was off like a shot, regardless of who might see her.

Once it happened when the Rector was with us in the garden, holding, with the Harvest Festival in view, a leisurely conversation about marrows. One moment Sugieh was sitting modestly at his side doing her best to look like a Sunday School teacher and the next all you could see of her was a small white rear disappearing battlewards into the undergrowth, fifty yards away.

Fortunately the Rector was short-sighted and a little deaf and so missed the alarming spectacle a few seconds later, when a dozen pheasants erupted precipitately out of a gorse patch and fled up the hill with Sugieh, hard behind them, whooping like a Red Indian. Even more fortunately he had gone home again before she returned and missed hearing what Charles called her when she came back pheasant-less, marched straight indoors and knocked Shorty off his hook.

People have different ways of working off temper. Small boys kick walls. Charles used to slam doors – until Blondin narrowly escaped becoming a Manx squirrel one morning when Charles was particularly mad with the Government. After that, since having to look both sides of a door and on top before slamming it rather spoilt the effect, he took up smoking. Sugieh's remedy for all her frustrations, from falling out of a tree through too much showing off to being clouted by Mimi for being cheeky, was to knock down Shorty.

We got wise to her in the end. When we saw her stumping down the path with her ears flat and her tail stiff as a starched poker we used to nip in and lock Shorty in the bathroom. Sometimes, however, we weren't on the spot when she got frustrated, and the first we knew about it was the crash, mingled with the frantic ringing of the budgie bell, as the cage came off its stand.

She never hurt Shorty. After the first couple of crashes Charles worked out mathematically where the cage would land and we kept an armchair permanently on the spot. But Shorty used to get awfully mad about it. When we rushed in to the rescue they were always in the same position. Sugieh on the arm of the chair with her nose against the bars, shouting all the things she dared not call Mimi, and Shorty – keeping carefully to the middle of the cage – bouncing up and down with rage and screaming back like a Hyde Park heckler.

The only damage she did, other than to our nerves, was to knock the cage so out of shape that eventually the bottom came off and had to be tied on, like the fire-guards, with string. It still fell off every time she hit the cage, but as the cage always landed right way up in the armchair Shorty came to no harm and always thoroughly enjoyed the sequel in which Sugieh, screaming wildly for Anna and the RSPCA, got her bottom smacked on the spot.

It wasn't, we discovered as the months went by, that Sugieh was particularly wicked. It was just that she was a Siamese. After a while we found we could recognise fellow Siamese owners almost at sight by their harassed expressions and the way they flinched at unexpected noises. All of them had hair-raising tales to tell of their experiences. There was Ho, for instance, who lived at the other end of the village and whose ambition seemed to be to get himself jailed for felony, with his mistress as an accessory after the fact. Ho just walked into other people's houses, stole anything he thought his owner would like, and took it home to her. His mistress, who was a pillar of the WI and terribly worried about the whole thing, spent anguished hours restoring to the rightful owners love-gifts which ranged from a pair of unwashed socks to a Victoria sandwich still in its box. Even she, however, was floored the time he came back with a brand new skein of yellow wool which nobody claimed and followed it up next morning with a complete knitted sleeve in the same colour. The mystery was only solved when on the third day he came in with the rest of the knitting still on the needles, and by following the trailing wool through two hedges, round a pond and up a lane (like all criminals he had made his one mistake and left the ball behind) she traced it back to a farmer whose wife was away for the weekend and hadn't missed it.

There was Basil, who – hag-ridden perhaps by his unfortunate name – went upstairs whenever visitors came and brought down the bath sponge. That may sound harmless enough, but the sight of a cat in a strange house eternally slinking round behind a bath sponge can be quite unnerving. At least two visitors, unused to the ways of Siamese, never went there again.

There was Heini, who persistently stole the golliwog belonging to the little girl next door even after his mistress bought him an identical one of his own. Heini, too, was so attached to a stair carpet which he had turned, after months of hard work, from Wilton into a remarkable imitation of Astrakhan that when his owner had the house converted into two flats, with her own new front door at the top of the stairs, he howled himself into a decline for two days until she had the door rebuilt at the bottom so that he could be with his beloved carpet.

There was – but why go on? Compared with other people's cats Sugieh was as innocent as a Botticelli angel; even if she had just swatted the heads off all the tulips in mistake for butterflies.

Charles said her trouble was surplus energy, and if we took her for walks she might work it off. She did to begin with. The first time we took her out across the hills she was so overcome that she walked three miles through this strange new wonderland with eyes as round as Alice's and never uttered a word. And when she got back she was so tired she fell asleep without even waiting for her supper.

Not for nothing, though, was her father's name Caesar. After a few trips she was the one who led us up the hills with her tail raised like a battle banner, and Charles – who had to rescue her from near-catastrophe practically every time we went out – was the one who sank into an armchair when we got home and reached for the brandy.

Again and again he had to climb trees after her. Not because she couldn't get down by herself, but because she liked being rescued from trees. It made her feel feminine.

Once she chased a fox. True it was a vixen with a cub and the vixen's chief concern, from the moment Sugieh opened her big mouth and shrieked at them to stop, was undoubtedly to get her child away from this terrifying creature with sky-blue eyes and a bray like a donkey's. All the same I died a dozen deaths until Charles hauled Caesar's daughter – safe, but swearing fit to burst – out of the bramble thicket where she had finally lost them.

One dreadful evening, pushing her inquisitive nose through a gap in the mowing grass just off the main track, she flushed a courting couple. The worst part of that affair was that the young man occasionally did odd jobs for us and was a friend of Sugieh's, so instead of crossing her eyes warningly at them and passing on, which was her usual way with strangers, she immediately sat down and began to bawl for us to Come and See who she'd found Here – the Nice Young Man who mended our Cistern. We dragged her away eventually by the scruff of her neck. All of us were scarlet with embarrassment; indeed the young lady, who had hidden her head in her boyfriend's lapel and was by this time sobbing with mortification, was so embarrassed that even the back of her neck was red. Sugieh didn't notice it. Slung over Charles's shoulder like a sack of potatoes she continued to shout back greetings long after we had hurried out of sight, and ­the next time the young man came to work for us she ran up to him and started yattering so excitedly he had no doubt at all as to what she was talking about. He blushed all over again on the spot.

We realised then why people take Siamese cats out on leads. Not to protect the cats, but to protect the public. Next time we went to town we, too, bought a lead and harness for Sugieh.

The result of that was as alarming as it was unexpected. The moment we put Sugieh on a lead she went up and down on the end like a yo-yo, screaming that we were Putting her in Chains, got her back feet securely hooked up round her ears, and threw a fit in the middle of the lawn. Other Siamese owners, glancing smugly at cats who, though they were all psychological cases in other ways, at least sat like slit-eyed Buddhas when they were in harness, told us we must persevere. We did. We persevered so hard we nearly had a fit ourselves at the very thought of taking Sugieh for a walk, but we never got her used to a harness. In the end she did agree, in order that we might hold up our heads among our fellow humans, to wearing a collar attached to the lightest of cords. Not round her neck. That apparently made her feel like a galley slave. Round her middle, where it gave her the appearance of a hula dancer and was, as she and we were perfectly aware, completely useless. The moment she saw anything she wanted to chase she just slipped her back legs out of it and went.

The one thought that sustained us through that long, calamitous summer was that one day Sugieh would grow up and have kittens. There had been a time when we had looked forward to having kittens for their own dear little sakes – and, of course, because if we could sell them for anything like the price we had given for Sugieh we would be able to retire after a couple of litters. Now our only thought was that they might sober her down.

Up the lane Father Adams was fervently hoping the same about Mimi, and meeting with unexpected snags. After Mimi's initial attempt at eloping with the cat from the farmyard Father Adams had taken the strictest precautions to preserve her virtue. The first yell that appeared to his anxious ear to contain a note of passion; the first suggestion of voluptuous rolling on the ground – and Mimi, even if she had only been taking a dust bath, was locked in the attic with her earth-box until all danger was past.

At length, however, to the intense relief of the neighbours, Mimi attained her first birthday and Father Adams started looking round for a suitable mate. His first shock – and it shook him to the core – was the discovery that every Siamese male for miles around had been neutered. His second was the discovery, after riding ten miles on his bike to contact a lady whom he had lauded to the skies before he went because she had, he said, had the ­decency to leave a cat as nature made it, that she wanted a three-guinea stud fee.

He nearly had apoplexy when he heard that. According to his reckoning, while it was perfectly all right for him to sell Mimi's kittens and make money out of them – he had in fact already confided in us that he expected to make more out of her than out of his strawberries that season – for anybody to charge for a tom's services bordered on rank immorality. Nobody, he bellowed when he came back, thumping his fist on our front gate till it rattled – he always did that when he felt strongly about something, and we wished he wouldn't; it looked as if we were the ones he was having the row with – nobody but an old maid would have thought of such a thing and he was damned if he'd encourage her.

Heaven knows what would have happened, what with Mimi shrieking her head off with frustrated passion up in the attic and her owner stubbornly refusing either to pay for a pedigree husband or to let her mate, for the sake of peace, with the tom from the farmyard – we explained genetics to him by the hour but we couldn't shake his conviction that if she once Went Wrong, as he delicately put it, she would produce piebald kittens for evermore – if he hadn't, at the crucial moment, changed his doctor.

Father Adams was always changing doctors. He had had two new ones since we knew him. The first he changed because he drove a fast sports car ­and when the National Health contributions went up Father Adams blamed it directly on his petrol consumption. The second he changed, presumably by way of making a clean sweep, at the same time as his dentist, when he had trouble with his false teeth.

Now he had changed again, to a doctor who had just come to live in a neighbouring village. Father Adams, who signed up with him the day after his arrival, said he was a proper nice young man and understood his arthritis perfectly. It was, we understood, pure coincidence that he had an unneutered Siamese tom named Ajax. It was pure coincidence, too, that the next time Mimi came in season Father Adams had such a chronic attack of arthritis he had to stay in bed and send for the new doctor.

He was an understanding young man. As soon as he heard Mimi screeching in the attic and learned the sad story of her unrequited love he drove straight back home and fetched Ajax. He must have been a good doctor too. That very evening Father Adams's arthritis was so much better he was able to hobble triumphantly down to the Rose and Crown.