A Comfort Оf Cats

Nine

The cat house was part of our security plan. The remembrance of Seeley's disappearance was always with us and, to guard against the same thing happening again, either Charles or I was always with Sass and Shebalu when they were out and it took up a great deal of time.

We ought to have a house and run for them, I kept saying. They could be out in it in good weather, enjoying the sunshine, while we got on with other things. We'd still accompany them on walks, of course, and watch over them while they hunted, but we wouldn't be continually panicking in between because they'd managed to vanish in a row of cabbages.

Charles, agreeing, said he'd put up a cat house himself. It would only take a couple of weeks. The question was, two weeks from when? He already had three major jobs on hand on which he spent an hour or so in turn when the spirit moved him. That way, according to him, they got done before one realised it. One day there they were – finished.

The conservatory wasn't for a start. He'd been renovating that for years. People sometimes asked, seeing him on the ladder, whether he was putting it up or pulling it down. Fencing the field beyond the cottage was another of our projects. We'd bought it as an additional paddock for Annabel. Charles had so far put one side fence up really expertly, but it wasn't much use without the others. Thirdly – the item which had top priority at the moment – he was building a dresser in the kitchen.

That, I must admit, was entirely my own fault. The previous autumn, when we'd measured the kitchen for the pine dresser I'd fancied when we brought home the sack of onions, it was to discover that a normal-sized dresser was too small and would look silly and one of the big ones would be far too long. In an unguarded moment I'd thought of the old sideboard out in the woodshed, stowed there years before by Charles. I measured it. It fitted the space exactly. If we used that as a base, I said – faced it with pine-cladding, tiled the top, built pine dresser shelves above it – it would look like a super Swedish-style dresser and make some room in the woodshed into the bargain.

Charles, fired with enthusiasm, said he'd enjoy doing that. Wasn't I glad now he'd kept that dresser? The pine-cladding part wouldn't take more than a week. He'd have the whole thing finished by Christmas.

He might have done if it weren't for the fact that Charles is the world's top perfectionist. When, for instance, he found that the sideboard was veneered he insisted on removing all the veneer before he started. Why I couldn't imagine, since pine-cladding was to go on top of it, but Charles said when he did a job he did it properly. Stripped of the veneer, there were cracks to be filled in and rubbed down. Again I couldn't think why, until Charles explained that the finish was now so perfect it would be a pity to pine-clad it at all. He would varnish it instead, to bring out the grain, which would be quicker and he could start on the top part even sooner.

Unfortunately the varnish turned it a peculiar red colour so he reverted to the idea of pine-cladding. He also decided to give it a new back, and new shelves inside. New bottoms to the drawers, too, while he was at it. I didn't want them sticking, did I? he asked when I said but that would take ages.

Oh boy, I said, just give me the chance! Thinking I'd be able to store things in the sideboard from the start, as soon as we'd brought it inside I'd agreed to moving the old kitchen cabinet out to the porch to give Charles more room to work in. I now trudged miles a day carrying cups and plates and cutlery, leaving trails of sawdust behind me, while Charles sawed inspiredly away as if he were Sheraton and the cats played games through the empty drawer holes. Never mind about them sticking. Give me just one drawer I could actually use, and I'd stand on my head in celebration.

Add a cat house to the list? Not on your nelly. We, I said firmly, were going to buy one. Even so the thought was with me that, even if we bought the house itself – there were plenty of wooden sheds with windows on the market – Charles would still have to build a run around it and we'd have Project Number Four under way. At which point, while I was wondering whether my nerves would stand it, the Francises decided to close their Siamese boarding cattery at Low Knap.

Probably the best-known Siamese cattery in England – at one time it was said to be unique in Europe – it is nearly thirty years since Dr and Mrs Francis set the standard for modern cat boarding. Individual houses – separated, not in rows; large, individual runs; complete disinfection when a boarder moved out, even down to the blow-lamping of the earthboxes. Infra-red lamps over beds that were deep-sided and private, cushions to sit on in the windows – there were Siamese who'd boarded there for as long as three years while their owners were over-seas.

That in itself was a tribute to the proprietors. Siamese are peculiar creatures. Some catteries refuse to take them at all, saying they are more trouble than any other type of cat. The Francises, knowing this, specialised in the Oriental breeds, boarding only Siamese, Burmese and Havana. It was like visiting a top racing stable to walk past the runs, seeing an aloof-looking aristocrat in each. In some cases there were two or three aristocrats from the same household, lying there like a pride of lions, gazing with disdain at the rest of the world but keeping a hopeful eye open for the Francises.

Now they had retired. Rather than pass the business on and risk their standards not being maintained, they had closed, which was why we'd bought a caravan. Our cats had always boarded there. Sugieh had been mated there. We'd always left them with every confidence. No place, we said, could ever come up to Low Knap. In future we'd have to take the cats on holiday with us.

Not that I looked forward to it. I was already waking in the clear cold light of dawn envisaging trouble with Sass over his earthbox and positive mayhem when it came to the cooking. Always, in the kitchen, I had to watch out for stealthy paws. Sass in particular could materialise from nowhere. How would I manage in a caravan, cooking with two of them present and no handy door through which to dump them?

It is an ill-wind that blows nobody any good, however. The closing of Low Knap might have landed us with the prospect of taking the cats on holiday – I only hoped I was going to survive it – but it also meant that the Francises had some first-class cat houses and runs to dispose of, and we were able to buy one.

We hired a do-it-yourself van to bring the sections up from Dorset. The rumour went round that we'd been seen driving a lorry piled high with hen houses. According to Father Adams they were speculating at the Rose and Crown as to whether we were planning a caravan park in the new field we'd acquired or had been carried away by watching The Good Life.

I explained to him that the field was for Annabel and the 'hen houses' comprised a single cat house. Ah well, he said, he weren't goin' to tell 'em. What with the things they reckoned we were up to, and what young Bannett were doin' with the graveyard, it gave he the belly-ache laughing just to listen to 'em.

So the cat house lay in sections on the lawn throughout the winter, covered by a tarpaulin. We wouldn't need it till the spring and Charles was still busy with the dresser. Meanwhile Tim Bannett had bought a field further up the lane from ours because he was planning to expand in the goat business. Polly was ready for mating, he said, and he thought of getting a second nanny – he'd need more room than he had at the cottage. Couldn't he graze them round the edges of the graveyard? I asked. He could always fence off the mounds. After all there are still villages where they graze sheep actually in the churchyard, following the medieval custom...

There'd probably be a riot if he did, said Tim. He wouldn't like to, anyway. Apart from which, couldn't we imagine what people'd say about the milk? They'd had enough to say about the bright green hens' eggs.

They had indeed. Fred Ferry swore they'd made his eyes twitch, though the rest of the village attributed that to too much cider. 'Twas St Vitus Dance of the eyeballs,' according to Father Adams, 'and thee dussn't get that through eatin' eggs.'

Anyway, Tim bought the field and kept going to and fro with fencing poles. On his way he usually stopped for a natter with us over the wall, which naturally didn't go unnoticed. Charles, meanwhile, inspired by the first faint stirring of spring took the tarpaulin off the cat house sections and ordered a ton and a half of paving stones for the base on which it was to stand. These, when they came, were dumped outside our gate, the driver saying it was past his knocking-off time.

All of which incidents were pieced together, country-style, into the usual wildly wrong conclusion. We'd bought a field. Tim had bought a field. We were going into partnership together. Caravans in our field, chalets in his – we had the sections all ready on our front lawn. He'd been seen in his field hammering in posts to mark the sites. There was the paving for the paths outside our gate. We were going to open at Easter. The bookings were rolling in. We were expecting to make our fortunes.

Nobody really believed it, of course. It was just a piece of typical village invention, with somebody adding a bit every time the subject came round like children playing a game at a party. The touch that tickled us most was added by one of our neighbours who went abroad from time to time on business. Vastly proud of the fact, he always made sure that everybody knew without actually telling them directly. The next time the subject was raised in the Rose and Crown – 'Well, I'm off to Bahrain,' he announced, 'I only hope that by the time I get back there won't be wooden huts all over the hillside.'

There wouldn't have been much time for it, since he was only going for three days. As it was, there wasn't even one hut. Apart from the fact that the cat house was going in the garden – on my best flower bed, being the sunniest and most secluded spot – it took us three weeks' solid work to erect it, and even then we were racing against time. Digging up the plants, levelling the ground which sloped considerably – that in itself, took days. Then there was laying the paving-stone foundation for the house – cementing it and waiting for it to set. Meanwhile Charles laid a frame of paving stones on which to stand the run, this being most important. We could fill in the centre at our leisure, Dr Francis had told us, but if we didn't put the framework of the run on paving right from the start, however much our two might languish when we put them in it saying they gave in, we had them Beaten, as soon as our backs were turned they'd be tunnelling as if they were in Colditz. Siamese cats, he said, can dig like moles.

They are certainly intelligent. As soon as the house was up our two recognised it immediately, marching familiarly through the door and sniffing around. They jumped on the shelf on one side and peered out of the window. He remembered this, said Sass – but why wasn't the Francises' garden outside? He jumped down, crossed the floor and reared up puzzledly beneath the other window. Where, he demanded, was the shelf that used to be Over Here?

We'd omitted that one because, it being such a good-sized house, I fancied working in it myself during the summer. I could see myself in there with my typewriter and the cats, enjoying the drowsy, bee-humming sunshine. Sheltered by the overhanging nut tree, the scent of lilac in the air... but for that there wasn't room for a shelf beneath each of the windows. The second one, in any case, as I lifted up Sass and showed him, would only have looked out on the garage wall. That wouldn't have been interesting now, would it? I said. Apparently it would. Sass kept looking for his missing shelf all the summer.

This is jumping ahead, though. We still had to put up the run and bolt the big wire frames together. Sass shinned up the inside of the first frame the moment he saw it in position – propped up temporarily with poles while we aligned it, minus the other three sides or roof. He looked like a commando tackling an assault course. It was a good eight feet up to the top. This, he said excitedly, was how they used to try Fruitlessly to Escape at Low Knap. Gosh, he exclaimed when he got to the top. What had happened to the roof?

Only he would try to climb out of a run which had only one side and no top to it, which was how another local legend arose – that he was crossed with a monkey, which people often say about Siamese. Actually they had reason for it in his case. He has this prehensile-looking bend in his tail, and when I coaxed him to back down on to my shoulder from his marooned position at the top of the frame, he would stand with it hooked round my neck.

At last the house and run were up, however. Two days later a ginger cat was seen inside it. At which the village had no doubt as to what we were up to. We were opening a boarding establishment for cats.

They were wrong again. The cat belonged to my Aunt Louisa, who'd gone to Canada for three weeks. She lived alone now and Ginger was her sole companion. She fed him on minced beef and plaice. When relations invited her to Winnipeg she said she couldn't leave Ginger at a cattery, he liked his minced beef sharp at twelve. On the premise, no doubt correct, that they wouldn't watch the clock for him if he boarded anywhere, she said she couldn't possibly go.

Louisa is my favourite aunt. She helped bring me up. She would walk barefoot to the ends of the earth for me. She was to go to Winnipeg, Charles and I told her. We would look after Ginger ourselves. No, he couldn't sleep with us, he'd have to live in the cat house. But it was a cat house fit for a king. And, I promised her earnestly, he should have his minced beef sharp at twelve.

So Louisa flew off. My cousin Dee drove her to Gatwick. Charles and I couldn't go or Ginger would have missed his twelve o'clock feed. And if I muttered things under my breath for the next three weeks as I frantically minced beef or steamed plaice, that was nothing to the language used by Sass and Shebalu as, four times a day, they watched him eat. I shouldn't have given him four meals a day, of course. Grown cats should only have two. But I'd promised Louisa, and just suppose he wilted... I turned the mincer handle faster at the thought of it.

When they were in the garden for their own look around, oddly enough our two scarcely seemed to notice him. He spent a lot of time sitting in the cat house window and so long as he wasn't actually out in the run... Whether it was because he was a big cat and discretion seemed wiser than valour; whether it was that to our two the cat house represented Low Knap and at Low Knap they'd been used to seeing other boarders... the fact was that they passed the cat house with scarcely a glance on their way up and down the garden.

Indoors it was a vastly different matter. The side window in our bedroom overlooked Ginger's run and for the next three weeks its conveniently broad sill constituted Siamese Intelligence Headquarters.

He could see his Ears! (Sass's own enormous pair would go up like huge black dhow-sails). He was Looking Out! (Shebalu would crouch, flat as a leaf, like a secret service agent on a cliff-top.) He was in the run! (The pair of them, caution forgotten, would press noses to the window to look down.) They spent hours up there watching him. At least it kept them quiet, said Charles. You couldn't say that, though, at meal times. I used to put in Ginger's food dish, give him a pat and nip smartly in and upstairs to watch the reaction.

He'd got Fish for breakfast... Grrrrr, growled Shebalu. Who did we think he was, anyway? Giving him fish and she'd only had tinned rabbit. At Low Knap they'd All had The Same. She'd rattle her teeth at him. At lunchtime it would be Sass. That cat down there was eating Minced Beef. Minced Beef – and he, Sass the Important, didn't get any lunch at all!

Wails would rend the air. That was when I started giving them a tit-bit at lunchtime – Sass always managed to look so thin. They ate it in triumph in the bedroom windowsill – though it was still, observed Sass looking down, Not As Much As I Gave I Him.

Louisa wrote to say she'd arrived in Winnipeg. We were very relieved to hear that. Dee had seen her on to the plane, relations were to meet her off it – on the face of it there hadn't been much that could go wrong. It was just that we knew from experience that if anybody's luggage did get lost – or if somebody got their foot stuck in the disembarkment gangway or left behind in the loo if the plane stopped off in Iceland... you could bet on it being Louisa. Things always happened to her.

She wrote again. She'd been to Moosejaw. To Calgary. To Banff National Park, where she'd seen a bear. There was a plane strike on in Canada but we weren't to worry. Cousin Len had checked with Wardair. If the return plane couldn't take off from Winnipeg, they were going to take the passengers by bus down to Grand Forks in North Dakota. Whatever happened she would be back on the sixth of June. She hoped Ginger was eating his minced beef.

He was indeed. Bang on the dot of twelve there he was at his dish, watched, like one of those clocks on which figures appear and do things on the hour, by two incredulous faces from aloft. By the time we got to the sixth of June and Charles and I drove to Gatwick (we had arranged to bring her back) I could honestly say, hand on heart, that he hadn't missed his minced beef by a second. Her plane was due at Gatwick at seven in the morning. We left the cottage at five. She was to wait in the airport lounge, we'd told her by letter... we'd probably be there around eight. We couldn't leave any earlier what with Annabel to put out to pasture, Sass and Shebalu to take for their walk and feed – and of course, come what might, the plaice to be poached for Ginger's breakfast.

We drove via Salisbury Plain and Aldershot. It is a pleasant route and actually a quicker way from the cottage. It takes us an hour to get on to the motorway at Bristol, whereas in that time we can be well across Wiltshire. We stopped for a snack beyond Stonehenge. Gosh, I was tired, I said. I'd been awake all night worrying about having to get up before four – but at least we were on time. If we picked her up at eight, we'd be back before twelve. Ginger wouldn't have missed his minced beef once. I'd developed a fetish about that – like Sass and his earthbox, said Charles. Did I think the ruddy cat would turn into a pumpkin?

Did I realise also that Louisa might not be on the plane, particularly if she'd had to go to Dakota? Her cousins wouldn't have been allowed to accompany her on the bus. Goodness knew what she might have got up to.

We imagined practically every possibility after that. We saw her losing her ticket, leaving her passport behind, getting locked in the lavatory at Grand Forks. We visualised every possibility in fact, but the one that actually happened. We got to Gatwick later than we'd intended. There'd been a traffic hold-up in Guildford, miles of road up between there and Dorking... I went haring into the airport. There was nothing on the arrival board. Good-oh, I thought. She hadn't got in yet. We hadn't kept her waiting. I asked the Wardair clerk when their Winnipeg plane was due. She consulted her list. Flight 359 from Winnipeg, she told me, wasn't due till tomorrow morning.

We should have realised it, of course. On the outward flight, travelling with the sun, Louisa had arrived the same day. Coming the other way, due to the time-lag, she wouldn't be back until the seventh. It wasn't her fault. She hadn't done the trip before. It was we who should have checked. All of which didn't alter the fact that while we stood there starkly at Gatwick, she was blissfully asleep in Winnipeg.

There was nothing for it, said Charles philosophically. We'd have to go home, see to the animals, then drive up again that night. We dared not risk going to bed. We'd never get up in the morning.

I had a vision of our whizzing up and down past Stonehenge, three times in a single day. We couldn't do it, I wailed. I was dead beat already. 'Oh yes we can,' said Charles.

We would have done, too, but for the traffic on the road. It was much heavier than it had been earlier. There were interminable hold-ups at the sections under repair and we realised more and more how tired we were.

'We just can't do it,' I said at length. 'We'd have to start back as soon as we got home. Look. Annabel's on the hillside – she'll be all right. The cats have got plenty of water. For our own sakes we'd better stay up here for the night. We'll be back to feed them by mid-morning.'

So that was what we did. We stayed at Dorking. We didn't sleep a wink, of course, imagining two Siamese watching for us forlornly out of the window and Ginger fading away without his minced beef. At least we were on the dot at Gatwick next morning, however, when the Winnipeg plane came in. All he hoped, muttered Charles, was that she was actually on it and hadn't brought half of Winnipeg with her...

'She couldn't,' I protested.

'Don't you believe it,' said Charles. And for an awful moment I thought she had. When the doors opened and Louisa came through, she was pushing a trolley loaded with suitcases and carrier bags.

All was well. As usual she was helping others – bringing out an elderly couple's luggage as well as her own. We grabbed her and her belongings, hustled her out and into the car, explained that we'd been up there since the previous morning. 'The cats didn't have their supper last night,' I said. 'We're in a hurry to get home.'

I didn't mention that Ginger had also missed his previous day's minced beef and fortunately it didn't occur to Louisa. All the way back to Somerset, while Charles and I drove blearily in turn, she chatted away about what she'd done, where'd she'd been, how she was looking forward to seeing her cat.

We arrived at the cottage. Walked down the path. Thank goodness there were two Siamese faces at the window. Distinctly indignant but at least they were there, and Annabel was bawling up on the hill. There was – even more thank goodness – a ginger cat sitting bolt upright in the cat-run, obviously none the worse for his fast.

My heart returned to its moorings. We'd soon get them some food, I said. Louisa consulted her wristwatch. 'Ten to twelve,' she observed. 'Just in time for Gingie's minced beef.' It was the next bit that had us licked. 'How clever of you both,' she said, 'to have done all that and Ginger hasn't missed a single meal.'