A Comfort of Cats

Thirteen

We took the caravan away three times that summer, enjoying it more and more each time we went. 'We must start bringing the cats with us,' I kept saying as we relaxed in comfort in it at night. I imagined Shebalu curled on the bunk beside me; Sass gazing wonderingly out at the sea; the pair of them chasing, tails raised, along the seashore if we could find a beach without dogs.

'No reason why we shouldn't,' Charles would reply between blissful blasts on his recorder. 'Provided we take all precautions.' At which another panorama would cross my mind. Windows screwed down permanently. Bars across the rooflight. There'd have to be an escape hatch over the door. Even then I could see us coming back one evening to find they'd discovered a way out through the floor. Perhaps we shouldn't be too precipitate after all, I'd say. They were perfectly happy with Pauline. One day, though, when we could really be sure they were safe, we really would bring them along.

We went to Devon for our second trip. It passed off without a hitch. There was nothing to caravanning when you were used to it, we said. We almost could have brought the cats. It was out of the question, though, on our third trip, when we took the caravan to Cornwall for three weeks and were joined for part of the time by Louisa and my cousin Dee, who rented a residential caravan a short way from where we had our touring one. Dee has a dog called Rosie who is Nemesis-on-wheels to cats and Louisa can be guaranteed on any occasion to need enough surveillance for fifty. On this particular holiday Louisa kept falling down.

It wasn't, as she told us when we picked her up, that she was getting old. She isn't anything like old to start with and in any case looks twenty years younger. It was the fault of a pair of trendy shoes she'd bought and absolutely insisted on wearing.

They had walking tops, she said, defensively displaying the Oxford laces when we told her they were lethal. So they might, but they didn't have walking soles. They also had stack heels like woodpiles in a log-yard and she clumped along on them as if she was perched on pattens. We'd complained last year when she wore her boots, she went on. That was true enough. While Charles, Dee and I went round in proper walking boots, Louisa had worn her fleece-lined winter ones. Not only did they look odd on a cliff-path in September, with butterflies still on the ragwort and the Cornish sun blazing down, but she'd stumbled several times over the bulky toes and we automatically closed round her like fielders in a cricket match when she got near the edge of a cliff.

This year, with her stack heels, it was worse than ever. She fell down even when the ground was flat. Louisa tripping over nothing carrying a bucket of water was practically a daily occurrence at the camp.

It wasn't funny when she fell on the rocks at Kynance, however. Louisa was considerably shaken. Perhaps she should get some boots after all, she said. Walking ones like ours. So Dee drove her over to Penzance and what did she have when she returned? A pair of ski boots. She said she'd liked the look of them, and they were waterproof and would be useful in the garden.

How that suited them for cliff walking was clear only to Louisa, but there she was, trudging happily along wearing ski boots in September. They were black, square-toed and had bright yellow piping; people looked with curiosity when they saw them. On warm days, Louisa said they were hot, which wasn't surprising, but at least she didn't fall down in them. She hadn't discarded the stack heels, though. They were still to have their moment.

Charles and I had gone to Cornwall a fortnight ahead of Dee and Louisa and we came back a few days earlier. I asked Louisa if there was anything I could do for her when we got back and she said would I ring her brother. He is a widower, lives alone and thinks the world of Louisa. Like her, he is also somewhat woolly. Told she'd be away for a fortnight, he'd thought she'd said a week and had stocked up her larder for her return. He'd written to tell her so and Louisa had had a fit... he always bought steak for Ginger, she said, and when I said well, if he was as bonkers as that at least he could put it in her freezer – Oh no, she said. He wouldn't do that. He knew Ginger liked it fresh. He'd probably thrown it out.

Anxious there shouldn't be a repeat and that he should know exactly when she was coming back, she asked me to tell him she'd be home on Monday night and would he please leave the garden door unbolted. After considerable heart-searching she'd been persuaded to leave Ginger at a very good cattery near Bristol, she and Dee were going to collect him on the way, and she wanted to go in through the garden door because it was easier for carrying his basket.

I rang my uncle. He said he was sorry to hear about the back door because it would be dark when she got home. He'd done a few odd jobs for her while she was away, including laying a new garden path. It had taken more cement than he'd calculated, however, and there was still an eight-foot strip unfinished at the end...

'Oh crumbs!' I gasped. 'And she'll come in in the dark and go headlong over the edge!'

Oh no, he said blissfully. She'd be able to see it. There was light enough from the street lamp for that. It was just that if she'd come through the front way in daylight she'd have then gone out to look at the garden, and the path would have been a nice surprise for her and she would have seen it from the finished end.

I worried. I worried all the weekend. I wasn't a bit surprised when Louisa rang me on Monday night to announce that she was home, Ginger was fine and she'd just fallen down on the path.

'No dear, not at that end,' she said as I breathed fire and slaughter about my uncle. It seemed she'd come through the back door, spotted the break in the path as he had forecast, carried Ginger safely indoors... She'd then gone out with a torch to have a better look and had fallen flat over nothing at the top.

That wasn't all. I can't ring Louisa because she refuses to have a phone. She says it would startle her when it rang, Ginger wouldn't like it either, and supposing she got rude calls? She rings me instead, from the callbox in her road, and we are forever having alarms when Louisa can't get her tuppence in and we are cut off in mid-call, or I hear bangs in the background, or people's voices, and I ask what is going on. 'Somebody wants to use it,' she says. 'Well dear, I'd better go.' She then hangs up immediately, leaving me having a fit at my end in case somebody has biffed her on the head.

The night she came home from holiday her call finished abruptly as usual and the next day Charles and I drove into town. I was afraid she might have felt peculiar after her fall and I'd been worrying about her all night. No, she hadn't felt giddy, she said. It was just that there were several other people waiting for the phone. As a matter of fact, though, as she was coming out of the callbox the woman who was next in the queue had pushed in – it hadn't left Louisa much room to manoeuvre and she had fallen down again.

'It was the dog,' she said as I clutched my head and told her she must be more careful.

'Which dog?' I enquired. The dog being held by the next person in the phone queue, apparently. Louisa had tripped over his lead. She'd fallen flat on the dog – winding him so he could only squeak, she said, and he'd realised she was cross with him because when she got up, his ears were down. She'd told his owner he ought to control his damned dog and marched home in high dudgeon. It was dreadful language for Louisa. She must indeed have been feeling shaken.

She'd then lain awake all night, loving animals as she does, worrying whether she'd upset the dog by what she said or hurt him when she landed on him. 'His poor ears were so down,' she kept saying. 'I wish I hadn't spoken so crossly.' Some dogs have their ears down naturally, I comforted her. What sort of little dog was he? I'd imagined something pint-sized. Being Louisa I should have known. She was jolly lucky he had only squeaked. She'd fallen on a whacking great Alsatian.

She had, we discovered when we questioned her, been wearing those confounded stack heels. She thought they'd be all right for town, she said. Other people wore them. Not people with a centre of gravity like hers, we told her, firmly relieving her of them.

So the caravan was a success, Louisa wasn't getting old and the cats had been fine at Pauline's. They'd spent three holidays at Burrowbridge by this time and were obviously quite at home there. On their second visit, to make them even more so, I'd taken along a large clump of grass in a pot. They were going to be there for a fortnight and while there was grass along the wire of their run – enough, as Pauline said, for normal cats – as I explained, our two eat a great deal of grass and one could hardly describe them as normal.

'How right you are,' she'd said when I rang her from Devon. 'Do you know what that cat has done now?' 'That cat' is always Sass, of course. Shebalu invariably behaves herself when away from home. Teacher's favourite hoping for merit marks has nothing on our canny blue girl.

At first, it seemed, they had eaten the grass, then Sass had taken to sitting on it. It had turned yellow, he'd then given up the hole in the paving and adopted the grass pot as an earthbox instead. She wouldn't have minded, Pauline said, but he had an outsize box in his house. What on earth made him perch on a flowerpot?

Did we think he was right in the head?

She was the one who'd raised him, I told her... Personally I thought it was part of his ritual. He was probably trying to ensure that the weather stayed fine, or that he got rabbit again for his supper. Pauline gave them a lot of fresh rabbit and they once went on strike when she didn't.

He used the grass pot as an earthbox the next time he went there, too. It obviously had become part of his ritual. Pauline said she was getting used to him now. He just wasn't like other cats. Even so, why he took a toad into their sleeping accommodation is something we puzzle over still.

It must have been Sass. Shebalu wouldn't have touched it. He is the only one who carries strange things round in his mouth. When I picked up their travelling basket, anyway, there was the toad behind it, goggling at us as large as life. Pauline said it couldn't have gone in on its own because the weather had been chilly and she'd kept the door of their sleeping quarters shut. She'd had the heater on and the cats had gone in and out through the slightly open window which was a good four feet up from the ground. No toad, she said, could have jumped straight up in the air and in through a small gap like that. There was somebody else who could have done it, though, carrying the toad in his mouth... But why on earth would he want to? I asked. If there was one thing she didn't like it was toads, she said, and whether that little devil knew it... She wouldn't put anything past him.

Oddly enough, the following summer we found a large toad in the run of the cat house at the cottage. It couldn't have got through the small-gauge wire and it certainly hadn't gone in through the door, which we never leave open, even when the cats aren't in the run, for fear of birds getting in. There was the toad, though, trying futilely to climb the wire on the inside while Sass sat interestedly beside it. Charles brought it out and put it on the garden by the garage, leaving it to make its own way. It could have gone anywhere in the Valley – but where did we find it next morning? Or rather, where did Sass find it, with that incredible nose of his? Back by their run, huddled forlornly against the outside of the frame, as if the one thing it wanted was to get in.

We didn't let it. A toad needs a wider range than a cat-run. Besides which Sass was prodding it energetically through the bars, which hardly augured a congenial relationship, though it didn't seem to worry the toad. I covered it with leaves to stop him annoying it, leaving a hole through which it could breathe. It stayed there all day, looking out from its shelter like a contemplative hermit, withdrawing slightly when I bent down to look at it.

Next day it had gone. We never saw it again. We wondered, though – had Sass some affinity with toads? How did two of them come to be with him in places where it was logically impossible for them to be – and why did the second one try to get back?

If Sass knew, he wasn't telling. There is much that is mysterious about that cat. In any case, when we'd got back from Cornwall the previous autumn we'd had other things than toads on our minds. We found that the Valley had been invaded by what a friend termed The Pheasants' Revolt.

They came from a nearby estate whose coverts had lain empty for years until, with syndicate shooting becoming popular, the owner had let the rights to a tenant who had started raising pheasants there again. We'd seen them in their runs when we took Annabel out for exercise and had felt sorry when we thought of their fate. True they wouldn't have been bred if it hadn't been for that purpose, but we hated to think of anything being shot.

Apparently so did the pheasants. They'd been released from their runs while we were away on holiday, to get used to flying before the shooting season started, and it looked, when we got back from Cornwall, as if most of them had come to live with us. They sat in their dozens on our wall. They strutted about with Annabel on the hillside. They meandered about picking grit up in the lane. We had to absolutely crawl up the hill when we took the car out because they kept flying out in front of the bonnet.

One theory was that the hillside where they'd been raised was too cold for them now it was autumn, and that when they were freed they had naturally made for the shelter of the Valley. The man who'd raised them still put corn out every night up at the runs but Fred Ferry said pheasants was wily. They seemed to know about guns by instinct and a lot of 'em would make off while the going was good.

Maybe so – but why come to us? I asked. Fred explained that we were right by the stream. ''N thee bist right on the edge of the wood, and thee hassn't got a dog and 'tis quiet as the grave down here.' ''Cept when thic cat of thine starts up,' he amended, looking across the lawn at Sass who, probably with Fred's sherry in mind, was bawling matily at him from the cat-run.

'Theest know what?' he said, suddenly inspired, 'Theest ought to put down some corn theeself. Then theest could let out thic cat... By gorry, he 'ouldn't 'alf be useful...'

'Oh no he wouldn't,' I said.

Fred muttered to himself all the way up the hill, but we wouldn't have dreamed of doing any such thing. In particular we wouldn't have let Sass chase Phyllis who, within days of our coming home, had adopted us.

She was the smallest, drabbest, scrawniest pheasant hen you could ever expect to see, but she had the assurance of a Salvation Army bandswoman. You could well imagine her banging a tambourine as she approached with her deliberate, slow-stalking tread. She did approach us, too, unlike the showier, posturing cock-pheasants who flapped away, squawking their heads off, the moment we got anywhere near them. I only had to open the door to shake out the tablecloth and Phyllis would stroll quietly, unhurriedly, up.

I could shake the cloth right over her, Phyllis didn't mind; nor was she the least bit concerned about Sass. She must have worked out what his being on a lead meant and when I opened the door to take them out and he shot out like a greyhound from a trap – silently, as was Sass the Mighty Hunter's wont – she knew he couldn't get far. She merely slow-stepped on to the lawn till she was sure we had him under control, then she'd slow-step nonchalantly back – which was heart-warming in that it meant she trusted us but extremely frustrating to Sass, almost nose to beak with a Siamese's idea of heaven and held back by a rotten old collar.

She was hungry, said Charles. Look at her thin little body. Probably the other pheasants wouldn't let her eat with them. She was obviously attracted to the yard by the crumbs we threw out for the birds, and to us because she knew we put them out. If we put crumbs on the far side of the lawn for her, she wouldn't hang around the door and upset Sass. (Who, when he was indoors, now spent most of his time planning her downfall from the window above the freezer.)

This meant two lots of crumbs, since we couldn't neglect our regulars. It also meant two lots of crumbs for Phyllis, who followed me across the lawn, ate the lot I put down over there, then stalked back to the yard and joined the sparrows.

'Corn,' said Charles inspiredly. 'The packet Louisa brought back from Canada for popping – if we gave that to Phyllis she wouldn't bother about the crumbs – that would keep her away from the door.'

Phyllis appreciated the corn. She waited eagerly for it every morning, following me across the lawn when she saw the packet. Unfortunately when she'd finished that she came back and ate the birds' crumbs anyway and all we had to show for that advancement was that now she expected corn from us as well – how could we stop giving it to her, once we had started? – and Sass was more frustrated than ever. Not only was she mooching unconcernedly around the yard whenever he went out, knowing full well he couldn't get at her, but if he went across the lawn to his favourite hunting corner with me holding on to his lead, he only had to look round and That Pheasant would be following close behind us, thinking that if I was on the lawn it meant corn.

Other people were beginning to notice her, too, following me around like a domestic hen. Fred Ferry, seeing me throw down the popcorn one morning, said he seed we was following his advice. Oh no we weren't, I said. This one was tame. We were feeding her because she was so thin.

'Thin?' said Fred. I followed his eyes. I'd got used to thinking of her as scrawny, but Phyllis, on a diet of popcorn and bird crumbs, was now sleek-feathered, practically as broad as she was long and ripe for anybody's table.

It was November now and shooting had started. I hoped she would stay safe. The other pheasants gradually disappeared – scared off, perhaps, by the guns. Or they might have eaten what wild food there was and moved on to other grounds. Or gone back to the runs for the corn put out by the keeper and, inevitably, been shot.

Whether Phyllis would escape was in the lap of the gods. I would not, I said, grow fond of her. But how could I avoid it – going up, for instance, to clear a bramble patch in Annabel's field and looking up to find her standing quietly watching me. Goodness knows where she had come from; we had no idea where she slept... but when I came back, she followed me down the lane to the cottage, walking like a devoted dog at my heels. Only because she was hoping for corn when we got back, I knew, but how could I not get fond of her?

Charles did too. He didn't think she'd go back to the runs, he said. She was too content in the Valley. Certainly we weren't responsible for her being down here, either – it wasn't our fault she liked the bird crumbs. What he was afraid of was her strolling about in the lane the way she did and somebody coming past and knocking her on the head. He never had liked Fred Ferry's knapsack... Secretly I'd been thinking the same.

We watched over her through November and on into December, nipping out when Fred Ferry appeared. He seemed to be going past more than ever. Even Father Adams noticed it. One of these days that old Fred'd meet hisself coming back, he observed.

After the end of December Phyllis would be safe – from guns, at any rate, since the shooting of hen-pheasants ceases then. As for Fred – he wouldn't dare, I said. He knew I had my eye on him. So Phyllis continued, placidly content. She'd eaten her way through the popcorn. 'Better buy her some more,' said Charles. 'Not to get fond of her, mind, but she seems to have taken us on and we can hardly stop feeding her now.'

Six days before Christmas I bought her a seven-pound bag of corn – and the next day Phyllis disappeared.