Doreen Tovey Cats in May z-lib org - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Unknown (ч. 2)

– but it wasn’t exactly surprising. Mighty tough was our flush. People’d been tolling it like a bell for years.

Nothing unusual, in fact, had happened for ages – until the night we went to see Charles’s friend Allister, and Allister got Charles interested in Yoga. Allister is always getting Charles interested in something. Once, when Solomon and Sheba were small, it was archery and they nearly winged the kittens. Once it was the proposition for removing rock from behind the cottage with dynamite. Fortunately for the cottage the proposition fell through. Now – unfortunately for me – it was Yoga.

Allister hadn’t done any himself. So far he’d only read a book about it. A jolly interesting book, as he said, and when I heard his description I was quite keen to read it myself. I wasn’t at all surprised when Charles said he was going to get it from the library. What did alarm me – knowing from experience what Charles’s enthusiasm could mean – was when, after several sessions of intense study, he announced that he was taking it up.

I spoke to Grandma, who had a lot of influence with Charles, about that. But all she did, after listening to him intently with her spectacles on the end of her nose, was encourage him.

Most interesting she said it was, and there was a great deal in some of these things. Charles might learn much from it. If she were younger she would take up Yoga too.

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Highly Entertaining Well, there we were. Charles meditating all over the place with Grandma’s blessing and practising deep breathing.

The cats sitting importantly by him meditating as well and announcing that they used to do this in Siam. Any minute now I expected to see the three of them wearing turbans.

Until, once again, I had an idea.

This, like the snuff one, was also born of desperation.

We were visiting some friends who lived on the moors at the time – staying with them, as the weather was bad, for the night. It was winter still, of course, and all the evening Charles had been talking happily of Yoga – how it mentally lifted one… raised one above bodily things… he didn’t, he announced (wonderful indeed, seeing there were several degrees of frost) even feel the cold.

I did. When we went to bed – without bottles because we’d been talking so late and Charles said we really didn’t need them, not feeling the cold – I was absolutely perished.

Round about two o’clock in the morning I got out and put the floor-rugs on the bed, but it made no difference. I was still perished.

Charles, who had rolled over while I was getting the rugs and was now comfortably cocooned in at least three-quarters of the bedclothes, informed me once more that he didn’t feel the cold. Mind over matter, he assured me, snuggling cosily into his pillow. I ought to take up Yoga. I ought to meditate too.

I did. After a little meditation I put my hand on one of the bedposts – one of those old-fashioned brass ones it was

– until it was icily cold. Lovingly I burrowed through the cocoon with it in search of Charles. Tenderly I placed it 125

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in the middle of his back. There was a loud, excruciating yell… And Charles gave up being interested in Yoga.

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THIRTEEN

With Solder and Crowbar

That was the winter Grandma’s parrot Laura died. As a result, according to Grandma, of the coalman looking at her through the window.

Everybody else said it was old age. To the family’s knowledge Grandma had had Laura for thirty years, and she hadn’t been first-hand even then. Grandma had bought her from a pub in the belief that parrots from licensed premises (or, she said, from a sailor if you could get one) talked – and had kept her, when she turned out to be completely dumb except for screaming like a maniac at mealtimes, on the grounds that it was wicked to keep birds in such places and she couldn’t send her back.

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her happily for thirty years. Until, in recent months, she had begun to droop, and lose her feathers, and develop a wheezy little cough. When we reminded Grandma of that, and how for weeks now Aunt Louisa had been putting whisky in her drinking water and tying a hot-water bottle to her cage every night and still Laura had gone on failing, Grandma said it was rubbish. Laura always got bronchitis in the winter, she said; Louisa always put whisky in her drinking water (a statement which we had to clarify when there were strangers present for the sake of Aunt Louisa’s reputation) and it was no use our arguing. With her own eyes she had seen the coalman looking through the window with his great black face, it had frightened poor Laura, and now she was dead.

She was indeed, and there wasn’t much we could do about it except change the coalman the following week and offer to get her another parrot. After which – the management of Grandma being rather wearing at times – Charles and I went down with flu.

It wasn’t so bad to begin with, when only Charles had it.

True it was unfortunate that the first day he took to his bed I had to go to town. When I got back the cats, whom I had left sitting happily on his chest enjoying his temperature

– the first time, Sheba announced, that she had been really warm this winter – were waiting anxiously for me in the hall window. Charles hadn’t fed them, complained Solomon, regarding me indignantly through the glass.

Charles was groaning, said Sheba, and they’d had to come downstairs because they couldn’t stand it. Charles hadn’t let them Out, roared Solomon, whose idea of anybody staying home, even with double pneumonia, was to let him 128

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With Solder and Crowbar in and out of doors all day long. Charles was hardly a little ray of sunshine either. When I went up to see him all he said – presumably in case it helped at the inquest – was that he’d taken his temperature at three o’clock and it was a hundred and two.

For three days he lay there wilting heroically. With his knees up most of the time because Sheba had decided that in the bed, in a little cave under Charles’s knees if he would kindly raise them for her, was the warmest place to be.

Calling feebly for more food – not because he was hungry but because by the time he’d braced himself to tackle his soup or his poached plaice Solomon, who didn’t believe in this weaker brethren business, had appreciatively eaten the lot. Assuring me, when I asked how he was, that he felt very frail indeed… very frail.

It was on Monday, however, when Charles was on the convalescent list and I had taken to my bed, that the fun really started. Not that it was exactly fun for me. I had a temperature too, and to my poor, flu-befuddled mind it seemed more like one of those symbolic plays where people keep walking in and out.

First it was the cats, coming in with round, astonished eyes to ask what on earth I was doing there and when was I going to get up. Lying there instead of Charles, said Sheba reproachfully, and I knew she liked it under his knees. Then it was Charles, asking if he should make a cup of tea. Then, a few minutes later, it was the cats again – Charles having apparently decided there wasn’t much chance of my making it, anyway – appearing to report that he wasn’t half mucking about in the kitchen and he hadn’t given them their breakfast yet. Then it was Solomon, howling wrathfully downstairs, 129

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charging – grumbling loudly to himself – up to his earth box in the spare room, and then appearing dramatically in the doorway once more to inform me (even in bed I was still in charge in Solomon’s little world) that Charles hadn’t changed it, Charles wouldn’t let him out, and if I didn’t do something quick there’d be an accident.

At that point I summoned strength to yell for Charles, whereupon the cats were let out, I got my cup of tea, Charles – flushed with achievement – announced that he would now get the breakfast, and, save for a monotonous creak… BANG from down below where the sitting-room door latched itself firmly every time he went through (and what on earth he was doing going through it about fifty times a minute I couldn’t imagine) there was peace.

It lasted about five minutes, at the end of which Charles called up to say the post van hadn’t arrived yet and ought he to get Solomon in – after which my next diversion was Charles in the garden calling Solomon. Shortly after that there was the sound of a tray being deposited on the hall table. Breakfast now, I told myself, and felt quite hungry at the thought. But no. Charles, having got it that far, was once more in the garden calling Solomon…

It took twenty minutes to round up Solomon and get that tray up to my bed. By that time the toast was stone-cold

– which Charles said was odd, because it was hot enough when he made it. The tea was cold too. Colder even than the toast. Understandably so when I questioned Charles and found that he hadn’t made a fresh pot. Having, he said, only poured one cup each out of it, and there was still bags left, he’d used the lot he’d made an hour ago.

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With Solder and Crowbar I will skim the details of the rest of the morning, taken up by the Rector arriving to enquire whether he could get us anything in town (yes, I replied gratefully via Charles; a rabbit for the cats); Charles coming up again to ask what size rabbit; Charles shouting at me from the garden could I see, because the Rector was waving to me from the road; Charles coming up ten minutes later to ask whether I was awake and should he make some coffee; and, ever and anon, the cats marching in like a Greek chorus to enquire was I still in bed, they didn’t like what Charles had given them for breakfast, and – once again – Charles wouldn’t let them out.

By then it was lunch-time. There was no need for Charles to ask me what he should do about that. Before he wore his legs out completely I got up and fixed it myself.

What followed was, of course, inevitable. After all that work Charles had a relapse. By afternoon he was back in bed and I was tottering up with cups of tea for him. By evening, too – and there was no denying it; Sidney said he could hear him from the other end of the garden – Charles had a cough. There was no need – as Sheba said, snug once more in her little tent under Charles’s knees while Solomon lay determinedly on his chest, heaving like a storm-tossed sailor with every wheeze – to ask who was most sick in this house. It was undoubtedly Charles.

He recovered eventually, of course. By the end of the week, with people going down like flies all over the village and the cats sitting on the wall happily informing people as they passed that we’d had it first, Charles – except for his cough – was quite flourishing. Which was how, looking 131

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round for something to occupy us during convalescence, we came to re-string the grandfather clock.

You remember, perhaps, the grandfather clock. The one in the hall, where Sheba used to sit on top and Solomon was eternally opening the door to watch it tick? We’d found a key for it eventually, and for a while there’d been peace. Sheba had even given up sitting on the top. No fun in that, she said, if old Podgebelly wasn’t mucking about underneath.

And then one day the key broke off in the lock, and we were back where we started. Sheba sitting on the top, Solomon hanging through the door, entrancedly watching the pendulum. He was taller now than he had been – or else a bit more athletic. And when we went home one night and, when I opened the hall door, only Solomon ambled through, I had the fright of my life. No sign of Sheba, the door of the clock wide open, and – the silence struck me immediately – no sound of ticking from the clock…

I hardly dared look, so sure I was of what I’d find. Sheba lying in the bottom of the clock flat as a pancake, with a weight on top of her – pushed in experimentally by Solomon or, as she was apt to do when nobody was about, having an inquisitive look on her own account and over-balancing.

Sheba, as it happened, was asleep on our bed. Frozen to the eiderdown, she said when I found her there a few minutes later and hugged her with relief. Which was why she hadn’t come down, and I’d be a lot more useful if I got her a hot-water bottle. Solomon it was who’d stopped the clock. Want to see how? he enquired excitedly as I set it going again. Standing on his thin hind legs he opened 132

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With Solder and Crowbar the door, reached in a long black paw and prodded the pendulum. Clever, wasn’t he? he said.

After that little scare we went back to tying the door with string while we were away, and it was just as well we did.

One night we went home to find that the clock had stopped again – and this time, when we opened the door to find out why, one of the weights was off. The catgut had snapped and it was lying in the bottom.

So, during our convalescence, it seemed an apt time to re-hang it. Quietly, contemplatively – with, as Charles said, plenty of time to appreciate the way craftsmen of old did their work.

What the craftsmen of old did with grandfather clocks, as we discovered when we started in on ours, was to hang the weights on catgut, tie the ends in knots inside a couple of hollow cogwheels – and then bung the clock face on fast, right in front of the cogwheels and fixed so firmly that we couldn’t get it off.

We used everything but a crowbar on it before we’d finished, and still we couldn’t get it off. We never did get it off. We were in fact fast reaching the stage of jumping on it when Father Adams looked in to see how we were and informed us that you didn’t put new gut in like that. Not by taking off the hands and strewing pendulum, weights and pieces of clock case all over the floor. You eased it – with a piece of wire if necessary, but definitely without touching the clock face – in through they little holes. . .

We managed it in the end. What Charles said before we’d finished about the craftsmen of old and those little holes must have scorched their ears even at a distance of a hundred-and-twenty years – but we did it. We even got 133

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the clock back together again, mounted on its pinnacle, and working. We have never, to this day, been able to replace the second hand. It got a bit bent when we were taking it off and, though we straightened it again with a hammer, every time we put it back it gets hooked up in the other hands and the clock immediately stops. For days, too, we nearly went mad because no matter what we did to it the clock kept striking on the half-hour – five at half-past four, for instance, and midnight at half-past eleven. Which, even in a household like ours, was a little muddling.

We discovered what it was eventually. We had the minute hand on upside-down. A discovery that so delighted us we forgot the vicissitudes we’d gone through to get one simple weight running on one simple piece of catgut and went round boasting of our prowess in mending clocks.

Which was why, when Grandma broke the hand on her alarm clock a week or two later, she asked us, as experts, to put it right.

What we did to our own clock was, as Charles remarked only the other day, nothing to what we did to Grandma’s.

Quite by accident, of course. The clock had no glass in it to begin with – that had got broken one morning when the clock went off too early for Grandma’s liking and she had swept it on to the floor. The hand had snapped off another morning when she put the clock under the bedclothes to muffle it and it caught in the blankets. All it needed, as Charles assured her, was a touch of solder and it would be as good as new.

The trouble there was that we weren’t very expert with solder. At least four times we got the hand on – success at last! said Charles each time we did it – only to find we’d 134

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With Solder and Crowbar soldered it to the other one and they both went round together. And when at last we did get it on by itself we discovered that during our endeavours the clock face – the little circle round the hands – had been badly scorched by the soldering iron.

We painted that – or rather Charles did, being the artist of the family – with aluminium paint. Which made the rest of the clock face look shabby, so he painted that green. Only to discover that, in his enthusiasm, he’d painted over the numbers – so when the green paint was dry he put those in again in red. At which stage, putting in the figure twelve, he unfortunately touched the minute hand with his brush and, being very lightly soldered, it fell off again. And by the time we’d soldered it on once more the aluminium-painted circle behind it was not only scorched. The heat had cracked the paint…

Charles was for starting all over again, but I was feeling slightly cracked myself by that time. We gave it back to Grandma as it was. The hand, as I pointed out before she had a chance to say anything, was at any rate on.

Actually Grandma was too stunned to pass much comment. Yes, she said, gazing disbelievingly at her chameleon-like alarm clock, it was.

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FOURTEEN

Right up the Pole

Spring arrived in the valley at the end of March. It needed experts to detect it, mind you. Charles still had a cough.

Sidney still clung firmly to his muffler. Father Adams still clumped past the cottage every morning in a balaclava that made him deafer than ever – to protect, as we heard him informing the Rector at the top of the hill one day, his lug’oles from the frost.

But the cats knew it had come. Only a week before we had had snow, and it had been the easiest thing in the world to find them in the mornings. A small, neat line of tracks leading straight from the back door to the nearest cloche – that was Sheba. Ears down, coat stuck up like a parka, a quick dig in the early peas and in again.

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A trail that wound deeply through the wastes like a traveller lost in the Antarctic – pausing to inspect a bush, digressing to look in the greenhouse, ambling haphazardly up the drive and ending at a frozen puddle – that, on the other hand, was Solomon. Sitting interestedly on the ice and listening to it crack.

We had, when we got them in again, had the usual protest meeting over the bird table – with, outside, little wrens and blue tits gratefully fluttering in the snow, and, inside, Solomon and Sheba shouting battle songs in the window.

We had also witnessed an incident which Charles said sometimes came to nature-lovers like us, as a reward for diligence and patience.

One morning the cats, in the middle of raucous advice to the birds as to what they’d do if they laid hands on them

– and it wouldn’t, bawled Solomon, with his eye on his old enemy the blackbird, include giving him bacon rind, either – had suddenly gone quiet. Going in to see what was wrong, on the principle that silence in a Siamese household always means trouble – there, sure enough, was Sheba hiding behind the curtain, Solomon visible only as two ears stuck periscope-fashion above the windowsill, and magpies staging a raid outside.

Back and forwards they were going, the great black-and-white wings flashing so fast between the bird table and the woods that, as Solomon said in a small, un-Solomon-like voice from beneath the sill, there must be hundreds of them out there, and it was a jolly good thing we were in.

As a matter of fact, which was the interesting thing about it, there were only two. Working, according to Charles who understands these things, to a plan of Time and Motion.

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One chasing off the other birds and piling the cake over by the gate and the other – the girl she bet, said Sheba from behind her curtain; it was always the girls who did the work and the other one looked a lazypants to her, like Solomon

– busily transporting it from the gate into the woods.

But now, quite suddenly, it was Spring. With Sheba sitting on the cottage roof and refusing to come down – she could, she said, see every mouse-hole for miles around and the air was fine up here – Solomon chasing a ginger tom, and Timothy arriving for the Easter holidays.

We weren’t quite out of the woods yet, mind you. That night, looking for two little cats who had elected to stay out Both Ends of the Day now that Spring was here, we met the ginger tom chasing Solomon. While Timothy

– presumably to keep his lug’holes warm, too – was now wearing a crash helmet.

It added, as Charles remarked, little to the decor of the cottage or to Timothy, but he refused to take it off. He also, having once renewed his acquaintance with Solomon and with us, hardly ever seemed to go home. We had Sheba on the wall busily informing people he Wasn’t Ours, Solomon stalking admiringly after him being a space cat, Timothy himself performing landings on the lawn from Mars…

Wunnerful how the little chap’d took to us, wasn’t it? said Father Adams, beaming benignly over the gate at the mêlée on his way to the Rose and Crown – which was all very well for him.

People didn’t tell him his little boy’s trousers were coming down. People didn’t tell him his little boy was calling them rude names in the lane, or encouraging a cat with a long black face to walk deliberately over their cars. People didn’t 138

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tell him they thought that helmet was bad for his little boy’s ears – to be met by the little boy retching realistically and sticking out his tongue. Everybody thought he was ours.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he appreciated the relationship, but he didn’t. He followed Charles around informing him scathingly that he couldn’t grow cabbages like his Granfer. Me he advised professionally that my rake was no good. Break he I would if Charlie-boy didn’t put a nail in h’n, he said. And when a little later the rake did indeed come off the handle and I tried to slink nonchalantly past with it hidden in a bucket – did Timothy avert his gaze and ignore it like a gentleman? Like heck he did. Told I, didn’t he? he said.

His one saving grace was his interest in nature, and even that had complications. Because when I pointed out the birds to him, and Charles told him about them making their nests – and then Charles, in an unguarded moment, told him of the collection of birds’ eggs he had had as a boy – we had fresh problems with Timothy. He wanted a collection, too.

In vain I tried to persuade him against it. All he said, while Charles looked suitably guilty, was that Charlie-boy did. The best I could do, as the die was cast, was to stipulate sternly that he must never damage a nest, never frighten the bird, never take more than one egg – and then only if there were at least three there already. And only, in any case, I said firmly, if he was going to be a Naturalist.

He was, he assured us. On a business basis, apparently, because next time I asked after his collection he said he had six hedge sparrow’s eggs already. Only one from each nest, he assured me as I clutched my head and groaned. But 139

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there were lots of them about, ’n’ if he swapped one with somebody who had, say, a spare moorhen’s egg, that would save him disturbing a moorhen, wouldn’t it?

It would also, I hoped, giving the scheme my dubious blessing, stop Timothy from falling in the pond – which was something Charles, nostalgically remembering his own childhood, hadn’t thought of.

As it was, spurred on by a book on birds which he’d persuaded Father Adams to buy for him, the next development was that Timothy started borrowing our stepladder to look at nests he’d spotted up the lane or in the woods, which meant that Charles or I – accompanied, of course, by Solomon; and, in the far, reproachful distance, Sheba – had to go with him to hold the ladder and prevent him breaking his neck.

That in itself wasn’t too bad. It was all quite local –

concentrated round a corner of the village where everybody thought we were nuts anyway. But one day Timothy turned up in a state of great excitement announcing that he’d found a hawfinch’s nest. Over by the church, he said it was; in a rather tall hawthorn, which meant taking the ladder – and, as the branches were prickly, please could he borrow the shears?

We all went on that expedition. I got roped in – hawthorns being rather tricky – to help hold the ladder. I didn’t mind that so much, but I did experience a qualm when we reached the church to find that Timothy had told us a little lie. That it wasn’t, he explained, quite right here after all, but some way down the lane.

I guessed what lay ahead of me, and I was right. A procession down the road with me trying to look as if I 140

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always went for walks carrying the rear ends of ladders.

Timothy wearing his crash helmet. The cats marching happily behind. People, as I pointed out, were looking at us even then – but it was no good telling Charles. He, re-living the halcyon days of youth, was a Naturalist too by this time. ‘Take no notice,’ he said.

So there – when we reached the tree and my final fears were realised; it was not in some corner of a hidden copse but hanging right over the road – I stood. Holding the ladder while Charles pruned out the branches, Timothy directed operations from the sideline, and the cats sat conspicuously on top.

Just about everybody passed us while we were there.

The doctor laughing his head off, old ladies raising their eyebrows, Sidney tapping his head. What they’d be saying about us in the village I could just imagine, but it didn’t worry Charles. Not, that was, until he came down out of the tree – there was nothing in the nest and it was, once more, a hedge-sparrow’s – and heard what Timothy had to say. He’d just remembered, he announced. Rector’d given he a talking-to yesterday about birds’-nesting. Did we think we should go back across the fields with the ladder – so nobody’d know we’d been? he said.

Spring, in spite of that little setback, still surged steadfastly on. Starlings started nesting in the eaves and Solomon, trying to climb a wall to see them, fell down and hurt his foot. I made some dandelion wine, which attracted all the ants in the neighbourhood who immediately started getting drunk in the greenhouse. The Rector’s cats got spring eczema and were going round self-consciously painted with Gentian Violet – which scared our two practically out 141

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of their points when they saw them. They thought it was Woad, they said.

We started going for walks after supper – round the village in the soft spring evenings, with the cats greeting people they hadn’t seen all winter Most Friendlily and people gazing apprehensively back. We went off for a few days by the sea to get our strength up for the summer – and when Solomon’s basket fell off its handle as we carried him into Halstock, there again was another sign. Woodworm on spring manoeuvres in the cover; the only part Solomon had left intact.

And finally – the one thing we needed to convince us that Spring was really with us – Tarzan the tortoise came back.

He appeared one day as magically as he had vanished, ambling down the garden helped by two excited paws. He didn’t half look thin to him, said Solomon, lying down when we appeared and squinting anxiously under his shell. What about giving him some rabbit? Found him in the garage, said Sheba, beaming proudly at Charles. Under that straw heap she’d been watching for days, and wasn’t she clever?

She was indeed. So was Charles, whose idea it subsequently was to paint a bull’s-eye on Tarzan’s back to match the cottage. White for the walls, he chanted, describing a neat lime-wash circle on his drab brown shell. Blue for the doors, he said, putting a small circle inside the first one while Timothy and the cats stood admiringly by. Now, he announced, we could never lose Tarzan. We could spot him anywhere he went. Even if he got out and wandered round the village, people would know he was ours.

Which was how, quite simply, we arrived at the next stage of our springtime saga. Visitors to the valley were apt to 142

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be surprised these days anyway, when at the top they met Hardy and Willis sporting purple whiskers. When, rounding the corner one morning, one of them then encountered Timothy in his crash helmet, a tortoise painted blue and white, Solomon – because at that moment Tarzan had stopped for a rest – looking worriedly underneath and Sheba, following them at a distance shouting that they were all very silly and had Better Come Right Back Home… he jumped, and turned quite pale.

That, said the villager with him, was the lot from Cats In The Belfry. The visitor mopped his brow. If he asked him, he said shakenly, we were ruddy well up the pole.

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FIFTEEN

Cats in May

It is Maytime now in the valley. The birds are singing; the lilac is in bloom; Solomon and Sheba are moulting; and

– judging by the ants in the greenhouse – our dandelion wine is a riot.

Timothy is still with us. Father Adams never got Fred Ferry’s summons after all. At the eleventh hour they united instead over a right of way running through some building land. Fred Ferry says he remembers distinctly using it when he were courting… Father Adams says so does he, and the elm tree is up there still… From the sentimental expressions they assume when they are talking about it I have a strong suspicion they are making it up, particularly since if they are successful it will result, according to Father Adams, in something unique even in this district – a footpath going 144

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through a house. Meanwhile, there being nothing like a good fight for his rights to put him in a good humour, he has arranged to keep Timothy for the summer. Do ’un a power of good, he explained when he broke the news to us, and he weren’t much trouble, were he?

We are resting now from the turmoil on the lawn.

Charles has just come back from a hayfield, where he has spent two hours looking for Timothy’s scout knife which he – Timothy, that is – and Solomon lost while they were being naturalists. Tossing it up they were, wept Timothy, when a jackdaw distracted their attention, and when they looked round it was gone.

I, as a further mark of Timothy’s zest to be a naturalist, am now a swallow’s Mum. One just a few days old which he found lying in the lane one night in the shelter of the barn and brought to me for succour. Much good did it do me, too, to say I didn’t know what to feed it on. ‘Flies caught on the wing,’ advised Timothy pontifically, without a thought of the sight which would have ensued had we taken his advice. Charles and I and the cats, catching swallow’s flies on the lawn.

It is, as a matter of fact, doing very nicely on boiled egg and biscuit crumbs. Fed every hour, of course, which means my taking it to town during the day, but what is that to Timothy? Or to my colleagues, to whose delight – with happy memories of Blondin – it feeds clinging to the front of my dress, looking open-beaked up at my mouth and taking egg from a matchstick with aplomb.

It lives, when we are home, in the bathroom – which is why Sheba is now sitting on the bathroom windowsill, imploring us piteously to open up. Thirsty she says she is, 145

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Cats in May

bawling so hard that already the Rector’s wife has stopped to ask if she is Well. So thirsty she can hardly speak… and we know she likes to drink from the washbasin…

But as Timothy says, we want the little swallow to grow up, don’t we? And fly, according to his bird book, away to Africa in the autumn? And come back again next year and nest in our roof instead of the starlings? And be a perishing nuisance for evermore, I think despondently. Throwing its fledglings down for me to look after – and I bet they all like egg.

I dare not say this openly, of course. We are all such naturalists now. Solomon, when I left a chicken in the kitchen this morning ready for the oven – and he, with a quick glance over his shoulder, nipped it into the yard –

was quite hurt when I said he’d stolen it. Fainted it had, he assured me sorrowfully. He’d taken it out for Air.

Solomon right now is lying in a deckchair, waiting for his tea and swatting – though not, I fear, with the swallow in mind – the gnatflies as they pass. Time we finished writing, he says – and probably he is right. Who, if we told them, would believe any more of our stories? About our getting a mate for Tarzan, for instance, at Timothy’s suggestion…

and what happened after that. Solomon in any case is tired

– and you know who really wrote this book? Not me, if you go by his expression. But a big, Seal-Pointed cat.

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Other titles from Summersdale Cats In May_Insides.indd 149

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Cats in the Belfry Doreen Tovey

£6.99 Pb

1 84024 452 6

‘It wasn’t, we discovered as the months went by, that Sugieh was particularly wicked. It was just that she was a Siamese.’

Animal lover Doreen and her husband Charles acquire their first Siamese kitten to rid themselves of an invasion of mice. But Sugieh is not just any cat. She’s an actress, a prima donna, an iron hand in a delicate, blue-pointed glove. She quickly establishes herself as queen of the house, causing chaos daily by screaming like a banshee, chewing up telegrams, and tearing holes in anything made of wool.

First published over forty years ago, this warm and witty classic tale is a truly enjoyable read for anyone who’s ever been owned by a cat.

‘If there is a funnier book about cats I for one do not want to read it. I would hurt myself laughing, might even die of laughter’

The Scotsman

‘Every so often, there comes along a book – or if you’re lucky books – which gladden the heart, cheer the soul...

Just such books are those written by Doreen Tovey’

Cat World

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The New Boy

Doreen Tovey

£6.99 Pb

1 84024 517 4

‘So there we were, driving along with an earth-box, a bag of turkey and, squalling his head off on my knee in Sheba’s basket, the new boy.’

The Toveys are no strangers to disaster, particularly the Siamese-related kind, but when their beloved Solomon dies unexpectedly, they’re faced with a completely new type of problem – do they find another cat to replace the one they’ve lost?

The animals always win in the Tovey household and this time is no exception. It is with the interests of Solomon’s (very audibly) grieving sister Sheba at heart that Doreen and Charles set off in search of Solomon Secundus, affectionately known as Seeley.

Joined by a myriad of endearing characters, Seeley ensures he’s living up to Solomon’s standards in just the amount of time it takes to fall in a fishpond. This is an enchanting tale that will tickle your funny bone and tug on your heartstrings all in the same breath.

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Chapter One

There was nothing, that last summer, to warn us of the sadness that lay so short a while ahead.

True, Sheba had been ill the previous autumn. ‘Kidney trouble’ the Vet had diagnosed after examining her. And when he told us gently that she was now an elderly cat, that her kidneys were very much enlarged but that with treatment and careful diet we might, if we were lucky, have her with us for another year – we were numbed at the prospect of the future without her.

For thirteen years life in our West Country cottage had been dominated by a pair of Siamese cats: Sheba, the clever one; tiny, blue-pointed and as fragile as a flower: Solomon, her noisy brother; seal-pointed, huge, our bumble-footed clown.

Every inch of the place held a memory of them doing something. Sheba playing tag with us on the coalhouse roof on a summer’s night, for instance. Hanging over the edge bawling she was Here, we weren’t to go in without her or Cats In May_Insides.indd 156

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Doreen Tovey

the Foxes might Get Her – and then, as we reached up to lift her down, retreating lightheartedly to another corner saying Ha! ha! That one fooled us, didn’t it? She wasn’t afraid of Foxes...

Or Solomon, dark-backed and seemingly as unmoving as a doorstop, peering stolidly through the gate when he knew we were keeping an eye on him. Always the adventurer was Solomon. Never within our boundaries if he could help it and, on the occasions when we had to go out and were watching him like security guards to make sure he didn’t get away (wipe a plate – out to check on him; put away a jug – out to check on him again), there he’d be sitting by the gate. Very ostentatiously With Us. Not a thought in his head about moving. Why on Earth, enquired the set of his back view, were we watching him Like That? And waiting, as well we knew, to vanish like Siamese lightning the moment we took our eyes off him.

One day, of course, we would have to lose them. The one dis-service animals render us is that they don’t live as long as we do. But cats live longer than dogs. We’d heard of Siamese of twenty and more. And not only had our two, until Sheba’s illness, gone through life with the enthusiasm of eternal kittens, but it seemed such a little while since they had been young.

I could reach out, it seemed, and almost touch them like it. Going down the lane at three months old with their mother and their brothers in the wheelbarrow... all the others in the wheelbarrow that is, and Solomon tagging tearfully along behind.

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The New Boy

wondering at the peculiar snicking noises, there was Solomon, mortified at being discovered, helping her by trying to bite her stitches out. The first time we took them to the Siamese cattery at Halstock after their mother had died and, as we left, they’d sat side by side in their big paved run, wistfully watching us go. They had the tips of their tails crossed, like children holding hands to give each other courage. They’d done that, said Mrs Francis, every time they sat out in their run...

Thirteen years had slipped by since then like May mist blown by the wind. The cats were seven when we acquired an eleven months’ old donkey and now Annabel was seven herself. As wayward as ever and there was no need to worry about her age, thank goodness. Donkeys live to twenty at least, and we had been told they could live to forty.

I worried about the cats, though. Being the world’s worst pessimist I always had done. I worried when they were ill.

I worried when they were out of sight. When Solomon was out of sight, at any rate, for Sheba very rarely strayed. I ran like a deer at the sound of a cat-fight, in case the loudest, most urgent of the howls should be (as they usually were) Solomon, having started the fracas, bawling for me to come to the rescue. Sometimes I ran when it wasn’t a cat-fight

– bursting through the door, shouting ‘SOLOMON!’ as I went, only to find that it was the boy who lived on the hill practising bird-calls, or visitors to the Valley calling their dogs.

Embarrassing though it was, it didn’t really bother me. I would have gone to the ends of the earth to rescue Solomon.

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the earth than any of the others, but because for me he was something very special.

I had never, for a moment, taken him for granted. In thirteen years I had never once seen him come round a corner or into a room with that dawdling, elegant walk of his, without marvelling at the perfection of his beauty. He had the proud, high-boned features of the East from which he came. His face shone like dusky silk. And if his slanted, sapphire eyes had faded a little with the years, they were the most loving, communicative eyes I have ever encountered in a cat.

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www.summersdale.com

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Document Outline

Also by Doreen Tovey:

Contents

Seen Him on Television?

Up Drains and at ’em

The Reason Why

Blondin