Cats In The Belfry

ELEVEN

Beshrewed

Sometimes we wondered what we had done to deserve those cats. Take, for instance, the American we met in Florence. It was all very well for her to stand in front of Lippi's portrait with her hands clasped in ecstasy, declaiming Browning's poem about him at the top of her voice. It was all very well for her to feel so deeply about Savonarola she nearly passed out at the first sight of St Mark's. She had time for such things. She wasn't so addled by a pair of slant-eyed tyrants that she'd booked her train reservations for the wrong day. She wasn't still suffering from the effects of the latest trip to the cattery with Sheba bawling to Charles to Spare Her every inch of the way and Solomon eating car rugs as hard as he could go. Her cats knew how to behave themselves.

She had three of them, all Siamese. In winter they lived graciously in a New York apartment and never dreamed of trying to tear the doors down to get out. In the summer, together with a Boxer, a 'cello, a sewing machine and her husband, who was a member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, they drove in an estate wagon up to Maine where they spent three happy months hunting in the New England woods.

They were simply wunnerful on the trip, she said. The only snag was that as it was a five-hundred-mile journey they had to stay at a motel overnight, and while dogs were allowed in motels they never knew how the proprietor might react to cats. They had overcome that, she said, by having three wicker travelling baskets made to look – we admired the touch – like Gladstone bags. When they arrived at the motel the cats were popped into the bags, cautioned to be quiet, and carried in with the luggage.

'And are they quiet?' I asked, with a horrible vision of Solomon being carried screaming into the cattery in his basket, long black paws flailing out of every hole he could find so that it looked as if we had captured an angry octopus.

'Oh sure,' she said. 'After they've cased the joint to make sure it's all right they settle down so quiet you'd never know they were there. They wanna go to Maine as much as we do.'

While we still had our mouths open she told us about Clancy. That, as she said herself, was really something. Clancy was a champion Siamese tom belonging to a friend of hers back home. He was handsome, he was affectionate, and he fathered such wonderful kittens that his services were in demand all over New York. The trouble was he had to eat so much raw beef to keep his strength up that his food bill was colossal, and nothing like balanced by his stud fees. It was a problem in economics that had Clancy's owner's husband, who was a stockbroker – of Scottish descent, said our friend, anxious that we shouldn't get the wrong angle – quite worried for a while. Then he found a solution. He opened a stockbroking account in Clancy's own name, all his stud fees were invested in it, and Clancy was now the richest cat on the New York Exchange. Didn't we think, she asked, finishing her coffee at a gulp – she had a busy afternoon ahead of her, buying tablecloths and seeing the place where Savonarola was burned – that that was wunnerful? We said it sure was.

Our cats might not be wizards of the Stock Market but there was little doubt that they would have made wonderful actors. Sheba could melt the stoniest heart with her fragile, wide-eyed innocence, deceptive though it was; and Solomon, when he was sitting down and you couldn't see his spindly legs, which were now so long he walked like a camel, could look unbelievably tragic.

As a combination they were irresistible, and well they knew it. Nobody would think, when we had visitors and they sat side by side on the hearth-rug with Sheba demurely reaching up to wash Solomon's ears and Solomon occasionally retaliating with an ­affectionate slurp that nearly knocked her off her feet, that right before the doorbell rang they had been fighting like a couple of alley cats over who was going to have first place on Charles's lap. Nobody would think – seeing them trotting meekly down the hill behind the Rector, who had for the umpteenth time that week found them sitting outside his front gate wailing that they were lost – that to their dear little minds it was the side-splitting equivalent of ringing doorbells and running away. Nobody except us, who had seen them marching determinedly up the hill in the first place, ignoring our appeals to come back and changing their pace to a forlorn meander before our very eyes as they rounded the corner.

And even we were flabbergasted when we heard that when we were at the office they could be seen in the hall window every afternoon at four-thirty, gazing wistfully up the hill and imploring passers-by to tell them when we were coming home. When we got in just after five they were always Sound Asleep in an armchair and there was such an exhibition of opening one eye, yawning and complete astonishment that we were back so soon that we could hardly believe it. Until we went home one night to find them Sound Asleep and the hall curtains lying in their water bowl. Nobody misses anything in the country and the woman who told us how that happened – it was just after four and Solomon, presumably limbering up for the show at four-thirty, was swinging upside down on one of the curtains like a monkey – said she hoped he hadn't hurt himself but he went down with an awful bang.

Solomon was all right. It was just that his weight – his favourite pastime just then was eating and he was, I regret to say, familiarly known as Podgebelly – had brought down not only the curtains but the blocks on which they were screwed to the wall as well. He was in any case not entirely to blame. He was only copying Sheba, who often swung upside down on the curtains to amuse Charles.

He was always copying Sheba. Brash though he was, always noisy, always in trouble – underneath it all Solomon was a small, wistful clown, valiantly striving to be most important and best at everything and pathetically conscious that he was not. Sheba, on the other hand, was a veritable prodigy. Frail and tiny as a flower, she could run like the wind, climb like a monkey, and had the stamina of an ox.

What Solomon envied most was her prowess as a hunter. Solomon was hopeless at hunting. Not because of any physical incapacity but because he just hadn't got a clue in his big, bat-brained head. His idea of catching mice in the garden wall was not, like Sheba, to lie patiently in wait for them. That, he said, was girl's stuff. He blew threateningly down the hole and then, when they wouldn't ­come out and fight like men, thrust in a long black paw and tried to hook 'em out.

Any time he did sit down with her to watch something – very impressive he looked too; head narrowed, dark nose pointing eagerly, every inch Rin-Tin-Tin on the trail – five minutes without action and Solomon was either sound asleep from sheer boredom or, with his head swivelled back to front, busy talking to a passing butterfly.

The result was that while his sister slaughtered mice and shrews by the dozen, Solomon never caught anything first-hand in his life. Unless you count his snake, which was quite six inches long, and he got so excited when he found it that he jumped on its tail instead of its head and it got away.

It was, we knew, his secret sorrow. The look on his face as he watched Sheba prancing and posturing with her trophies before laying them Eastern-fashion at our feet was pathetic. Sometimes, when he could bear it no longer, he would dawdle up on his long, sad, spidery legs, head down so that Sheba shouldn't see what he was carrying, and present us with a soggy leaf. Then he would sit down and look soulfully up into our faces, imploring us with all his small Siamese heart to make believe that he had caught something too. It was a heart-rending scene – marred only by the fact that the moment he managed to grab Sheba's booty away from her, Solomon was a different cat altogether.

Then, tossing it high into the air, leaping after it and catching it in his paws, flinging it spectacularly across the room – it was just as well to be out of range when he got to that stage; Charles once fielded a boundary right in his cup and it put him off tea for days – Solomon's ego was back with a bang.

It was His Mouse, he said, panting fiercely over the corpse at Sheba and daring her to pant back. But you couldn't catch Sheba out. She just sat smirking at Charles saying didn't Solomon look silly showing off like that and it was only an old one anyway. It was His Mouse, he said, crouching defensively over it when the Rector called – adding, quite untroubled by conscience, that he'd Caught It All Himself. He went on yelling about it being his mouse until either everybody was fed to the teeth and Sheba went and sat on a door or else, taking him completely by surprise – on one occasion indeed frightening him so much he leapt several feet into the air – the mouse got up and ran away.

Once it happened with a field mouse which, while Solomon was telling the milkman how he caught it, nipped smartly round the corner and under a cupboard door. We never did find out what happened to that one, except that the next time Charles took his duffel coat out of the cupboard all the toggles fell off.

It happened several times with shrews. What with live ones looking for the way out and dead ones tucked tidily under the hall rug by Sheba – she was pressing them, she said, for her collection, and it didn't matter if we stepped on them one bit – in the end we got to know quite a lot about shrews.

Before we had the cats I had only seen one live shrew in my life, and that was the one which came tearing round the corner where I had just dug away a flower border from the side of the cottage, only to discover that he no longer had a home to go to. I can see him now scuttling to and fro on the cobbles, searching incredulously for his front door, and me scuttling conscience-stricken behind him, wondering whether it was safe to pick him up and help him find a new one. Some people said shrews were so nervous they died if you touched them. Others said they bit. I never learned who was right from that one. In the end my nerve failed me and I went indoors while he made up his own mind what to do. I learned soon enough when we had Solomon and Sheba, though. Shrews bite.

Both Charles and I were bitten at different times. I by one which Solomon had delightedly cornered in the kitchen after its first escape – he was talking to it and when I put out a nervous hand to pick it up that must have been the last straw; squealing with rage it leapt fiercely at me and bit me in the finger. And Charles by one which, as it looked a little battered, we had put in a box lined with leaves and grass and locked in the bathroom to see if it would revive. It did. When Charles went in to look at it a while later it was trying, mad with temper, to climb out of the box, and when he put out a helping hand he got bitten too. He yelled so hard that Sheba, who was looking under the bathroom door at the time, fled out of the house in terror and up the damson tree, Solomon hid under the bed and I dropped the pastry bowl. Not that a shrew's bite is very big, of course. Hardly more than a pin-prick. It was just, said Charles, appearing with a large strip of sticking plaster round his finger and the shrew, ready for release, bouncing furiously up and down in the toe of a sock, that it was so unexpected.

Even more unexpected was the shrew that actually lived with us for four days. This was a good deal later, when Sheba, finding that if she came in with anything alive we took it away from her, had developed the habit of sneaking her trophies up on to our bed. There she could do her nature study against a background of nice clean eiderdown, with the advantage that when she heard us coming she had only to pick up her victim and dive under the bed and we couldn't touch her. This particular shrew, however, she took up to the bed while there was still somebody in it. Aunt Louisa. (Although we had only the two cats now we still put guests in our room and slept in the spare room ourselves. It saved a lot of argument with Solomon.) And Aunt Louisa, when she saw the shrew, let out such a scream that Sheba, who was normally as imperturbable as an iceberg, dropped it in amazement and it got away.

I know all about shrews eating several times their own weight of food a day and it being impossible to keep them in captivity. Sidney, who has a natural countryman's interest in such things, told me he had seen it on the Telly. Impossible or not, that shrew appeared so often during the next four days even Sheba began to look shaken when she saw it. Upstairs – cruising like a small grey submarine across the landing or through the bedrooms. Downstairs – ambling airily out from under the chest or the cupboard door and across the carpet. We never caught it, though it never hurried. Charles refused to touch any of Sheba's shrews now, without gloves, and by the time he had fetched them – I refused to touch it at all – it had always vanished, while the cats were so embarrassed they had obviously decided the best thing to do was to ignore it.

Several times when I went to change Solomon's earth-box I found it lurking under the rim. Charles said that was probably how it kept alive, eating worms and insects out of the earth-box. That seemed unlikely. If there were any worms or insects around Solomon would have eaten them himself. It put a new responsibility on me, though. Not wishing to have its death on my conscience, every time I changed the box I felt obliged to put down a handful of grass as well.

Aunt Louisa said I took after Grandma and both of us were crazy. Solomon enquired indignantly how he could ignore what was under his earth-box if I fed it right under his nose and said that until it went he was going to use the garden. Charles took to surreptitiously shaking his shoes in the morning before he put them on. We felt like running up the Union Jack when, on the evening of the fourth day, the shrew ambled down the porch step and out of our lives for ever.