Cats In The Belfry

FOURTEEN

The Great Pheasant Mystery

There was a time when our garden was practically a naturalist's paradise. Jackdaws nested in our chimney. If during the breeding season we never got a wink of sleep after daybreak, what with first the parents getting up and talking to one another and later on four or five youngsters hissing non-stop for breakfast only a brick's width from our ears – what, as Charles said, was that compared with the sight of a black feathered rear sticking trustfully out of our chimney pot while its owner fed the offspring underneath?

Thrushes, bursting with confidence, banged their snails on our path till it sounded like a blacksmith's and looked like a cockle-stall at Southend. Blackbirds, joining us for meals on the lawn and heaving worms out of the ground like lengths of elastic, put more visitors off their food than we could count. One year – just, according to my grandmother, to show how Mother Nature trusted us – we even had a baby cuckoo on our doorstep. Every morning when I opened the front door it was squatting on the porch, close up to the milk-bottle. We never knew why – unless it was lonely and thought the bottle was another cuckoo. It never attempted to get at the milk and as soon as I brought the bottle indoors it flapped and fluttered round to the back where it sat all day on a heap of stones, watching us stolidly through the kitchen window.

Even when it was being fed by a depressed-looking hedge-sparrow that soon had to hover in mid-air to get anywhere near that cavernous mouth it still watched us. We were jolly glad when it grew up and went off to Africa. My grandmother, bitterly disappointed because we wouldn't let her rear it at home – it reminded her of Gladstone, she said, and Aunt Louisa could easily have fed it – said we didn't deserve the trust of innocent little creatures. Charles said innocent little creatures be blowed – the way that damned thing had watched his every move for weeks he felt so furtive he expected to be arrested by Scotland Yard every time he set foot outside the door.

It was interesting all the same. What with the cuckoo, the robin that used to come in and perch on a chair while we ate and the woodpecker that went a bit queer in the head and started pecking a hole in a nearby telegraph pole in the middle of winter – we watched that entranced for days until somebody told the Post Office about it and they came out and tacked a metal plate over the hole – we saw ourselves as budding Ludwig Kochs. And then we had the cats.

After that the sensible birds gave the cottage a wide berth. Any time they had to fly over our territory when the cats were about they zoomed smartly up at the front gate and flew over at ceiling height until they reached the back. The jackdaws persevered for a while but even they gave up when Sheba climbed the chimney stack one day and looked meaningly at them through the cowl. The only bird that came near us when the cats were about – and he disappeared pretty smartly when Sheba looked round the corner – was the blackbird who used to play with Solomon. At least the blackbird was playing, as birds sometimes do – flying low over Solly's head as he crossed the lawn, uttering mocking little cries and perching enticingly on the wall. Solly wasn't. He went after him like a Wimbledon champion, leaping spectacularly through the air with his paws going in all directions.

That, actually, was where the blackbird made his mistake. He had obviously watched Solomon hunting mice in the garden and summed him up as a blockhead who couldn't catch anything. He hadn't seen him indoors, practising with ping-pong balls and flies. Solomon with a ping-pong ball was a joy to watch. Sheba had what Charles loftily described as a typically female way of trying to catch things. When we threw a ball in the air for her she leapt hazily towards it, waved her paws and missed. It was surprising when you considered her prowess with mice – no less surprising than the fact that Solomon, who couldn't catch anything on the ground to save his life, could shoot through the air like an arrow and field anything we threw between his front paws while still in flight.

It was his only talent and he made the most of it. When we wouldn't throw balls for him, or rolled-up silver paper, he went round swatting flies. It was a little disturbing to have a cat continually sailing through the air as if he were Anton Dolin, particularly since he invariably came down again like a bomb, but it got rid of the flies. It also – though the blackbird didn't know it then – made it rather dangerous for little birds to make fun of him. One day, after a particularly good practice with a meat-fly, Solomon went out, leapt smartly into the air, and fielded two feathers out of old Smart-Alec's tail.

We knew the blackbird got away. We saw him with our own eyes, streaking down the valley as if the spooks were after him. Not, however, according to Solomon. He spent the rest of the evening swaggering round the place in a style we knew only too well – Charles called it Podgebelly's panther walk – with his head down, two black feathers sticking out of the corner of his mouth and a look which inferred that if you wanted to know where the rest of the bird was, he had it inside.

When he went to bed that night and the owls began to hoot across in the woods he got up and stalked to the window. There was a time, when he was a kitten, when he was scared of the owls and used to back rapidly under the bedclothes when they started up, but not now. Face pressed to the glass, his camel-like rear hunched threateningly in the air, he told them exactly what he'd do to them if they didn't shut up. Eat them and put their tails with the blackbird's.

Often in the days that followed I remembered Aunt Ethel's prediction that Solomon would grow up not quite right in the head. Watching him leaping round the lawn, shadow-boxing – on the strength of two blackbird's feathers – everything that flew over from a sparrow to an aeroplane, I wondered which of us would end up in a straitjacket first. Solomon or me.

When he went out of the door now it was on his stomach, in case there was one round the corner. When he patrolled the garden – with reproving glances at the potting shed where Sheba, he said, made far too much noise talking to Sidney and frightened them away – it was with the narrowed eye and stealthy tread of the hunter. When he slept before the fire, stomach up to catch the heat, it was no longer the deep, tranquil sleep of somebody with nothing but crab sandwiches on his mind; he caught dream birds so energetically it looked as if he had St Vitus's dance.

They were the only birds he did catch. No live ones ever came within swatting distance again. To make up for it, if there was a dead bird lying around within a mile radius, Solomon brought that home instead.

Sometimes it was very dead – like the crow that must have been shot quite a month before and nearly fell to pieces when Solomon laid it triumphantly on the carpet. We picked that up in a shovel and returned it hurriedly to the woods – better make sure it was off our premises, said Charles; we didn't want anybody thinking Solomon had killed it. Actually I thought Charles was being a bit over-cautious there. Even Solomon's greatest admirer could hardly have believed him capable of shooting a crow with a twelve-bore shot gun. But I said nothing. It didn't make much difference anyway. The next day the crow was back again.

By A Great Stroke of Luck, said Solomon, laying it lovingly on the carpet where it positively vibrated with age, he had gone another way through the woods than was his wont, and there it was under some leaves. Nice, wasn't it? he demanded, licking a limp-looking feather carefully into place and settling down possessively beside it. Almost as good as new. He was going to Keep It For Ever and Ever, he added loudly, looking round to make sure that Charles was listening. But Charles, holding his nose, had already gone for the disinfectant.

After that Charles listened to me and Solomon's trophies went in the dustbin, with the lid hammered on so that he couldn't get them out again. He tried hard enough. He practically did a skiffle act all on his own, scratching frantically at the lid and wailing loudly for his fowl's head he'd discovered on Father Adams's rubbish heap and his pigeon's wing that he'd found up the lane.

Charles said if the crow had been dead a month, the pigeon must have died during the Roman occupation – but smell didn't worry Solomon. The more it reeked, the more ghastly the specimen looked, the better he was pleased. So long, that was, as he had found it himself. If we gave him something that wasn't perfectly fresh – meat bought one day, for instance, and offered to him for supper on the next – he stared at us in horror and said surely we didn't expect him to eat That. Sheba was just as bad. Trying to Poison Us, she would wail, reeling dramatically back at the first unbelieving sniff. After which they would go and sit forlornly side by side on the garden wall, asking passers-by in sad, small voices whether they had any spare food on them, or knew of a good home for two little cats that nobody wanted.

Weekends were the worst. Often by the time we got to Sunday night I was at my wits' end over feeding those animals. I might buy two pounds or more of perfectly fresh meat on Friday – and by Saturday lunchtime, if it was a warm day, they refused to touch it. Fish was out for the same reason. They wouldn't even eat that for Saturday breakfast. Tinned cat food set their ears on edge with horror. Siamese never ate that, they announced. Not even in an emergency. Best tinned beef or veal was acceptable for one meal. After that, that too was out. Siamese, they said, marching sadly out to the wall in dignified procession, needed Variety.

Week after week Sheba, looking so fragile it practically brought tears to my eyes, even though I knew she was putting it on, ate nothing at all on Sundays, while Solomon existed ostentatiously on All Bran. Our hearts sank every time we saw the open cupboard and the tell-tale packet on the floor with the hole hungrily torn in its side – mute reminders of the fact that we Weren't Feeding Them Properly. Wistfully we remembered Blondin – happy as a king with a couple of nuts and a slice of orange... his only vices a passion for trouser buttons and a tendency to stick his tongue hopefully down the spout of the teapot when nobody was looking… With a sigh of regret for the past we went out and ordered a refrigerator.

The day it arrived, a bright, gleaming symbol of their victory in the fight for fresher food for Siamese, Solomon – sometimes it seemed there was no end to the trouble that cat could cook up for us – brought home his biggest trophy yet. Irving himself couldn't have devised a more effective entrance. The men on their knees in the kitchen fixing the wires; myself making a friendly cup of tea; Sheba sitting, wide-eyed and inquisitive, right in front as usual and one of the men asking her jocularly whether she thought it was going to be big enough to keep her mice in; Charles working out how many bottles of beer it would hold – and suddenly Solomon, his eyes shining like stars above a cloud of feathers, his long thin legs spread wide to avoid the trailing wings, staggering in with a big cock-pheasant.

You could have cut the silence with a knife as he laid it at my feet and cuffed a stray feather off his nose. The men looked at one another under the peaks of their caps. We knew what they were thinking – that they'd happened on a neat little poaching set-up where we used Siamese cats instead of dogs and, poachers being what they were, the sooner they happened out of it again the better.

Charles tried hard to mend matters by explaining about Solomon's habit of bringing dead things home from the woods. Giving the body a nonchalant push with his foot he said Ha! Ha! Like the old crow he brought home he supposed – fell to pieces the moment you touched it. This one didn't fall to pieces. It rolled over with a solid, healthy thud, whereupon Solomon leapt at it with a fiendish yell and warned it to get up again if it dared. The men, scared out of their wits, finished as hurriedly as they could and fled. They hardly spoke another word to us, but as their van leapt away up the lane a hushed voice floated out through the window. No wonder they wanted a refrigerator, it said.

One thing we did know. Wherever Solomon had got the pheasant he hadn't caught it himself. A blackbird's tail-feathers were one thing – but a bird that size would only have had to flap its wings at him and he'd have been up the nearest tree screaming for the fire brigade.

He might have stolen it from somebody's larder. It was equally possible that one of the local game-keepers had dropped it over the gate as a present in passing, as country people, shy of receiving thanks, sometimes do – and that Solomon had simply picked it up and brought it in.

We never knew the answer. For two days it lay hidden under the bath with Solomon trying to batter the door down and Charles alternately saying that it ­seemed a shame to waste it and that men had been sent to Botany Bay for less. We hoped somebody might drop a clue as to where it had come from, but they didn't. If it had come out of somebody's larder it was, as Charles said, quite obvious that it hadn't got there legitimately either. We dared not make enquiries for fear, if it wasn't a present, of branding Solomon as a poacher. Having spent every waking moment since the day he was born trying to impress people with his toughness it was, after all, only natural for them to believe him.

On the second night therefore – since, quite apart from conscience, we could hardly eat a bird which might (if one followed another line of thought) have died from poisoning, we crept out after dark with the body wrapped in a bag, walked two miles into the hills, and regretfully buried it in a ditch.