Cleo

Absence

A cat seizes opportunities whenever they arise.

Cleo was on edge, as if a low-grade electric current was running through her fur. Whiskers twitching, she paced the carpet. Up, down, under the table and back again. When a car hummed down the street, she froze and flattened her ears. Once the car had gone she’d regained her composure and resumed her carpet patrol. Our next-door neighbor’s son shouted to a friend. She arched her back and sank her claws in the rug.

She kept returning to the desk under my bedroom window, which had the best view of the street. Its gravitational force pulled her back, and back again to survey our front garden and the houses across the road. At the sound of a bird’s call she sprang up on the desk and wove through the curtains to peer out. She then dropped back to the floor with a disappointed thud. The clatter of a distant rubbish tin and she was back on the desk again, scanning the neighborhood before jumping down again to resume her restless stride.

Th en the sound she’d been waiting for—the click of the front gate. Bounding on the desk and through the curtains, she stared intensely at the figure approaching the house. Her tail unfurled and quivered with delight. She sprang to the floor and sped down the hallway toward the front door squeaking mews of delight.

When I opened the door to Philip, Cleo lunged at him and stretched her front paws up his thighs.

“She’s been waiting for you,” I said, as he gathered her in his arms. Cleo clambered up his fisherman’s jumper, licked his neck and burrowed under his chin. Not since Cleopatra made up with Mark Antony had a reunion been so loving.

The children’s welcome was more cautious. Lydia glanced up from a wooden jigsaw puzzle she was working on with an expression that implied a certain amount of groveling would be required if she was ever to take Philip seriously again. Rob emerged from his bedroom door and nodded politely.

As weeks melted into months, warmth and trust gradually returned. The bond we’d had before grew even stronger. Even though I tried to keep part of my heart cordoned off in case it was shattered again there was no doubt I loved—we all loved—Philip.

Late one Sunday afternoon he bundled us all—including Cleo—into his car.

“Where are we going?” I had a longtime aversion to secrets and surprises.

“You’ll see.”

With Cleo perched on Rob’s knee and Lydia beside them, the atmosphere in the backseat was surprisingly genial.

“Are you taking us to a circus?” Lydia asked. Her latest ambition was to become what she called an “upside down lady” in a pink sequin bodysuit and matching feathers hanging from the roof of a circus tent.

“Not this time,” Philip replied. I was impressed how quickly he’d learned parents’ language—using the word “no” sparingly.

“What are we going to the museum for?” Rob asked as we turned into the botanic gardens that lead up to the museum.

“You’ll find out.”

Philip drew to a halt in the same parking lot I’d used that evening we’d first met. He asked us to wait in the car for a minute and disappeared up the steps.

“Are we going to see dinosaurs?” Lydia asked.

“We can’t,” Rob replied, “it’s too late. The museum’s closed.”

“That’s right,” I added. “It’s nearly sunset.”

A gold medallion sun sank in cotton-candy clouds. Long shadows stretched from the columns in front of the museum. It was a perfect night, an almost exact replica of how it had been when we first set eyes on each other. It didn’t take much to envisage the bridal party standing on the steps and that powerful surge of recognition at the sight of my handsome army boy. I still wasn’t certain if my physical reaction had been the result of a cosmic explosion of soul mates colliding—or simply undiluted lust.

Philip reappeared and beckoned us to follow him up the steps. We clambered out of the car. Normally, Rob would have left Cleo in the backseat, but he seemed to sense something momentous was about to happen. He carried her up the steps, while I took Lydia’s hand.

To my surprise, Philip was standing where I’d first seen him, in a shaft of evening sun slightly to the right of the museum doors.

“There’s something I want you to see,” he said, standing aside and holding out his hand. He seemed to be pointing toward a concrete window frame so recessed and steeped in shadow it was difficult to notice anything unusual about it. I was beginning to wonder if Philip wasn’t as straightforward as I’d imagined.

“Look closer,” he smiled.

To my astonishment, hidden in the deepest recess of the window was a small navy blue box. Inside the box was a diamond ring. In front of Rob, Lydia and Cleo, he slid it on my finger.

“How did you get the right size?” I asked, appalled at my lack of romance but genuinely impressed.

“Stole a ring from your jewelry box. Hoped you wouldn’t notice. Did you?”

I shook my head. It was impossible to answer. I was too busy choking back happy tears.

We agreed a long engagement would suit us all under the circumstances. No date was set, but we thought a year or so would give the family time to become fully integrated. I was only 36 and there was plenty of time if (heaven forbid) Philip felt the need to have a child from his own biological blueprint. Even though I felt sheepish telling crusty journalistic friends I was embarking on an engagement long enough to satisfy Jane Austen, it seemed the best way to go about things. This was no normal marriage. It was a union between one man, three people and a cat. All parties needed to feel comfortable.

I was just getting used to the idea of wearing an engagement ring when an important-looking envelope arrived in the post.

“Cambridge must be crazy!” I said, passing Philip the letter. “They’ve accepted me.”

He laughed, folded me in his ridiculously sinewy arms and said he always knew they would. The timing was perfect in many ways. He’d just been accepted into the Swiss business school IMD to study for an MBA (sometimes I wondered if he might be planning to drown in a sea of initials). Once I’d finished the Cambridge fellowship, the kids and I could join him in Lausanne for the rest of the year…

Cambridge. Switzerland. It couldn’t possibly work. I’d have to leave Rob and Lydia in New Zealand for three months—and Cleo for an entire year! It was impossible. I’d write back to the university, thank them for their generosity and decline.

But Philip urged me not to turn them down. When would another opportunity like this turn up? Steve and Mum agreed with him. Mum offered to look after the children for the first month I was away, and Steve would have them for the remaining two. Cleo gazed at me steadily. Was she daring me to go or stay?

After Cambridge, Lydia would join us in Switzerland and learn French (people said it would be a breeze). Rob said he’d rather stay in his New Zealand high school and visit us during holidays. It was a wild, unrealistic plan with more hidden potential for disaster than an Angolan minefield. We decided to do it.

Cleo helped us interview people willing to rent the house while we were away. First on the doorstep was Jeff, a clean-cut accountant in a blue and white checked shirt. He seemed charming, but Cleo hissed at him and hid under a chair. An hour later Virginia, an aromatherapist, arrived in a haze of silk scarves and patchouli oil. Cleo eyeballed Virginia from a vantage point on top of the bookshelves. When Cleo insisted on claiming higher ground over someone like that it was never a good sign. Lines would be drawn in the litter box. Threats would be exchanged. A battle of wills was bound to follow. I’d already explained to her over the phone that the cat was part of the deal, in fact probably the more important part.

Virginia glowered back at Cleo and said, “One of the reasons I was attracted to aromatherapy was that cats make me sneeze. However, I’ve discovered that if a cat is given weekly baths in lavender oil my sneezing problem practically vanishes. Th en I just have to deal with watering eyes, but homeopathy could be…” I let Virginia drone on as she drained her cup of peppermint tea, then thanked her for her interest.

Personally I warmed to Audrey, a flamboyantly dressed woman in search of a setting to begin her new life since her husband had run off with a massage therapist of undetermined gender. She turned pink with pleasure when I admired the magnificent necklace draped in layers over her breasts. It was a cross between one of those ribbons police stretch around crime scenes and something I’d seen hanging in my cousin’s cowshed. An Italian designer piece, she said, created by a one-armed artist whose work was gaining value by the day.

Our house, she said, was perfect because there was plenty of room for her to dabble in her weekend hobby, sculpturing massive genitalia out of polystyrene, assuming we didn’t mind her transforming Rob’s bedroom into a studio. Fortunately, Rob wasn’t home to have an opinion. As Audrey stood in Rob’s doorway mentally erasing his model airplane collection and replacing it with monoliths of passion, a shadow flicked between her ankles. Audrey’s reflexes were fast enough for her to snare Cleo and press her to her bosom.

“Oh, a pussy!” she boomed. “A house isn’t a home without a furry friend like you!”

Cleo didn’t share Audrey’s enthusiasm for a bonding session. In fact, she was more interested in Audrey’s necklace than Audrey. She raised a paw and patted a silver bauble inquisitively.

“I think perhaps you should put her back down,” I suggested nervously.

“Nonsense! Pussy knows I adore cats, doesn’t he?”

“She’s a she, actually…”

As I tried to disengage Cleo from the necklace, she caught the bauble between her teeth and crunched. Like the first boulder in an avalanche, it tumbled to the ground. In an unstoppable flow of slow motion the bauble was then followed by a cascade of beads, gems and ribbon. Audrey shrieked. Not even the one-armed master would be capable of restoring the pile of festive rubble that now lay at her feet.

Audrey declined my offer to string the beads together again, or at least find somebody who might be able to. I grabbed an old supermarket bag and shoved what was left of the artwork into it. She was gracious enough to leave without strangling me. Or Cleo.

I was starting to feel desperate. Was nobody right for Cleo? Finally Andrea, a young doctor with green eyes and a froth of dark curls, arrived. She swore she was a cat person and would take good care of Cleo. She didn’t try to seduce Cleo as others had and failed. She simply looked around the house and asked questions in an easygoing way. As Andrea stood to leave, Cleo arched her back in a sensuous curve and invited Andrea to pat her. With our cat’s paw print of approval, we signed Andrea up.

I knew that as well as being capable of great affection Cleo was tough and independent, a survivor. Nevertheless, I worried. Sinking my nose into her fragrant fur, I prayed we’d see her again. The prospect of leaving the kids for three months was like chopping an arm off and putting it in the freezer. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t going to be an amputation like losing Sam, but a mere putting on ice. Mum and Steve assured me the children would be fine, especially with Anne Marie’s help. I knew all three of them loved Rob and Lydia, but they couldn’t provide that unique combination of neuroticism and adoration that is a mother’s love. They kept telling me three months would fly. Philip assured me he was going to be engrossed by his pressure-cooker MBA squeezing a two-year course into one.

Cambridge has been home to the best of Britain’s grey matter for centuries. Being clever people, the inhabitants have arranged to live in one of the most picturesque towns on earth. Its thirty-one colleges, ancient and modern, are tossed loosely together around the river Cam, which can be sluggish or romantic, depending on its mood. Even on that first day in the knifelike January air, the beauty of Cambridge dragged me out of internal melodrama. The turrets of King’s College Chapel pointed skywards with such delicacy they were surely fashioned by bees, not human hands.

“Miss Brown, we’re expecting you,” said a voice that sounded as if it came directly from God. It carried knowledge, power, authority—and belonged to the college porter.

Something about the porter reassured me I was part of his scene now and everything would be okay. After he showed me to a large, comfortable room overlooking four fruit trees, I spread photos of the children, Philip and Cleo on every available shelf. And burst into tears.

Everything about Cambridge was unfamiliar. Back home, January is one of the hottest months of the year. Even though I knew England was going to be cold, I hadn’t imagined the chill would penetrate every form of clothing and footwear I owned. The English version of the sun dragged itself out of bed at half-past seven and hovered in the air like a reluctant twenty-watt bulb before collapsing into the gloom around three p.m.

Nevertheless, I adored the oldness of Cambridge. The cobblestones, the creaking colleges, the dreaminess of boy soprano voices wafting towards what must surely be heaven at Evensong in King’s College Chapel (which, by the way, is nothing short of a cathedral). I loved the quirkiness of Cambridge and its adherence to rules so ancient nobody can remember why they exist. Only college Fellows are allowed to walk on the grass (though I never dared, in case I was the wrong sort of Fellow). Because most of Cambridge’s rules serve no apparent practical purpose, there’s a pleasant tolerance of odd behavior. If, for instance, a professor turns up at a formal dinner wearing a diving suit and mask (it was rumored one had) he was simply adhering to some tradition nobody else could recall.

Everywhere I went in Cambridge there were cats. Being hopelessly cat-sick, I tried to befriend the fat marmalade feline who sat on the brick wall behind the fruit trees. He scurried away at the sight of me.

One day I saw a black tail disappearing around the corner of an ancient church. My heart leapt in recognition. Logically, I knew it wasn’t Cleo, but maybe the creature carried some of her spirit. But by the time I’d clambered over the slippery paving down the side of the church the cat had disappeared.

A smug tortoiseshell stretched himself in front of a professor’s open fire and yawned. He opened one eye, licked his chops, ran a lazy paw over one ear and fell asleep. His claws snapped open and shut. His tail twitched. No doubt he was dreaming of mice.

Homesickness was such a full-time job during the first few weeks there was hardly time for research. I wrote to Philip, sent postcards and letters on tape to the children every day. Cleo made regular appearances in my dreams. One night I saw her three times the size of the Ardmore Road house. With her head resting on the chimney, she stretched her front paws around the windows and meowed. Her meow was like the roar of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. Maybe it was her way of saying she was safe and fulfilling her duty as protector of the home. Unable to sleep, I pulled on two pairs of socks and stumbled down the stairs. The one black phone that house residents shared was mercifully free. I listened for the pulse of the phone ringing at the other end and was about to hang up when someone answered.

“Andrea?” I shouted.

“What time is it?” she mumbled in a voice heavy with sleep.

“Sorry. Have I woken you?”

“It’s all right.” Damn. I had woken her up. “I was sleeping in. It’s Saturday morning. Where are you?”

“Still in the UK. I was just wondering how Cleo, I mean, you are getting on. Any problems with the cat, I mean house?”

“I had a rugged night,” she replied. “Cleo jumped through the skylight onto my bed when I was fast asleep. It was terrifying. I thought she was a burgler.”

That was the start of a series of phone calls across the globe focusing on the topic of an eccentric black cat. Andrea soon discovered Cleo’s three great passions: expensive items, anything made with love, and stolen goods.

“I was heading out to work the other morning when my handbag—not the cheap copy I bought in Bangkok, the genuine Gucci one—anyway, it seemed extra heavy,” she said. “Lucky I looked inside. Cleo was curled up in there! She looked all expectant, like she was sure I was taking her to work with me. She loves that bag. But honestly, how can she tell the difference between the copy and the genuine article?”

She’d always had a nose for quality. If Cleo was looking for something to sharpen her teeth on she’d favor cashmere over wool, Egyptian cotton over polyester, leather over plastic, even high-class expensive plastic.

The next phone call featured the tablecloth Andrea’s mother had embroidered for her twenty-first birthday present. Andrea had arrived home one evening to find Cleo had dragged it off the table and was curled up asleep on it.

“She” s got this sixth sense,” I explained apologetically. “She knows when something’s been made with love.”

A few weeks later Andrea complained the laces of her running shoes, left and right feet, had disappeared.

“Go into the garden and look in the ferns behind the goldfish pond,” I said.

Following instructions Andrea discovered not only both shoelaces (soggy and frayed) but several socks she” d assumed had been stolen off the clothesline by a neighborhood foot fetishist.

“I’m so sorry,” I echoed across the oceans. “I didn’t realize she was going to be such a handful.”

Andrea was surprisingly forgiving. In fact, she” d found Cleo so interesting she” d enrolled in night classes in animal behavior.

“Cleo has classic separation anxiety,” she said. “She needs lots of activities to make her more independent. I’ve bought her a few toys to keep her occupied. They seem to be helping, but she still prefers my shoelaces. As for jumping up on the table…”

“We’ve tried to stop her, Andrea, but she thinks she runs the joint.”

“Well, I’ve developed the perfect solution. A water pistol.”

“You squirt her?”

“Only when she’s up on the table. Right up the backside. She’s a fast learner.”

I felt like the mother of a delinquent child receiving reports from its correctional institution. Nevertheless, Andrea was obviously fond of Cleo and it sounded like her methods were working. I wasn’t going to complain if she ironed out some of our cat’s quirks in our absence.

The next time we spoke Andrea told me about the personal trainer she’d hired. Roy visited the house twice a week and, according to Andrea, Cleo always knew when it was Tuesday or Thursday—a Roy Day. She waited in the front window until Apollo in a tracksuit opened the front gate. She then bounced to the front door, eager to find out what he’d brought her to play with this time—stretchy bands, balls? The moment Roy unfurled his exercise mat on the floor Cleo spread herself on it and rolled on her back, stretching her arms and legs, flicking her head side to side, watching for Roy’s admiration.

“Anyone would think Roy’s been hired for Cleo’s fitness training,” Andrea grumbled with (thank heavens) a smile in her voice, but she did confess to feeling resentful at times. Whenever Roy engaged Andrea in a particularly harrowing set of sit-ups, Cleo would upstage her by burrowing her head under the exercise mat or engaging Roy in her version of wrestling—wrapping her paws around his ankles and kicking him with her hind legs.

Upside down, her toes clinging to the Swiss ball while she attempted twenty-five push-ups, Andrea could sense Roy’s attention wandering to the feline flirting with him from behind the curtains. Roy was a self-confessed dog person, but he was beginning to change his mind. He asked Andrea where he could get a cat like that. She recommended house-sitting for unusual families who’d taken off overseas.

Even though Cambridge opened fascinating new worlds to me, nothing surpassed the joy of reuniting with Lydia and Philip after three months. On the pretext of having important business in Ireland, wonderful Mary, the fashion reporter, accompanied Lydia from New Zealand. Lydia rewarded her by throwing up orange juice on Mary’s jacket as the plane flew out of Auckland.

We met at Heathrow before flying to Geneva and boarding a train that wove along the lake front. The train stopped briefly at chocolate-box villages on its way to the medieval town of Lausanne.

I promised five-year-old Lydia she’d adore her new school and would be speaking French in no time. Wrong on both counts. Apart from having a regime as rigid as the Swiss Alps, the Swiss school was a nightmare for Lydia. She couldn’t understand a word anyone said. As we staggered up the vertical path to the local primary school every morning, I tried to divert her attention to rows of tulips standing to attention alongside the path, or the Alps sprinkled with icing-sugar snow across the lake. She always had a “sore tummy” by the time we reached the school gates. I hated leaving her red-faced and in tears as I abandoned her to the care of her teacher. Madame Juillard’s kindness turned out to be a form of inadvertent cruelty. She spoke to the class in French, then repeated everything in English for Lydia. As a result, Lydia remained unable to communicate with her classmates.

The one subject Lydia excelled in was swimming, due to long summers spent on New Zealand beaches. The Swiss sports teacher was intrigued by the Antipodean tadpole. Despite the humiliation of a preswim shower and the insistence on a bathing cap being worn at all times, Lydia could slap out a length of the indoor pool in her deep-sea overarm. Unable to relate to the wild freedom that creates a young surfer, the teacher amused us by suggesting Lydia had a future as a synchronized swimmer.

While I was flat-out failing to meet the standards of Swiss hausfrau-hood, Philip slogged through punishing hours at business school. On one of his rare days off when we were sailing up a mountain slope in a gondola not much bigger than a vitamin pill, Philip took my hand and remarked that the skin under my engagement ring was turning a delicate shade of green. I was startled to discover he was right. Our year’s betrothal was past its use-by date. He suggested if we were going to tie the knot, Switzerland was as good a place as any to do it. Besides, we both liked the idea of getting married far away from those who regarded our unusual setup as a source of gossip and amusement.

There are the Swiss Alps, chocolates, banks, watches, cheese and cuckoo clocks. While Switzerland is famous for many other things besides (including giant mountain horns and nuclear shelters for every household) it is not widely feted as a wedding destination. We were about to find out why.

If there was a competition for the most difficult place on earth to get married in, Switzerland would win the prize. But then, Philip and I had a talent for doing things the hard way. We decided the land of clocks and chocolate was ideal for us to tie the knot. Someone should have warned us. As usual, we were insane.

When he wasn’t studying the machinations of international business, Philip was warring with petty officials, who demanded to see and stamp every document that had our names on it (from birth certificates and proof of my divorce to Girl Guide sock-darning awards). After weeks of phoning and faxing lawyers across the globe, the Swiss officials were finally satisfied. Every scrap of paper was signed, countersigned and delivered in triplicate. But that wasn’t enough. They then demanded to know how many facial moles our parents and grandparents had, at what age they had sex for the first time and which side they slept on at night. The truth is, Swiss officials don’t want people getting married in their country, and they’ll do everything in their power to stop it. They don’t approve of holy union. It’s too much paperwork. They’d rather people lived in sin.

The best thing about getting married in a foreign country is it’s so inconvenient that the few guests who do make the effort to turn up sincerely want to be there. We arranged the wedding to take place in the September holidays, so Rob and other family members could share the occasion. I bought a cream suit and matching hat. We took a day trip across the lake to Evian to buy Lydia a French party frock with a lilac sash and stiff petticoat straight out of The Sound of Music.

Around forty guests turned up for the wedding. Most of them wanted to stay in our miniscule apartment. We practically had them sleeping in wardrobes. The living area was set aside for itinerant Romanians. Mum and Rob slept in Lydia’s room.

Without being biased I have to say it was the best wedding I’ve ever been to. It was in an exquisite medieval church on the shores of Lake Geneva. Our weekend honeymoon was friendly, too. Five guests, including the bride’s mother and children, accompanied us to the dreamy shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. The only thing missing was a small black cat.

After the guests dispersed, Philip returned to his executive sweatshop. Golden autumn days leaked into sleety grey. Cobbled streets that had been picture-book quaint in summer faded to charcoal drawings. We never adjusted to the ferocity of European cold. No matter how thick our socks, our toes became ice.

At the end of our year in Switzerland I wasn’t sad to leave. The feeling appeared to be mutual. Officials at Geneva airport decided we were such an unlikely trio we had to be terrorists. They took us aside to interrogate us. How could we possibly be married? Whose child was she, anyway? When I swore we’d packed no guns, they knew they had us. We were escorted into a room, where I was made to unpack my suitcase to reveal a weapon of minimal destruction—my umbrella.

On the way home we had a few days’ stopover in New York with my old friend Lloyd. He knew all the right places to take a girl. What gay man doesn’t? I made excuses to take a break from the sightseeing, sneaked into Kmart and bought a pregnancy testing kit. Back at Lloyd’s I hurried upstairs past his African mask collection and shut myself in his bathroom. Holding the test stick to the light, it was hard to stop my hands trembling long enough to read the result. Hallelujah! A little plus sign appeared.