More Cats in the Belfry

FOUR

It didn't last long. Miss Wellington took on a family of doves somebody over in the next village didn't want and chaos broke out once more at the top of the hill.

Given a picture of a pink-washed cottage with lichened roof and lozenge-paned windows, a garden full of lavender, hollyhock and roses, and an elderly lady in a straw hat standing in the middle with a white dove perched on her hand, most people would have said that, for them, was the epitome of rural England. Alas, while that was exactly how Miss Wellington's garden did look, with her raffia-flowered hat adding just the touch needed for the right old-world atmosphere, the snag was that her cottage overlooked the lane, and she'd had the dovecote fixed between her two front bedroom windows. The birds took to their new home at once, but instead of fluttering lovingly down to sit on her hand among the hollyhocks they spent most of their time stumping about in the road, picking up grit and holding up people wanting to drive past.

Wherever they'd come from they'd obviously never experienced a road before, and had no idea of the danger. They just pottered about playing Who's Afraid when vehicles came along. Practically every time I drove up I had to get out of the car, shoo them away and then rush to nip past before they settled again, and one day I saw the coalman standing in front of his lorry furiously waving a sack at them while Miss W. screeched up and down the scale about his having No Soul, absolutely No Soul, and in future she'd get her coal elsewhere, and he said she was ruddy well welcome, and the pigeons just went on walking about.

The climax came when Mrs Binney happened past one morning and stopped to ask Miss Wellington 'What be goin' to with they, then?' which was one of her stock remarks and actually related to nothing except her desire to start a conversation. Fred Ferry, who lived opposite Miss Wellington and happened to be leaning on his gate, promptly bawled 'Turn 'em into pigeon pie,' and guffawed so loudly at his own joke that he really did scare the doves, who rose into the air in a panic-stricken flurry and made for the dovecote, and in the rush one of them had an accident on Mrs Binney's violet hairdo.

Fred Ferry slapped his knee and nearly fell down laughing, Mrs Binney bellowed something she'd certainly never learned at the Mothers' Union, Miss Wellington said that anybody who used language like that was no lady, and Mrs B. departed in high dudgeon.

Later that day, with the cottages at the top of the hill glowing golden in the evening sunshine and the doves once more pottering about in the road, a car turned the corner by the Rose and Crown and drove slowly along the road past the farm – so slowly it was hardly moving. As it approached Miss Wellington's cottage a hand came out of the window and quietly lobbed something on ahead.

There was an almighty bang, the doves erupted in all directions, and the car came down the hill, turned at the bottom where I was peering out of the window wondering what on earth had happened, and proceeded unhurriedly back up again. There were no doves on the road when it passed Miss Wellington's. Fred Ferry said they were still going round up in the air. Not a bird was hurt. Apparently it had been nothing but a noisy firework. All the cottagers had rushed out, though, and recognised the car and its occupant as it went by, and I heard that Bert Binney came in for a good few free pints at the Rose and Crown that night. And on subsequent nights, because the doves never ignored a car again. Miss Wellington was livid, but she couldn't do anything about it – except pass Mrs Binney with her head in the air when she met her in the village, and as Mrs Binney was doing the same when she saw Miss W. that, as Father Adams said, made two of 'em.

It had been Fred Ferry's fault in the first place, of course, for laughing that outrageous laugh. Like a ruddy hyena, as Father Adams so often remarked. It was, rather. I'd often heard it myself and longed to dot him one, following some ridiculous remark he'd made about the cats. I felt like that when I was taking them for a walk up the Forestry path one night. I'd chosen my time carefully – immediately after supper, when there weren't likely to be many people about with dogs. Saska was on his lead, to which he was quite accustomed. Tani was on one too, for her first expedition outside the cottage boundaries: a light elastic collar with a cord attached, which I'd made by way of training her and also so that I could pick her up immediately if we met a dog, rather than have her bolt in some irretrievable direction.

She wasn't too bad on it. She squirmed a bit and tried to wriggle out of it backwards, but we'd got almost as far as the Forestry gate and she was just beginning to walk properly on it when we happened upon the Smell.

It was a smell, too. About half an hour earlier a rider had come down the hill on a strange horse, tried to get it across the stream to go up into the forest, and it had started playing up. Some horses are like that about water crossings they don't know. It had backed, reared on its hind legs and frothed at the mouth. One must never let a horse get the upper hand, of course. Give in to it, turn away, and it will never cross that stream again. So the rider dug her heels in, I went out and made a noise walking behind it, and the horse capitulated and went across... where, to relieve the tension, it did a pool the size of our garden pond in front of the Forestry gate, shook itself, snorted, and went on.

Only in extremity will a horse relieve itself in the roadway. It prefers the straw in its stable, or will move off the bridleway on to a grass verge rather than get splashed. Tani had never met such a spectacle before, but she obviously realised what it was. Anybody would, by the overpowering pong. Her only previous experience of such matters was when Saska performed, and presumably she thought this was one of his efforts – which, being a boy and careless, he hadn't been too careful about positioning. So there we were. Me standing by an enormous wet and pungent patch in the dust, Saska obliviously ahead on his lead tugging to get through the gate, and Tani like small mouse on a string behind me, scratching furiously to try to cover it up.

I tugged the cord, but she wouldn't come. I couldn't go back to her, with Saska pulling hard in the other direction. At that moment Fred Ferry swung briskly down the hill behind me and rounded the corner (Fred was always appearing like that, knapsack on his shoulder and heading for the hills, which was why he had the reputation of being our local poacher) and said, his eyes like saucers, 'Cor did she do that?' He knew very well she couldn't have done, but it didn't stop him reporting it as a fact up at the pub, so that people kept coming past for days asking was it true that I had a cat that widdled like a water-cart?

They used to stop and watch to see if she'd perform, and she didn't like it. She would run indoors and hide behind the sofa, protesting that the White Slavers she was always expecting had caught up with her at last.

Life had its complications where my Aunt Louisa was concerned, too. Now nearly eighty, in her young days she'd helped my grandmother bring me up, and I looked on her as my responsibility. She still lived in the old family house in Bristol and, with a strong strain of independence, kindly neighbours and myself keeping an eye on her, she managed very well indeed.

'Managed' was the operative word. She was lively as a cricket, looked about sixty, and ran local affairs, as my grandmother had done before her, as if she were the Queen Mother. Her particular friend was a much younger woman who lived a few doors away and whose name was pronounced like mine but spelt Dorine.

Every day, while Dorine was at work, Louisa would go down to let her two cats, Norton and Petal, into the garden for exercise, get them in again in due course, and generally see that all was well. Dorine, in turn, came up for a chat with Louisa every evening and acquainted her with what was going on in the rest of the road and her own activities, which were not inconsiderable. To help cover the expenses of her big old house, in addition to her full-time job she regularly took, as boarders, two or three students who were on special courses at the nearby polytechnic. They had their lunch at the college and went home at weekends, and thus fitted in well with Dorine's own schedule. She gave them comfortable accommodation, had only to provide them with breakfast and an evening meal five days a week and she and Louisa monitored their welfare between them. Louisa, for instance coped on the odd occasion when she went down and found one of the students still in bed, suffering from a cold or a stomach ache and needing cosseting. Dorine dealt with the reprobate who said he didn't like cats and was caught one day aiming a kick at Norton. He was reported to the college and transferred forthwith to other accommodation. Even so, when I found one of Louisa's pantry shelves loaded one day with bottles of tomato ketchup and Louisa said she was hiding them from Dorine's students, my mind did boggle slightly. Dorine had, it seemed, come up the previous evening breathing fire and slaughter, clutching a bagful of bottles and declaring that this lot (her current quota of students) were really the end. They wanted tomato sauce on everything – even the gourmet meal with wine which she gave them once a week when her boyfriend came to supper – and she wasn't going to have it, so would Louisa keep them for her so she could say with truth that she didn't have any in the house?

She added vengefully that she'd put an air-freshener in their bedroom and they'd been searching for that, but they hadn't found it and never would. She'd put it there because one of them smoked heavily and the bedroom smelled ghastly. Why had they wanted to find it? Louisa asked. Because they didn't like the smell of it, said Dorine. Where had she hidden it? In the smoker's mattress – there was a little tear in the cover and she'd put it inside. Louisa telling me all this, was practically crying with laughter, never realising how peculiar, at times, her own actions were.

Another of her neighbours, Edward, was a bachelor of about my own age. I had known him since we were children, and after his mother died he had turned part of his house into a very comfortable flat and let the rest. He had a daily woman to clean for him; Louisa kept a motherly eye on him and made him cakes; and Dorine, as another remunerative sideline, did odd bits of washing and mending for him. So I was considerably taken aback one day when Louisa said that Edward had asked her to ask me to dye his bathroom curtains for him. Pale blue towelling they were, but they'd got rather washed out. He fancied them a dark brown and he'd be very grateful if I'd do them.

Why hadn't he asked Dorine? I wondered. Was it...? We were about the same age and now both alone in the world... But no it couldn't be, I told myself. He was a confirmed bachelor; I certainly wasn't interested and Louisa knew it. So, out of friendship, I did them. Actually I was quite good at dyeing things: Louisa had probably mentioned it to him, I decided. And the curtains turned out beautifully.

I took them back, Louisa and I went across to the flat and hung them while Edward was out, and I drove beatifically home with the thought of a good deed well done – only to have Edward ring me as soon as I got in, apologising so profusely I could practically see him sweating on the other end of the line. He couldn't understand why Louisa had asked me to dye his curtains. 'Never would I have dreamt of it,' he kept protesting. 'Never would I have dreamt of it.' He had meant her to ask Dorine down the road, he explained, and why on earth she'd thought he meant me...

I could understand it. Our names sounded the same, and if anyone was going to misconstrue a thing it would be Louisa, who spent her life confusing words and pronunciations. It was around that time that England played the Cameroons in a World Cup football match and Louisa kept enthusiastically telling me, and everybody else she encountered, that she'd been watching the match against the Macaroons on television. She also persisted in calling rudbeckias rudybeckias, referred to her newly acquired microwave, in which she constantly produced her most ghastly failures, as her microphone and generally pulverised the English language in a manner that reminded me of my grandmother – her mother – who, when I was young, used to speak of Hitler as Herring Hitler and Stalin as Old Stallion. Funnily enough, Louisa had never done it when she was younger. Was it a family trait that developed with age? I speculated apprehensively...

I sorted out the confusion of the towel­-dyeing, anyway – to my satisfaction if not entirely to Edward's, who went on apologising every time we met for weeks – and returned to my chief preoccupation at the time, which was to see whether I could get the two cats used to the caravan with a view to one day taking them with me on holiday.

When Charles was alive we had planned to do it with Saska and Shebalu. We never got as far as actually taking them. We did try a few days' practice camping in our own caravan field, but that proved so disastrous, and confirmed our neighbours' impression that we were odd even for this village to such a degree, that we eventually abandoned the idea. But Saska was older now, and Tani was such a timid little thing, and I, on my own, would find them such good company on short holidays (I imagined, seeing in my mind's eye the three of us strolling along the sands of my favourite Cornish cove and curled up reading cosily by lamplight in the caravan at night)... and so I started taking them up to the caravan with me when I went up to air it. They would sit side by side in the doorway, gazing out at passing riders like a couple of gypsy cats – they only needed spotted handkerchiefs and dangling earings – or Tani would investigate the ground-level cupboards while Saska, as he'd done in the old days, would climb up to see whether there was a way out through the skylight (why, since the door was open, it was difficult to imagine, but Saska never lost his penchant for imitating Houdini)... and one summer morning, when the swathes of grass I kept cut, like an L-shaped lane, to facilitate towing the caravan in and out were backed shoulder-high with masses of rose-bay willow­-herb, moon-daisies and golden rod that had wandered over the wall from the cottage garden, they disappeared. The cats, I mean. Completely.

I couldn't believe it. One minute I had my head in the cupboard under the sink checking the emergency candles. The next, withdrawing it as I did every few seconds to assure myself that they were still in the doorway, I realised that they were gone.

I dashed out and gazed wildly round the field. Nothing but that solid backcloth of vegetation, like an enormous herbaceous border gone wild, into which they must have disappeared. Unless they'd gone out to the lane... I rushed to look along that. There was no sign of them. Back to push like a frantic swimmer through the rose-bay willow-herb and golden rod towards the line of trees and rising hillside at the back, wildly calling their names, but there was no sign of them. They could have been a matter of feet away but in that tangle I wouldn't have seen them. On as far as the trees themselves, up and running along the barer hillside, where there were still tracks trodden flat by Annabel. Nothing. But I knew, there would be adders about in the sunshine. Seeley had, as a kitten, been bitten by one up there. I stamped heavily as I ran, to scare them away, and tried not to think of it. On, everywhere I could think of, but there was no sign of them.

In the end I had to give up searching and wait in the cottage with all the doors open, hoping that they'd come home by themselves. They always did, Father Adams had said when I met him down in his part of the lane while I was hunting. They don't always, of course. Seeley had gone out that morning all those years before and never been seen again. So when blaming myself for taking my eyes off them for even for a second, wondering where they were and what had befallen them, I turned away from the kitchen counter where I was half-heartedly making a cup of coffee an hour later and saw them marching one behind the other towards the sitting-room door without so much as a glance at me, I couldn't believe it. Where had they been? I demanded, falling on knees to scoop them up and hug them. Just looking around, according to Saska, who was the lead as usual, trying to give the impression of having hardly been away five minutes. Keeping an eye on him, according to Tani, who was marching hard on his heels. Gosh, I wouldn't believe where he'd taken her.

I jolly well would. I decided that taking them away in the caravan was out, and made up my mind to watch them even more closely from then on. And what with doing that, and answering letters, and observing events in the valley, the summer passed.

I was getting more letters than usual. Waiting in the Wings had recently been published, and so many people were writing to tell me that it mirrored the way they had felt after losing someone dear to them, or a beloved animal. The book had helped them, they said, and many of them went on to recount their own stories of strange occurrences that had led them to believe that the people or animals they had lost had survived physical death and were waiting for them somewhere on the sidelines.

The incident that impressed me most happened when I was talking to a woman at a meeting in London – a down-to-earth no­-nonsense type who was in the legal profession and bred Siamese cats as a hobby. She, too, told me how much she'd liked Wings and I told her I'd thought that she, of all people, would think I was batty. 'But it did all happen,' I assured her. 'And my husband really did see Solomon's ghost.'

She believed it, she assured me, looking straight at me. She was certain that people, and animals, went on. She was sure that when any of her cats died, or had to be put down their spirits stayed with her for several days before they left her. She could sense them. There was only one who hadn't, she said, a Siamese male whose original owner had died. When, many years later, the cat had to be put down because of an incurable complaint, he'd only stayed with her for about an hour.

'But why?' I asked. 'Where do you think he went?'

'After all I'd done for him,' she said mock-indignantly. 'Off to find his original owner, of course.'

It wasn't like that when, a year after I lost Shebalu, Saska died too. I had no sense of his staying near me afterwards. All I knew was one of the greatest friends I'd ever had, the last of the animals I'd shared with Charles, had gone, and Tani and I were alone.