Дорин Тови - Cats In May

How that cat could do it I don’t know. Every single sentence of that book had been written – unless I locked him out of the house, when he sat on the garden wall gazing at passers-by with sad blue eyes and telling them that he was unwanted, or shut him in the garage where he sat and screamed blue murder – to the accompaniment of Solomon leaping round the place like an overgrown grasshopper, saying the typewriter was bad for his nerves.

I felt like a criminal every time I used it. Sometimes, indeed, seeing him stretched out on the rug with the firelight playing on his sleek cream stomach and his great black head pillowed blissfully on Sheba’s small blue one, I would sneak upstairs and tap out a few lines in the spare room rather than disturb him. It was no use. Solomon, deaf as a post 12

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Seen Him on Television?

when he was in the woods and I, trying to get him in, was rushing up and down the lane yodelling ‘Tollywollywolly’

like something out of Autumn Crocus (it was the only call he would answer and the fact that it made people look at me rather oddly and back rapidly up the lane again was no doubt his idea of a huge Siamese joke) – Solomon, when it came to typewriters, had ears like a hawk.

One of our neighbours, long used to our cats peering nosily through her windows to see what she was doing and even, on occasion, marching in procession through her cottage from front to back, had an awful shock one day when she looked up from a spot of one-finger typing on her husband’s portable to see Solomon on her windowsill leaping up and down like mad. She rang me at once in a panic. He’d gone nuts at last, she said. (There was no need to ask who, of course. The whole village had been anticipating it ever since he was born.) Would I come and fetch him, or should she call the Vet?

She could hardly believe it when I told her it was just his reaction to a typewriter. In that case, she said, why didn’t he go away? Why stand on her windowsill jumping round like a circus flea? Why indeed, except that it was typical of him. Creep silently to the spare room or the kitchen; even, as I did on occasions, slink out, typewriter in hand, to the potting shed – and after a couple of minutes Solomon would appear, gazing at me in sad reproach and, every time I touched a key, leaping several feet in the air.

Even after I’d shut down the typewriter in disgust he still went on doing it. Move a foot – up he went like a rocket.

Lift the coal-tongs – somebody, he said, turning a full circle in mid-air and landing defensively on the bureau, was After 13

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Him. One day after a typing session the Rector spoke to him unexpectedly from behind, as he was drinking from a flower vase on the hall table, and poor old Sol was so scared he nearly hit the ceiling. It cost us a new noiseless typewriter to overcome that foible, and if anybody accuses us of being silly about animals I can assure them that it wasn’t bought on Solomon’s account, but because by that time Charles’s and my nerves were so bad we were going round like grasshoppers too.

By the time the book came out Solomon had forgotten the typewriter, but we hadn’t. When we were asked to take them to a Siamese party in London we turned green and refused on the spot. Solomon’s nerves were bad, we said, and so were ours. If we took him on a train we’d be lucky to get to London in one piece. Bring Sheba, they said. But we couldn’t do that either. Solomon, left on his own even for half an hour – as we knew from the time Sheba’s boyfriend bit her on the tail and we had to rush her to the Vet for treatment – sat in the hall window so that the whole village could see how we were neglecting him, and howled the place down.

So we went to the party on our own and that was how the trouble started, because there we met some cats who did know how to behave themselves. A dear old Siamese queen called Suki who, judging from her crumpled ear and battle scars, had been hell-on-wheels in her day but sat there looking placidly out of her frail wickerwork cage as if she were Victoria herself. Bartholomew and Margharita, two sleek young Seal Points from Chelsea who drank sherry and looked so much like Solomon that in the midst of all the gaiety my heart sank like a stone thinking of what he 14

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Seen Him on Television?

was probably doing at that very moment – either ripping up the stair carpet or broadcasting basso profundo to the whole village that we’d gone away and left him. And, most impressive of all, Tig, who’d come straight from being televised at Lime Grove.

Tig was very like Solomon too, except that – though his mistress looked rather harassed and had her hat over one eye in the normal way of Siamese owners – he himself was as calm as a cucumber. When she produced his earth pan saying she hoped nobody minded but he’d been too busy up till now and it wasn’t good for him to go all that time with a full bladder he looked at her with disdain. Didn’t have a bladder, he said, strolling off to greet the pressmen and photographers as to the manner born. And sure enough, though every time we saw his owner she was looking more and more worried and still trailing him anxiously with his little pan, such was his self-control that the whole evening Tig, as became a public figure, firmly declined to use it.

I was green with envy as we rolled home on the train that night. All those cats behaving like society’s top ten, even down to Tig’s superb refusal of the earth box… Tig himself, suave, controlled, self-assured, actually appearing on television… What, I asked Charles wistfully, did he think would happen if our two were ever asked to go on TV?

Probably be quite all right, murmured Charles, relaxing blissfully in his seat and prepared at that moment to view anything – even Siamese cats – through a champagne-coloured haze. Probably we (which meant me) made too much fuss about taking them places. Our cats, he said, patting his headrest affectionately in lieu of Sheba’s small blue rump before he fell asleep, would absolutely knock 15

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’em on TV. Which explains why the next day, when the BBC rang up to say they had heard about the party and the book and what about Solomon and Sheba going on a programme that night, we, without a second thought, said yes.

It was a mistake, of course. I realised it the moment I put down the receiver and saw Solomon watching me with dark, Oriental suspicion from the doorway. It was a habit of his when I was on the phone and though it no doubt sprang from curiosity as to what on earth I was doing talking to myself, and probably a firm conviction that I was mad and if he hung around long enough I might do something interesting, the sight of him sitting there like some character from a Limehouse thriller sent a nervous shiver up my back.

It was a well-founded shiver, too. The moment Charles brought the cat baskets in through one door ready for the journey, Solomon, hastily abandoning his role of Fu Manchu, put his ears down and marched determinedly out through the other. By the time we had cornered him

– flat under the bed yelling he wasn’t going any place, it was winter and we knew he never went anywhere in the winter

– and hauled Sheba down from the top of the wardrobe where she had gone not because she was scared but because she wanted Charles to chase her too, it was obvious what our television appearance was going to be like. Complete and utter bedlam.