Дорин Тови - Cats In May

It was too. Mercifully by the time we arrived at the studio

– what with my nerves, Solomon gnawing frantically away at his basket like an outsize termite, and Charles, the effect of the champagne having worn off, informing me 16

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Seen Him on Television?

dramatically as we drove through the night that if those damned cats made a fool of him in public he’d be ruined, that was all, absolutely ruined – I was practically in a coma.

What I do remember of that night, however, will haunt me till I die.

It rises before me now like a horrible dream. The procession through the foyer with Charles carrying Sheba, me carrying Solomon, and – from the look on his face that was something the BBC hadn’t thought of – an assistant producer gingerly carrying Solomon’s earth box.

The briefing in the studio, with the producer practisedly arranging what I should say and where I should sit while I grew hotter and hotter thinking of what might happen when the baskets were opened. The awful moment came when they were opened and, in a matter of seconds, that quiet, dignified studio was transformed into a merry-go-round with Charles and the producer belting in furious circles after Solomon, who was going it like a racehorse and still shouting we knew he never went anywhere in winter.

The nightmare intervals when they caught him, thrust him feverishly into my arms and, in voices hoarse with anxiety, implored me for Pete’s sake to hold him this time. And the paralysing climax when, with Solomon’s claws stuck in my back like grappling hooks, Sheba smirking complacently at the camera from my lap and the producer praying aloud in the control room, we went on the air – to be greeted, of all the damfool opening remarks, by an interviewer saying he understood I had the cats in the studio with me that evening.

What happened after that, beyond Solomon leaping from my back with one deafening yell and heading for a ventilator, 17

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I never knew. I gather I said something about him being able to open the refrigerator, because next day two old ladies turned up to watch him do it. Sheba obviously gave her usual smug account of herself because we had a letter from a woman offering to adopt her. ‘Dear wee thing,’ she called her, not knowing that the one and only time we’d got Solomon to settle on my lap for half a second the little perisher had nipped him surreptitiously in the rear and set him off again like a rocket.

I dimly remember, too, Charles driving us home again, pounding his forehead with his clenched fist and asking brokenly why it had to be him, him , that these things happened to.

I didn’t really recover consciousness till the next day, however. Next day – when the Rector came to see how I was and ask after Solomon, for whom, he said, it must have been a terrible, terrible ordeal. At that moment, Solomon hove into view. Not cringing, cowed or shaking with fright as one might have expected, but lounging loftily along with what was soon to be known as his Rex Harrison walk. He greeted the Rector with a loud bass bellow as he came up.

Had he, he enquired airily – pausing in the doorway so that we might get the full effect, while behind his glasses the Rector’s eyes grew round as a pair of poached eggs – seen him on Television?

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TWO

Up Drains and at ’em

There must, said Charles, pulling the lavatory flush and listening despondently to the hollow gargling noise that responded immediately from the washbasin, be a reason why things happened to us.

I knew exactly how he felt. The things that had happened to us that week included Solomon being bitten by a kitten, the pressure cooker blowing up and now, as a last straw, the drains going wrong.

The immediate reasons were obvious, of course. Solomon got bitten because, having cornered a stray kitten about the size of a flea and settled down for a spot of mild torture

– which consisted of sitting about two feet away, where the kitten couldn’t get at him and dabbing at it inquisitively with a long black paw – he’d discovered it was even more 19

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exciting to put his paw in the kitten’s mouth. Twice he’d done it successfully. From the rakish set of his ears as I shot up the lane to the rescue it was obvious he’d decided it had enormous possibilities and he wasn’t half feeling brave.

The third time, just as I got there, the kitten shut its eyes, screwed up its courage, and bit.

Solomon, after that, had gone lame for a couple of days.

Not that there was anything really wrong with him. It needed a magnifying glass even to see the bite. But Solomon believed in making the most of things. If he’d been bitten, then he was wounded. And if he was wounded – boy! were people going to know about it. The result was that when he sat, he sat with the savaged paw raised ostentatiously and trembling like a leaf. When he moved, he didn’t limp like any ordinary, normal cat, he went round in anguished, three-legged leaps like a frog – which was, of course, the immediate reason for the pressure cooker blowing up. I got so unnerved by his hopscotching all over the place that one morning I put the cats’ rabbit in the cooker and forgot the water; the only consolation being that when, with a loud bang, the safety valve blew out, Solomon stopped being wounded for the first time in days and went up the nearest tree like a rocket.

The immediate reason for the septic tank going wrong was, according to Sidney, who did the garden for us in his spare time, equally simple. We took too many baths.

It was all very well for him, of course. Not only was he unlikely ever to take too many baths, as we realised full well when he stood to windward, but in his part of the village he was connected with the main drainage. Not officially, mind you. He would have had to pay for that.

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Up Drains and at ’em Sidney, having constructed a quite magnificent bathroom in the corner of his kitchen, had burrowed under the flagstones on a couple of dark winter evenings when his neighbours were watching TV, risen like a trout to a mayfly under the very spot where what he referred to as th’old stink pipe passed his cottage, and quietly connected himself to it without more ado. Had he felt like it he could now take ten baths a day and it wouldn’t have mattered a hoot. As it was Sidney didn’t believe in baths – weakening, he said they were; all he wanted was the bathroom itself, like they had down in the Council Houses. We, on the other hand, having cut our baths to a minimum which Charles said made him feel an outcast even to think of, had only to pull the flush and – to the delight of the cats, who immediately rushed into the bathroom and began bawling threats down the wastepipe

– we got these horrible gurgling noises and the cover rose alarmingly on the inspection trap.

When it got to the stage where when we poured water down the kitchen sink it immediately came up again in the bath Charles said we must do something about it.

Normally, of course, Charles is not nearly so precipitate as this. When he took all the door handles off for painting, for instance – even though, as the inner side of the fastenings were latches, people were continually getting locked out and having to let themselves in again with skewers – it was months before he put them back on again. Rome, he said, while people battered furiously on doors all over the cottage and swore never to come again, wasn’t built in a day, and renovating it – particularly painting six ring handles with black enamel – took time.