Дорин Тови - Cats In May

It was an evening such as we had spent hundreds of times before – pottering in the garden, with the gnats biting sultrily and occasional oaths and the sound of breaking glass coming from the corner where, instruction sheet in hand, Charles was putting up his own greenhouse. Solomon had had his bottom smacked for rolling in the paeonies; Sheba for stalking Father Adams’s bantams. Solomon had stunned a wasp and been prevented from eating it in the nick of time.

Sheba, always out for effect, had stretched herself in a Diana-like attitude in a seedbox on the garden wall, causing quite a sensation among passers-by and an even greater one with Charles when he discovered she was lying on his lettuce plants. An ordinary, normal evening. Until the moment when I went to call them in for supper and found, instead of the usual bedtime tableau of two little cats sitting soulfully on the wall wondering whether we wanted them any more, only Solomon. Solomon, happily boxing midges in the dusk.

His only comment, when we asked him where Sheba was, was an assurance that he didn’t know but if we were worried about it he could easily eat her supper as well.

We searched for her for three hours without success.

Leisurely at first, expecting to see her small pale figure come tearing down the lane or out of the woods at any moment. Then more concentratedly, with torches, looking in outhouses and old barns, tracking and calling endlessly through the woods while Solomon – locked in before he could decide to do a Stanley act and vanish as well – wailed reproachfully at us from the kitchen window.

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Up Drains and at ’em At one o’clock we went to bed. Not to sleep, but to wait for daylight so that we could go on searching. It was one of the most miserable nights I have ever spent in my life. Not only on account of Sheba, who by this time I imagined a mangled little heap in some fox’s den. On account of Charles, who lay there holding forth alternately on the fox which he was going to kill with his bare hands when he caught it and a mysterious perambulator he now remembered being pushed up the hill at dusk, and the more he thought of it the more certain he was, he kept telling me, that Sheba had been in it being kidnapped. On account also of the perishing gale which blew round the bed like Cape Horn and was the result of having every door and window in the house wide open so that we could hear if she called. And not least on account of Solomon, who at two o’clock started howling his head off in the spare room.

‘Poor little chap,’ said Charles when, after a particularly piercing scream we decided we’d better have him in with us before he woke the entire valley. ‘He’s missing her too,’

he said as Solomon, with a reproachful sniffle, marched in and peered suspiciously under the bed. He wasn’t, of course. All Solomon was worried about was whether we’d had Sheba in with us and not him. When he discovered she was nowhere to be seen he snuggled happily down with his head on my shoulder and within a few minutes was snoring like a pig. A little later the snores gave way to the steady grinding of teeth. Dreaming happily of being able to eat all Sheba’s suppers in future as well as his own – and drowning, incidentally, any chance we had of hearing her footsteps if she did come back – Solomon slept.

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Cats in May

The cause of the trouble returned at nine o’clock next morning. We had been out since daybreak, combing the woods again, calling her till we were hoarse, looking apprehensively in streams and cattle troughs in case, like a small blue Ophelia, she floated there among the duckweed.

Father Adams had arrived, spade in hand, with the intention of digging out the fox’s earth in the wood so we might know if that had been her end. Charles, flatly refusing to believe we had lost her for ever and enlarging on his theory that – presumably bound and gagged, since we’d heard no sound – she’d been carried off in the perambulator, was on the point of ringing Scotland Yard. Solomon, with his smuggest I’m-here-aren’t-I-not-silly-like-Sheba expression, was sitting conspicuously on the cooker determined not to miss anything. I, gazing dumbly at the kitchen table, was trying to realise that never again would I see her sitting there explaining earnestly just why she wanted more fish

– usually because Solomon had pinched hers while she wasn’t looking. When there was a cracked soprano wail and in she stalked.

We never discovered where she’d been. From the mud on her paws and her worn-down claws I personally believed she must have been accidentally locked in somebody’s outhouse and spent the night trying to dig her way out.

Sheba herself supported Charles. Kidnapped, she assured us, crossing her eyes and beaming enigmatically every time we looked at her. Locked in a cellar with iron bars and a great big man on guard. Got through a window and walked ten miles home with the kidnappers hunting her every inch of the way. Make a good story for Television, wouldn’t it?

she demanded, sauntering airily over to her plate to see 28

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Up Drains and at ’em what was for breakfast. Whereupon Solomon did what I felt very much like doing myself. Knocked her down and bit her on the bottom.

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THREE

The Reason Why

The immediate reasons for the things that happened to us were indeed obvious. You didn’t need to look far for the reason why people thought we were nuts, for instance, when practically every day saw us marching through the village at least once carrying those wretched cats in public procession – Charles pink with embarrassment because the only way Sheba would be carried was flat on her back in his arms, gazing adoringly up into his face; I with Solomon dangling goofily down my back like a sack of coals while I held on to him by his back legs. Unless of course it was the fly season, when, though I still held him by his back legs, with his front ones he would be flailing the air behind me like a demented windmill.

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The Reason Why

Even people who knew us – who knew that we were only fetching them back from the Rector’s or the Williamses or whoever it was that had rung up to complain about them this time – looked at us a bit oddly on such occasions.

People who didn’t know us usually thought we ought to be locked up.

Father Adams, who owned a Siamese himself and knew what it was like – though his, he said, was pretty good these days except when our two devils led her into mischief – was quite indignant one night when somebody said as much in the Rose and Crown. ‘Said he seen thee sliding out of the woods on thee backside with a dappy gert cat round thee neck,’ he informed me over the gate, his voice – as was usual when he was conducting a conversation at a distance of more than three feet – a full-blooded bellow that could be heard all over the village. Probably he had at that. The wood was on a steep slope and, once having caught Solomon, the only way to get out of it without letting go of him was to sling him over my shoulder and slide down on my seat, with the result that, in a community where practically every female under forty wore jeans, I could be identified a mile away by a large black mudpatch on mine.