Дорин Тови - Cats In The Belfry

We hesitated, and did nothing. And then, one fateful Sunday morning, we were introduced to Mimi, a young Siamese queen who had recently come to live with the people down the lane. She was six months old and had been given to them by a woman who had gone abroad and been forced to leave her behind. She had been with them for just two weeks, and already the effect on that unimaginative farm labourer's household, where the dog slept outside chained to a draughty kennel and the ordinary cats, kept to catch rats in the outhouses, were never allowed indoors at all, was revolutionary.

Mimi slept not only indoors, but in Father Adams's armchair, on his corduroy waistcoat which he took off specially for her each night before he went to bed. She was never allowed out after dark or when it rained – neighbours spoke in scandalised tones of seeing the old man himself tenderly filling an unmistakable earth-box in the garden after supper.

And now, in this hill village where men prided themselves on their toughness – within living memory they had held kicking matches on the Green and even now you would never catch one of them pushing a pram in his right mind, not even up a hill – here he was, the oldest, toughest, of the lot, parading down the lane as proud as a peacock with a Siamese cat in a harness of bright red rug wool.

He apologised for the harness. Mother, he said, was going to buy her a proper 'un with a bell next time she went to town. Meantime they had to use the wool because Mimi (he pronounced it My-My and it wasn't till months later, when I was helping him make out the pedigrees for her first kittens, that I discovered her original owner had named her after La Bohème) was in season for the first time, and had to be kept away from other cats.

I stared at her in amazement. I had always heard that Siamese queens in that condition nearly drove their owners off their heads yelling and screaming for a husband, and here was one standing in the road as quiet and demure as a nun, with nothing but a strand of rug wool between her and a countryside alive with ranting farmyard toms.

I asked if she had a voice. Not half, he said proudly. Bellowed like a ruddy bull when she wanted food, or for him to get out of her chair. But not for a tom. Class, she was. She wouldn't so much as look at an ordinary cat. The harness was only so that he could pick her up quick if a tom attacked her.

Class she certainly was, from her tapered black head, beautiful as an Egyptian queen carved out of ebony, to the tip of her elegant whip tail. I thought she was the loveliest animal I had ever seen, and when the old man went on to tell us how she climbed the curtains like a monkey when the fit took her, perched on the rail, and refused to come down, or went round the room leaping from the top of the piano to the mantelpiece like a racehorse, I knew I was lost. Here was Blondin all over again – with the added advantage, according to the old man, that Siamese cats never broke a thing.

There was just one thing more I wanted to know. Could she, I asked, catch mice? It was like asking a speed maniac if his car could do fifty on the flat. 'Mice,' roared Father Adams in a voice that vibrated with scorn. 'She brut a gert snake in t'other day four foot long, with his 'ead bit clean off, and played with 'un like he were a bit o' string.'

Within a few weeks both Adams and I were sadder, wiser people. The next time she came in season Mimi ripped the seat clean out of the armchair, drove the whole village nearly round the bend with her bawling and finally jumped out of the bedroom window and fled up the lane to the farm, where she was only saved from a fate worse than death by the fact that her dusky Oriental face and blazing blue eyes frightened the battle-scarred old tom who lived there nearly out of his wits, and he was still hiding behind the water-butt when Mrs Adams, wailing and wringing her hands, panted up the hill in her wake.

It was a shaken Father Adams who came down to see us the following Sunday with Mimi, once more quiet and demure, padding sleekly at his heels. He said his wife had got a book about cats out of the library last time she was in town, and according to that Siamese queens couldn't be mated till they were twelve months old. If they had to put up with this caper for another six months, he said, with the blasted cat shouting her head off for a tom every few weeks and people knocking on the door and complaining about the noise, it would drive him clean up the pole.

We knew how he felt. We had troubles of our own. Since we saw him last we had acquired Sugieh, and the first thing she had done on entering her new domain was to race up the curtains just like he said, hurl herself like a minute, jet-propelled bomb at the birdcage, and frighten Shorty out of his last remaining tail feather.

She'd had no effect at all on the mice. Only the night before they had chewed a hole in the bag of the vacuum cleaner and when I switched it on a couple of pounds of dirt had gushed out all over our new cream Indian carpet. I was still wondering how I was going to get it up.

TWO

Caesar's Daughter

Sugieh fell in love with us the moment she saw us. It was most embarrassing because we had made up our minds to have a Seal Point like Mimi, and when the breeder said all the Seal Point kittens had gone but perhaps we would like to see the two Blue Points that were left it was understood that we did so merely out of interest.

Unfortunately nobody had told Sugieh that. Her brother, who was as good as sold to a woman who had already bought one of the Seal Points and was coming back for him later if her husband agreed, took one look at us when we went in, strolled off into a corner and started to chew the wireless flex. Sugieh, however, was quite certain we had come for her. She sat there on the hearthrug like a small girl with her suitcase packed ready to go on holiday – her eyes screwed tight with anticipation, her paws pounding up and down like little pistons. When I got down on my knees and spoke to her she opened her eyes for a moment – blue as periwinkles they were, and completely crossed with excitement – greeted us with a squawk that was astounding, considering her size, and screwed them up tight again, waiting for the treat.

Her owner asked if we were intending to breed Siamese ourselves and when we said we were she remarked – just by way of interest, of course – that Sugieh's blue blood was only on her mother's side. Her father was a pure Seal Point, and if she in turn was mated to a pure Seal Point when she grew up, her kittens would be Seal Points as well. Though of course, she said, Blue Points were becoming very popular. Some people thought they had gentler dispositions than the Seal Points, and they were very beautiful. Which reminded her – before we went we really must see Anna.

She opened the door and shouted for Anna at the top of her voice. There was an answering bellow from some distant part of the house, and after a sufficient interval had elapsed for a dignified, unhurried descent of the stairs, Anna appeared.

A Siamese that has apparently just had a blue rinse is, at first sight, something of a shock, and this one reminded me irresistibly of a film star who had married into the aristocracy and gone on from there in a big way. Her legs were long and slender as a gazelle's. Her eyes, which were lighter than those of a Seal Point, glittered like jewelled almonds. She walked as if she owned the earth. If the breeder had reckoned that the sight of Anna would help to sell us Sugieh she was right – but not on account of her beauty. It was the expression of complete hauteur, once she had looked us over, with which that cat swept past us and over to the corner to kiss her son, who was going to a home where they could afford two Siamese.