Дорин Тови - Cats In The Belfry

Once she chased a fox. True it was a vixen with a cub and the vixen's chief concern, from the moment Sugieh opened her big mouth and shrieked at them to stop, was undoubtedly to get her child away from this terrifying creature with sky-blue eyes and a bray like a donkey's. All the same I died a dozen deaths until Charles hauled Caesar's daughter – safe, but swearing fit to burst – out of the bramble thicket where she had finally lost them.

One dreadful evening, pushing her inquisitive nose through a gap in the mowing grass just off the main track, she flushed a courting couple. The worst part of that affair was that the young man occasionally did odd jobs for us and was a friend of Sugieh's, so instead of crossing her eyes warningly at them and passing on, which was her usual way with strangers, she immediately sat down and began to bawl for us to Come and See who she'd found Here – the Nice Young Man who mended our Cistern. We dragged her away eventually by the scruff of her neck. All of us were scarlet with embarrassment; indeed the young lady, who had hidden her head in her boyfriend's lapel and was by this time sobbing with mortification, was so embarrassed that even the back of her neck was red. Sugieh didn't notice it. Slung over Charles's shoulder like a sack of potatoes she continued to shout back greetings long after we had hurried out of sight, and ­the next time the young man came to work for us she ran up to him and started yattering so excitedly he had no doubt at all as to what she was talking about. He blushed all over again on the spot.

We realised then why people take Siamese cats out on leads. Not to protect the cats, but to protect the public. Next time we went to town we, too, bought a lead and harness for Sugieh.

The result of that was as alarming as it was unexpected. The moment we put Sugieh on a lead she went up and down on the end like a yo-yo, screaming that we were Putting her in Chains, got her back feet securely hooked up round her ears, and threw a fit in the middle of the lawn. Other Siamese owners, glancing smugly at cats who, though they were all psychological cases in other ways, at least sat like slit-eyed Buddhas when they were in harness, told us we must persevere. We did. We persevered so hard we nearly had a fit ourselves at the very thought of taking Sugieh for a walk, but we never got her used to a harness. In the end she did agree, in order that we might hold up our heads among our fellow humans, to wearing a collar attached to the lightest of cords. Not round her neck. That apparently made her feel like a galley slave. Round her middle, where it gave her the appearance of a hula dancer and was, as she and we were perfectly aware, completely useless. The moment she saw anything she wanted to chase she just slipped her back legs out of it and went.

The one thought that sustained us through that long, calamitous summer was that one day Sugieh would grow up and have kittens. There had been a time when we had looked forward to having kittens for their own dear little sakes – and, of course, because if we could sell them for anything like the price we had given for Sugieh we would be able to retire after a couple of litters. Now our only thought was that they might sober her down.

Up the lane Father Adams was fervently hoping the same about Mimi, and meeting with unexpected snags. After Mimi's initial attempt at eloping with the cat from the farmyard Father Adams had taken the strictest precautions to preserve her virtue. The first yell that appeared to his anxious ear to contain a note of passion; the first suggestion of voluptuous rolling on the ground – and Mimi, even if she had only been taking a dust bath, was locked in the attic with her earth-box until all danger was past.

At length, however, to the intense relief of the neighbours, Mimi attained her first birthday and Father Adams started looking round for a suitable mate. His first shock – and it shook him to the core – was the discovery that every Siamese male for miles around had been neutered. His second was the discovery, after riding ten miles on his bike to contact a lady whom he had lauded to the skies before he went because she had, he said, had the ­decency to leave a cat as nature made it, that she wanted a three-guinea stud fee.

He nearly had apoplexy when he heard that. According to his reckoning, while it was perfectly all right for him to sell Mimi's kittens and make money out of them – he had in fact already confided in us that he expected to make more out of her than out of his strawberries that season – for anybody to charge for a tom's services bordered on rank immorality. Nobody, he bellowed when he came back, thumping his fist on our front gate till it rattled – he always did that when he felt strongly about something, and we wished he wouldn't; it looked as if we were the ones he was having the row with – nobody but an old maid would have thought of such a thing and he was damned if he'd encourage her.

Heaven knows what would have happened, what with Mimi shrieking her head off with frustrated passion up in the attic and her owner stubbornly refusing either to pay for a pedigree husband or to let her mate, for the sake of peace, with the tom from the farmyard – we explained genetics to him by the hour but we couldn't shake his conviction that if she once Went Wrong, as he delicately put it, she would produce piebald kittens for evermore – if he hadn't, at the crucial moment, changed his doctor.

Father Adams was always changing doctors. He had had two new ones since we knew him. The first he changed because he drove a fast sports car ­and when the National Health contributions went up Father Adams blamed it directly on his petrol consumption. The second he changed, presumably by way of making a clean sweep, at the same time as his dentist, when he had trouble with his false teeth.

Now he had changed again, to a doctor who had just come to live in a neighbouring village. Father Adams, who signed up with him the day after his arrival, said he was a proper nice young man and understood his arthritis perfectly. It was, we understood, pure coincidence that he had an unneutered Siamese tom named Ajax. It was pure coincidence, too, that the next time Mimi came in season Father Adams had such a chronic attack of arthritis he had to stay in bed and send for the new doctor.

He was an understanding young man. As soon as he heard Mimi screeching in the attic and learned the sad story of her unrequited love he drove straight back home and fetched Ajax. He must have been a good doctor too. That very evening Father Adams's arthritis was so much better he was able to hobble triumphantly down to the Rose and Crown.

FIVE

Trouble Everywhere

Sugieh came into season for the first time in September, while we were in Scotland and she was once more staying with the Smiths. We were afraid she might. According to the book it could happen with a precocious Siamese as early as four months, and as Sugieh was by this time seven months old and so precocious it made you want to spit, it was obvious she was saving her efforts for a special occasion.

With the aid of James she staged it magnificently. She uttered her first call in the middle of a dinner party and scared everybody, including herself, nearly out of their wits. The Smiths, realising what was happening, had hardly finished assuring the more nervous guests that she was not going mad when she called again, louder than before. Whereupon, they told us, their eyes glazing slightly at the memory, James, hearing her voice through the mists of sleep and forgetting for the moment that he was no longer the cat he had been, had leapt gallantly out of the gramophone and tried to make love to her on the hearthrug, and Sugieh had shinned up the standard lamp in alarm and brought it down in the cutlets.