Дорин Тови - A Comfort Оf Cats

Tim, presumably with thoughts in that direction himself, ordered several loads of topsoil. To keep everybody happy he decided also to avoid the corner where there were mounds. In fact there were only two, the rest of the ground had obviously never been turned, but in a village you never can win.

He did everything he could. Rather than have the topsoil tipped in soullessly from a lorry he had it piled in his driveway and wheeled it reverently across by wheelbarrow. When he was over there working he always took off his hat. In order that people could see where the mounds were and appreciate that he was respecting them he heaped them even higher and planted daffodils on top. All he got for his trouble was that when strangers spotted the unmistakable outlines and stopped to consider the matter over the wall, there was always somebody on hand, strategically placed so the Bannetts could hear them, to expound the ethics of the affair. That young folk nowadays had no sense of what was decent and proper; that if the truth were known the plot really belonged to them; that they wouldn't fancy eatin' any of they cabbages... and to speculate what, by current values, the graveyard was worth as land.

The other thing that occupied the village that winter was working out why we'd bought a caravan. That we were going to sell the cottage and travel abroad was one of the rumours that came back to us. That we were going to start a caravan park was another. Even the closest of our local acquaintances – Tim, Father Adams and Fred Ferry, who knew we'd bought it so we could get away in it when the fancy took us and, we hoped, take the cats – had their own opinion as to how the venture would work out. The caravan might have come down the hill all right, they informed us regularly. They'd bet us anything we liked we'd never get it up .

That, however, was a problem for the future. Meantime we had a more immediate one with Sass. Following an unfortunate oversight on my part he'd reverted to his neurosis about wool. Not just chewing holes in it, as many Siamese do (cat psychologists say it's because they're lonely), but treating it with hostility; not in any circumstances to be slept on; and if he got the chance he used it as a lavatory.

It stemmed from the evening we brought him home as a kitten and introduced him to Shebalu. We put him in a cage-fronted basket, thinking he'd feel safer speaking to her from in there. Unfortunately instead of approaching him with caution, as Seeley had done to her when she was a kitten (adult cats are normally more afraid of strange kittens than the kittens are of them) Shebalu had put her nose to the bars, sworn horrible oaths and threatened to eat him, and Sass, unable to escape, had had diarrhoea on his blanket.

It was that, I felt sure, which had given him his thing about wool. It was obvious from the first that he was a cat who thought and you could practically see what he was thinking. In this new house you used wool as a lavatory – wasn't that what had been there when he'd had the accident in his basket? Furthermore he'd better continue to use it if he wanted to propitiate the cat-gods. Wasn't that the obvious reason why he'd survived such a ferocious attack by the Enemy?

Obviously fearing further attack, Sass wetted everything woollen he could find in the days that followed. The fresh blanket I gave him that night. The nest of sweaters I put for him on our bed. He'd have wetted a sweater with Charles inside it one night – Charles happened to be quietly snoozing – if I hadn't spotted the look on his face and whipped him away before he could do it.

Long after Shebalu had accepted him and he slept in her arms at night as if he were her own, his phobia about wool remained. Give them a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel and they lay against it like Botticelli angels. Put it in a woollen cover or wrap it in a sweater and Sass worked like a beaver all night. Next morning, inevitably wetted, that being part of the ritual, sweater and bottle would lie discarded on the floor and Sass would be regarding us with the air of Sir Galahad after a vigil. He'd kept off the bogeyman but Only Just said his earnest, round-eyed expression. Shebalu, having had to sleep bottleless all night, would be watching us direly from another chair. It was all her fault, we told her. Scaring him the way she had. We'd never had this trouble with any other kitten.

Eventually, by keeping wool away from him, we cured him of his fetish about wetting. When there wasn't anything woollen around he used his box with an untroubled mind. There was just one rug in the sitting-room which apparently was some sort of touchstone and which we had to cover with a rubber sheet – weighing it down with two earthboxes and an array of ornaments otherwise Sass would lift it up and perform religiously underneath.

Other than that we'd got him out of it. We even got him round to sleeping on a blanket – with a hot water bottle under it moreover, which with Sass was really something. And then I made my unfortunate mistake. Shut him in our bedroom without an earthbox – with a nest of sweaters and a hot water bottle on the bed.

It was the result of all the double-checking we'd got the habit of over the years. To lock wardrobes, for instance, to keep our blue-eyed demons out, and then go back and have another look to see we hadn't locked them inside instead. To turn off the electricity at the mains before we went out in the car (Solomon used to poke at wires and switches)... and then, halfway up the hill, reverse speedily back again, unable to remember whether we'd done it or not. In this case I'd gone up to check that the hot water bottle wasn't leaking. It had dripped a little when I screwed it up and if it did that on the sweaters, Sass might get ideas...

That thought was actually in my mind , so how, having checked the bottle and patted their heads, I could have absentmindedly closed the bedroom door on them, leaving them with innocent expressions, cut off completely from their earthboxes...

I knew there was something wrong when we came back two hours later and there were no faces at the hall window to greet us. Even more so when I opened the hall door and nobody came through it as if shot from a catapult. Kidnapped. Dead. The wardrobe had fallen on them. The usual Siamese owner's thoughts flashed through my mind. Then I looked up the stairs, saw the closed door at the top, heard the sound of rampaging elephants inside... My thoughts switched immediately to those sweaters on the bed. I knew what I was going to find.

He'd done an absolutely outsize wet – through the sweaters, through the quilt, right down to the blankets. The hot water bottle had been dumped on the floor. In a futile hope I picked it up and checked it. Alas, it wasn't the bottle that had done the leaking, though the swamp on the bed was big enough. I looked at the undoubted culprit, watching me warily from the dressing table.

Why couldn't he have used a corner in an emergency, like any other cat? I wailed. If it came to that, why couldn't he have held on for a mere two hours? Normal cats don't use their boxes every five minutes like demented fountains. Why did he have to make such a point of it?

He regarded me with his Elizabethan philosopher look. His face always seemed much longer when he was solemn. I knew how he got Nervous, he said. How did he know it would only be two hours? He'd thought it was through not doing it that he and Shebalu had got locked in. He'd only been making a Libation.

He'd done that all right. I had to change all the blankets and it took days, after I'd washed it, to air the quilt. Even then I had to mount guard on it when Sass was anywhere near. He kept sniffing it with an air of unfinished business. More than that, he'd gone right back to his obsession about wool – obviously wetting the sweaters had brought it back to him. It became his main preoccupation and for a while it felt like ours as well.