Дорин Тови - A Comfort Оf Cats

It certainly had. We had a performance every evening. Round and round and round. It went beyond exercise, beyond merely copying Shebalu – you could tell it by his expression. If he didn't go round and round like that, Something Terrible would happen.

That was bad enough. Eventually it even affected Charles, who said there ought to be an Outward Bound course for cats. He knew one cat who'd be on it like a rocket, he said, before he had us all going round in circles. But Sass then developed another compulsion and worked the two of them together.

It involved going up the bookcase and it was also started by Shebalu, of whom I was beginning to have my suspicions. She knew Sass wasn't a good climber. She knew he had this thing about having to copy her. So every single night without fail she would leap to the top shelf of the bookcase and sit looking down at him expectantly for his reaction, which was to erupt from chair or hearthrug as if she'd pressed a button and start worrying about getting up there himself.

Another cat would have ignored the challenge. Pretended it didn't matter. In similar circumstances Solomon used to go off and climb something simpler to satisfy honour – usually Charles's dressing-gown behind the bedroom door, which was known as Solomon's ladder. Not so Sass. From the expression on his face, if he didn't make it up the bookcase the haunts would get him. So I'd help him up. I couldn't win, of course. He'd then sit there and worry about coming down again – silently, as is usual when Sass is in a crisis, but you couldn't fail to know he was up there doing it. For one thing there was Shebalu, now back on the hearthrug herself, looking up interestedly as if he was about to jump from a skyscraper. For another, every now and again he'd put a paw on the top of the standard lamp and peer anxiously down through the shade. 'Not through there!' I'd yell and rush to stand on a chair so that he could get down via my shoulder...

Once a night was enough for the bookcase routine but within minutes of completing that he'd remember the other thing that kept off the haunts and he'd be off on his trek round the settee. If he saw us watching him he stopped and lurked, but the moment we looked away, on he went, round and round, as if he was on a treadmill. The only guaranteed way to break the sequence was to open the door to the kitchen, through which he'd vanish quietly on his next trip round to see if there was anything to eat.

Did I think he was mental? Charles sometimes asked. Not from the way he nipped into the kitchen, I said.

It was odd, all the same. He did other odd things, too, though they didn't impinge quite so much on our nerves. The business of moving pens and pencils and paintbrushes around, for instance, took place after we'd gone to bed. At first it was just an odd pencil which I'd find lying tooth-marked on the rug in the morning. I'd pick it up and put it back in the vase on the Welsh dresser, commenting that Sass was being a retriever again.

Charles, whose hobby is painting, keeps his brushes and pencils in that vase, on hand for the moment of inspiration. He didn't mind Sass taking one pencil – in fact he regarded the tooth marks with affection. Strong little teeth. He certainly gripped things tightly. Funny little chap, wasn't he? he said.

He didn't say that when, as was inevitable with Sass, there was a build-up in the operation. When we began to come down in the morning to find brushes and pencils strewn around as if our dark man had been distributing largesse. They were scattered across the carpet. They were poked under rugs and cushions. Some of them we didn't find for days. He began to hide my pens, too, which I have a habit of leaving on a shelf of the bookcase. Sometimes I couldn't find a thing to write with.

It had become another of his compulsions. One which occupied a lot of time. He took to sitting on the Welsh dresser when he thought it was our bedtime, willing us to go upstairs so he could start. As if he were waiting for the coast to be clear before he started running the brandy barrels, said Charles. Perhaps he'd been a smuggler in a previous incarnation.

Charles was still reasonably light-hearted about it when he made that remark, though he was getting a bit concerned about his chewed-up brush handles. Pencils he didn't mind so much but paint-brushes were expensive, he said. What was more, it wasn't hygienic.

Rather more hygienic than Sass's next development, which was to start putting the brushes in his earthbox. At that point the project came to a sudden end in a strong smell of Dettol and references to one-way tickets to Siam. The vase joined the onion sack upstairs in the verboten room and Sass was most upset, though he showed no sign of it during the day. Only after we went to bed that night did our dark man, normally so silent, start howling... great, soulful howls that announced he'd been doing his Best. He hoped he wouldn't be blamed for falling down on the brush ritual. He'd have gone on moving them for Ever and Ever. If anybody's whiskers were going to fall out, it ought to be that Rotten Old Charles's.

Hating to hear him howling so disconsolately – besides which he kept us awake – we compromised by leaving a selection of removables on the dresser. Pencils he'd already chewed. Old pens that needed refills. A broken wooden curtain ring that Sass immediately adopted as his favourite talisman. His other treasures were moved only during the night, but his ring appeared constantly during the day. Hooked from under the piano. Tossed in front of us to beguile us into playing with him. From time to time, when he thought it necessary, laid reverently in his earthbox. There were times, particularly when he was carrying it round the settee, when he looked like a South Sea Islander with a nose-ring doing a war dance. What did it matter, however, so long as it kept him happy and we were the only ones who knew about it? Letting anyone else see him was a different matter. It would have been added evidence of our oddness. Meantime the thaw came and spring arrived, heralded by Annabel getting a dose of colic.

It would have been understandable if it had happened while we were snow-bound and she couldn't go into her field – when she spent the day alternately eating hay in her stable and looking out over her tiny half-door. Charles had made it specially to fit her height, so she could get her head over the top. Even so she kept bawling about how bored she was and that she wanted to go out. So every day we took her for a walk up the hill, where a track had been trodden in the snow.

Annabel loved it. The people who lived at the top gave her sweets and fondled her ears. She had her photograph taken standing importantly by a snowman. Always one for effect, this was when she behaved at her best, with a daily captive audience. She plodded along behind me being Annabel Going To The Klondike, walking obediently in my tracks. She made no attempt now, as was her usual practice on walks, to nip my bottom and then mockingly shake her head, her mouth wide open in a disparaging donkey laugh which held all the more meaning for being silent.

One afternoon, encouraged by Miss Wellington, we tried to take her out on to the main road. She was sure it was possible and it would set such a good example, she said, if our dear little donkey could do it.

We tried, not by way of an example, but to see how far we could go over the drift. We might have got through – it had packed like ice on top and Annabel is as sure-footed as a mountain goat – but the wind had come up, loose snow was blowing sideways off the fields, and we walked into a veritable blizzard. Without altering pace for an instant our four-footed friend turned round and started back. Annabel believes in looking after Annabel – no setting examples for her. We emerged like a set piece sculptured in ice, white from head to foot. People said it looked most spectacular and photographed that little incident too. We often wondered what they captioned it in their albums. 'Pioneers en route for the Yukon', or 'The queer lot who live in the Valley?'