Дорин Тови - A Comfort Оf Cats

It started with our bringing home a half-hundredweight of onions in a green plastic sack which we'd bought at the local Saturday market. We'd happened to meet Tim Bannett there and he'd just bought two sacks himself. Next year, when he was better organised, he told us, he was going to grow his own. Meanwhile, as the next best thing, he was buying them in bulk. Liz was going to string these like the Breton onions – it told you how in the self-sufficiency book and they'd look good hanging up near the jars of honey. With their home-made wine on the shelves, he added, and the box of apples we'd given them... There was a sort of Virginian pioneer's Thanksgiving look on his face.

There was one on Charles's, too, as we also drove home with a sack of onions. Tim was right, he enthused. The big porch outside the kitchen, which we'd recently had built to take gum boots and anoraks and the freezer, would make an admirable winter store. A couple of sacks of potatoes; one of flour; these onions; his cob-nuts when he harvested them. There was something in this self-sufficiency business – it gave one an independent, let-'em-all-come feeling.

It did indeed. I began to have visions myself. Big stone jars of pickles; a neatly-stacked winter woodpile – not the last-minute odds and ends we frenziedly sawed up now. Perhaps we could get one of those big pine dressers for the kitchen, I said. I rather liked them. It would go well with our red-tiled floor and the strings of onions. We had our old oil-lamps, too, which we'd used before we got electricity at the cottage. I could get those out and polish them. They'd look really right on the dresser.

So long as I didn't want to actually use them, said Charles. We'd had enough of groping round in dimness before. He had other things to do this winter.

So, dreaming our dreams, we drove home with our sack of onions and stacked it proudly against the wall in the porch – only to find Sass chewing at the mesh a few minutes later as if it was his one hope of getting to Mecca.

It couldn't have been the smell of the netting which attracted him. That was over-powered by the onions. It wasn't the onions either. When I offered him one he ignored it. It was then that it struck me it might be the colour of the netting – green like the grass and the watercress. Experts say cats are colour-blind and see only in shades of grey. I wondered, though – could Sass be different? It was a theory I put to Charles a few days later after an incident in the orchard.

By this time, worried by Saska's preoccupation with the sack (Charles having come up with the thought that the dye in the netting might be poisonous), we'd moved it up to the spare-room-cum-study as the one place our gannet couldn't get at it. I write up there, it is a very small room and the smell of onions is hardly like that of violets – but, as Charles said, which was more important? Sass, indubitably. I put up with the onions.

So this particular day I was upstairs working, Charles was in the orchard, Shebalu was asleep downstairs (four years older than Sass, she insists on senior rights occasionally) and Sass, bereft of company, was busy bawling the place down. I could tell by the rise and fall of the howling that he was wandering from room to room. Presently there was silence. A creak on the stairs. I waited for it – the sound of sniffing at the door jamb. Then the hiatus which I knew from long experience with Siamese meant he was peering under the door.

His bellow when it came was like the foghorn on the Lizard. He knew I was In There! he roared. He could See Me! Why didn't I Let Him In? What was in there he wasn't supposed to know about?

I could stand the foghorn. I'd had long experience of that, too. What I couldn't stand was when he started chewing the carpet. I carried him over to Charles who said of course he'd have him in the orchard – he was so intelligent he was always a delight to be with. 'Couldn't she be bothered with you then?' I heard him ask as the two of them made their way up through the gooseberry patch. Sass gave a man-to-man 'Wow!'

I went back to my work. For a while all was peace and silence, then I heard footsteps thumping up the stairs. It was Charles, clutching Sass. His face was scarlet. Did I know, he said, what this cat of mine had done? Gone straight up an apple tree – right to the top – and chewed a whacking great hole in the net!

The apple trees are netted to keep off the birds, whom we like but who devastate our crops. The nets are expensive and Charles had spent ages putting them on, manoeuvring them carefully with a pole to cover all the branches. Admittedly this was autumn and the birds wouldn't start in till the spring, but 'A brand new net!' groaned Charles. 'And now I've got to take a ladder up and mend the hole with string. That blasted cat must be bonkers.'

It was then I pointed out that the nets were green, like the onion sack and the watercress. Perhaps he was a breakthrough, I said; a cat who recognised colour. Charles said breakthrough was the right description for him, the way he'd gone through that fruit net. But why should he get fanatical about things that were green , not brown or white or blue?

Maybe when he saw Shebalu eating her grass clump with such reverence, I said, he thought he should eat everything that colour to be on the safe side. Maybe it was some sort of Siamese ritual, like that business of his with the rug. (The rug is a story with many facets. I'd better tell that one later.) The more I saw of Sass, I confessed, I wondered whether he was superstitious.

Charles looked at the cat we were talking about. Sass never wasted time. Having done his stuff with green netting for the day he was obviously practising for his next encounter with Polly. Back arched, tail stuck out like a teacup handle, he was advancing across the room at absolutely nothing. He stiffened, feinted, jumped aside, spun round... advanced sideways at nothing again. He didn't know about superstitious, said Charles. If I asked him, that cat was nuts.

Five

We first realised we had a strain of unusual mice in the Valley when we were returning from a walk one day with Annabel.

I was in front, going ahead to open the Forestry gate, Charles was coming behind with his four-legged girlfriend, when what I thought was an autumn leaf skittered across the track in front of me and came to rest at the bottom of the bank. It moved again as I got near it and I saw that it was a field-mouse. Chestnut brown, small – the size of a half-grown oak leaf – and making no attempt whatever to get away. Maybe it was injured, I thought, stooping to pick it up and put it where Annabel wouldn't tread on it. (I'll pick up anything with gloves on except an adder; another thing I've grown used to over the years.)

It wasn't injured, however. It was sitting up on its haunches eating grass seed, turning the tassel like a corn-cob in incredibly tiny paws, ignoring me completely as if I were some sort of local tree. By the time Charles came up it had finished that grass head and moved a foot or so up the bank, where it selected another which it sat up and nibbled while it looked interestedly down at Annabel.

'Perhaps it's got concussion,' I whispered to Charles. Never had I seen an outdoor mouse so confident. Charles studied it closely.

'Nothing wrong with that one,' he said. 'It's just not afraid of anything.'

Neither was the one I saw next day eating bird crumbs by the cotoneaster in the yard. It was sitting nonchalantly with its back to me and didn't even turn round as I passed. It wasn't the mouse we'd seen in the lane. This one was definitely larger. There was the same air of insouciance, however – the obvious lack of fear. I wondered if they came from the same litter.