Дорин Тови - The New Boy_INSIDES.indd

It had never happened before in fourteen-and-a-half years. Perhaps it was delayed shock at losing Solomon, we decided – or subconscious resentment at our adoption of Seeley. Maybe all the chittering she’d done at him had strained her throat. Or was she perhaps jealous, and trying to sound like a baby herself?

We didn’t call the Vet. She didn’t appear to be ill and for the moment the thought of the Vet was synonymous with Solomon. After two days, in fact, her appetite came back – but not her voice. As the days went by and still she squeaked we began to think that it never would. And then, a fortnight after she’d so suddenly gone semi-mute, Charles said excitedly one morning, ‘She spoke!’ She did, too. With a vengeance. When I went out to ask her how she was feeling – ‘WAAAAAH!’ said Sheba profoundly, in deep contralto.

She’d been a soprano previously. Eventually her voice did become lighter again, though never so high-pitched as before. Something had damaged her vocal chords – and still we put it down to probable shock. Until, some weeks later, I happened to be having tea with Janet up the lane and she said that her cat, Rufus, had been off-colour. Wouldn’t eat for days, she said, and then he had lost his voice. Not that he’d ever had much of one, but it had gone right away to a squeak.

Her theory was that Rufus had picked up a germ from a stray cat she’d seen hanging around. Sheba, sniffing the garden in search of Solomon before Seeley came, could similarly have picked it up. It hadn’t occurred to us that 60

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it might be an infection of some sort – as, obviously, it undoubtedly was. As we’d have suspected, too, of course, if Seeley had also caught it.

Presumably Seeley hadn’t caught it because, having just come from his mother, he was still well endowed with antibodies. He was meanwhile engaged in other ways of worrying us. Like trying to get up the chimney.

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SEVEN

That was one of the very few ways in which he differed from Solomon. Solomon had never been the least bit interested in the chimney. Sheba had stood on her hind legs once and peered inquisitively up it – after which she’d decided a passing gnat was a lot more interesting so she’d chased that instead and left an ivy-leaf trail of artistic black pawprints all up the sitting-room wall. But other than that it meant nothing to them at all.

We put a guard over the fire when we went out, of course, and there were guards, for safety’s sake, on all the electric fires. We had to watch those, I must admit, because Solomon was an expert at threading his tail through the cross-pieces.

I remember, on one occasion, someone asking me on the phone how he and Sheba were. ‘Fine,’ I replied, never thinking to cross my fingers. ‘Absolutely bounding. Not a single thing wrong with them for once.’ And no sooner 62

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did I put down the phone and open the sitting-room door than Solomon, who was sitting in front of the fire, stood up, raised his tail, backed a step or two in his usual dance of greeting – and stuck his tail straight through the guard wires and onto the fire. It was all right. I whisked him away too fast for the heat to get to his skin. But there we were, not five seconds from saying how perfect everything was, with a horrible smell of singeing and Solomon’s tail scorched in poker-work stripes that didn’t grow out for weeks. It just doesn’t pay to be complacent with Siamese cats.

We hadn’t been complacent with Seeley. When, on his very first day with us, we found him clinging like a little white starfish to the top of the rounded fireguard (it was winter by now and we had a proper fire) we took precautions at once. He was obviously heading for the two inch gap above the guard, so we got a piece of wire netting, wired it firmly to the top of the guard, left sufficient at either side to bend round the fireplace hood when the guard was in place –

and with that at the top and a pair of heavy brass firedogs wedged against the bottom, we reckoned we’d pretty well taken care of that little hazard. We had, too, though I don’t know which surprised people more. Coming in and seeing the fireplace wired up like No-Man’s Land for no apparent reason, or coming in when Seeley was clinging to the top of it and one could see them thinking, ‘Good God! They’ve got another of them!’

Not only was the guard now pretty depressing-looking but it kept back some of the heat, of course, so when we were going to be permanently in the room we took it away.

Thus it was that Charles lit the fire as usual one morning and then we sat down at the other end of the room to have 63

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breakfast and Charles was just saying, with his cup halfway to his lips, that he thought, this morning, he’d get on with winter-washing the apple trees, when he suddenly yelled, slammed down the cup so hard it splashed coffee all over the tablecloth, and shot sideways up the room as if jerked by a string. I was sitting with my back to the fireplace and for the moment I was quite bewildered. Only when I turned round and saw him flat on his stomach on the hearthrug clutching a kitten as unrepentantly black as pitch did I realise what had happened.

The fire, said Charles, hadn’t been drawing well. He’d just looked across and decided he’d have to re-light it after breakfast and at that moment a spark flickered up from the apparently dead coal, hovered for a moment in the draught, and then soared like a star up the chimney. As it did, Seeley, who’d been sitting on the hearthrug with the wistful waiting-for-Santa expression on his face which is why Siamese kittens get themselves on Christmas cards so often, soared after it and Charles, thanks to the fact that he’d been looking and also to the speed at which he’d moved, had been just in time to grab him before he vanished.

After that we had to keep a guard over the fireplace at all times and, as the old guard looked so dismal with the chicken wire tied to it, we decided to get a new one that fitted the fireplace properly. Wrought iron while we were at it, we thought, as we’d have to keep it there in the summer as well. As our fireplace is unusually wide to allow for log-burning we had to have the fireguard specially made, of course, and a pretty penny that little Siamese foible cost us.

Seeley also differed from Solomon over the ever-pressing question of where he had his earthbox. Solomon and Sheba 64

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had been born in the cottage. On our bed, as a matter of fact; otherwise, their mother had insisted, she wouldn’t have kittens at all. Thanks to her equally determined insistence that they had to be brought up upstairs, because only there were they safe from the kidnappers she imagined were lying in wait for them round every corner, they’d spent the first impressionable weeks of their lives in the spare room and there, as a matter of course, they’d had their earthboxes. As far as Solomon was concerned it was more than a matter of course; it was a law of the Medes and Persians. His box had always been there; he expected it to be there; if it was anywhere else his stomach wouldn’t work and the entire village was told about it molto voce.

After fourteen and a half years of following in Solomon’s footsteps Sheba also took it for granted her box would be there. Not for regular use, of course. There were super places among the dahlias for general digging. But for when we were out, or if it was raining, or at night when there were foxes around the cottage.