Дорин Тови - The New Boy_INSIDES.indd

He ruled them now as if they’d always been his people.

He lay there loftily in the best armchair looking at us just like Solomon, while they told us about his achievements.

How he went to bed with them at night, for instance.

Sleeping between her and her husband with his head on the pillow, said Mrs Pitman, while Samantha slept as good as gold in the airing cupboard.

One night her husband had gone on strike and said he wasn’t going to have that cat in bed with him. (Not that he didn’t like him, said Mrs Pitman, but Sappho took up so much room, they always ended lying on the edge.) Sappho, evading eviction, took refuge under the bed. It was no good trying to entice him out with rabbit. Sappho 40

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said firmly he didn’t want it and he wasn’t Coming.

Until, said Mrs Pitman, her husband got out of bed to close the window, which he’d forgotten – when Sappho was out, up on the pillow and under the sheets in one fast black streak. You couldn’t help laughing, said Mr Pitman admiringly. They couldn’t turn him out, after that.

Sappho had landed in clover all right. You could tell that by the way, when the Pitmans’ daughter brought him a saucer of milk, he condescended to drink it. On his side in the armchair, languidly lifting his head to lap. You could tell it, too, by the story of the time they’d lost him. He was such a one for going exploring around the neighbourhood, said Mrs Pitman; they never knew where he was going to turn up next.

Anyway, they’d been enquiring around for hours on this occasion when somebody said they’d seen him earlier in the Johnsons’ farmyard, and when they got there, there was this great big heap of steaming manure which they knew hadn’t been there that morning… They always thought the worst, she said resignedly. (I could understand it. After years of Siamese cat-keeping, so did we.) And the farmer wasn’t there, to ask permission, and they dared not use spades, for fear of hitting Sappho with the edge…

So when the farmer came back, there they were, she and her husband and the children, frantically moving the manure heap with their hands. She and her daughter were crying, she said reminiscently, imagining poor little Sappho suffocated underneath.

‘That gert dark-coloured cat? Oh, he were fright ened by die tractor when I brought the muck in,’ the farmer said 41

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heartily. ‘Went up thic old tree. Han’t he come back home then?’

Sappho in fact was still up the tree. Not twenty yards from the manure heap, and he’d been watch ing them from it all the time. Right at the top and he must have been shouting for help, before they came, for hours. When they fetched a ladder and got him down, he’d completely lost his voice.

Well, there we were. He and Samantha had settled down with one another. And he’d been four when they had him, while Samantha was two. It encouraged us to think that Sheba might be all right, too, when we got our new boy.

Only – were we ever going to find a kitten just like Solomon?

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FIVE

They say it’s always darkest just before the dawn and that Saturday night I’d just about given up hope. We’d rung every breeder we’d ever heard of, travelled all over our own and neighbouring counties and so far we’d drawn a complete blank. When the phone rang I almost didn’t answer it. I was so tired of saying No, we hadn’t found him yet.

It was someone ringing up with more addresses. Dutifully I thanked her, half-heartedly rang the numbers… It was the usual story. No kittens at the first place. Small ones at the second. (I always asked if the kittens were small and almost without exception the answer was Yes.) But the third… Oh no, hers weren’t small , said the voice enthusiastically. She had the mother and the father, and the father was huge. Yes, and dark and with big bat ears… That was just like Orlando.

She’d try to keep him in if I’d like to see him.

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I hadn’t heard amiss. Orlando, it seemed, wasn’t kept penned like most pedigree stud cats. They had only one breeding queen themselves, explained Mrs S. They bred because they liked the kittens about the place, not as a business. So they had to let Orlando out to find other wives, or the place would never hold him.

It was only just holding him the following after noon.

We were standing in a hall that looked as if it had come straight out of a Hollywood film set. A luxurious, deep-pile carpet covered about half an acre of floor. In the centre an open-tread, wrought iron staircase swept in a striking curve towards the landing. On the right, in an alcove, was a pool in a rockery grotto, with concealed green underwater lighting and fish gliding lazily among the water lilies. I was still goggling at that… my mind registering goldfish …

indoor fishpool … surely not with Siamese cats … when a flap opened in a door at the back of the hall and a Siamese kitten scurried through, gave us a sharp-eyed glance in passing and disap peared into a room on the left.

‘That’s one of them. One of the boys I think,’ said Mrs S.

‘And the one making the noise is Orlando. We’ve kept him in since breakfast and he doesn’t like it.’

Noise was the understatement of the year. Orlando sounded as if he was being sawn in half. He wanted to Go Out. He’d promised to meet Another Cat. WANT HIM

TO TEAR THE PLACE DOWN? roared a voice that had more than a hint of Solomon’s in it. HE’D START ON IT

PRETTY SOON, warned the voice after a much-needed pause for breath.

We went into the room. If one didn’t know Siamese one would, from the uproar, have expected to see something 44

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approaching a sabre-toothed tiger and – if they were present at all and not hiding panic-stricken under a bed somewhere

– a clutch of terrified kittens and a nervous, intimidated queen. We’d had experi ence, however. It was no surprise to us to see a trio of smudge-faced kittens tumbling unconcernedly over the furniture, a seal-point female cleaning her back leg on the hearth-rug, and none of them taking the slightest notice of the huge, black-shouldered male who, with his eyes shut tight to help him shout better, was sitting bawling to himself in the middle of the floor.

It was a room that matched the hall. Enormous, magnificently carpeted, a grand piano on one side and settees dotted about as if it were the Savoy. There were enough Siamese for the Savoy, too. Orlando, his wife, three kittens and – for the moment I thought I was seeing things – another huge seal-point and a blue-point as well.

Mrs S., following my gaze, explained. The blue-point was their previous breeding queen, now enjoying a well-earned retirement. The seal-point, William, was one of Orlando’s grown-up sons. Neutered of course, said Mrs S., or he wouldn’t have got on with his father. With Orlando himself away so much, it was nice to have a boy around the place.

It wasn’t the number I was staring at. It was the fact that there was not just one cat like Solomon regarding me from these ultimate-in-luxury surroundings, but – I could hardly believe it – three. Orlando and his wife, who were very much alike to look at. And, surveying us loftily from the lid of the grand piano, William, their neuter son. It was like looking at Solomon in a triple mirror. The same eyes, the same bone structure, the same velvety dark-seal colouring. It was hardly surprising, when we compared the 45