Дорин Тови - More Cats in the Belfry

He started to climb the wire netting run of the cats' garden house from the outside too – it was a good six feet high, on a bank on a raised base, and he'd shin up and dash about on the wire top like a mad thing. Which was all very well – I was always on hand to lift him down from the slope of the cat-house roof when he'd had enough – until the day he and Tani were watching a mousehole in the stone at the top of the lawn. I'd slipped in to take something out of the oven (I had to do things like that when I thought they were safely based a moment) and when I scurried out again they were missing.

I called them. No response. I blew Charles's scout whistle which I kept in my pocket for such emergencies – I'd long ago discovered that when I blew it Tani, always expecting the kidnappers, would emerge full pelt from wherever she was and bolt for the cottage. But, this time she didn't. The lawn – and it was almost dusk – was bare and silent. So I dashed inside for the only thing I could think of – the tin of cat biscuits that to both of them was a summons to heaven – and ran up the garden path rattling it. As if by magic Tani appeared from somewhere at the back of the cottage and rushed indoors and Saphra, too, shot across my vision. Not at ground level but darting across the top of the cat-run and, in order to get to the cat biscuits before Tani, launching himself from above my head out across the path and plonk down on the lawn on the other side.

It was a good eight-foot drop and I started to run again, sure he must have hurt himself, but he bounced up fresh as a daisy and came tearing towards me. Pirate kittens did things like that, he informed me in a Siamese bawl. That was his Boarding Jump. Sinbad had taught him about it. Now what about those biscuits?

A few days later he did far worse than that. It was a Sunday evening, and as usual I'd been out on the lawn with them. I'd picked up Tani and carried her in because it was supper time and gone back to fetch the Menace, whom I'd left studying a beetle in the border. Always ready for a game, he put his ears back, raced across the lawn and shinned up the tall plum tree against the garage wall. Right to the top from which he stepped off on to the wide, gloss-painted strip that edged the sloping garage roof, and immediately lost his footing on it.

The garage is a conversion of a 250-year-old barn, the same age as the cottage. It is some twenty feet high at the apex and the roof-slope is steep. He couldn't get a grip on the painted wood, it didn't occur to him to jump beyond it on to the rougher tiles, and he started to slither down towards the bottom.

'No... please!' I breathed, unable to do a thing to help except hope I might be able to catch him when he fell off. Then one of his claws caught in a splintered bit, he held on there for dear life anchored by one paw and yelling at him not to move, I rushed down to the woodshed for a ladder. He couldn't have known what I was saying – he hung there because he wasn't able to move – but the result was the same. I belted back with the ladder – fortunately of light aluminium, and I managed to extend it easily – slapped it against the roof and scuttled up it. He wouldn't let me unhook him with my hands, but clung to the wood strip for all he was worth. Only when I lay flat against the ladder and put my shoulder under his back feet, so that he could get a grip with them, did he turn and clamber cautiously down my body, sinking his claws into me like climbing pitons every inch of the way. How he would manage when he got to the end of me I dared not think. At that point, however, he was a good way down from his original mind-bo­ggling height and was level with the top of the Bramley apple tree on the other side of the path. One leap and he was across the gap and sprawled flat as a starfish across a branch of his haven.

Hurriedly I scrambled down the ladder and grabbed him before he could find anything else to climb. I'd thought I was alone while all this was happening. I should have known better, of course. No sooner did I start down the path, one hand firmly clutching Saph's scruff, the other under his feet, holding him against my cheek because, despite the fact that he put years on me with every day that passed, he was Saska all over again and I loved him dearly, than 'You shouldn't let him do things like that – he might hurt himself' came a voice from the now darkening shadows of the lane.

I recognised it at once. Miss Wellington. If it had been Mrs Binney, after all the tales I'd been hearing – mostly from Fred Ferry – ­about her being seen around the country lanes at twilight with a companion in a pork-pie hat, I wouldn't have been so surprised. But Miss Wellington? What on earth was she doing out and about almost in darkness?

SIX

I soon found out. Miss Wellington, having revealed her presence in the lane, obviously thought she'd better explain why she was there before the rumour went round that she, too, was having secret assignations in the gloaming.

It seemed that her sister, widow of a headmaster and herself recently retired as headmistress of an infants' school in Wiltshire, had bought a cottage which was for sale further up the lane from me and was shortly moving into it. I'd mentioned the cottage to Mrs Binney as a possibility for Bert, but she said Shirl was a town girl and din't fancy living up among all them trees, whereas mine was in a spot where there were more people about and had a proper road running down to it. Shirl wanted her own car when they got settled, she said importantly.

Which took care of Shirl, and why Miss Wellington's sister wanted to live in such a remote spot, up a side lane off the main one, with a very rough stretch of bridle path to drive over before she got to it and, if it came to that, close to Miss Wellington, was anybody's guess. But she did want it, and had bought it, and Miss Wellington was keeping a self-appointed eye on it. To see that vandals didn't damage it before Poppy moved in, and dusk was the time when they were most often about, she told me, which left me with two thoughts uppermost in my mind: first that from now on I could expect Miss Wellington to be hovering in the lane any time I was in the garden at twilight; and second that if her sister's name was Poppy what on earth could Miss Wellington's own Christian name be? I'd never heard her referred to as anything but Miss Wellington. If I'd been asked to hazard a guess I'd have said something like Augusta or Victoria with that surname. In fact in the fullness of time, when Poppy Richards had moved in and started to refer to her sister in conversation around the village, we discovered at Miss Wellington's name was Pansy. Before long the two sisters' cottages – one at the top of the hill and the other up the valley in the other direction – were known as Pansy's and Poppy's, and Miss Wellington had become Old Pans when spoken of by the more disrespectful locals such as Fred Ferry, while her sister needless to say became Old Pop.

This is jumping ahead of events, however. For weeks before Mrs Richards moved in Miss Wellington was as consistent a visitor to the valley as Mrs Binney had been, lurking around like MI5 at dusk, marching through proprietorially during the day, picking up loose stones from the bridlepath on her way up to the cottage in case, she explained, she turned her ankles on them; and snapping off odd sticks and branches in the hedge on her way back in case, she said, they scratched her sister's car when she moved in. The stones she dumped on the grass verges of the lane which, as I owned the land on both sides of it, were mine, and I kept the grass on them cut down with the hover-mower and from then on was forever catching the blade on the stones with a horrible scraping noise and using language about Miss Wellington that would have shocked the Rector. The branches she tossed into the wood on her way back up the hill – always at the same spot. The wood, too, was mine and the collection was starting to look like the beginnings of a Guy Fawkes bonfire. I didn't like to say anything to her, but the air was rapidly becoming electric.