Дорин Тови: More Cats in the Belfry

'Ah,' I said, recollecting the evening back in the spring when I'd passed the village hall on foot on my way home from a meeting of the History Society at the chairman's house, where we were planning the reissue of the village history we'd done a few years before, and I'd heard 'Sally' being belted out with such vigour it sounded as if the piano was coming through the corrugated tin roof at any moment. That explained it. I liked to know these things. I'd wondered at the time who was making all that noise.

Anyway, it seemed that the Singalong leader was a Mr Tooting who, with his wife, had retired to the village from the Midlands some years earlier. His wife had since died and Mr Tooting, distinguishable at any distance around the village by the fact that he was short, wore glasses, a military moustache, an air of supreme self-importance and a checked tweed pork-pie hat, had thereafter thrown himself into helping run local affairs. He was the most active churchwarden the Rector had ever had, always ready to organise beating the bounds, head a sub-committee for repairs to the organ, or personally oversee the men re-leading the roof. He fetched the old people's medicines en bloc from the chemist in the next village if they left their prescriptions in a special box in the post office, and was secretary of the Gardening Club, the Boys' Club and the Friendly Hands Club, at which he conducted the Singalong Half-hour by standing beside the piano, waving his arms at the audience as if trying to levitate them out of their seats, and leading the songs in a hearty baritone.

According to Mrs Adams, on the occasion of Mrs Binney's acting as accompanist for the first time, he bowed to her afterwards, led her forward by her fingertips as if they were dancing a minuet, and presented her to the audience, who supposed they must be meant to clap and obligingly did so. 'And then,' said Mrs A. with meaning, 'he kissed 'er 'and.' I could just imagine it. Mr Tooting doing a pint-sized impression of the conductor of the London Philharmonic at the last night of the Proms.

What did Mrs Binney do?' I enquired.

'Turned red as a beetroot and showed her teeth,' said Mrs Adams.

I could imagine that, too. Mrs Binney's smile, fortunately rare, was the result of somewhat antiquated dentistry and reminded most people of a horse about to bite.

Mr Tooting, still busy bowing to the audience, must have missed that bit. From then on all the Singalong Half-hours ended with his leading Mrs B. forward for applause, escorting her to her chair in the front row while he returned to the platform to read out the notices, and afterwards helping her on with her coat and walking with her to her front door, which was only a few yards up the lane, on his own way home, and anyway he had a torch. It didn't fail to arouse comment in the village, however.

'Tryin' to hang her hat up there all right.'

'Fancies herself livin' in thic bungalow.' 'Flatten he like a steam-roller on thur weddin' night', was Fred Ferry's country-candid observation to me outside the post office one day as we watched them walking up the village street together.

They were walking up the street together – big, brawny Mrs Binney and bantam-sized Mr Tooting – because she'd spotted him from behind her curtains as he passed her gate and had nipped out to catch him up. Mrs Tucker, who lived opposite her and kept a watchful eye on village goings-on from behind her own curtains, said she was always doing that.

Given that she'd decided he was interested in her, Mrs Binney was obviously doing her best to further matters – to which end, rocking the village to its stolid foundations, and as suddenly as she'd volunteered to play the piano, one day she abandoned the chamber-­pot hat and drainpipe coat she'd worn ever since I could remember and appeared, first of all in the post office and later the same day in the valley, wearing a Picasso-patterned summer dress and a hairdo of violet bubble­curls.

Father Adams was talking to me at the cottage gate when she came somewhat self-consciously down the hill. 'Gawd, Mod,' he said, stopping in mid-sentence to stare at her in feigned astonishment. 'Thee'st look like a hyacinth wrapped up in a Tesco bag. What on earth'st thee bin doin' to theeself?'

Ignoring him, she patted her curls complacently and asked me how I liked it. 'I... er... hardly recognised you,' I stammered, which was obviously the right answer because, while Father Adams faded quietly into the background and disappeared – no doubt to tip his cronies at the top of the hill not to miss on her way back – she confided to me that Shirl had done it. Took all last night, she had, doin' the perm. And made the dress for her. Very handy with her sewing machine, was Shirl. Appreciating the effort needed to construct a dress that fitted Mrs B.'s large and angular form in any material, let alone matching up sections of white nylon patterned with red, yellow and green triangles, I said she certainly must be.

Shirl, I would explain, was Mrs Binney's son Bert's girl-friend. Twenty years back she would have been living with her parents in the nearby seaside town where she was a hairdresser, with Bert zooming over on his motor-bike to court her in the evenings and at weekends. In these days of couples no sooner fancying each other than moving in together, however, Shirl and Bert were ensconced in a caravan behind the Barage on the main road where Bert worked as a mechanic, while they looked around for something permanent.

Twenty years back Mrs Binney would have disowned Bert and written off Shirl as a brazen hussy, if not a daughter of Jezebel, but as they were only emulating what went on on the telly, and even, if rumour was to be believed, in some of the yuppy-owned big houses around the district, what, Mrs B. demanded of her neighbours, not without a touch of pride in her Bert's being among the avant-garde, could she do about it?

It was none of my business. Indeed, what with the dress, the violet hairdo and the piano-playing I began to wonder about her own intentions towards Mr Tooting. Did she see herself as Thoroughly Modern Maude, sharing his bungalow as Shirl shared the caravan with Bert? And if so, with her being a member of the Mothers' Union and Mr Tooting a churchwarden, what would the Rector say?

For the moment, at any rate, it made my life considerably easier. She gave up coming down the hill quite so often to bemoan the condition of the cottage garden or tell me that I'd never raise Tani – and Tani, almost magically, started to thrive.

She still had nervous diarrhoea at the drop of a hat but Pauline's vet, whose practice was twenty-five miles away from me but worth the journey because he had Siamese cats himself and understood them, prescribed charcoal and kaolin granules to mix with her food. That controlled the diarrhoea and she started to put on weight.

She started to stand up to Saska, too. When he was indoors, where he didn't have to keep up his public image of an Eminently Superior Prince from Siam, he had a habit of trying to frighten her, when he thought I wasn't watching, by lowering his head, flattening his ears and stalking round her in a menacing circle while she crouched at bay on the carpet. Then one day I saw her, instead of crouching, lying on her side with one long back leg extended stiffly against him, fending him off like somebody using a boat-hook, and one front paw outstretched ready to hit him. As he moved round her she revolved correspondingly, as if on a pivot, so that she was always facing him, and when he couldn't find a point from which to pounce on her he gave up and pretended he was just passing by en route for food.

That was another thing. Fortified by the charcoal and kaolin she began to bolt her own meals and then start eating his, and I had to feed them separately so that he got his share undisturbed. So it was that one morning I came down, gave Saska his breakfast in the sitting-room and Tani hers in the kitchen, nipped out into the yard to change their litter trays, pulling the back door, which had a Yale lock, behind me to stop her following me – all part of a Siamese cat-owner's routine – and realised, even as I slammed it, that I'd locked myself out.