Дорин Тови - More Cats in the Belfry

Normally I kept a spare key in the woodshed, but the previous day I'd gone out in the car, tossed my handbag on to the back seat after shopping and found, when I got home, that its contents had fallen out on the car floor. I'd gathered them up, put the car away and come down to the cottage to discover that the back door key wasn't in its usual place in my handbag. I thought it must be still on the floor of the car, decided to leave it until next day, and used the spare key from the woodshed instead.

That was the one now marooned indoors on the kitchen dresser – along with the car keys, so that I couldn't go up and look for the original door key on the car floor either.

Panicking about what the cats might do if left where they were – they normally expected to go out into the garden directly after breakfast – I fetched a ladder and a screwdriver, climbed on to the sloping hall roof, thankful that for once nobody was about to ask what I was doing, and crawled up it to the spare room window. Joy oh joy! As I thought! I'd left the casement slightly ajar for air when I'd cleaned it a few days previously. I raised the catch with the screwdriver, climbed in and belted downstairs – passing a puzzled Saska who had just finished his breakfast and couldn't make out why I'd come in through that door when I'd gone out through the other one, and a claustrophobic Tani who'd been marooned in the kitchen without anybody for company and didn't like it – shot out into the yard to fetch the litter trays which I knew they must by now be in urgent need of – and realised immediately that I'd done it again. Slammed the door behind me without thinking and locked myself out.

There was no point in trying the spare room window this time. I'd fastened the latch properly when I got in. I moved the ladder and tried the boxroom window over the kitchen. No go. Charles had long ago secured that one against intruders and I had kept it like that, with wire wound round the latch and bar. I climbed down and called to Tani through the back door keyhole to be a good girl. I wouldn't be long getting back to her, I said. I'd Better Not Be, she screeched back with the promise of imminent stomach upset in her voice. Where was Saska? Where was her BOX? she demanded in a rising soprano.

I rushed round to the sitting-room window and instructed Saska likewise. Where was Tani? Was I taking her out Without Him? he bawled, standing on the window sill with his tail raised threateningly against the curtain.

'Oh no!' I wailed aloud. 'Don't let him do that!' Saska had an unfortunate habit of spraying when he was upset about anything. I hadn't any idea whom I was asking. I didn't suppose the Almighty would be greatly concerned at my being locked out of the cottage through my own stupidity or the prospect of Saska spraying up the curtains. I often asked Charles for help when I couldn't find things or was in a predicament and it was surprising – sometimes to the point of being uncanny – how often the situation resolved itself. But I couldn't expect Charles to help me over this. And judging by Saska's tail the matter was urgent.

I ran down the lane to the Reasons'. Father Adams wasn't on the phone. Janet Reason had already gone off to her job at the nearby airport. Peter was just getting ready to leave himself. Could I use their phone to ring the police? I asked, explaining what had happened. When I rang the local police station, however, an answering machine informed me that it wasn't manned, and I should dial 999 if there was an emergency.

It was an emergency as far as I was concerned, I told the voice that answered when I did, explaining that if someone could come and open the car for me I could get the key of the cottage. I was given the number of Taunton police station, where they said they only had a few car keys. I'd better try the AA; they'd give me the number. There a female voice said I'd got their Travel Bureau, which didn't open until nine o'clock. What did I want? I told her, including the urgency about the cats' litter boxes. She was most sympathetic. Wouldn't they hold on? she asked, passing me swiftly to Emergency, who said someone would be me within an hour.

An hour! I tottered back up the lane, imagining the mayhem Tani might commit in the kitchen, and Saska against the sitting-room curtains, in that time. When Peter drove past a few minutes later, leaning out of his car window to ask was I all right, because I'd told him I was going back to wait for the AA, I was once more up on the hall roof, tapping away hammer and screwdriver.

'Fine,' I answered, more brightly than I felt. 'Had a sudden idea. Almost in. Any minute now.' It was something I'd seen Charles do on odd occasions when we'd been locked out­ – and sure enough, even as I spoke somehow I'd tapped the window frame enough for me to jolt the catch loose, insert the screwdriver, lift it up… and I was in again, downstairs, giving the cats clean litter boxes. In the Nick of Time, Tani announced, jumping into hers with evident relief, while I put the key in the outside lock so it couldn't happen again.

Now I just had to ring the AA and say there was no need for them to come. In my agitation I couldn't find their number in the phone directory. I decided to open the car now that the car keys were available, get the number from the AA book, which was in the door pocket, and retrieve the other back door key that had been the cause of all the trouble. I couldn't believe it when I couldn't find the key on the car floor. I phoned the AA, turned out my handbag once more in desperation and there, after all the panic, it was. Hidden in a corner, where it must have been all the time.

The next silly thing I did was get in a muddle over Tani's spaying. She should have the operation at six months, the vet had told me when he treated her for her nervous stomach. She'd been born at the end of January... six months from January was June, I calculated. I booked her in for the end of June and had driven her almost the twenty-five miles to the vet's on the appointed day when it dawned on me that six months from January was July. Tani was only five months old.

I drove on to the surgery to explain. Some cats were big enough earlier, said the vet, examining her. But definitely not Tani. She was still very small – needed to grow a bit more. She was a lovely little girl all the same, he said, cuddling her closely, which she decided was what she'd come for. So I brought her home for another month, unwisely told Miss Wellington what had happened, and started her off on another of her campaigns – which this time was not to have Tani spayed at all, but to let her have kittens.

Miss Wellington will be remembered by my readers as the elderly lady who concerned herself deeply with everything that happened in our part of the village. Whenever the stream flooded in the valley, though her own cottage was at the top of the hill and she was in no way inconvenienced by it, she took it on herself to patrol the swallet – the large natural hole in the limestone bed of the stream higher up in the forest down which the surplus water was supposed to go but very often didn't. She rang the Council to tell them when it was blocked with silt – and again when they didn't arrive at the double to unblock it. She foresaw catastrophe every time it snowed, rained hard or the wind got up to gale force, and scurried round trying to organise forces to counter whatever threatened – masculine forces if possible, so that the male residents of the valley usually took cover when they saw her coming, though she did once suggest that she and I should move an enormous tree trunk to stop the overflow from the swallet sweeping down the bridlepath. In vain I protested that I would do myself an injury. Before I knew it I was on the other end of the log, struggling like Samson to shift it.

Way back when Annabel was young Miss Wellington had tried hard to persuade us to let her have a foal. Every time she went to stay with her friend who lived by the sea in Devon she would send us postcards showing mother donkeys on the beach with their cuddlesome offspring and Some day – this? written heavily across them. 'Old Mother Wellington's at it again,' the postman used to announce when he delivered her holiday greeting; and when we did try to get Annabel a foal – a fine old caper that turned out to be, too, what with her measuring fifty-four inches round the waist (Annabel, that is); collapsing in the lane telling us she could Go No Further, it was her Condition, when we tried to get her to exercise; and keeping us on the hop for three months waiting for a late delivery when in fact she wasn't having a foal at all – a good few people thought we'd been brainwashed into it by Miss Wellington, when what we'd hoped for was a small companion for Annabel.