Дорин Тови - More Cats in the Belfry

It was a smell, too. About half an hour earlier a rider had come down the hill on a strange horse, tried to get it across the stream to go up into the forest, and it had started playing up. Some horses are like that about water crossings they don't know. It had backed, reared on its hind legs and frothed at the mouth. One must never let a horse get the upper hand, of course. Give in to it, turn away, and it will never cross that stream again. So the rider dug her heels in, I went out and made a noise walking behind it, and the horse capitulated and went across... where, to relieve the tension, it did a pool the size of our garden pond in front of the Forestry gate, shook itself, snorted, and went on.

Only in extremity will a horse relieve itself in the roadway. It prefers the straw in its stable, or will move off the bridleway on to a grass verge rather than get splashed. Tani had never met such a spectacle before, but she obviously realised what it was. Anybody would, by the overpowering pong. Her only previous experience of such matters was when Saska performed, and presumably she thought this was one of his efforts – which, being a boy and careless, he hadn't been too careful about positioning. So there we were. Me standing by an enormous wet and pungent patch in the dust, Saska obliviously ahead on his lead tugging to get through the gate, and Tani like small mouse on a string behind me, scratching furiously to try to cover it up.

I tugged the cord, but she wouldn't come. I couldn't go back to her, with Saska pulling hard in the other direction. At that moment Fred Ferry swung briskly down the hill behind me and rounded the corner (Fred was always appearing like that, knapsack on his shoulder and heading for the hills, which was why he had the reputation of being our local poacher) and said, his eyes like saucers, 'Cor did she do that?' He knew very well she couldn't have done, but it didn't stop him reporting it as a fact up at the pub, so that people kept coming past for days asking was it true that I had a cat that widdled like a water-cart?

They used to stop and watch to see if she'd perform, and she didn't like it. She would run indoors and hide behind the sofa, protesting that the White Slavers she was always expecting had caught up with her at last.

Life had its complications where my Aunt Louisa was concerned, too. Now nearly eighty, in her young days she'd helped my grandmother bring me up, and I looked on her as my responsibility. She still lived in the old family house in Bristol and, with a strong strain of independence, kindly neighbours and myself keeping an eye on her, she managed very well indeed.

'Managed' was the operative word. She was lively as a cricket, looked about sixty, and ran local affairs, as my grandmother had done before her, as if she were the Queen Mother. Her particular friend was a much younger woman who lived a few doors away and whose name was pronounced like mine but spelt Dorine.

Every day, while Dorine was at work, Louisa would go down to let her two cats, Norton and Petal, into the garden for exercise, get them in again in due course, and generally see that all was well. Dorine, in turn, came up for a chat with Louisa every evening and acquainted her with what was going on in the rest of the road and her own activities, which were not inconsiderable. To help cover the expenses of her big old house, in addition to her full-time job she regularly took, as boarders, two or three students who were on special courses at the nearby polytechnic. They had their lunch at the college and went home at weekends, and thus fitted in well with Dorine's own schedule. She gave them comfortable accommodation, had only to provide them with breakfast and an evening meal five days a week and she and Louisa monitored their welfare between them. Louisa, for instance coped on the odd occasion when she went down and found one of the students still in bed, suffering from a cold or a stomach ache and needing cosseting. Dorine dealt with the reprobate who said he didn't like cats and was caught one day aiming a kick at Norton. He was reported to the college and transferred forthwith to other accommodation. Even so, when I found one of Louisa's pantry shelves loaded one day with bottles of tomato ketchup and Louisa said she was hiding them from Dorine's students, my mind did boggle slightly. Dorine had, it seemed, come up the previous evening breathing fire and slaughter, clutching a bagful of bottles and declaring that this lot (her current quota of students) were really the end. They wanted tomato sauce on everything – even the gourmet meal with wine which she gave them once a week when her boyfriend came to supper – and she wasn't going to have it, so would Louisa keep them for her so she could say with truth that she didn't have any in the house?

She added vengefully that she'd put an air-freshener in their bedroom and they'd been searching for that, but they hadn't found it and never would. She'd put it there because one of them smoked heavily and the bedroom smelled ghastly. Why had they wanted to find it? Louisa asked. Because they didn't like the smell of it, said Dorine. Where had she hidden it? In the smoker's mattress – there was a little tear in the cover and she'd put it inside. Louisa telling me all this, was practically crying with laughter, never realising how peculiar, at times, her own actions were.

Another of her neighbours, Edward, was a bachelor of about my own age. I had known him since we were children, and after his mother died he had turned part of his house into a very comfortable flat and let the rest. He had a daily woman to clean for him; Louisa kept a motherly eye on him and made him cakes; and Dorine, as another remunerative sideline, did odd bits of washing and mending for him. So I was considerably taken aback one day when Louisa said that Edward had asked her to ask me to dye his bathroom curtains for him. Pale blue towelling they were, but they'd got rather washed out. He fancied them a dark brown and he'd be very grateful if I'd do them.

Why hadn't he asked Dorine? I wondered. Was it...? We were about the same age and now both alone in the world... But no it couldn't be, I told myself. He was a confirmed bachelor; I certainly wasn't interested and Louisa knew it. So, out of friendship, I did them. Actually I was quite good at dyeing things: Louisa had probably mentioned it to him, I decided. And the curtains turned out beautifully.

I took them back, Louisa and I went across to the flat and hung them while Edward was out, and I drove beatifically home with the thought of a good deed well done – only to have Edward ring me as soon as I got in, apologising so profusely I could practically see him sweating on the other end of the line. He couldn't understand why Louisa had asked me to dye his curtains. 'Never would I have dreamt of it,' he kept protesting. 'Never would I have dreamt of it.' He had meant her to ask Dorine down the road, he explained, and why on earth she'd thought he meant me ...

I could understand it. Our names sounded the same, and if anyone was going to misconstrue a thing it would be Louisa, who spent her life confusing words and pronunciations. It was around that time that England played the Cameroons in a World Cup football match and Louisa kept enthusiastically telling me, and everybody else she encountered, that she'd been watching the match against the Macaroons on television. She also persisted in calling rudbeckias rudybeckias, referred to her newly acquired microwave, in which she constantly produced her most ghastly failures, as her microphone and generally pulverised the English language in a manner that reminded me of my grandmother – her mother – who, when I was young, used to speak of Hitler as Herring Hitler and Stalin as Old Stallion. Funnily enough, Louisa had never done it when she was younger. Was it a family trait that developed with age? I speculated apprehensively...