Cats in May (4 page)

The immediate reasons for the things that happened to us were indeed obvious. You didn’t need to look far for the reason why people thought we were nuts, for instance, when practically every day saw us marching through the village at least once carrying those wretched cats in public procession—Charles pink with embarrassment because the only way Sheba would be carried was flat on her back in his arms, gazing adoringly up into his face; I with Solomon dangling goofily down my back like a sack of coals while I held on to him by
his back legs. Unless of course it was the fly season, when, though I still held him by his back legs, with his front ones he would be flailing the air behind me like a demented windmill.

Even people who knew us—who knew that we were only fetching them back from the Rector’s or the Williamses’ or whoever it was that had rung up to
complain about them this time—looked at us a bit oddly on such occasions. People who didn’t know us usually thought we ought to be locked up.

Father Adams, who owned a Siamese himself and knew what it was like—though his, he said, was pretty good these days except when our two devils led her into mischief—was quite indignant one night when somebody said as much in the Rose and Crown. ‘Said he seen thee sliding out of the woods on thee backside with a dappy gert cat round thee neck,’ he informed me over the gate, his voice—as was usual when he was conducting a conversation at a distance of more than three feet—a full-blooded bellow that could be heard all over the village. Probably he had at that. The wood was on a steep slope and, once having caught Solomon, the only way to get out of it without letting go of him
was
to sling him over my shoulder and slide down on my seat, with the result that in a community where practically every female under forty wore jeans, I could be identified a mile away by a large black mudpatch on mine.

What had annoyed Father Adams, however, was the stranger’s inference that I was odd, coupled with the
observation that he supposed most country people were a bit touched anyway. ‘I told he!’ he roared, tipping the brim of his hat belligerently over his eyes like the characters he had seen on Telly when they, too, had put
somebody properly in their place. ‘I told he, not half I didn’t!’ What, I enquired wearily, for I knew Father Adams’s home truths of old, exactly had he told him?

It was as I feared. Father Adams had first informed
him that I weren’t as daft as I looked, followed by the announcement that if he thought I were he ought to have been here a few years back. When, he had advised the startled stranger triumphantly, he’d have seen I going round with a squirrel on my head.

I am digressing here, however. What I was really coming to was that Charles was right. There was a reason—a deep-seated, fundamental reason way back behind all those immediate reasons—why things happened to us. And I knew what it was.

Sometimes, being only human, I was inclined to blame it solely on to Charles. The time the brakes froze on the car one bitter night miles from anywhere, for instance, and, having left the tools at home for safety as usual, the only thing he could think to do was light a candle we happened to have in the car and lie hopefully underneath trying to thaw them out. That was bad enough. The wind kept blowing the candle out and by about the twentieth time Stirling Moss had held it silently out from under the car for me to re-light I was so mad I could have jumped on it. What was really so dispiriting, however, was that when eventually a man did come along with
aspanner and manage to free the brakes, no sooner had we coasted a few yards down the road to prove they were free than Charles said we really must go back and thank him. Before I could stop him he had put the brakes on again—and there we were, frozen rigid as before.

At that stage I leaned my head on the roof of the car and wept. If I’d listened to my grandmother, I howled, while the snow melted forlornly in my snowboots and Charles, looking nervously over his shoulder, said Sshhhh, not here, the man was
listening
—if I’d listened to my grandmother I’d never have married him.

It was quite untrue, of course. My grandmother thought Charles was wonderful. If she’d been there at that moment she’d probably have been under the car herself, button boots and all, holding the candle with him.

I remember the time, before we were married, when he called for me one night in the pouring rain with a hole in the roof of his sports car right over the passenger seat, and the hole itself stuffed with a
Financial Times
.

There he was, dressed to kill in plus fours, diamond-checked golf stockings, and a white racing helmet.
There he was, tightening the string that held the exhaust pipe on and adjusting the windscreen wiper. Only for effect, of course. It hadn’t actually worked since Charles bought the car. The real operative system consisted of another piece of string tied to the wiper with an end dangling in through each window, and as we went along we pulled it alternately in a sort of rhythmic rowing motion.

There he was. Dangerous Living—plus fours and all—personified. If my father could have seen either the car or Charles in that helmet he would have had a fit. But Father was engineering far away. Grandma was my legal guardian. And all Grandma did was gaze nostalgically at the golf stockings and say she wished she were forty years younger.

Halfway up the street, with the pair of us pulling away at the wiper strings like a couple of Cambridge strokes, the car back-fired and the
Financial Times
descended on to my lap, followed by a gallon or so of water which had collected on the sagging roof. Even then Grandma was undismayed. As we backed spasmodically to the front door she came running out with an umbrella. That I didn’t grab it and hit Charles on the helmet
there and then; that I meekly put it up inside the car, stuck the top through the hole in the roof and, with the umbrella itself tilted smartly out of the port window—otherwise, said Grandma, the rain would run down it
inside
the car and Charles would get wet—zoomed off up the road again as if I always went about in cars with my umbrella up; that I said nothing at all about the fact that I was now soaked to the stomach because, as Charles kept reminding me, he’d promised to meet old Ian at seven-thirty and we were already late … these things are of no importance at all except as evidence that even in my salad days I should have had my head read.

What is important is that there, in a nutshell, is the basic reason why things happened to us. On my left Grandma, with whom I had lived in a state of impending calamity since the day I was born. On my right Charles, with whom I was to continue in that state from the day we were married.

They had much in common, Grandma and Charles, including a passion for gadgets that were either impractical or—when handled by them—impossible. Gadgets that were impossible for them, of course, were not necessarily impossible for other people. Take Charles’s
electric drill, for instance. So simple that, to quote the advertisement, a child could use it. The first day he brought that home he used the sanding attachment to polish an old copper kettle I had just bought in a junk shop. Wild with enthusiasm he not only sanded a hole clean through the kettle bottom, he also—as a result of doing the job in the bathroom because he said that was the most convenient power point—turned the bath and lavatory seat emerald green in a shower of copper dust. Which, I regret to say, became embedded, and we have an emerald-spotted lavatory seat to this day.

When he used the paint-mixing attachment he not only mixed the paint, he went on so long that eventually the whole lot shot out in a sort of circular tidal wave and Solomon, hanging hopefully around in case we were getting something to eat, became temporarily the only Seal-Point Siamese in existence with bright blue ears. When he used the drill itself with no attachment whatever, to drill a couple of holes to fix the switch for the hall lights, he managed that all right. The trouble was he then went on to fix a switch that
was—according to Father Adams—big enough for Battersea power station, with two little inch-long screws. The result was that within two days the switch came off in somebody’s hand and for the next six months—until Charles, who flatly refused to have a smaller switch, remembered to buy some longer screws—the switch, with a couple of whacking great cable wires attached, lay tastefully on the hall table and anybody who wanted to go upstairs operated it from there.

Aunt Ethel, grovelling one day for the switch which had fallen down behind the table and coming up instead with a dead mouse which had been filed there by Sheba, said she didn’t know how I stood it. The answer was simple, of course. This was exactly how I had lived with Grandma. Down to the gadgets which invariably went wrong. Down to the paint—Grandma had once painted some chairs, putting the second coat on before the first was dry, and for weeks when unwary visitors sat on them there had been a gentle rending sound every time they got up. Even down to the mice.

Grandma once had a cat called Macdonald who was bitten by a mouse. Believe it or not, she used to say, she
had seen that cat one day with a mouse which had its teeth firmly fixed in his chin while Macdonald himself—one paw on the mouse’s tail, his head strained upwards like a giraffe and the poor old mouse stretched like elastic in between—tried desperately to lever it off. As a result of that experience Macdonald had developed a complex about mice. When he caught them he no longer ate them, but laid them out in rows in conspicuous places and gloated over them. Visitors needed jolly strong stomachs to take tea in our house in those days, when more often than not there were half a dozen mice laid out on the rug before their very eyes and a big black cat sitting proudly by the side of them like a pavement artist, but Grandma would never allow them to be taken away from him. It would hurt his subconscious, she said. It was his way of retrieving his pride after the mouse had bitten him. If people didn’t like it, she said, when any of us remonstrated with her, they could do the other thing.

We would soon have been left without any friends at all if it hadn’t so happened that Grandma also had three parrots and that one day Piquita, the Senegal parrot, bit Macdonald on the paw when he was seeing how far
he could reach into her cage. Piquita was always biting people. She was the most fiendish bird I have ever come across—and that, considering the number of parrots Grandma kept in her time, all of which bit at the slightest instigation, was saying something. She was small, with a green back, an orange stomach, yellow legs, and a grey, snake-like head. She had pebble-grey eyes which were also cold and snake-like, except when
she got annoyed, when they turned bright yellow and went on and off like a Belisha beacon.

You could always tell when Piquita was going to attack by the flashing of her eyes. The trouble was, by that time it was generally too late. Her usual time for attacking was when she was being fed and, with Grandma’s usual inconsistency, while her other parrots all had cages with seed tins that fitted from the outside, Piquita alone had a cage where they hooked on to the inside.