Now he knew who she was: Mrs. or Miss X. Sanskrit. And her companion? Brother or spouse? Brother, almost certainly. The pig-potters.
Now they were out of the shadow and crossed the Walk in full light straight at him. And he saw they were truly awful.
It wasn’t that they were lard-fat, both of them, so fat that they might have sat to each other as models for their wares, or that they were outrageously got up. No clothes, it might be argued in these permissive days, could achieve outrageousness. It wasn’t that the man wore a bracelet and an anklet and a necklace and earrings or that what hair he had fell like pond-weed from an embroidered head-band. It wasn’t even that she (fifty if a day, thought Mr. Whipplestone) wore vast black leather hot-pants, a black fringed tunic and black boots. Monstrous though these grotesqueries undoubtedly were, they were as nothing compared with the eyes and mouths of the Sanskrits, which were, Mr. Whipplestone now saw with something like panic, equally heavily made-up.
“They shouldn’t be here,” he thought, confusedly protecting the normality of the Capricorns. “People like that. They ought to be in Chelsea. Or somewhere.”
They had crossed the Walk. They had approached his house. He backed further away. The area gate clicked and clanged, they descended the iron steps. He heard the basement flat bell. He heard Mr. Sheridan’s voice. They had been admitted.
“No, really!” Mr. Whipplestone thought in the language of his youth. “Too much! And he seemed perfectly presentable.” He was thinking of his brief encounter with Mr. Sheridan.
He settled down to a book. At least it was not a noisy party down there. One could hear little or nothing. Perhaps, he speculated, the Sanskrits were mediums. Perhaps Mr. Sheridan dabbled in spiritism and belonged to a “circle.” They looked like that. Or worse. He dismissed the whole thing and returned to the autobiography of a former chief of his department. It was not absorbing. The blurb made a great fuss about a ten-year interval imposed between the author’s death and publication. Why, God knew, thought Mr. Whipplestone, since the crashing old bore could have nothing to disclose that would unsettle the composure of the most susceptible of vestal virgins.
His attention wandered. He became conscious of an uneasiness at the back of his mind: an uneasiness occasioned by a sound, by something he would rather not hear, by something that was connected with anxiety and perturbation. By a cat mewing in the street.
Pah! he thought, as far as one can think “pah.” Cats abounded in London streets. He had seen any number of them in the Capricorns, pampered pet-cats. There was an enormous tortoiseshell at the Sun in Splendour and a supercilious white affair at the Napoli. Cats.
It had come a great deal nearer. It was now very close indeed. Just outside, one would suppose, and not moving on. Sitting on the pavement, he dared say, and staring at his house. At him, even. And mewing. Persistently. He made a determined effort to ignore it. He returned to his book. He thought of turning on his radio loud, to drown it. The cries intensified. From being distant and intermittent they were now immediate and persistent.
“I shall not look out of the window,” he decided in a fluster. “It would only see me.”
“Damnation!” he cried three minutes later. “How dare people lock out their cats! I’ll complain to someone.”
Another three minutes and he did, against every fibre of disinclination in his body, look out of the window. He saw nothing. The feline lamentations were close enough to drive him dotty. On the steps: that’s where they were. On the flight of steps leading up to his front door. “No!” he thought. “No, really this is not good enough. This must be stopped. Before we know where we are—”
Before he knew where he was, he was in his little hall and manipulating his double lock. The chain was disconnected on account of the Chubbs, but he opened the door, a mere crack and had no sooner done so than something — a shadow, a meagre atomy — darted across his instep.
Mr. Whipplestone became dramatic. He slammed his door to, leant against it and faced his intruder.
He had known it all along. History, if you could call an incident of not much more than a month ago, history was repeating itself. In the wretched shape of a small black cat: the same cat but now quite dreadfully emaciated, its eyes clouded, its fur staring. It sat before him and again opened its pink mouth in now soundless mews. Mr. Whipplestone could only gaze at it in horror. Its haunches quivered and, as it had done when last they met, it leapt up to his chest.
As his hands closed round it he wondered that it had had the strength to jump. It purred and its heart knocked at his fingers.
“This is too much,” he repeated and carried it into his drawing-room. “It will die, I daresay,” he said, “and how perfectly beastly that will be.”
After some agitated thought he carried it into the kitchen and, still holding it, took milk from the refrigerator, poured some into a saucer, added hot water from the tap, and set it on the floor and the little cat beside it. At first he thought she would pay no attention — he was persuaded the creature was a female — her eyes being half-closed and her chin on the floor. He edged the saucer nearer. Her whiskers trembled. So suddenly that he quite jumped, she was lapping, avidly, frantically as if driven by some desperate little engine. Once she looked up at him.
Twice he replenished the saucer. The second time she did not finish the offering. She raised her milky chin, stared at him, made one or two shaky attempts to wash her face, and suddenly collapsed on his foot and went to sleep.
Some time later there were sounds of departure from the basement flat. Soon after this the Chubbs effected their usual discreet entry. Mr. Whipplestone heard them put up the chain on the front door. The notion came to him that perhaps they had been “doing for” Mr. Sheridan at his party.
“Er — is that you, Chubb?” he called out.
Chubb opened the door and presented himself, apple-cheeked, on the threshold with his wife behind him. It struck Mr. Whipplestone that they seemed uncomfortable.
“Look,” he invited, “at this.”
Chubb had done so, already. The cat lay like a shadow across Mr. Whipplestone’s knees.
“A cat, sir,” said Chubb tentatively.
“A stray. I’ve seen it before.”
From behind her husband Mrs. Chubb said: “Nothing of it, sir, is there? It don’t look healthy, do it?”
“It was starving.”
Mrs. Chubb clicked her tongue.
Chubb said: “Very quiet, sir, isnt it? It hasn’t passed away, has it?”
“It’s asleep. It’s had half a bottle of milk.”
“Well, excuse me, sir,” Mrs. Chubb said, “But I don’t think you ought to handle it. You don’t know where it’s been, do you, sir?”
“No,” said Mr. Whipplestone, and added with a curious inflection in his voice, “I only know where it is.”
“Would you like Chubb to dispose of it, sir?”
This suggestion he found perfectly hateful, but he threw out as airily as he could: “Oh, I don’t think so. I’ll do something about it myself in the morning. Ring up the R.S.P.C.A.”
“I daresay if you was to put it out, sir, it’d wander off where it come from.”
“Or,” suggested Chubb, “I could put it in the garden at the back, sir. For the night, like.”
“Yes,” Mr. Whipplestone gabbled, “thank you. Never mind. I’ll think of something. Thank you.”
“Thank you, sir,” they said, meaninglessly.
Because they didn’t immediately make a move and because he was in a tizzy, Mr. Whipplestone to his own surprise said, “Pleasant evening?”
They didn’t answer. He glanced up and found they stared at him.