How we finished that journey I never knew. We tried going slowly. It made no difference except that it gave passers-by more chance to gawk. We tried going fast – and Sugieh threw herself hysterically under the clutch pedal and nearly killed the lot of us. We put her in the basket with the kittens, thinking they might calm her down, and within fifty yards we had to stop and take her out again before she trampled them to death. Then, no sooner had we got her out and strapped the basket of kittens up again than there was one almighty screech – and Solomon pushed his big, stupid head clean through an airhole and hung there like a stuffed trophy on a wall, choking rapidly and screaming in terror.
That was one of the worst moments of my life. Even Charles seemed to have gone mad. He leapt out of the car, slamming the door so that Sugieh couldn't follow him, and began frantically turning his pockets out on the grass. He was, he shouted, when I asked what he was doing, looking for a penknife. The only way to rescue Solomon was to cut him out. If he did, I shouted back, he'd kill him. You couldn't get a bee's whisker between Solomon's neck and the basket, let alone a penknife. Look!
I put out my hand to show him how firmly Solomon was stuck – and Solomon immediately bit my finger to the bone. If he had enough strength to do that, I thought, he had enough strength to stand what I was going to do now. Without more ado I put my hand flat against his face, shut my eyes and pushed. There was a sort of sucking noise and then, with just enough time to bite another finger for luck, Solomon's head plopped back to safety like a cork from a bottle.
On we went. Dante's Inferno on wheels. The hole in the basket plugged with a scarf, me with my hand wrapped in a towel and Sugieh, the cause of it all, still going round and round the car like a spinning top. At Glastonbury we found a basket shop, bought the biggest hamper they had and shut her in it. Now at least she couldn't race round the car. Instead she expended her energy in screaming louder than ever.
We hardly expected to reach Halstock alive ourselves. We were even more astounded when we reached the kennels and unlocked the baskets. Out, from one, stepped Sugieh, sleek and composed as you like, to greet the Francis's with a gracious bellow. And out, from the other, tumbled four lively kittens fit and fresh as daisies, led by Solomon whom we had expected to find at least a hospital case.
We left them going up and down the wire of their run like caterpillars. We arranged, however, to ring the cattery later that night to see how they were. Charles said they might be suffering from delayed shock. When I heard him talking to Mrs Francis on the 'phone after dinner, and he gave a suppressed groan, I thought he was right. When he put down the receiver, however, he assured me that everything was quite normal. It was just that Sugieh had spotted Rikki and was busily shouting greetings at him the entire length of the cattery while the kittens – as Charles said, grimly, they would let us down – liked their nice, clean, sparkling earth-box so much they had gone to sleep in it.
EIGHT
Downfall of a Church Organ
Cats, said Father Adams, leaning dejectedly on our front gate with his hat tilted over his eyes, was the very devil. From which remark we gathered that, despite all his efforts, Mimi was once more in season.
Three times now she and Ajax had honeymooned uproariously in the attic, and three times Father Adams, praying piously for the patter of tiny paws, had been disappointed. Not only had Mimi failed to outdo the strawberry patch, now the strawberry patch wasn't any good either. A couple of Mimi's earlier suitors had staged a prize fight in it one night to console themselves and trampled all the flowers.
Father Adams said it had him licked. He wouldn't listen to Mrs Adams's theory that it all arose from Ajax already having a wife and steadfastly refusing – as all good husbands should – to look at another cat. He said she was a silly old fool. Not about Ajax having a wife. All Dr Tucker's patients knew Ajax's wife. She was a slender doe-eyed creature called Andromache who had two claims to fame. Firstly that she had bitten the grocer's boy, which was something a good many housewives who had suffered from his cheek would like to have done themselves. And secondly that she was so fond of Ajax that even when she had kittens, which is a time when most queens will attack a tom on sight, she would let him get into the basket with them.
Father Adams knew that was right. He had seen it for himself. Hefty, battle-scarred Ajax tenderly washing the ears of his latest batch of offspring while Andromache sunbathed on the porch. Father Adams's comment on that was that he was an adjectival fool. Catch him putting a flannel to any of his kids' faces while his missus sat round sunning her fat rump.
What Father Adams refused to believe was that Ajax wasn't interested in other females. Cats had more sense, he said. Nobody else believed it either – until a certain strange sequence of events that set everybody wondering. Andromache, coming into season at a time when Ajax was away at the vet's for ear treatment, got out of the pantry window one night and went for a walk with a cat called Nelson who lived at the Carpenter's Arms. It was a fine May evening, with the air heady with the scent of hawthorn and a nightingale singing romantically in the copse. Ajax was miles away with penicillin powder in his ear, Nelson was near at hand and ardently amorous – and nine weeks later there were seven black and white kittens with unmistakably Nelsonian squeaks in the basket on the doctor's porch.
Ajax didn't help with that lot. Andromache might rub whiskers with him as much as she liked and say of course they were his, silly, it must have been the penicillin – but he knew black and white when he saw it. He knew Nelson, too. He nearly murdered him one night on the roof of the Carpenter's Arms and the next time he went to stay with Mimi there was no nonsense about being faithful to his wife. Six strapping little Ajaxes Mimi had, and Father Adams rubbing his hands with delight; though Mrs Adams rather took the gilt off the gingerbread by continually saying it didn't seem right to her until he asked her what the devil she wanted him to do about it. Take the ruddy cats to a Marriage Guidance Council?
It was, of course, complete coincidence. Mimi just happened to be a cat who didn't mate easily. All the same, as people said, it made you think. At the time when Father Adams was leaning on our gate moaning, however, this extraordinary turn of events was still in the future. We, too, were quite oblivious of the tragedy ahead of us. Our problem just then was to fit Sugieh and her tyrannical family into a normal pattern of living.
It took an awful lot of doing. When we had visitors to stay, for instance, we could no longer put them in the spare room. Way back when Sugieh was using it as a nursery we had moved the earth-box up there for convenience – and there, like the Rock of Gibraltar, the kittens expected it to stay. After the embarrassing night when Solomon – who was always much too lazy to use the box before going to bed as Sugieh had taught him, and in consequence invariably had to get up in the early hours – practically tore the door down shouting that he had to get in quick while we in turn tried fruitlessly to persuade him that a box on the landing would do just as well, we gave up putting visitors in there. We slept in it ourselves, kittens, earth-box and all, while the visitors had our room.