We had, too, to be very careful in our choice of guests. It had been one thing to leave Sugieh sitting on the table at mealtimes. We could always nip her off quickly and pretend we didn't know what had come over her – she never did that in the normal way. When, however, a cat and four kittens marched on to the table like a detachment of the Salvation Army as soon as it was laid and grouped themselves solidly round the cruet, it was no good trying to pass that off as an accident. Neither was it any good locking them out in the hall and pretending that was where they usually spent mealtimes. They kicked up such a racket, yelling and banging on the door, that it invariably led to the visitors saying not to shut the little dears out for their sakes and opening the door themselves. Whereupon the little dears would hurl themselves across the room and onto the table with such purpose there could be no doubt even in the dimmest mind as to where they normally sat at mealtimes.
By the time we had weeded out people who objected to kittens peering interestedly into their plates while they ate, people who were squeamish about Solomon sicking up spiders into their laps – that was the worst of spiders, they had such indigestible legs – and people who objected to playing canasta with kittens chewing the cards or poking experimental paws into their ears, there weren't really many we could invite at all.
In some ways it was just as well. The place wasn't looking its best just then anyway. The lamp on the side table, for instance, made from a Georgian candlestick and so lopsided it reminded one of a bad Channel crossing. Romantically-minded visitors might like to imagine its having been dropped down some sweeping Regency staircase in a moment of emotional crisis by a lady who looked like Margaret Lockwood, or used as a weapon in a drunken Regency brawl. The truth was that it got bent one day when four kittens tried to jump it at once in a glorious Grand National round the sitting room, and we were never able to straighten it out.
On the bureau there used to stand a Bristol glass jug, an old toby jug and a china image of a Breton woman spinning. The Bristol jug went west the day after Sugieh brought her family down from the spare room for the first time. When I rushed in after the crash Solomon, sitting on the spot where it had once stood and looking down at the remains with eyes as round as saucers – Sugieh and the others were busily looking out of the window at an ant they swore had just gone round the corner – said it fell off all by itself just as he got there, and why had it gone that funny shape?
We never knew who was responsible for knocking off the head of the Breton spinner. Everybody was at the far end of the vegetable garden busily learning to catch mice when we found her decapitated body lying on the carpet, and when they all trooped back again at lunchtime they assured us they were just as mystified as we were.
After that we took the precaution of putting our one remaining treasure – the toby jug – on the floor when the kittens were around, but we might just as well have left it where it was. Seeing that the top of the bureau was now a nice clear space the gang took to sitting on it en masse while they decided what to do next and one day, what with the blue boys having a practice fight while they waited, Solomon saying he ought to sit in front because he was most important and his sister furiously refusing to budge otherwise she couldn't see Charles, the whole lot fell off, landed on the jug like a bomb, and that was the end of that.
Wherever we looked we were surrounded by evidence of our decline and fall. The hide chair in the corner, draped with a tattered car rug. Not to protect it from the kittens – we had long given up hope of that; when they wanted to sharpen their claws they just turned back the rug and got down to it – but to conceal the fact that the stuffing now stuck out in tufts, like some strange African hairdressing style. The patch on the carpet where Solomon sicked up the day he ate two cream cakes at a sitting – and another where Charles dropped the coffee pot the day the she-kitten, who was still hardly bigger than a mouse, lovingly climbed his leg inside his trousers instead of out.
Aunt Ethel was cross about that. Charles ought to have more self-control, she said, and I ought to know better than to give a kitten that age cream cakes.
That was a joke if you like. From the day Solomon found his way onto the table for the first time by the simple expedient of clambering up the curtains and falling off when he got to food level there had never been any need to give him anything. What he fancied he took. The trouble was, what he fancied wasn't always good for him.
Prawns, for instance. Offer Sugieh a prawn and she would close her eyes and say we knew she never ate anything. Offer it to the blue boys and they took one sniff and fought harder than ever. Offer it to the she-kitten, who was so fastidious we wondered she didn't want all her meals sent down from the Dorchester, and she said it was dirty and buried it under a rug. Offer it to Solomon – offer him even a sniff of a prawn's whisker – and, his black face shining with eagerness and his small pink tongue licking nearly up to his eyebrows, he would follow you to the ends of the earth.
Solomon liked garlic sausage, liver sausage, All Bran and string. The first time we saw a piece of string vanish into his mouth, followed by an almighty hiccup which nearly lifted him off the floor, we rang the vet in a panic, but he sighed wearily and said not to worry, particularly if it was Solomon whom he always referred to as the Gannet. Just let nature take its course. It did – then and all the other times we found him eating string, surrounded by an admiring audience of kittens who watched his big act as if he were the star turn at the circus – which, of course, was just what he imagined himself to be. But it never failed to scare us stiff. I was afraid he'd choke and Charles colourfully imagined it winding round his inside like the string on an outboard motor. It took years off us when he made the exciting discovery that he could now get a ping-pong ball right inside his mouth and gave up string-eating to be an Alsatian dog instead.
What with spiders, string, and the occasional butterfly caught napping on a cabbage which he ate wings and all, Solomon was, of course, frequently sick. But never, ever, was he so gloriously sick as the day he ate the cream cakes. It was, in spite of what Aunt Edith said, quite an accident. Hearing the 'phone ring just as I was unpacking the shopping, I had gathered up the fish, chops, sausages and bacon, all of which Solomon had been gloating over saying he liked that, and were we going to have it for tea, and taken them with me for safety. Only the week before I had been idly chatting on the 'phone when a procession, led by the head of the family, passed by on its way to the lawn carrying two pounds of bacon.
I didn't take the bag of cream cakes because Solomon had never shown any interest in them before. Now, as there was nothing else about, he did. Before I had even finished 'phoning he came out to tell me he felt full. As the afternoon wore on he got quieter and quieter and his eyes grew rounder and rounder until eventually he took up his position in the middle of the carpet and we knew there was no doubt about it. Solomon was going to be sick.
Our cats were always sick in the middle of the room. It was a habit started by Sugieh, to make sure she didn't die while we weren't looking, and we were so used to it by this time that we were quite adept at nipping down a newspaper the moment we heard the first burp. All would have been well that time, too, if it hadn't been for the village pest, who chose just that moment to come collecting for the church organ. She came right in, of course. According to Charles that was why she did the collecting. She saw Solomon sitting like a small, sooty-faced elf in the middle of the carpet, and before we could stop her – 'The little Daaaaarling,' she screeched, and swept him tightly to her massive, Scotch-tweeded bosom.