It was too much for Sol. He gave one despairing 'Whoops' and threw up all down her best silk blouse and over the carpet. She was absolutely furious. Even when Solomon said he was sorry but it was two whole buns and she had squeezed him rather hard round the middle but Never Mind, he felt Much Better now, she wouldn't listen. She marched out without waiting for our contribution and gave the Rector her notice on the spot. People were always insulting her, she said. But when people trained their cats to be sick over her, that was the absolute limit.
That, as Charles used to explain to people for a long time afterwards, was the reason not only for the patch on the sitting-room carpet, but for the fact that the village organ had hardly a black key to its name.
NINE
Call Me Hiawatha
It was just about then that we had a recurrence of the bath trouble. Sugieh's craze for water had vanished after she had her family. She was too busy now, as she was always telling us between frantic toppings and tailings of four protesting kittens, ever to think of herself. So Charles had gone back to leaving the door open while he soaked so that he could hear the wireless, and apart, as he said, from momentary heart failure whenever he heard the posse thunder past like a herd of elephants on its way to the kitchen, bath-time was once more quiet, peaceful and refreshing.
Then, galloping out with the rest of the posse one day, the she-kitten stopped to wash her paw. Solomon had stepped on it, she said, and she didn't want it to be Dirty when she saw Sidney. Taking off after the others like a small blue comet – nobody ever walked in our house; just sometimes they whooshed faster than others – she missed the kitchen turning, shot through the bathroom door instead, and before anybody could stop her there was an almighty splash and she was in the water. When I went in Charles was lying back, still clutching the loofah, with an expression of utter resignation on his face, while his girlfriend sat dripping happily on his chest telling him how much she loved him.
From then on, even if she was at the far end of the garden talking to Sidney, the moment she heard the bath tap running she would tear into the house like greased lightning, take up position outside the bathroom door and demand to be let in. A few seconds later Solomon, always ready to join in anything that required using his voice, would roll round the corner and demand to be let in too. Finally the blue boys would arrive to make up the party and the whole lot would sit down and bellow their heads off.
The only way to stop them was to let them in, and since we couldn't do that while the water was still in the bath it meant, in order to preserve the peace, bathing in about five seconds flat, pulling the plug as we leapt out, and opening the door to the public the instant the last drop had gurgled down the plug-hole.
They never did anything special in the bath; it was just that they didn't want to miss anything that was going on. Sometimes, said Charles, towelling himself savagely while four smudge-marked faces watched him with interest from the bottom of the bath and Solomon, consumed with curiosity as usual, wanted to know why he took his skin off when he washed, and didn't it hurt when he put it on again. Sometimes he thought he'd get more privacy if he took his bath in Trafalgar Square.
Actually Charles was feeling rather put out with the kittens just then because they had stopped him becoming an archer. Charles had a friend who was keen on archery. One day the pair of them had gone rabbit-shooting with a local farmer and Allister, just for fun, took along his bow and arrows. The farmer took a twenty-yard shot at a rabbit and missed; Allister, taking random aim immediately afterwards, transfixed the rabbit on the spot. 'Lumme! Ruddy Robin 'Ood!' said the farmer, gazing at him in awestruck amazement – and though Allister modestly said it was a complete accident and he couldn't do it again if he tried, Charles had come home with the ambition to be a Robin Hood too.
He started reading books on archery. He bought himself a hat. Though he never wore a hat in the normal way all Charles's sporting activities were highlighted with what he considered to be the appropriate headgear. A balaclava for climbing, for instance, though he was hardly likely to get frostbite in his ears in the Lake District, and all it did was render him stone-deaf when I said I thought we had gone high enough; a scarlet and white striped one made (by me) at top speed one winter when we had snow and Charles, who had been busily reading a book on the frozen North, said pioneers always wore striped caps for woodcutting. Now he had his archer's hat – Sherwood Green, turned up on one side and pinned with a natty sweep of pheasant's feathers that was all his own idea. All he needed now was to learn to shoot – and one evening Allister came over with his equipment and they went out on the hillside to make a start.
Half an hour later a procession entered the kitchen. Charles first, trembling like a leaf and carrying the blue boys; Sugieh marching alongside with crossed eyes and bushed tail yelling that he'd Nearly Killed Them All and they were going to Leave Home That Very Night; Allister behind, wearing the bewildered expression that marked everybody who ever came up against our Siamese in force; and, far in the rear, Solomon and his sister happily dragging home Charles's hunting hat by its feathers.
What had happened was quite simple. Allister, showing Charles the correct stance and draw, had let fly across the valley and scored a magnificent bull in an oak tree. Charles, using exactly the same stance and draw, had hit a stone two feet ahead of him. The arrow had ricocheted off smartly to the right – and before his horrified eyes had landed slap in the middle of the posse, headed by Solomon, just as it appeared in a body round an outcrop, nosily intent on seeing what Charles was doing. Nobody was hurt. Only, said Charles, he had lost another ten years off his life. Over a mile he and Allister had walked to find a safe place and those cats must have tracked him every inch of the way. If he put the Channel between them, he said bitterly; if he went to Japan or somewhere to practise archery, he bet that lot would turn up the moment he took aim and swear he had done it purposely.
Whether they would or not, that was the end of Charles's ambition to be an archer. Allister left the blunted arrow behind – in case, he said, Charles should change his mind, then he could practise with it. But it was the kittens who played with it, not Charles. We kept it under the Welsh dresser, from which it was apt to emerge precipitately at all hours of the day, two kittens dragging it by the feathers like a battering ram and the other two charging behind shrieking it was Their Turn Now and Hurry Up and get it Into the Garden.
We took their playing with it for granted, like all their other nefarious pursuits, and anyway we knew the arrow was blunt. But the old lady who used to worry about Sugieh eating scraps in the lane and now felt it incumbent to keep an eye on the way we were bringing up the kittens nearly had a fit the day she looked over the wall and saw them tearing round the garden with it like a pack of Comanche Indians. Did I think it was right, she enquired breathlessly – you could see the dust still settling on the path behind her, she had scuttled up it so fast – to allow those dear little kittens to play with a dangerous missile like that? The wee black one was screaming so hard in the middle of the lawn that indeed she feared he had hurt himself already.