Before we had the cats I had only seen one live shrew in my life, and that was the one which came tearing round the corner where I had just dug away a flower border from the side of the cottage, only to discover that he no longer had a home to go to. I can see him now scuttling to and fro on the cobbles, searching incredulously for his front door, and me scuttling conscience-stricken behind him, wondering whether it was safe to pick him up and help him find a new one. Some people said shrews were so nervous they died if you touched them. Others said they bit. I never learned who was right from that one. In the end my nerve failed me and I went indoors while he made up his own mind what to do. I learned soon enough when we had Solomon and Sheba, though. Shrews bite.
Both Charles and I were bitten at different times. I by one which Solomon had delightedly cornered in the kitchen after its first escape – he was talking to it and when I put out a nervous hand to pick it up that must have been the last straw; squealing with rage it leapt fiercely at me and bit me in the finger. And Charles by one which, as it looked a little battered, we had put in a box lined with leaves and grass and locked in the bathroom to see if it would revive. It did. When Charles went in to look at it a while later it was trying, mad with temper, to climb out of the box, and when he put out a helping hand he got bitten too. He yelled so hard that Sheba, who was looking under the bathroom door at the time, fled out of the house in terror and up the damson tree, Solomon hid under the bed and I dropped the pastry bowl. Not that a shrew's bite is very big, of course. Hardly more than a pin-prick. It was just, said Charles, appearing with a large strip of sticking plaster round his finger and the shrew, ready for release, bouncing furiously up and down in the toe of a sock, that it was so unexpected.
Even more unexpected was the shrew that actually lived with us for four days. This was a good deal later, when Sheba, finding that if she came in with anything alive we took it away from her, had developed the habit of sneaking her trophies up on to our bed. There she could do her nature study against a background of nice clean eiderdown, with the advantage that when she heard us coming she had only to pick up her victim and dive under the bed and we couldn't touch her. This particular shrew, however, she took up to the bed while there was still somebody in it. Aunt Louisa. (Although we had only the two cats now we still put guests in our room and slept in the spare room ourselves. It saved a lot of argument with Solomon.) And Aunt Louisa, when she saw the shrew, let out such a scream that Sheba, who was normally as imperturbable as an iceberg, dropped it in amazement and it got away.
I know all about shrews eating several times their own weight of food a day and it being impossible to keep them in captivity. Sidney, who has a natural countryman's interest in such things, told me he had seen it on the Telly. Impossible or not, that shrew appeared so often during the next four days even Sheba began to look shaken when she saw it. Upstairs – cruising like a small grey submarine across the landing or through the bedrooms. Downstairs – ambling airily out from under the chest or the cupboard door and across the carpet. We never caught it, though it never hurried. Charles refused to touch any of Sheba's shrews now, without gloves, and by the time he had fetched them – I refused to touch it at all – it had always vanished, while the cats were so embarrassed they had obviously decided the best thing to do was to ignore it.
Several times when I went to change Solomon's earth-box I found it lurking under the rim. Charles said that was probably how it kept alive, eating worms and insects out of the earth-box. That seemed unlikely. If there were any worms or insects around Solomon would have eaten them himself. It put a new responsibility on me, though. Not wishing to have its death on my conscience, every time I changed the box I felt obliged to put down a handful of grass as well.
Aunt Louisa said I took after Grandma and both of us were crazy. Solomon enquired indignantly how he could ignore what was under his earth-box if I fed it right under his nose and said that until it went he was going to use the garden. Charles took to surreptitiously shaking his shoes in the morning before he put them on. We felt like running up the Union Jack when, on the evening of the fourth day, the shrew ambled down the porch step and out of our lives for ever.
TWELVE
Death of a Fur Coat
The day Sheba chased a gnat behind the picture over the bureau and left a row of black footprints up the wall Charles said it wasn't fair to blame the cats for everything. It wasn't her fault, he said, that when it flew past she happened to be looking up the chimney and had her paws covered in soot. I must remember that Siamese were not as other cats, and make allowance for their verve and curiosity.
He didn't say that when we put down the new stair carpet and Solomon, busily showing Sheba how Strong he was, ripped the daylights out of the bottom tread while we were still hammering down the top. He said Solomon was a damblasted little pest and if he wasn't careful he'd end up in the Cats' Home. Neither did it improve matters when I, to protect the rest of the carpet until Solomon got tired of sharpening his claws on it, made a set of stair pads out of folded copies of The Times. The idea was to put a pad on each stair whenever we were going out. It worked for a few days – then one morning Charles, dashing up at the last moment to fetch his wallet, slipped on the top copy and slid from top to bottom on his neck. Both Solomon and I were in the dog-house then, and although it didn't worry me unduly – Charles, who is six feet tall, falls down the cottage stairs, which are steep and narrow, quite regularly, and I would get the blame even if I were on the top of Everest at the time – Solomon was quite put out about it.
While Sheba comforted Charles in the hall, walking up and down on his stomach and asking anxiously if he were Dead, Solomon sat at the top of the stairs delivering a long Siamese monologue about the injustice of it all. Sheba Clawed Things, he said, and Nobody Complained About Her. She did too. The underside of the spare room armchair sagged like a jelly bag where Sheba, when she first woke up in the morning, dragged herself round and round on her back by way of exercise – and all Charles said about that was that we had to make allowances for her high spirits.
She Knocked Things Down and Hit People Too, wailed Solomon. You could tell when he got to that bit by the pitch of his voice. Always powerful, it rose to an ear-shattering roar when he was in the right and knew it. Solomon didn't knock things down and hit people. He couldn't climb high enough to start with. But Sheba, shinning like a mountain goat up the bookshelves either side of the fireplace, was always bombarding unwary visitors with dislodged encyclopaedias or law books. Lately I had begun to wonder whether that, too, was quite the accident she claimed it to be. It had certainly been no accident the night I was just in time to stop her crowning Solomon with a Benares brass pitcher. When I caught her she was standing on the arm of a chair trying as hard as she could to hook it off the mantelpiece with her paw while he, stretched out full length to warm his stomach, lay innocently asleep on the rug below.
Now, craning his neck over the landing to make sure everybody heard him, Solomon continued his tale of woe. Charles was Clumsy, he wailed, staring reproachfully down at the spot where Sheba, relieved to find that Charles was good for a few more years yet, was making the most of the occasion by treading vigorously on his waistcoat and assuring him that she was a good girl. Charles would have Fallen Down the Stairs even without the newspapers, yelled Solomon. Charles Fell Over Everything. Charles Fell Off the Ladder only last Saturday. Nobody, said Solomon, with the mournful wail-cum-sniffle which meant that at that moment he was feeling particularly hard done by, could blame him for that. Charles had done it All By Himself.