There in the pouring rain sat not the little black and white waif of the night before, but two beautiful blue kittens with round topaz eyes, their mouths wide open in a tremolo wail. They had obviously been rehearsed. We had never seen them before, but the moment the door opened they raised two perky little tails and marched boldly in. As they did so Susie jumped off the kitchen windowsill, where she had been waiting, and prepared to follow them. They were the very best she had, she explained in her shrill little voice. As we obviously only liked superior cats, could she bring them to live with us instead? It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, saying that she couldn't, and shutting the door in their faces.
SIXTEEN
Three Years' Hard
It is three years now since Solomon and Sheba came into our lives. Sometimes – it is a symptom common among Siamese owners – it seems like thirty. In that time there have been diverse changes in our household. We no longer have Shorty, for instance. He died quite suddenly last year. We felt so guilty in case it was the result of being perpetually knocked off his hook by Solomon and Sheba – though indeed, wedged securely in the armchair in his cage and swearing heartily away with a cat either side of him he always seemed quite to enjoy it – that we sent him to the Ministry of Agriculture for a post-mortem.
When the report came back a weight was lifted from all our consciences. He had, it said – though how he had managed it on birdseed and water was a mystery – died from a fatty heart and enlarged liver. We didn't replace him. With the cats around it didn't seem fair – and anyway his cage had hardly been relegated sadly to the woodshed for more than a week before Solomon, climbing inquisitively over a pile of junk, fell on it and reduced it to a shape which made it, as he himself said after carefully inspecting the damage, quite impossible to keep a little bird in again.
We still have the fish – though their lives too have not been without event. Last winter the biggest of the lot developed fungus on his head and gills. For a fortnight, while everybody heroically ate shop cake, he swam sadly round in a special fungus-clearing solution in the pastry bowl. At the end of that time the fungus was still gaining and it looked very much as if we might have to listen to Sheba, who visited him hopefully every day and, when she found she couldn't reach him on account of the cake rack tied over the top of the bowl, strongly advised us to hit him on the head and put him down the drain. In desperation I tried a remedy I found in a book in the public library. Put the fish in a solution of one teaspoonful of common salt to a quart of water, it said, increasing the quantity of salt by an additional teaspoonful each day for four days.
It didn't seem to do our fish much good. Indeed by the evening of the third day he was floating round the bowl on his side, practically at his last gasp. It was Charles who, in a sudden flash of inspiration, realised the truth – that on account of the damp weather the salt we had been using was much more concentrated than usual, and that in consequence we had practically pickled the little chap alive. In a twinkling we had him out of his brine bath and into a bowl of warm, clean water.
But still he floated. Overcome with remorse we sat up till midnight, taking it in turn to hold him upright and steer him round the bowl by his tail until, at long last, our efforts were rewarded and it gave a faint flicker of its own accord. He recovered rapidly and within a short time, the fungus completely cleared, we were able to return him to the tank. The odd thing was that whereas before he had been completely gold, where the salt had acted on the fungus he was now black. He had a black head and gills, black tips to his fins and a black tail. He looked – said Charles, roaring with laughter, much to the disgust of Solomon who knew he was being talked about and immediately put down his ears and sulked – exactly like old Podgebelly. There was another interesting thing. We had never known before whether our fish, swimming somnolently round in their tank, were male or female. They all behaved exactly the same. Not, however, after the salt bath. Within a few days Podgebelly's double, his smart black tail waggling rakishly through the water, was chasing the girls like mad.
Solomon and Sheba have had their ups and downs as well. Sheba, not long ago, was bitten on the tail by one of the local toms. How she – so coy she closed her eyes and practically swooned if you so much as glanced at her, so prim she always looked as if she were wearing mittens and a mob cap – could have let such a mangy specimen of feline manhood come within half a mile of her was a mystery, but even she, I suppose, has her romantic moments. She paid for that one, a week later, with an abscess as big as a tangerine on her tail. True to form she was very brave when we took her to the vet, allowing him to open the abscess and pump a penicillin injection into her rump with an air of fragile martyrdom that practically had him in tears over his hypodermic. He said we must keep the incision open for a week, draining it and inserting a penicillin tube twice a day. With some cats, he said, that could be the devil of a job, but with this little sweetheart – here Sheba closed her eyes and smirked at him; the way, no doubt, she had smirked at the tom before he bit her tail – we would obviously have no trouble at all.
That was what he thought. Sheba and a handsome young vet was one thing. Sheba and ourselves was quite another. He could open an inch and a half of her tail with a scalpel and all she did was languish at him. We only had to pick up the bottle of Dettol and she was streaking up the hill to the Rector's like a comet, yelling to Hide her Quick, we were going to Torture Her.
As if that weren't enough to put up with, Solomon met the same cat a day or two later in the lane, stalked up and stuck his neck out at him like an ostrich – instead of taking to his heels as any normal cat would have done – and promptly got slashed on the cheek. It was only a small cut – but doing Sheba's tail was a picnic to trying to see to that. She, after all, was very small and frail. If we could stop her getting out of the house we could, with Father Adams to help us, usually corner her somewhere and minister to her; even if it was flat on our stomachs under the table like a rugger scrum. But Solomon was so powerful even three of us couldn't hold him still. The cat book said the way to deal with an awkward cat was to clutch him by the scruff of the neck and press him firmly down on the table. But Solomon had so much scruff he could turn round inside it, with the remarkable result that while we were holding him by the back of the neck he was flat on his back waving his paws like a windmill. The only way we could cope with him was for me to drag him round and round the floor on my hands and knees pretending he was a kitten, and getting a dab in with the Dettol when I could.
They had, needless to say, fully recovered by the time the grandfather clock arrived. The man who came to set it up laughed when I asked about having it hooked to the wall so that they couldn't knock it over. No, cats couldn't hurt that old beauty he said, affectionately patting its walnut sides. They'd made things to last when they made he.
They had indeed. That clock, which had come to us on the death of my grandmother's brother, had belonged to my great-great-grandfather, and what with his years in the family shipping business in New York and his son's sojourn as a sheep-farmer on the River Plate it had done some travelling in its time. 'Twice round the Horn and the scars to show it,' great-grandfather used to say, after nostalgia for good old English beer and a couple of Victorian policemen to push him home on a barrow at closing time had brought him home to final retirement in the land of his birth. The scars were still there. Deep chips out of its base where it had slipped its moorings once in a gale and fallen, as great-grandfather himself was always doing, over his sea-chest. Neither great-grandfather nor Cape Horn, however, had ever subjected that poor old clock to the indignities it suffered at the hands of those cats.