‘When was that, can you remember?’ I pressed.
‘Couldn’t say for sure, but a week ago sounds about right,’ the tortoiseshell replied.
I fixed her with a stare. ‘Do you have any idea where he went?’ I asked, my heart pounding so loud I could hear it.
Suddenly, her head dropped. ‘From what I heard, an alley-cat chased him to the town sign on the main road south. After that, I don’t know what happened to him,’ she said sorowfully.
I thanked the tortoiseshell and leapt down from the wall. I pelted out of the alley and across the middle of the square, dodging the legs of shoppers and dashing between parked cars until I reached the entrance to the churchyard. Spotting Jasper prowling between the headstones on the far side, I sprinted across the grass, causing a cluster of crows to flap skywards in alarm.
‘I know what happened to Eddie,’ I panted. ‘A cat chased him to the main road south, about a week ago. An alley-cat told me.’
Jasper’s eyes widened. ‘An alley-cat told you?’ he repeated, doubtfully.
‘Yes, the one next to the sweet shop. She’d seen you go up and down searching for him, but she was hiding from you.’
Jasper stared at me with a mixture of surprise and admiration.
‘I knew it,’ I said, feeling self-righteousness bubble up inside me. I had been right not to listen to Purdy; Eddie had not gone off in search of adventure, he had been forced to run away. But any vindication of my maternal instincts was dwarfed by my concern for Eddie’s well-being. The tortoiseshell had confirmed my worst fears: that he had got into a confrontation with an alley-cat and been chased out of town. He would be out there somewhere, alone, hungry and too frightened to come home.
I stared at Jasper defiantly, willing him to recognize the seriousness of the situation. ‘So, what are we going to do?’ I asked.
‘Well, there’s only one thing we can do,’ replied Jasper soberly. ‘I’ll have to go after him.’
Later that evening Jasper bade farewell to the kittens and slipped out onto the street under cover of darkness. I walked by his side through the town’s back streets until we picked up the main road heading south. There, we padded past the shops, the public toilets and the car park, to the point where the pavement ended and a grassy verge took over. All around us, the fields beyond the hedgerows looked inky-black in the darkness. An owl screeched, unseen, in a tree nearby.
We stepped off the kerb and made our way across the damp verge to the hedgerow. I knew Jasper would be able to handle himself, yet I still dreaded the thought of him leaving, and the fact that we would have no means of communicating while he was away. Much as I had felt vexed and frustrated by him in recent weeks, Jasper was my anchor. Without him, I would have no one to confide in and seek reassurance from.
As if he had read my mind, Jasper murmured, ‘It’ll be okay – I’ll find Eddie.’ He nuzzled his face against mine and I looked up into his amber eyes, wanting to commit their comforting gaze to memory.
Jasper burrowed into a gap in the hedgerow, there was a brief rustling sound, then he was gone. I turned and retraced my steps slowly back to the café. There was nothing I could do now except wait.
15
After breakfast on Monday morning I descended the stairs to find Debbie casting puzzled looks around the café. I could almost see her doing a head-count, as she watched the kittens file across the floor behind me. A few minutes later, I was settling into my habitual position in the window when I heard her rattling a box of cat biscuits on the back doorstep. ‘Jasper, breakfast!’ she called hopefully into the empty alleyway.
Linda, who was tying her hair back at the mirror beside the counter, registered the look of concern on her sister’s face. ‘What’s up, Debs?’ she asked casually.
‘I haven’t seen Jasper for a couple of days. He’s not been in for breakfast, and he’s not in the alley, either,’ Debbie replied, frowning.
Linda’s eyes slid back to her reflection in the mirror. ‘To lose one cat may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness,’ she observed, smiling wryly until Debbie’s steely look sent her scurrying to refill the napkin-holders.
‘Oh, hello, it’s Debbie Walsh from Molly’s. I’m afraid we’ve lost another cat,’ Debbie told the vet, blushing, on the telephone later that morning. ‘Could you let me know if you hear anything?’
However, there was no poster campaign for Jasper, as there had been for Eddie, and Debbie avoided mentioning his disappearance to the café’s customers. I suspected that Linda’s comment might have touched a nerve, and Debbie was embarrassed by the fact that the Cotswolds’ only cat café had now mislaid two of its charges.
Throughout the day Debbie threw worried looks in my direction while I sat at the window, staring anxiously down the parade. ‘Don’t worry, Molls – Jasper’s just gone wandering again, that’s all,’ she reassured me. I rubbed my cheek against her hand, wishing I could explain to her what was really going on.
I veered between telling myself that Jasper would find Eddie and bring him home, and feeling certain that I would never see either of them again. Even sleep brought no respite: I was troubled by unsettling dreams, from which I would wake with a sudden jolt of panic and an overwhelming sense that I should be doing more – that I should have been the one to go after Eddie. The powerlessness of my position, stuck at the café waiting, was agonizing. Every time the phone rang, my stomach lurched, as I hoped – and at the same time dreaded – that it was a call about Eddie or Jasper.
Although the kittens understood why their father had gone, the loss of Jasper in addition to Eddie had a de-stabilizing effect on our fractured family. I became more withdrawn and taciturn than ever, spending hour after hour gazing listlessly through the window. We were now an all-female colony, and in the vacuum created by Eddie and Jasper’s absence, the kittens became more quarrelsome, as if they were jostling for position in the new hierarchy.
Purdy had always assumed certain privileges, as the most confident and outgoing of the litter; but, without their father around, Abby and Bella now became more extrovert and began to challenge Purdy’s dominance. I kept out of their squabbles, thinking the best thing I could do was allow them to work out their sibling rivalries for themselves, but barely a day went by when I didn’t hear a sudden hiss and spit as a minor disagreement boiled over into conflict. Their disputes usually ended with Purdy, realizing she was outnumbered, striding huffily out through the cat flap and marching off down the cobbles. She would often hop onto Jo’s white van outside the hardware shop and look around insouciantly, before settling down on the van’s roof for a proprietorial wash.
One morning, Linda took delivery of a large cardboard box at the door while she and Debbie were preparing to open the café.
‘What’s in there, Lind?’ Debbie asked, watching Linda run a knife along the seam of brown tape.
‘Ming’s Mugs,’ answered Linda brightly, enjoying Debbie’s look of blank incomprehension. She ripped open the cardboard box and pulled out a white enamel mug, emblazoned with a photo of Ming. The disembodied image of her face against the stark white background of the mug emphasized Ming’s pointed chin and enormous brown ears, and her slightly crossed eyes were a piercing, artificial shade of blue. Underneath the photos, in a bright-pink font, ran the hashtag #mingsmug.
Behind the till, Debbie’s mouth fell open in dismay. ‘And what are you planning to do with those?’ she asked coolly, walking around the side of the counter for a closer look.