‘He couldn’t have,’ said Charles. ‘How could he manage to bark?’
He had it all right – though, realising his mistake, he didn’t move the bulge again. He had a whole cache of our golf balls at home, hidden in the folds of his blanket.
She’d been wondering where he’d been getting them, said his owner when I reported him; she hadn’t known we had a clock golf course. Being another newcomer in the district I don’t suppose that she did. Or – she looked a bit old-fashioned when I told her – that it was mainly used by one of our Siamese cats.
Anyway, Seeley got his golf balls back, the garden wall was rebuilt and Nero, to show what he thought of us for telling on him, took to barking whenever he saw us. A state of affairs that annoyed Seeley to the extent that one day – filled, we could only imagine, with the he-man image of himself which he’d acquired since the coming of Shebalu – he got deliberately through the bars of the gate and advanced for a confrontation.
They met, it being refuse collection day, by the dustbins on the corner.
Who, demanded Seeley, sticking his neck out and walking as stifflegged as a Texan gunfighter, did old Fancypants think he was, disturbing the district like that?
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‘Rooo-oooff ’ said Nero, doing a flop-footed bounce meant to frighten the daylights out of Seeley.
‘Wanna fight?’ enquired Seeley, adopting his combatant’s stance. This, involving lowering his head till he was practically standing on it, bushing his tail and then advancing sideways like a crab, always worked wonders with the cat from down the lane. I don’t really think it worked with Nero. I think it was more my nipping through the gate waving the broom I’d grabbed from the coalhouse. But when Nero turned and fled and Seeley went bounding after him, another legend was born in the Valley. Both Seeley and the people who saw him thought he must be a terror with the dogs.
It was a good thing Shebalu wasn’t in on this lark, said Charles a day or two later, when, for the umpteenth time, we’d fetched Seeley back from a victory parade down Nero’s lane. It was indeed. If Shebalu had been out not only would she have been parading with him; it was already quite on the cards that she’d have been in the lead.
There was no doubt as to who was going to be boss in this outfit. Less than a week with us and she could already open all the doors for a start. With the aplomb of a practised safebreaker she stood against the ones that pushed, pulled determinedly at the others with a midget paw till she forced a crack through which she could squirm – and jauntily in her wake inevitably came Seeley, taking it for granted that that was what girls were for.
This of course was because Sheba had always opened doors for him. He was a lot more perturbed when he discovered that Shebalu could climb. We happened to 60
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look through the conservatory window one day to check on them and there he was sitting in the chair, gazing upwards as incredulously as if she’d taken off for the moon to where, high up under the conservatory roof, she was balance-walking along a branch of the grapevine.
She paused, graceful as a cheetah in a baobab tree, to look down at us through the vine leaves. Shouldn’t be up there, should she? said Seeley. He was a silly old worrypants, said Shebalu airily.
He was also, like Solomon before him, an inveterate non-climber. Three feet up a fir tree, at the end of which he fell off, and Seeley thought he’d gone up Everest.
His major trick until now had been to rush into the bathroom, heave himself laboriously up a coat behind the door and dangle from the top till he was rescued.
Very much what Solomon used to do – except that Solomon at least used to make it to the top, and when he got there immediately bawled for help. Our only intimation of Seeley’s predicament was a rush, a bump, and an ominous silence – at which combination we had to run like mad knowing that he was now hanging from the door by his paws, his nose over the top like Chad, far too scared to shout and his eyes round as an owl’s with apprehension. He did this on average once a day and when we’d gone through the accepted routine of rescuing him – I lifted his front legs, Charles raised his back ones, and we hoisted him sideways off the door like a croquet hoop – he then went round as if he’d just been voted Sportsman of the Year.
After the business of Shebalu and the grapevine you’d have thought he’d let his climbing efforts sink into oblivion. But no. Convinced – after all he was born 61
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under Leo – that he was the greatest, and anxious to appraise everybody else of the fact, he now showed off his prowess even more. She climbed the grapevine during the day, he went up the bathroom door at night...
On one occasion when we had visitors he went up four times in the course of the evening. Each time, at the sound of the bumps and thumps, we leapt like startled gamebirds and rushed hotfoot to the rescue. Our visitors were people who didn’t know about Siamese cats. Why did he go up there if he couldn’t get down again? they asked. When we said it was to substantiate his ego they looked at us as if we were mad.
If Seeley was Leo the Lion, however, Shebalu was Taurus the Bull – as well we knew when at breakfast time, with Seeley off for his walk, we locked her in the hall so that we could eat in peace.
She, as Seeley wasn’t with her, imagined that he must be in with us. Eating. At the very thought of it she howled and roared and hammered at the door till, heavy though it was, it rattled. Whether she battered it with her head or her paws we didn’t know. Only that we’d never had a kitten do that before (Seeley in similar circumstances had merely removed the draught excluder); that it was like the sound effects from Tannhauser while it lasted; and that when finally the thunder stopped there would be a pause (was she all right? we wondered); a nattering scamper up the stairs that proved she was; and finally a lot more thumping about in the bedroom as Taurus the Bull charged everything in sight, no doubt pretending it was us.
We laughed indulgently, pleased to hear such bounding high spirits. Until I went up one day and discovered 62
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Taurus the Bull jumping off the spare room tallboy into a stack of glycerined beech-leaves. I was preparing them for a bazaar. The Committee had provided the glycerine.
I was responsible for the entire supply of beech-leaves for sale on the stall. And at the sight of that horrible little cat jumping deliberately off into the middle of them...
then out, up the tallboy and down into the middle of them... Honestly, I said. I just Despaired.
I despaired even more when I found the number there were with bent tops and the leaves riddled with teethmarks like bullet-holes. She must have been jumping into them for days. I stored them in the roof after that. A tardy closing of the stable door, of course.
Not only did they look pretty motheaten when it came to putting them on the stall... Had I perhaps picked them a little too late? enquired one of the ladies...
They seemed to have been got at by leaf-weevil... But Shebalu had now acquired a taste for plants.
I could hardly believe it when I found the clematis cutting I’d been cherishing nipped clean off in its prime.
I thought a snail must have got it till I saw her later sitting in the window with her eyes closed, eating what was left of the stem as delicately as if it were asparagus. I could hardly believe it either when I found a rosemary cutting lying uprooted by the side of its pot – until, having re-planted it, I saw her pull it out again.