Charles said she probably wanted grass. She didn’t, of course. I brought a large clump in and put it in a bulb-bowl for her but she took no notice of that. Wasn’t going to look, she said, when I tried to show it to her. Plant-eating, it was obvious, was going to be Sheba’s thing. Just as ripping holes in the staircarpet had been Solomon’s, 63
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stripping the hide off a saddleback chair in the hall had been Sheba’s, and whizzing round the bottom of another armchair on his back was Seeley’s. Combined, in his case, with going up the bathroom door.
It would be better when she could go out into the garden, defended Charles. Meanwhile it looked as if locusts had attacked our pot-plants, the dish-mop lived perpetually on the living room hearthrug, and, trotting happily about the cottage when she wasn’t doing any of these things, was a kitten apparently disguised as Father Christmas.
She’d adopted as her favourite toy a lambswool ball with a bell on it which had once belonged to Seeley.
As we were fast discovering, she never did anything by halves. While he had been content to toss it around occasionally, and on odd occasions when he was being a Lion with his Capture, to carry it in his mouth across the room, you’d think it was fixed to her with glue.
She took it to the door to meet the milkman; into the bathroom, if the door was open, to talk to Charles while he shaved; she met every visitor with her ball in her mouth – or, if she missed out on their arrival, appeared carrying it, with the natural-born showmanship of the Siamese, at what she judged to be the most effective moment.
‘Isn’t she sweet?’ they would exclaim as, tail raised, eyes crossed with willing them to look at her and apparently wearing a large white chin-beard, she advanced towards them across as vast an expanse of carpet as she could possibly contrive.
Which was all very well but there was a bell attached to that ball. And pretty though it sounded in visitor-sized doses – like dear little Japanese windbells, said Miss 64
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Wellington listening to it nostalgically – when one had to live with it, it was more like Chinese torture.
From morning till night it tinkled. Sometimes faint, sometimes loud, according to where she was on the premises. Just a pause while she ate or slept, then the tinkling would start up again. It accompanied her to the Vet’s when, at the end of the fortnight, she went bravely for her inoculation. It accompanied her a few weeks later to Low Knap when, while we were in Cornwall, she and Seeley went to board with Dr and Mrs Francis...
That itself was an indication of how things were turning out. We put her, for travelling, with Seeley in his big, wire-fronted basket. It would help to give her confidence, we said. She’d never been so far before.
In fact it was she who bolstered up Seeley. While he crouched miserably in the basket as if he were in a tumbril, she sat perkily upright by his side as if she were doing the driving. While he wailed plaintively about Feeling Car-Sick whenever we looked back over our shoulders at him, she, peering out of the window, was positively entranced. And when we eventually arrived at Low Knap, Seeley, who’d been there before with Sheba, said the cat in the next enclosure was looking at him and please could we take him home... while Shebalu, now fourteen weeks old, emerged from the basket with the air of a Princess, formally inspected the chalet, went back into the basket to fetch her ball, which she took in and put in a corner...
We could go now if we liked, she said. She would look after Seeley.
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THERE WAS NO NEED for that. He soon remembered where he was. When we rang that night to check on them the report was that he was busy eating his supper while Shebalu – she had finished hers, said Mrs Francis – was happily playing with her bell. When we went to fetch them four weeks later the Siamese next door was sitting like the Statue of Liberty on top of the tree-trunk scratching post in his run; Seeley – he was definitely Higher, he said –
was sitting competitively on the post in his; and Shebalu, oblivious of either of them, was still playing with her bell.
Our cats had been very good and they’d miss them, said Dr Francis, but as for that blasted bell...
We knew exactly what he meant. It rang all the way home, too. Though on that occasion, after four weeks without them, it sounded like heavenly music in our ears.
With the holidays over, however, now came the moment of truth. Eighteen weeks old and raring to 66
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go, we couldn’t keep Shebalu in any longer. And, said Charles, we were going to have to watch her like a hawk, with all these gun-minded neighbours about.
Nobody would have potted at her deliberately, of course, but there was the man up the hill who practised with tin cans; our neighbour down the lane who liked pigeons en casserole for supper; John Hazell up at the top who occasionally tried out his .22. And, if we didn’t keep an eye on her, there’d now be a little white kitten shinning up all the trees, looking, at a distance, like a plump young pigeon herself.
It turned me cold to think of it. Earlier that summer I’d had quite a scare myself. We’d been going off for a picnic. Charles was getting the car out, I was carrying up the supplies – I was just rounding the corner of the cottage with the picnic basket when shots hit the roof over my head. Some pieces of tile fell down, a couple of starlings emerged swearing from under the eaves and took off for safer climes and I... ‘What’s going ON!’
I yelled indignantly, and wondered if I should take cover. It was the time of the Parish Council election.
I was one of the candidates. Surely it couldn’t be one of my rivals...
Deciding that it was probably somebody shooting pigeons... keeping a wary eye open nevertheless in case we had gone all Wild West... I shouted loudly for Charles and made for the Forestry gate. There was nobody there.
Just drowsy summer silence and a soundless, dusty lane.
As I ventured cautiously up the track a few feathers came floating down like snowflakes from overhead. But no marksman... and, if it came to that, no pigeon anywhere in sight.
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‘Old Sam from down the lane,’ said Charles. Sam being the owner of Nero, an enthusiastic shot and, having been raised in the Australian outback, not very used as yet to living in confined English spaces. Intending to give him a piece of my mind, still clutching the picnic basket, I marched vengefully down the lane to Sam’s... but there was no Sam either. Just complete and utter silence. The house lay sleeping in the morning sunshine. A couple of sulphur butterflies fluttered over a lavender bush. No sign of Nero anywhere and that in itself was something.
He always bounced out as if he was on springs in exuberant defence of his home.
Charles, insisting on me staying indoors, now searched the other lanes. There was nobody there, either. We went for our picnic still wondering.
We wondered wrongly, of course. It was weeks later that Sam confessed that it had been he who’d fired the shot. Out of his bedroom window, which made an admirable hide for pigeons, he said. And when he’d heard me shout it made an admirable hide for him, too