Which was why I was so pleased when the next morning, instead of making straight for the wood with the fox-earths when we let him out, he ambled innocently off up the Forestry lane. After breakfast, to be on the safe side, I went out and called him. He appeared as if by magic, though I couldn’t tell from which direction. It did strike me as odd that his legs were dry while the undergrowth was sopping wet, but it was only a passing thought. If one analysed everything with Siamese cats, sooner or later one would go bonkers. The main thing was that he was approximately where we’d left him. For once he hadn’t wandered off...
That was what I thought. On my way back from posting some letters that afternoon the owner of the most striking house in the district – Spanish-cubist style and right at the top of the village – asked me if he’d come home all right. He’d been up to see her that morning, she said. She’d found him sitting in the patio entrance just as if he belonged there; she could hardly believe it when she opened the door and saw him. When she held her 82
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hand out, however, he got up and walked away. Down the road through the village, which explained why his legs had stayed dry.
She couldn’t think why he’d favoured her, she said.
I could. Her house was a lot more imposing than ours and Seeley obviously fancied looking as though he lived there, just as Solomon, years before, had liked the new house up the lane. What was more the next morning, in spite of all precautions, Seeley vanished again. This, said Charles, when we’d crawled without avail up to the fox-earths and peered frustratedly over the wall round the Spanish patio, was getting beyond a joke. Which house, for goodness’ sake, was that blasted cat fancying himself in now?
Sam’s and Dinah’s down the lane, as a matter of fact.
When I caught up with him he was sitting on their patio, trying it out for the effect.
After a record like that it was like a miracle to find him always in the garden with Shebalu. Even Annabel was intrigued. She spent ages watching them from her field up behind the cottage, mouth pouted, ears pointed straight towards them, looking, with her big white door-knocker nose, as solemn as an owl.
One day I was the intrigued one, however. Seeley and Shebalu were in the wide garden border under the hillside – Seeley looking at something under a delphinium, Shebalu importantly watching crouched by his side. Behind the border rose a high stone wall over which Annabel normally couldn’t see – the retaining wall which holds back the hillside out of which the garden is carved. She was looking over it now, however.
Reared up, with her head above the top of it, as tall as 83
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a sixteen-hand hunter. She was, I discovered after my initial reaction that I must be seeing things, standing with her front legs deliberately on an anthill.
That, said Charles, was really clever. Who said donkeys didn’t have brains? Self-taught, too, I echoed. One thing was certain. We could always get her a job in a circus.
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Nine
THINGS SEEMED TO BE going pretty smoothly just then.
We had our minor alarms, of course. Sometimes in duplicate, as on the occasion when Charles came in to say that something had dug a huge hole in front of the paeony, it looked like a fox to him… adding, by way of encore, that Seeley was sitting on Shebalu in the conservatory and did I think that was all right?
That was easily dealt with. The hole, I said, had been dug by me the previous night, in the dark. Getting earth for earthboxes because I couldn’t find the peat. And Seeley sitting on Shebalu meant it was time for her operation. All the more so, I said, when Charles said she seemed to be enjoying it. We’d better ring the Vet without delay.
There was another alarm the night we heard Seeley nattering when we were in bed – followed, after a pause, by a mysterious rattling noise. Charles, on the alert for 85
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intruders, was up in an instant, walking stick at the ready.
I wasn’t. My interpretation was that Seeley was talking to himself as Solomon used to do and that Shebalu, having been disturbed by him, was pushing her food-dish around, probably to show her annoyance. He’d better go down and check, said Charles. If he did they’d be upstairs and under the bed, I warned him. Walking over us all night and we wouldn’t get any sleep...
Having thus deterred him it was my fault entirely that we lay awake for hours anyway, convincing ourselves that it was a plate being pushed around and not somebody breaking in, and that it wasn’t till the morning that we discovered the cause of the trouble. The cats slept on a rug on the settee, with a hotwater bottle under it and another rug round them to keep out the draught.
I fixed their bed, Charles filled the hotwater bottle and dumped it on the settee, and I put it in place under the rug. Usually, that is. The previous night I’d overlooked it. All night long the bottle had lain exposed on top of their bed. Too hot to sit on, taking up space that they ought to be in… hence Seeley’s worried nattering and Shebalu’s clattering her plate around.
The length of a twenty-foot room she’d pushed it, till she got it against the door into the hall. The nearest she could get to us and that was where she’d been rattling it.
Either to attract our attention or to make sure that if she wasn’t going to get any sleep, she’d see to it that we jolly well didn’t either.
Looking at her, so small and white and feminine, it was difficult to imagine her capable of such deliberate thinking. She roused in everybody, including Seeley, a desire to protect her from the dangers of the wicked 86
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world and conveyed an impression of such ethereal frailty one felt that one cross word and she’d be off to join the angels. In fact she outclassed Seeley by miles when it came to thinking. Charles said it resulted from her being city-bred; Seeley, he said, was more of the country gentleman.
As for frailty... no kitten could have taken more knocks than she did and come up bouncing. She had a habit of rushing out of ambush and trying to gallop alongside our feet and she was tripped over, trodden on – kicked even, on occasion. Didn’t Matter, she would assure us, picking herself up from the latest collision and tearing headlong on her way. And within seconds, sure as Fate, she’d be in collision again.
Sometimes we wondered whether that was why she was so crossed-eyed. Concussed when she was young, said Charles, in a suitably sombre voice. It wasn’t that initially, of course. Tumed-in eyes are hereditary with many Siamese. But she did squint more pronouncedly after she’d had a bang. At times we got really worried.
Gradually, however, we noticed that it coincided with moments of stress. She squinted when she was annoyed, she did it when she was concentrating, she did it when she was willing us to get her ball with a bell out of the bureau... Seeley always regarded us with the straightest gaze in the world, but when Shebalu was thinking she looked like Ben Turpin.
Cross-eyed or not, we already loved her dearly, and when the day arrived for her to be spayed gloom hung like a pall over the household. Over Shebalu because she couldn’t have any breakfast, over Seeley because she wasn’t allowed out into the garden with him, and over 87