He slept with her at night; he spent hours during the day sitting with her in front of the fire or on the settee
– because he loved her but also, it must be admitted, because he liked sharing the hotwater bottle she now had continuously in her bed. And thereby hangs another tale, because hitherto we’d always used aluminium bottles, which couldn’t be smashed like stone ones, or punctured by claws as could rubber.
They can still be damaged by constant dropping, however. Over the years, our nerves shattered by cats climbing our backs while we were filling them or staging what sounded like the French Revolution suddenly starting up upstairs, we’d demolished bottle after bottle. And one night, harassed by Seeley shouting for his supper in one ear and the pressure cooker with his rabbit in it suddenly letting off steam in the other, I dropped the last metal bottle just once too often and that was that. When I tried to replace it I was told they weren’t making them any longer; most people have electric blankets.
Most people maybe, but not cats with Siamese claws. We didn’t want them electrocuting themselves in the night.
For days I hunted in case somewhere there was a shop with an old-fashioned metal bottle under its counter, but it was no use. So eventually I bought a rubber one.
Sheba wouldn’t stick her claws in it, I assured the doubtful Charles. She was too old now for that. And if we put a double layer of rug on top of it Seeley wasn’t really likely to puncture it either. If he did, in any case, 16
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 16
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 16
18/01/2007 13:06:37
18/01/2007 13:06:37
Doreen Tovey
they’d jump off straight away. No cats in their right minds would sit on a leaking bottle.
Saying which I filled it, put it down before the fire inside the bed on which they slept at night – and Seeley, advancing cautiously towards it, said he wasn’t going to sit on it at all.
It smelled, he said, putting his nose to the rug with exaggerated, long-necked suspicion. It Wobbled, he announced, standing on it with his two front paws and quivering violently to prove his point. It was Dangerous, he finally decided and, being Seeley and knowing no fear, he raked the rug away so that he could see the bottle better. Presumably in case it attacked.
It was like having an obsessional bomb disposer around the place. As fast as I covered the bottle with the rug, Seeley, his whiskers bushed for action, intently exposed it again. Eventually, thinking he’d give up if we left him in darkness, Charles and I went to bed.
Covering the bottle once more, of course, and adjuring him to be good.
We should have known better. Seeley, when he gets an idea in his head, sticks to it like a leech. During the night he dismantled it all over again. This time, so that nobody could possibly sit on it by mistake, he pulled away the rug and the various sweaters which made up their bed, strewed them widely in all directions and left the bottle lying bleakly in the middle of the hearthrug.
There we found it in the morning. There we found Sheba, too, huddled forlornly in the fireplace complaining that she hadn’t slept a wink all night. Seeley, still on guard, sat watchfully on the table. It was entirely thanks to him it hadn’t gone off, he said.
17
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 17
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 17
18/01/2007 13:06:37
18/01/2007 13:06:37
Two
IT WAS QUITE A while before he trusted that hot water bottle. For several nights, so that Sheba could sleep on it undisturbed, we had taken him to bed with us. Stretched full length under the bedclothes, his head on the pillow, his eyes squeezed tight in utter bliss – I can’t pretend that he worried then about his girlfriend’s safety. Could this but last for Ever was obviously Seeley’s solitary thought.
Eventually he did get used to the bottle, however, and there he was once more, curled up on it at night, sitting on it by Sheba’s side, importantly, during the day.
He was tremendously fond of our old girl, as I realised particularly after the incident of his cage. This was the temporary affair we’d put on the lawn the previous summer, after he’d been bitten by an adder. He’d spent many a morning in there with Sheba, safeguarded from jumping on things that wriggled while we got on with our work.
18
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 18
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 18
18/01/2007 13:06:37
18/01/2007 13:06:37
Doreen Tovey
It had, in fact, become an accepted part of his routine.
A trek up the Forestry lane before the sun was up, a sniff round Annabel’s paddock to make sure there was nothing interesting there, a sortie into the woods, perhaps, for a peer down one or two holes... and then, when I called because it was getting hotter and the adders might be coming out to sun themselves, back he’d come for breakfast – which, for some unknown Siamese reason, always had to be in his cage. By the end of the morning he’d be howling the valley down about how long he’d Been in There, had we Forgotten him, let him out at Once he was getting cramp...
when we let him out, too, we always had such an exhibition of leg-stretching you’d think he’d been shut up in a match-box instead of an enclosure the size of a room... but it was definitely the ‘in’ place for summer breakfast.
Charles said it was some sort of tabu; Seeley probably thought his whiskers would drop off if he ate breakfast anywhere else. My theory was that, subconsciously, it took him back to his ancestors’ jungle days. He did some pretty peculiar things in it, anyway, which he never did in the house.
When he’d eaten his breakfast, for instance, he always camouflaged the saucer with moss and leaves and earth, raked up from the lawn with his claws. If he left a part of his food, he covered that in the same way. Once, given chicken out there as a treat, he covered it up so frantically without so much as tasting it that I thought he must be feeling off-colour. Apparently it was just that chicken wasn’t a thing one ate in the cage, however, A while later, the rules overcome by peckishness, he scraped off the moss and leaves and scoffed the lot as if he hadn’t eaten for a fortnight.
19
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 19
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 19
18/01/2007 13:06:37
18/01/2007 13:06:37
Double Trouble
Was this inherited memory of what to do with his kill? Was the fact that, in his cage, he always burrowed under a rug to sleep a further mental throwback to his forebears? Indoors, or in the conservatory or the car, Seeley would sleep stretched out trustingly for all to see him. In the cage, however, though Sheba slept normally on top of the rug, a camouflaged bump beneath it was all one could see of Seeley. It wasn’t to keep the draught out, either. He did it on the most sweltering of days.
All that had been in the summer, of course. In the winter, with no danger from adders, he’d come and gone as he liked while Sheba slept in front of the fire. But now it was April and adder time again and, as Charles still hadn’t got round to building a permanent cage (Rome, as he was continually telling me, wasn’t built in a day), one fine Sunday morning, when it was too nice for him to be indoors, into his temporary cage with his rug went Seeley.
I left Sheba in the conservatory, thinking it was a bit too early for her to sit in the open. And there I made my mistake, because while Seeley, if Sheba was with him, would stay happily in his cage all the morning, on his own he thought he was missing something and promptly proceeded to break out. The previous year he’d got out through all four top corners in turn, which was why we’d planned a stronger and permanent structure. Needs must when the devil drives the barrel-organ, however, as Charles is always saying, and so, as Charles was going off to fetch Aunt Ethel over for lunch and wasn’t available for guard duty, Seeley went into the temporary cage while I got on with the cooking.