Читать онлайн "Double Trouble [calibre 3.42.0]" - Тови Дорин - RuLit

To say he protested would be an understatement.

There were no little ‘Woohs’ and ‘Mrr-mrrs’ now.

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Doreen Tovey

Father Adams, plodding down the hill after his Sunday morning pint, said they could hear him up in the Rose and Crown. ‘IT’S HIS FIRST TIME IN THE CAGE

THIS YEAR,’ I shouted above the uproar. ‘HE’LL BE

ALL RIGHT ONCE HE’S SETTLED DOWN.’

Eventually, indeed, there was peace. He was asleep under his rug, I decided, and was sure I could see the tell-tale bump. I didn’t go out to check, not wanting to start him off again – and so, when I eventually did go over and discover the empty cage… with, in front of it, the tell-tale hole where he’d burrowed under the wire like a dog... I didn’t know how long he’d been gone.

I could give a couple of dozen guesses as to what he was doing, however. Right at that moment about to pounce on an adder in the orchard... equally right at that moment being chased up the lane by some Sunday morning walker’s dog... if he wasn’t out on the road at the mercy of speeding motorists, or (the distance depending on how long since he’d got away), miles across the fields, heading fast for the coast and Siam.

As a matter of fact he was just across the lawn. He must have been there all the time but in my initial state of jet-propelled panic... up the lane, down the lane and a frenzied yodelling of ‘Seeleyweeleyweeley’ over the Forestry gate that set the pigeons flapping out of the trees like bats... I didn’t think of his being close at hand.

He wasn’t telling me, either. Enjoying, as Siamese do, the spectacle of people tearing round in search of them when they are there within earshot all the time, it was only as I came panting past from the back gate towards the front that I happened to glance at the conservatory doorway and saw him sitting framed in it like the Mona 21

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Lisa, regarding me with the look of wide-eyed innocence that is known to every Siamese owner.

Was there a fire somewhere? his expression demanded.

And who was I supposed to be calling? Hadn’t I realised where he’d gone? He just wanted to be with Sheba.

After that we abandoned the idea of a permanent cage.

It was more sheltered for Sheba in the conservatory, Seeley obviously preferred to be with her, all we had to do was make a wire door and window guards for when it was hot and the windows had to be opened – and there, under a jungle-like ceiling of grape leaves, they were happy in the hottest weather.

We had some hot days that summer, too. Often it was six o’clock before the sun cooled sufficiently to make it safe to let Seeley out, and even then I checked the hillside to make sure there was nothing about.

I thought I made sure, anyway. One night I did my usual perambulation, bashing round the bushes with a clock-golf club and talking loudly to Annabel as I went (that was so the adders could hear the vibrations of my voice; the procedure wasn’t quite so batty as it looked).

Then I let Seeley out of the conservatory and, following his usual motto of never being in the garden if he could be out of it, up he raced like a gazelle on to the hillside...

and within seconds was racing back down off it again, carrying something in his mouth that was long and thin and squirming.

Actually it was a slow-worm. If it hadn’t been I wouldn’t have given much for his chances, the way its head was curling up around his face. I wouldn’t have given much for mine, either, seeing that he laid it very lovingly right at my feet. Clever, wasn’t he? he demanded, poking it 22

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to make it perform – and was obviously most put out when, holding it balanced across the clock-golf club, whence it kept falling off and having to be balanced again, I gingerly deposited it in a bramble bush.

The next night he went up and caught another one.

This time, since I didn’t appreciate his presents he didn’t bring it down to me but sat prodding it playfully up on the hillside. As at that distance we still couldn’t guarantee that it was only a slow-worm Charles immediately charged after him, armed with the garden hoe and yelling in the hope of scaring him off.

It was asking for it, of course. ‘Whass he after then, Red Indians?’ enquired Father Adams, appearing on the scene as if by magic. ‘That liddle old cat can handle snakes,’

he observed when I explained the situation. And then, shading his eyes to follow the fleeting Charles – ‘Thy old man’s going to fall down flat as a cow-dab runnin’– like that – thee’st see if he don’t,’ he announced.

For the record Charles didn’t fall down – which was just as well since he had to repeat the performance many a night that summer – and Seeley couldn’t handle snakes.

He’d learned nothing from his adder bite of the previous year, when he d been bitten on his paw. He still poked at anything that wriggled, picked it up by its middle instead of the back of its head and, when he saw us running after him, dodged with it into the undergrowth.

As at the same time he had a genius for finding the things... case the hillside though I might, within minutes of his going up there he’d have fished one out from somewhere... and since, though at that time of night there shouldn’t have been adders about, we could never be sure there weren’t, we were constantly on the run.

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We’d thought Solomon was bad enough about snakes.

Seeley practically made them his life’s work.

None of them was an adder, though, thanks to our keeping him in during the day. And eventually he ran out of slow-worms and turned, more prosaically, to mice. These at least he brought down to the cottage lawn. The dead ones we let him keep, the live ones we spirited away... and one day we saw something we never expected to see again. Sheba playing with a mouse.

She hadn’t caught one in years. For ages she hadn’t even been interested when Seeley caught one, turning her head with indifference when he started showing off. Recently, though, she’d been taking more notice of things. She must have seen us chasing after him on the hillside when he caught the slow-worms, for instance, and one day, instead of coming sedately indoors for her supper as she usually did, she vanished when we let the two of them out of the conservatory and gave us a considerable fright. We were afraid, when we couldn’t find her anywhere in the cottage or the garden, that she might have gone quietly off somewhere to die. We knew that she was very old and ailing, and cats do sometimes go off like that.

Sheba hadn’t. When, after scouring every corner we could think of, Charles climbed as a last resort up on to the hillside, there she was in Annabel’s field sitting in the evening sun. She hadn’t been up there for years and we could hardly believe our eyes. Sheba looked placidly back at us. Seeley went up there and we made a fuss of him...

now she was doing it, she informed us with a squawk.

She began sitting in the lane by the Forestry gate, something else she hadn’t done in years. She couldn’t 24

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jump on to the gatepost now. She sat at its foot and we had to keep fetching her back again because of the danger from passing dogs. We were amazed, nevertheless, at this new determination. We were even more amazed, looking out of the window at breakfast time one morning, to see that where Seeley, a moment before, had been tossing a mouse around on the lawn – there, sniffing it with interest, was Sheba.