Even as we watched, she picked it up in her mouth. I regret to say that even as we watched, too, Seeley came dashing back, forgetful of his usual consideration for elderly ladies, and indignantly snatched it away from her. She got her mouse, though. A day or so later he brought home another one and I abstracted it while he wasn’t looking. After some puzzled searching he went back to his hunting ground and I secretly gave the mouse to Sheba.
She was a young cat again as she snatched it up, gazed warily around her and triumphantly carried it into the conservatory. And there she, who hadn’t eaten solid food for months and most of the time now we spoon-fed her, wolfed that mouse as if she were starving.
It wasn’t, as we hoped, a return to health and strength for Sheba. Somehow she must have known she was near the end. She must have been going back over the things she’d so loved doing… mousing, sitting on summer evenings up in the field with Annabel, gazing up the valley from her lookout on the Forestry gate.
A week after the mouse incident she went up the garden one night with Charles for her usual walk and asked to be lifted on to the car bonnet There she made such a fuss of Charles, whom she’d always loved...
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rubbing against him, purring, lifting her head to butt at his sleeve... that when he brought her down again he said she was like a kitten.
She didn’t go out again. When we came down next morning she staggered as she tried to get up to greet us. There was nothing we could do for her. She’d had kidney trouble for years. Through the day she lay placidly curled in her rug. Through the evening we took it in turn to nurse her. Funny said Charles, to think of this time last night. She must have known, and she’d been saying goodbye to him…
She died the next day, as quietly as she had lived with us. It was sixteen years since she and Solomon had been born upstairs in the cottage. Now, with both of them gone, it seemed the end of an era.
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Three
WE HAD LONG AGO decided that when we lost Sheba we would get another blue-point kitten as soon as possible.
It wasn’t callousness on our part. On the contrary it was because we were so fond of her. The place wouldn’t seem right without a blue-point girl around it. Seeley had been the best cure for our grief when Solomon died.
Seeley himself would be lost without a companion to Mrrr-mrrr his confidences to and sleep with... So we reasoned, and if occasionally the thought crossed my mind that the newcomer, when she materialised, might be a vastly different character from our placid, home-loving Sheba, I put it firmly from me.
It never worked like that, I told myself. I could think of lots of people who had a pair of cats and always one of them was a quiet one. Black and Blue from up the lane...
Hardy and Willis, who’d once belonged to the Rector...
Even with Sugar and Spice, the twin Siamese queens 27
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who lived with two schoolteacher sisters we knew, while Spice was an incorrigible delinquent with the mind of a Mephistopheles, the other one, Sugar, never gave them a moment’s worry.
Since Seeley went from crisis to crisis with the inevitability of a James Bond serial it followed that the newcomer was bound to be like Sheba. She’d better be, anyway, if Charles and I were to survive.
Seeley had recently scared the daylights out of us by eating a rubber spider. Someone had sent it to him for Christmas and for months, suspended from the latch of the living room door, where it turned squeamish visitors quite queer when they saw it, it had been his favourite toy. He had played with it by the hour. Leaping at it with high-sprung Siamese leaps, growling at us over it with sinister Siamese growls, rushing across the room with it as far as the elastic would stretch and then letting it snap back, as deliberately as a boy with a catapult, to hit the door with a thump.
Then one night I cut down on his bedtime snack because he’d eaten so much during the day. He’d be getting far too fat, I told him reprovingly. He didn’t want to be known as Tub-turn, did he? Apparently he did, because when I came down in the morning it was to find that he’d filled the gap with his spider. There was one small piece of it left on the hearthrug. The rest...
the legs, the sinister-looking head, half the flabby black body and about a yard of elastic with a ring on it... was patently inside Seeley’s stomach.
I nearly dropped when I thought of it. Visions filled my mind of his having to be operated on… just one bit of that rubber, as well I knew, could cause a fatal 28
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blockage if it stuck. I had an immediate further vision of the Vet missing one of the pieces (the spider’s legs were so long and feathery and he’d probably chewed them all in shreds). Remorse overwhelmed me because I hadn’t let him have those cat-biscuits; if I had, his little stomach wouldn’t have been in jeopardy now.
I was trembling like a leaf as I made for the door to shout for Charles. I was still trembling when, spotting something odd lying by the door-jamb, I bent down to see what it was. And then I went quite weak-kneed with relief. There, neatly sicked up in a heap, were the missing spider parts. On top lay the ring and the elastic, which had presumably brought about their recall – and, looking at them, it was fortunate that they had. The ring was the size of a 10p piece. If that had gone down through Seeley’s gullet, nothing short of surgery would have got it out again.
After Charles had checked the bits to make sure that none was missing... the things he had to do in this house, he said, it was a good thing his stomach was strong...
we added another rule to our code for Siamese safety.
Never to leave Seeley alone again with anything made of rubber and chewable, and to see that his toys were locked in the bureau at bedtime.
He still had plenty of ways of putting the years on us, however. The next day he went out and fell in the rain-water tank. It was a fine bright morning and we were having breakfast with the windows open when it happened, which was how we came to hear the rumbling noises, as of distant muffled thunder.
‘Miss Wellington pushing her garden roller,’ I commented to Charles. And then, as we debated why 29
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she should be trundling her roller around in the lane...
she does some pretty odd things but we couldn’t account for that one... I heard the rumbling again.
‘Seeley’s in the water-tank!’ I yelled with sudden comprehension. And up we leapt like a couple of greyhounds... we may not have the staying power but quite a few Olympic runners would have a job to beat us at the take-off after our years of Siamese cat-keeping... and out into the garden, my mind ranging frantically while I ran as to what we could possibly do to get him out. Charles lowering me into it head-first by my heels seemed about the only possibility, since the eight-foot high tank was bolted to the wall, the water-level – being summer – was very low indeed, and Seeley, trapped as in a bear pit at the bottom, couldn’t possibly, poor little chap, jump out.