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

‘He’s woken up to the fact that he’s got a girlfriend,’

said Charles. And though you’d hardly have thought she was his girlfriend if you’d seen him playing with her…

flattening his ears, threatening to pounce and arching his back... if you watched carefully you saw that his pounces always missed; when he appeared to be locked in mortal combat kicking the daylights out of her he was in fact holding her in the gentlest of grips kicking industriously into thin air; and that the only one who really contacted was Shebalu who, with the determination of a black belt Judo wrestler, hurled herself again and again at his great dark back and head.

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They progressed like a house on fire. All Siamese are individuals and in no time those two had evolved a play routine we had never seen in any of our cats before. I looked up entranced from my reading one night and signalled to Charles to watch. Quite oblivious of anybody looking on, they were silently performing a dance. They faced each other, as if it were a back-cloth, in front of a yellow-covered armchair. Seeley, ears back, his eyes on Shebalu, retreated several paces backwards and stopped.

Shebalu, her ears sleeked back like a ballerina, walked the corresponding five paces forward and paused as well.

Then, even as we watched, she went into reverse while Seeley advanced gracefully, sinuously, towards her... It was part, of course, of their eternal boisterous mock-fighting... one threatening, the other retreating, and then the positions being reversed... but it looked so much like a professional tango that we could almost hear the music as we watched it. And they kept it up for quite a while.

And the next night they did it again.

I reckoned we could leave them together now, I said.

So the next day, after Seeley had breakfasted in the conservatory, we put Shebalu in with him to see what happened. We kept an eye on her, of course. She polished his plate, looked out of all the windows, ate a spider she found in a corner and was promptly sick. And then she joined him in the armchair and when next I looked through the window he was lying on his side and she was perched on top of him. Looking smaller than ever, like a sparrow on a Trafalgar Square lion, and earnestly washing his ears.

There was no doubt as to who was in charge. After a while Seeley, tired of her ministrations, ducked his head 45

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and tried to dodge. Immediately out came a paw the size of a saltspoon, his head was held firmly in place in imitation of the way her Mum had dealt with her, and the washing continued. Neither did Seeley try to escape again; he closed his eyes and meekly submitted.

So, that night, we let them sleep together. There were no complaints from Seeley. No wailing about wanting to go to bed with us or bumping noisily around the room to get us up. When, wondering whether things were perhaps too silent, we checked on them at three in the morning, they were curled cosily together on the settee.

Romeo and his Juliet, just as we’d envisaged them – as Solomon and Sheba had been through all their years together. Seeley was awake and watching us, of course.

What buoyant young Siamese wouldn’t, with a girl like that to guard?

We went happily back to bed ourselves and slept the sleep of the successful. Rather prematurely, unfortunately. Next morning Seeley left home.

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Five

HE WAS MISSING FOR six hours. Longer than he’d ever been away in his life. To add to the tension his absence coincided with the baker knocking down our garden wall, though it was not until some time after the young man had departed... profuse in his apologies, explaining that he was new to the van and its brakes, hadn’t realised the corner was so steep and, as he put it, ‘’twere a good job the wall were there to stop’n, wun’t it?’... that the thought occurred to us which resulted in our moving the pile of stones like frenzied navvies in case Seeley was underneath, my ringing the bakery to check that he hadn’t gone off in the van, and my ringing them again, at Charles’s insistence, to ask would they please look underneath in case he was on the axle.

He wasn’t. On which happy note, with Charles convinced that he probably had been, but had fallen off in the road somewhere en route, I embarked on 47

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my usual search for him through the Valley and set off another sequence of events.

It so happened that it was a Wednesday and Ern Biggs was working up at the Upcott’s cottage. Ern actually belonged to an adjoining village but some six months earlier one of our neighbours, Bill Trammell, meeting him in the pub and being impressed by Ern’s own account of what a first-class gardener he was, had offered him a couple of mornings’ work a week. This upset Father Adams, who, despite the fact that he couldn’t possibly cope with it, considered that he should be asked to do all the odd-job gardening that was going, but that is by the way. Once having set spade in the village Ern found so many people wanting their gardens done that he’d introduced his brother Bert as well, and now there were two of them working in the district. As stolidly plodding as shire horses, pausing to size up Father Adams from under their hat brims whenever they saw him – while Father Adams, I regret to say, regarded them witheringly and spat.

Some people liked them, others didn’t... the one thing people did agree on was that them Biggs brothers couldn’t half talk. We’d had some of Ern ourselves. We didn’t employ him, Charles preferring to do his own odd jobs even if they did take years in the doing – but that didn’t stop Ern, on his way home from the Trammells, pausing to give us advice on rebuilding Annabel’s house, spraying the fruit trees, or what he’d do if he was us with the vegetable garden. Advice which, illustrated with instances of what he’d recommended to other people in similar circumstances and they all now regarded Ern as the tops, was apt to last so long that we now took cover in 48

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the garage when we saw him coming. Particularly since he had somewhere learned that I made home-made wine and had been throwing out hints about wanting to try it.

When, therefore, I panted up the track above the wood, calling (Seeley-weeley-weeley’ as hard as I could go and sweating on the top line because Charles had just reported seeing the retriever from down the lane trekking along that way and I didn’t want the two of them meeting up, it didn’t exactly help matters to see Ern up the lane ahead of me, methodically laying the Upcott’s hedge with a billhook.

The one thing in my favour was that he was shortsighted.

So am I, but not to the extent that he was. So I halted in my tracks, gazed vaguely about me and pretended that that was as far as I was going.

‘Lookin’ fer a dog?’ called Ern.

‘No,’ I shouted back. ‘A cat.’

‘Gert black dog come through here just now. He belong to thee?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s from down the lane.’