“They do look very nice,” said Mrs. Whitaker.
“Yes,” agreed Galaad. “They look very nice.”
“Can I give you anything to eat before you go back?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Some fruitcake,” she said. “You may not think you want any now, but you’ll be glad of it in a few hours’ time. And you should probably use the facilities. Now, give me that, and I’ll wrap it up for you.”
She directed him to the small toilet at the end of the hall, and went into the kitchen, holding the Grail. She had some old Christmas wrapping paper in the pantry, and she wrapped the Grail in it, and tied the package with twine. Then she cut a large slice of fruitcake and put it in a brown paper bag, along with a banana and a slice of processed cheese in silver foil.
Galaad came back from the toilet. She gave him the paper bag, and the Holy Grail. Then she went up on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.
“You’re a nice boy,” she said. “You take care of yourself.”
He hugged her, and she shooed him out of the kitchen, and out of the back door, and she shut the door behind him. She poured herself another cup of tea, and cried quietly into a Kleenex, while the sound of hoofbeats echoed down Hawthorne Crescent.
On Wednesday Mrs. Whitaker stayed in all day.
On Thursday she went down the post office to collect her pension. Then she stopped in at the Oxfam Shop.
The woman on the till was new to her. “Where’s Marie?” asked Mrs. Whitaker.
The woman on the till, who had blue-rinsed gray hair and blue spectacles that went up into diamanté points, shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “She went off with a young man,” she said. “On a horse. Tch. I ask you. I’m meant to be down in the Heathfield shop this afternoon. I had to get my Johnny to run me up here, while we find someone else.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “Well, it’s nice that she’s found herself a young man.”
“Nice for her, maybe,” said the lady on the till, “but some of us were meant to be in Heathfield this afternoon.”
On a shelf near the back of the shop Mrs. Whitaker found a tarnished old silver container with a long spout. It had been priced at sixty pence, according to the little paper label stuck to the side. It looked a little like a flattened, elongated teapot.
She picked out a Mills & Boon novel she hadn’t read before. It was called Her Singular Love. She took the book and the silver container up to the woman on the till.
“Sixty-five pee, dear,” said the woman, picking up the silver object, staring at it. “Funny old thing, isn’t it? Came in this morning.” It had writing carved along the side in blocky old Chinese characters and an elegant arching handle. “Some kind of oil can, I suppose.”
“No, it’s not an oil can,” said Mrs. Whitaker, who knew exactly what it was. “It’s a lamp.”
There was a small metal finger ring, unornamented, tied to the handle of the lamp with brown twine.
“Actually,” said Mrs. Whitaker, “on second thoughts, I think I’ll just have the book.”
She paid her five pence for the novel, and put the lamp back where she had found it, in the back of the shop. After all, Mrs. Whitaker reflected, as she walked home, it wasn’t as if she had anywhere to put it.
The Price
TRAMPS AND VAGABONDS HAVE marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?
We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them, and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed.
And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or forever.
Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just the right distance out of town for the city dwellers to abandon their cats near us.
We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house is currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office and do not mingle; Snowflake, the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Snowflake’s cushionlike calico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I discovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled and almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who surprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be the best-natured cat I have ever encountered.
And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realize he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.
One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighboring farmer or household.
I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognizable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his gray skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.
We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him some antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat food.
We wondered who he was fighting. Snowflake, our beautiful white near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fanged possum?
Each night the scratches would be worse—one night his side would be chewed up; the next it would be his underbelly, raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.
When it got to that point, I took him down to the basement to recover beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was surprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up and carried him down there, with a cat basket, and a litter box, and some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash the blood from my hands when I left the basement.
He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered him almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellow pus oozing from the cut in his lip.
I went down there every morning and every night, and I fed him and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his canned food, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. He had diarrhea, and, although I changed his litter daily, the basement stank evilly.
The four days that the Black Cat lived in the basement were a bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath and banged her head and might have drowned; I learned that a project I had set my heart on—adapting Hope Mirrlees’s novel Lud-in-the-Mist for the BBC—was no longer going to happen, and I realized that I did not have the energy to begin again from scratch, pitching it to other networks or to other media; my daughter left for summer camp and immediately began to send home a plethora of heart-tearing letters and cards, five or six each day, imploring us to bring her home; my son had some kind of fight with his best friend, to the point that they were no longer on speaking terms; and, returning home one night, my wife hit a deer that ran out in front of the car. The deer was killed, the car was left undriveable, and my wife sustained a small cut over one eye.