Try the flower spray then, I agreed. But she must persevere, not give up on it. The vet had told her to persevere, too, she admitted dismally. It hadn't worked with him, though, when he'd owned Ming in the beginning.
It worked this time. Three weeks later Connie was on the phone again. She didn't know how to thank me, she said. Ming had given up bawling and accepted the fact that he couldn't get out, though he still peered under the fence for Ginger Bates. So far the latter hadn't peered back, for which she was truly grateful. Ming already had a permanently crumpled ear as the result of an encounter with a magpie whose nest he'd tried to raid in the old free-roaming field days, and she had always been afraid of his getting another from Ginger Bates.
She gave me a résumé of Ming's eventful history – of his many fights and consequent visits to the vet. He also suffered frequently from tonsillitis on account of talking so much, and had to be treated for that, which was no picnic. The things he'd stolen and brought home to the previous flat to await her return from school, she expounded earnestly, ranged from fillets of steak and a turbot skeleton with its head on to green balls lifted from the public tennis courts when nobody was looking, and parked one on each stair. How he'd carried them home she couldn't imagine, but he had. And only green ones.
As far as she could she'd tracked down the owners and returned the booty, but sometimes it had been impossible – for instance when she got home and found two pairs of red knickers laid out on the stairs with Ming sitting beside them saying they were a Present. She couldn't go round asking about those, she said: it would have been too embarrassing. She'd put them in the dustbin, but it had always remained on her conscience. Why did Siamese cats do such awful things?
I roared with laughter. Because they were Siamese, I said. And from what she'd told me I wouldn't mind betting, if we compared pedigrees, that he and Saphra were related. Saphra did things like that because he'd got his character from his grandfather, Saturn Sentinel, of the famous Killdown strain. People were fortunate, or benighted, depending on how one looked at it, if they had one of that line. Life was never the same again. I told her about Saphra and the purple towels and his being expelled from Langford. It was her turn to shudder down the phone.
By the next post she sent me a copy of Ming's pedigree and sure enough, there it was. Saturn Sentinel was Ming's grandfather, he and Saph were cousins. It didn't matter how far they were removed from their illustrious ancestor, I told her when I rang to break the news. If the genes were there, she was in for trouble.
We became friends – comrades in distress – at the very thought of it. She came to see my two – Saphra the extrovert Head of the Household, Tani pursuing her role of Fugitive from the White Slavers as usual – and was entranced by them. I went to see Ming, and was immediately captivated by him. Chocolate-pointed – a paler edition of Saphra – he was very like Saph, except for the crumpled ear. Handsome, tall – impressively so when he put on his Collapsing with the Cold performance, which was one of the first things he tried out on me.
Connie's flat had gas-fired central heating, with a large electric fire in the sitting-room to boost the temperature when necessary. It was November when I first went to visit her, and I'd met Ming, we'd had tea and were relaxing in the sitting-room when I happened to glance to my left, where there was a long radiator under the window. There, sitting upright, stretched to his full height against it with his head pressed wanly against the metalwork and his eyes closed was Ming. I bent down to look at him. He half-opened one eye, saw me watching him and leaned more heavily still against the radiator. I got the message. He was Suffering. Feeling the Cold. 'Any minute now you'll get the fire routine,' muttered Connie under her breath. A moment later I did. He walked over the electric fire, sat down in front of it and batted the plug, which was lying loose, till it rattled against the wall. 'WOW!' he said with feeling, fixing me with a look.
To illustrate what he expected to happen next, Connie put the plug in the socket and switched on the fire. As the heat came up and the element began to glow, Ming stretched himself in front of it and rolled on his back. Bliss! said his expression. If he could put the plug in the socket himself he would, said Connie. Any day now she expected him to work out how to do it.
He'd already worked out one thing that was quite extraordinary. Indeed, it was the most remarkable example of cat intelligence I've ever come across. There was a cat-flap in the kitchen door leading into the fenced-in garden, to which Ming usually had unrestricted access. When Connie was going to be out, however, she brought Ming indoors, put the fastener down on the cat-flap and a small but weighty cupboard in front of the flap. She was afraid that, with plenty of time and no supervision, he might still find a way to scale the fence.
Connie, who is one of the country's experts on wild orchids, would from time to time be away overnight giving a lecture or visiting other botanists, and her friend Diana would take charge of Ming. Di, who ran her own car-transport business, had flexible hours and would come in to keep Ming company during the day. She would feed him and let him out into the garden, and bring him in and secure the cat-flap when she was leaving. An added twist to this routine was that he greeted Di with affection when she came to be company to him, butting her with his head, winding himself round her legs, lying against her neck and purring when she picked him up.
When Connie returned from wherever she'd been however, and Di fetched her from the station and the two of them went into the house, Ming would hide under the bed, cringing away from Di and wailing up and down the scale about how much she frightened him and he hated her – a put-on act to make Connie think his life was intolerable while she was away which might have worked, so accomplished an actor was he, if Di hadn't persuaded Connie to stay hidden outside one day while she, Di, went into the house alone. With her own eyes Connie saw that cat, through the kitchen window, rubbing his face abandonedly against Di's, cupboard-loving with all his might – till Connie put in an appearance and he jumped from Di's arms, spitting blue murder at her, and fled.
That is by the way. The real story concerns the occasion when Di, having been with Ming during the early evening, and brought him in from the garden and fastened the cat-flap, went in later to give him a meal and a cuddle before his bedtime, only to find Ming missing, an open cat-flap in the kitchen with the cupboard moved aside from it, and deep black night outside.
Di's first thought was that she must have left the cat-flap unfastened and omitted to put the cupboard in front of it. Yet she was sure she'd taken both precautions. The question was where was Ming now? She went into the garden with a torch, shone it around, scarcely daring to breathe in case he'd somehow managed to get over the fence – and there he was. It was the frog season and he was sitting frog-watching in the border. She brought him in, fastened the cat-flap and barricaded it once more, and when Connie returned told her just what had happened.
Next day, determined to find out how he'd done it, Connie seated herself in the spare room from which, with the doors open, she had a clear view across the hall and through the kitchen to the barricaded flap. After a while Ming emerged from her bedroom, where he'd been napping on the bed, made his way to the kitchen and seated himself in front of the cupboard, prising the door open after a few minutes' activity with a hooked left claw. That done, he inserted his right paw in the open front of the small cupboard, put it behind the cupboard door and pulled. Slightly to the left, so that the cupboard slid sideways away from the cat-flap, on which he then undid the fastener to let himself through.