‘They’re Texas Longhorns,’ we shouted at Aunt Ethel now: her hearing aid wasn’t working properly as usual.
‘From a steer. You know – cattle, bred for beef. We bought them in Montana.’ Aunt Ethel regarded them with approval.
She obviously hadn’t heard a word we’d said. ‘Whichever of you got those,’ she said with pride, ‘must have been a very good shot.’
So, back in our old routine, we moved on towards Christmas. Charles busy with his orchard, I riding, writing, doing the house-work, taking the cats for walks in the woods in the afternoons.
We didn’t give them the freedom Solomon and Sheba had had. There were more people around now with dogs. More strangers, too, who drove out from town to go for walks and might have fancied a Siamese out on the loose. So we let them out for a run before breakfast, started calling them if they weren’t back in half an hour... Shebalu was usually back well within that time, but Seeley sometimes went further afield.
Up the Forestry lane, perhaps, looking for mice in the ruins, or going up through our woods to Mrs Pursey’s where he would sit hopefully by the birdtable in her bungalow garden, visible to every bird for miles.
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The Coming of Saska Mrs Pursey would ring us if she saw him. She knew we didn’t like him being even that far away. She was always afraid, she said, that he might go further, and someone who didn’t know he was ours might pick him up… And I would trudge off up the hill to fetch him, carrying him back down to the cottage on my shoulder, hoping nobody would see me and feeling a fool for making such a fuss.
The neighbours’ cats stayed out day and night without harm – but they, I told myself, weren’t Siamese. Valuable, attractive, and – discounting all that – with a genius for getting themselves into trouble.
On odd occasions he would be away for an hour or more, and, having checked that he wasn’t at Mrs Pursey’s, I would go charging round the lanes shrieking ‘Seeley-weeley-weeley’ and banging a spoon on his feeding plate.
As I flashed past, neighbours would ask if it was the big dark one again, and say they’d let me know if they saw him. I’ve no doubt they tapped their heads at each other when I’d gone. I would have done the same. But I knew Siamese. I never had any peace until – by which time I was usually on my knees – I’d report back to the cottage for the umpteenth time and Charles, keeping watch at base, would call ‘He’s back’ – and sure enough, as large as life, there he’d be sitting in the path. Where on earth had I Been?
his air of puzzlement would enquire. He’d been waiting here for me for Ages. What on earth possessed me to run about shouting like that? Didn’t I realise he wanted his breakfast?
He didn’t play truant very often, but it was always the same when he did. I’d be frantic in case he was in trouble
– even while, tearing from one to another of his haunts, I was telling myself not to be so stupid. ‘You know he 122
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always comes back,’ I’d think. As had Solomon, our other wanderer, before him. The number of times I’d rushed around the lanes thinking that Solomon had gone for good...
Once they came in for breakfast, they stayed in for the rest of the day. There were adders on the hills in summer
– Seeley, as a kitten, had been bitten up in Annabel’s field.
Strangers around, people with dogs, adders – for their own safety we kept them in. Until in the late afternoon, working at my typewriter, I’d realised that a deputation had arrived.
From their window-seat in the sun, or their armchair, if it was winter, and they were sitting watching me, side by side. Time to go out now, they would inform me. Before Charles started asking about tea.
Invariably I went with them, carrying a golf club for their protection. I didn’t take them as far as Solomon and Sheba used to go. Dogs seemed to appear these days from nowhere and the cats were vulnerable on the open track. I either sat with them on the hillside behind the cottage or took them into the woods.
At first just into the pine wood, where they followed me like dogs; Shebalu close behind me, in my footsteps like Wenceslas’s page; Seeley loitering at a distance to show his independence, but never letting me out of his sight. If I sat down, Shebalu was on my knees in an instant; she didn’t like the feel of the pine needles under her feet. When I looked round, sure enough Seeley would be sitting too...
upright, a few feet distant... conveying the impression that he was a Big Cat and nothing to do with us, but following us as soon as we moved on.
Some two hundred yards up the Forestry track there is a beech wood and after a while I began to take them into that. It was lighter – in winter, such sun as there was struck 123
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The Coming of Saska warm in the shelter of the trees and the cats loved chasing each other through the leaves. Up trees, down trees, charging around like pint-sized elephants; pretending they couldn’t hear me calling them, then catching me up at a tremendous lick; then back to the cottage in procession, for an evening in front of the fire. I would think how much the woods were like those in Canada. All it needed was a bear or two, or a moose. But then it wouldn’t be safe for the cats to be around in. Here, I told myself so many times... here they were so safe.
That Christmas, having resisted it for years, we installed television at the cottage. When we were going to find time to watch it was a problem, of course. We had so many other things to do. We liked having friends in for a natter round the fire for instance, and we liked reading: Charles did his painting in the evenings and it was the only time I had to play the piano. But we ought to have it for the news and the nature programmes, we decided – and, after our trip, I fancied seeing an occasional cowboy film, with cattle milling over the rangeland, riders racing in a cloud of dust out from a ranch... and, in nostalgic imagination, Charles and I riding with them on Sheba and Biz.
So we had it installed, switched it on – I remember the first time was when we were having tea by the fire with the long, low coffee table between us, and both cats were sitting on Charles’s lap. I was moving about with crumpets and teacups between Charles and the television set – but it was Seeley who objected to the interruption to his viewing, not Charles. Claws clamped to Charles’s knees, eyes concentrated as blue binoculars, he dodged his head impatiently round me when I got between him and the screen. Nearly missed that bit, said his expression. What 124
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was the man on that horse doing now? Why on earth couldn’t I sit Down!
It reminded me of someone I knew who once bred a litter of television-addicted kittens. She said it was the only thing that kept those seal-point beatniks quiet. They used to come rushing in when the set was switched on and sit in a gang in front of it. They liked cow-boy films the best, she said, and when I asked her how she knew, she told me they never fought or budged an inch while those were on. They were always a bloodthirsty lot, she admitted. She thought they liked hearing the guns go bang.
Aunt Ethel liked cowboy films, too. It was a great help when she came to stay with us and we could park her and Seeley in front of the set. (Shebalu, completely uninterested, always curled in a ball behind Seeley and slept.) We left them like that one night when we had to make a call in the village. They were watching a film about Mexican bandits and there were even more horses than usual charging round, and people escaping across the Rio Grande, and gunfights and a band of hostile Apaches.