Charles he delegated as the one to play with him – to which end, besides trailing ties and pieces of string wherever he went around the cottage, Charles was also expected to throw things for him. Sass, as keen a retriever as Shebalu had been as a kitten, would bring back his catnip mouse or his bean-bag with a bell on it over and over again. Charles, trying to read at the same time, would feel for it with one hand and throw it. Sass, watching with impatience the delay which this involved, eventually took to placing the toy on Charles’s foot – and, when the groping hand didn’t immediately locate it, jumping on it to show where it was and in the process puncturing Charles’s ankle. The resultant yells were absolutely blood-curdling.
Charles took to sitting with his trousers rolled up when he was reading, even when Sass didn’t appear to be around.
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The Coming of Saska to call in. He never knew when the attack would come, he said, and when I said but that wouldn’t help his ankles...
Maybe not, he said, but at least scratches would heal. That little devil was ruining all his trousers.
So Sass pursued his intrepid way, unmoved by Charles’s yelling. He brought his toys for me to throw, too, as a variation from Charles. Then... obviously I didn’t come up to scratch on the toy-throwing, either... he started offering them to Shebalu. I looked in from the kitchen one morning when things seemed unnaturally quiet, to see Sass trot across the floor with his bean-bag in his mouth and put it down in front of Shebalu. He sat back hopefully and looked at her.
She regarded it for a moment, picked it up in her mouth, shook it gently to rattle the bell, and quite deliberately tossed it. It went only about a foot and she didn’t do it again – but it was obvious our blue girl was trying.
How much she loved him was made clear one day when I was giving the living-room a belated clean. She was asleep upstairs on the bed – being so aristocratic she wasn’t the least bit interested in housework. Sass, on the other hand, was pottering about with me... turning somersaults on the cushions, continually rushing up my legs. A moment earlier he’d disappeared in pursuit of a pingpong ball and was diving about under the dresser. I finished dusting the mantelshelf, stepped back hard on poor Sass who must have right that moment come zooming back to climb me, and there was a screech as if he’d been flattened.
Immediately there was a thump from upstairs and Shebalu came tearing down to see what had happened.
Apologetically I held him out for her to inspect. He was all right, I said. ‘Just you be more Careful with him, all the same,’ said her look as she licked him proprietorially.
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Everybody loved him. Tim Bannett, calling in the morning after his arrival, was so struck by the size of his ears – and by the fact that Sass decided Tim could Love Him too and spent the visit attached like a limpet to his chest – that within minutes of Tim’s departure Liz arrived to ask if she could see him. ‘Gosh, he’s gorgeous,’ she said, looking at him admiringly. Sass pointed a pair of ears like big black yacht sails at her. Like him to sit on her sweater too? he asked.
Miss Wellington burst into tears as soon as she saw him, saying he was so like Seeley as a kitten. Father Adams reached out a wistful finger to stroke him. He had once owned a Siamese. It had been our admiration for her, all those years ago, that had led us to getting Sugieh. ‘Minds I of Mimi,’ he said now. He still pronounced it My-my. ‘If I were ten years younger, darned if I ’ouldn’t ’ave another.’
He needn’t worry about that, I told him. Sass was willing to share. I put Sass on Father Adams’s waistcoat, where he obligingly did his limpet act. ‘How about I then?’ Fred Ferry enquired. Sass was transferred to him. Never did I think I’d see sour old Fred stroking a Siamese kitten.
‘’Ouldn’t mind takin’ he up to the pub,’ he said – and patently there’d have been no objection from Saska.
Charles and I had brought him home, however, fully determined on one thing. Neither he nor Shebalu were ever going to be out of our sight – except when we went on holiday and they went to board with the Francises.
Out of doors that was, of course. Indoors it was a different matter. For the sake of our nerves and digestion they had to be shut out in the hall at mealtimes. Which was why, every Siamese worth his salt having his own idea of how to tackle important problems, Sass started trying to chew his way back in via our new mustard carpet.
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The Coming of Saska I could have banged my head on the wall with despair.
One has to accept, of course, that Siamese are destructive.
Solomon had ripped a hole in the stair-carpet by way of sharpening his claws: he and Sheba, over the years, had demolished two sets of loose covers between them: Seeley’s penchant, when he was shut out, had been removing the draught excluders from doors: Shebalu had recently started on a chair. But carpets. At the price they are now. And not just clawing them but chewing them till they were bare, fringed canvas at the corners... ‘What have we let ourselves in for this time?’ I wailed, clutching my brow in desperation.
‘Another cat who reasons for himself,’ said Charles. ‘You know you wouldn’t want it any other way. In the end you’ll think it funny.’
Not as yet I haven’t – where, when people come through our front door, the first thing they see is a whacking great vinyl corner piece over the carpet in front of the living-room door. ‘It’s not to save wear,’ I explain when I see them looking at it. ‘It’s to stop our Siamese chewing the corners.’
You can see their eyebrows lift... a cat chewing the carpet? I bet they go away and say I’m batty.
There is another vinyl protective piece where the living-room carpet adjoins the kitchen door. Until it was put there, when Sass got tired of waiting for his meals he lay down and chewed on that. There are more frayed edges outside the bathroom and bedroom doors, too, whereby hang a couple of tales. Normally Sass wouldn’t bother with the bathroom, there not being anything interesting inside, but one day Shebalu got shut in there by accident, being a great one for hiding behind doors. Sass discovered where she was – we didn’t even know she was missing – but did he howl the place down, as our other boys would have done?
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No. Sass the Resourceful lay down and tried to chew her out. When I went upstairs, wondering where they were, the corners of that carpet had gone.
On the second occasion we’d gone for a walk with friends, shutting the cats out in the hall as usual. They had a hotwater bottle in a nest of sweaters on the bed, an earthbox in the box-room, they could also go into the spare room if they liked and talk to passers-by out of the window... At least, that was the normal arrangement but in the rush of getting ready to go, somebody shut the bedroom door and also the one to the box-room. The only door left open was the one to the spare room, which we use also as a study.
Any of our previous cats would have been perfectly content to be in there – after all, we were only away for an hour – but Sass gets so intense about things, when we got back we found devastation. The carpet in front of the bedroom door was chewed with his trying to get in there.
So it was in front of the box-room door because he hadn’t been able to get in to his earthbox. Ditto in front of the bathroom door, his second attack on that one: it looked as if a dog had been worrying a slipper.