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Seeley just couldn’t get used to the idea at all. He hoped he wouldn’t be blamed for being Dirty, he would complain, his blue eyes round with concern as he seated himself in the corner by the window on his plastic washing-up bowl.
Even when he found he wasn’t blamed, he still didn’t like going upstairs in the dark. He was, after all, only a baby. He hadn’t been born in the place like Solomon and Sheba. And venturing in complete darkness through a strange hall, up the strange stairs and into a place that he knew his mother certainly wouldn’t have approved of his using, was a very worrying matter for a little cat.
So it was that we had to put the lights on for him and make encouraging remarks from the bottom of the stairs while he climbed them very reluctantly, not liking to leave us behind. So it was that, discovering a plastic bowl that looked exactly like his spare-room earthbox only in a far more sensible place (out side the sitting-room door, en route to the kitchen, and therefore in the direction that cat-doors and earthboxes were intended to be) he promptly started to use it. And thus it was that, having for years used a plastic bowl in which to keep small coal for backing up the fire (as being lighter than a hod and not so likely to damage the fireplace canopy when I swing it at it and inevitably hit it) we now began to find it suspiciously damp. Sometimes, if there wasn’t any coal in it, it was, quite frankly, awash. It happened so mysteriously, too – but it was no good blaming it on the fairies. Leading from the bowl was always a trail of little black footprints.
Then came the night when we had visitors and Seeley (in this he was exactly like Solomon) was keeping very quiet in case any of them were planning to Kidnap him. He sat 66
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around behind chairs; he lurked; he looked owlish. When anyone spoke to him he didn’t answer; just his eyes grew rounder than ever. I put him out in the hall once in case he wanted his box, but a little white shadow slipped swiftly back round the door again and vanished under the table. It never occurred to me that, with strangers there, he’d be even more reluctant to go upstairs by himself. It never occurred to me either that he couldn’t possibly – being Seeley – have gone for five solid hours without paying a visit to his box.
Eventually the visitors went, however, lingering at their car doors to comment on the freshness of the Valley air at night; on the mysterious sound of the stream gushing past in the darkness; on the ceiling of stars that shone like diamonds over the pines… Charles, seeing them off, agreed equably with every word. He didn’t look so unruffled when he came back indoors, however. He only hoped nobody had noticed,
he said worriedly. And when I asked ‘Noticed what?’ he said ‘Seeley using the coal-scuttle.’
Seeley, it seemed, hadn’t been able to hold out. And, not wishing to disturb Polite Company (or, which was far more likely, not wanting to go upstairs on his own) he’d done the only thing he could think of… an extension, in his infant mind, of using the plastic bowl… and used the copper coal-scuttle in the sitting-room. Charles had spotted him sitting in it with a look of unmistakeable earnestness on his face.
Who else had seen him, goodness only knew. All we did know was that, while Solomon himself had never used the coal-scuttle, in principle this was, exactly, Solomon.
Seeley was, in fact, far more like Solomon than he was unlike him, and was following increasingly in his footsteps every day. In the way he looked, the way he reasoned, in 67
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his bumble-footedness – and, very markedly, in his ever-increasing desire to be an adventurer.
I had quailed at the thought of that prospect from the beginning. All those acres of woods and moorlands and invitingly grassy lanes, and Seeley so very small, unaware of the dangers… Sometimes I wonder if that is why Siamese kittens are so white. So that when they set out on these inevitable treks of theirs, their mothers can spot them easily and fetch them back. The smudge on the nose that later spreads into the handsome Siamese mask; the little black socks that eventually become the elegant Siamese stockings; the dusky tipped ears and the absurd little black matchstick tail that will one day be a slender, curving whip – these they presumably carry to prove that they are Siamese, in case they meet up with another member of the clan. Nature provides no real camouflage for the young Siamese, however, who is unmistakeably, outstandingly, white – which only goes to show how well Nature knows what she is doing.
After his coming there was a week or so of decep tively peaceful days when, if I let him out, I had only to glance out of the door and there he was, gravely surveying the world from the wall adjoining the kitchen, or peering wide-eyed round the corner at the lawn – and then Seeley, like Solomon before him, was away.
On to the hillside behind the cottage to begin with, where he stood out white as a button mushroom against the turf. A very tentative little mushroom, es pecially when he was stalking Annabel and then she’d snort, turn round to look at him – and suddenly, to his consternation, the tables were reversed.
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He was fascinated by Annabel. Had been ever since he first looked out of the kitchen window and there she was, up on the hillside, like a great big perambulating furry rug.
She was obviously the reason for his venturing on to the hillside – though it was one thing to be trailing intrepidly after a hairy monster and quite another to have the monster looking at him. He would sit down then – Mum having presumably told him always to look Nonchalant in time of danger and never to run away. He would manage the nonchalant part, too, looking unconcernedly up the hillside, casually back over his shoulder and every now and then glancing fleetingly up at Annabel who towered, head lowered, above him. He would at the same time be trembling like an aspen and patently thankful when I rushed to snatch him to safety.
He persevered, though. When she came to the door for titbits in the morning he would advance staunchly across the kitchen to sniff at her nose. Then he discovered that if he got on the table he could, very daringly, waylay her ears. When they reached the stage where Annabel – or so it seemed to us as onlookers – stood there with her ears stuck forward deliberately waiting for Seeley to play with them, his confidence knew no bounds.
‘No, leave them!’ I said the first time Seeley walked between her legs as she stood in the yard and Charles, afraid she might stamp on him, would have leapt to the rescue.
And Seeley ambled as trustingly as if he were going through a set of croquet hoops and Annabel drooped her underlip benevolently – a sign we knew of old when Annabel was feeling motherly – and so we were encouraged to try putting him on her back. He took to it as to the manner 69
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born, crouched flat on her shaggy coat for a better grip and riding like that first for a few tentative steps across the yard, then through the gate into the lane, and eventually round the corner and up the steeply rising track to the field where she grazed behind the cottage.
Father Adams was rapt with admiration when he saw it. ‘Regular little cough drop he’s going to be,’ he said as Seeley swayed past him clinging to Annabel with great concentration.
He was right there. A few days of that and our cough drop discovered that he could, after riding Annabel into her field, leap off her back, dash madly through her wire fence, and be up in the pine woods before anybody could stop him. There he would flit, deliberately tantalising us, among the trees. As he grew bolder he began to venture into the depths. Charles hadn’t put up the cage yet – partly because he hadn’t got round to it and, in any case, one could hardly pen a kitten on the lawn in winter. Better to let him exercise his legs and bring him in, was Charles’s advice.