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consolingly, just how much he was growing to be like Solomon.
Not to be left out of things, Sheba now started her own stropping sessions on the dining-chairs. It was nice to see her feeling so good, I said, but I did wish she would find somewhere else… It was no good, of course. She’d strop on a chair to attract Seeley’s attention; he’d come across to hide beneath it and poke a paw excitedly up at her; she’d poke him back and he’d start climbing up to get at her…
Bang, before my eyes, went my tomato-covered chairs.
Bang went something else, too. Seeley, shut out in the hall at meal times, started in on the draught excluder round the door. He must have decided that if he could winkle that out he could get in through the resultant crack, so after a few indignant protests he would sniffle, sit down, and proceed with the task of removing the draught excluder.
Yellow foam rubber it was, and scattered in clawed-out bits over the red hall carpet it was not only quite impossible to miss seeing it, but it looked exactly like crumbled sponge cake.
‘What on earth…’ demanded Miss Wellington, arriving with a collection box one morning after breakfast and seeing what appeared to be pieces of cake scattered hysterically all over the carpet. Not wanting her to go off and tell people I’d been throwing cakes at Charles I explained the situation in detail. About shutting Seeley out or else he got in the plates, and if we did shut him out, then he set to on the draught excluder…
I got no sympathy from Miss Wellington. She’d disapproved strongly of our having Seeley – partly because she’d been so fond of Solomon and thought having a new 100
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kitten so soon meant we’d been hard hearted over him ourselves, and partly because she thought it would upset Sheba. She’d come in one day, however, and Sheba had been lying in front of the fire, with a car-rug banked round her as always in winter, to keep out the draught from the door.
‘And how’s our little girl?’ enquired Miss Welling ton, going forward to stroke her. Then she stopped. From where he lay, tucked into Sheba’s side with the red tartan rug round the pair of them, a little black pansy face was regarding her.
Not quite like Solomon’s yet, for his mask was still but a smudge. But it was Solomon’s eyes that looked up at her before he yawned, stretched, and put a fat little black paw more comfortably across Sheba’s neck.
‘The Dear, Dear Boy,’ said Miss Wellington. After which you’d think that Seeley had been entirely her own idea.
Now she said ‘The Dear, Dear Boy’ in quite a different manner. As if we’d had him chained in a dungeon, not merely shut in the hall so we could eat in peace. And if the dear, dear boy had chewed the draught excluder, her tone implied, she only hoped, for the sake of our consciences, he hadn’t swallowed any.
He hadn’t. Or if he had, it didn’t hurt him. And if Miss Wellington had had to put up with his yelling…
Not that we objected to his voice. We delighted to hear it. We could detect a definite note of Solomon in it, and the note was growing. His way of stump ing along saying ‘Mrrr-mrrr-mrrr’ to himself was enchanting, too. It was just that sometimes his voice was so overpowering. When he was in the hall, for instance, and roaring his head off to come in.
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very raucously, to be let out. He sounded like Solomon then, all right – and very much like his own father.
‘Wanna! Wanna! WANNA! WANNA!’ he would sit and howl, with his eyes closed, at the kitchen door. He would get quite carried away with the drama of it, too, and was always obviously quite surprised at himself when I interrupted him with ‘And what do you think you’re doing?’
‘Please???’ he would plead then, beguilingly, in his tiniest seagull voice.
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That was all very well, but he was becoming more adventurous every day and when we let him out we never knew what he was going to get up to. Come to that, we never knew what he was going to get up to if we kept him in, either. That first venture onto the table, for instance, when, with a mighty leap from the back of the armchair, he’d landed in my plate – that had given him a taste for taking flying jumps at things followed by spectacular skids.
The skids were no accident, either. From the inevitability with which they occurred it was obvious that they were quite deliberate. He skidded across the table, skidded across the counter tops in the kitchen, skidded exuberantly across the bathroom floor like a small boy on a slide. One day he skidded through the kitchen door and out into the yard so fast that, when he tried to turn the corner of the cottage and head for the lawn, he fell flat on his stomach on the 103
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paving stones. Didn’t Matter, he said, picking himself up and galloping dustily on. He was getting to be an Expert at Falling Down.
He was also getting to be an expert at falling off things.
Those prodigious leaps didn’t always work. Sometimes they landed him on the kitchen counter when there were dishes on it, or the table in the sitting-room when there were papers on it, and, with a wild scrabble, off would plop Seeley plus whatever he happened to have got his paws on. He broke so many plates and saucers that, against the day when it might occur to him to try for the mantelpiece, I stuck down all the china on that with strips of sticking plaster.
Better to be safe than sorry, I thought. I had my grandmother’s Staffordshire figures up there. I didn’t want to move them but I didn’t want them smashed… or the Italian china cats, or the glass swan from Venice that Louisa gave me, or the big Willow Pattern platter that was Charles’s grandmother’s. So I anchored the lot with sticking plaster
– and wouldn’t you have bet on it? Seeley never so much as looked at the mantelshelf. Presumably it didn’t offer the right possibilities for skidding. But, with the inevi tability that follows anything I do as surely as it rains if I clean the cottage windows, someone came to tea a few days later who happened to be interested in Staffordshire china.
‘Ah! Will Watch!’ she exclaimed, heading for the mantelpiece as soon as she entered and reaching for the yellow-trousered gentleman on the left. Presum ably, to air her knowledge, she would then have said ‘Ah! Rob Roy!’
and reached for the dour-looking Highlander on the right
– but she didn’t get that far. There was a slight sound of 104
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tearing as the plaster lifted a bit, but – anchored fore and aft by five pieces of Elastoplast – Will Watch stayed exactly where he was.
Her eyes widened as she looked at what was holding him – and at the strips on the china cats and on the glass Venetian swan. She was nothing if not urbane, however.
‘Ah! Benares vases!’ she said to bridge the uncomfortable pause – having sighted the big brass ewers at either end of the mantelpiece.
They weren’t held down by Elastoplast. They hadn’t been properly cleaned, either. Rushed for time as usual, I’d polished the fronts and handles before she came, bunged them back on the shelf confident that they gleamed like gilt in front and that nobody could possibly see the backs…
She did. She lifted them down, turned them round to examine the pattern, and I could have sunk through the floor when their unpolished reverses came into view. It was all his fault, I informed Seeley when she’d gone. And Seeley sat there as usual, looking back at me innocently.