He always did look innocent. We kept his toys – his ping-pong balls and his catnip mouse and the fur spider with a bell on it of which he was especially fond – in a china mug on the table by the wall. A cider mug, two-handled and very old. Not stuck down, because it hadn’t occurred to me that it was necessary, on an out-of-the-way table by the wall. He looked as innocent as a Botticelli angel when, in the course of fishing out his spider, he managed to land the mug with a crash in the middle of the coal-scuttle.
All those years and Solomon had never done that, I wailed
– rushing, as I anticipated, to pick up the pieces. All those years and he’d never done that, either, commented Charles, 105
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as I retrieved the mug and, to my amazement, it was still in one piece; Solomon would infallibly have had the handles off. And Seeley sat peering over the table edge, the picture of wide-eyed wonder. Must have been Sheba, he said.
He looked innocent when we found him locked unaccountably in the woodshed, too. At least, it would have been unaccountable except that I happened to be in the yard and saw him disappearing behind the shed with a purposeful look to his rear view – and, knowing that his next move could well be round the corner and up on to the hillside, I nipped smartly after him to see where he was going. I was just in time to see him vanish through a hole in the back of the shed. A hole which, filled as the woodshed is with bottles, baskets and Charles’s odd bits and pieces, we didn’t even know was there.
Seeley did. And when, the next moment, the wails of an Imprisoned Siamese, Absolutely in Dire Distress, Send for the Vet At Once and Better get the Police As Well… When the old familiar call that we knew so well from Solomon rent the air and Charles came running as usual with a look of apprehension on his face… we would have been flummoxed, too, that we had to undo a padlock to get him out, except that I had seen him going in through the back.
There he was, when Charles unlocked the door. Posed, more angelically than ever, on a pile of old wood shavings.
‘How on earth did you get in there?’ demanded Charles, who hadn’t yet heard the story. He didn’t know. Somebody pushed him in. Must have been Sheba, Seeley assured him soulfully.
So he proceeded through the winter. Happily play ing the game of Locked In The Woodshed By Sheba; exploring the 106
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mysteries of the countryside; entwining himself in our lives with every day that passed.
Secretly I dreaded the thought of Christmas that year.
Aunt Ethel and Louisa and Charles’s family there…
everything as it always had been, except for a dusky-faced cat no longer with us. I thought of Solomon a lot on Christmas Day. It was better than I’d anticipated, however.
Annabel was there on the frosty lawn, eating her biscuits and carrots. Sheba was with us on her tomato-coloured chair, her paws tucked under her like a little sitting hen, squawking com placently when people spoke to her. And if my eyes wandered sometimes around the chattering, lamplit room – to where a cat with big bat ears had once watched us from under the table… to where a cat with a worried expression had once peered from under a chair…
to where a cat, when he’d decided the visitors were Safe, had once sat holding Christmas court majestically on the hearthrug… now, in the self-same places, frolicked a little fat white kitten. Hiding beneath the table. Peering from behind the chair. Venturing forth, when he was sure that all was well, to play with his tail before the fire. The wheel had turned full circle. Seeley was carrying the lamp.
He not only carried it; he singed his whiskers on it. The bathroom at the cottage is on the ground floor, built back into the hill. In damp weather it condenses badly and to combat this we keep an oil-lamp burn ing behind the bath.
An old-fashioned Aladdin table lamp, which just fits into the narrow space against the wall. Turned low for safety, it gives very little light – but the heat is sufficient to warm the wall; it smells, not of oil, but of old-time country warmth; and such light as it does give affords a mellow, mysterious 107
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dimness. So, it seemed, thought Seeley – who, when he asked to be let through the sitting-room door these nights, could be found not seated worriedly on the coal-bowl, as had been his initial wont, but sitting quietly on the mosaic surround of the bath.
Thinking, he said when we asked him what he was doing.
Charles said he supposed it was all right to leave him with the lamp? Of course it was, I said, Solomon and Sheba had never touched it. It was therefore my fault, indubitably, that Seeley returned one night without his whiskers. The lamp, not medi tation, had been the attraction – until at length, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he’d plucked up courage to look down into the lamp-chimney and zing, as fast as lightning, he’d lost his whiskers.
‘Just like Solomon,’ said Sheba when she saw him. It was too, except that Solomon’s whiskers had been chewed off affectionately by his mother, not singed off over a lamp.
‘Growing more like him every day,’ said Charles with apprehension.
Growing he was indeed. When we first had him he could hide under the armchairs, dart around like a clockwork mouse beneath the bed, streak through the bars of the gate in the yard like an arrow as he made for the hillside. Now he could only poke a paw beneath the chairs when he lost his spider under them; he got stuck quite regularly, yelling his head off, under the bed; and he could only just squeeze through the bars of the gate.
One day, in fact, I spotted him making his exit through the gate as usual, rushed to retrieve him before he could get into the lane and discovered, to my alarm, that I couldn’t get him back. He could obviously squeeze onwards, sliding 108
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in the direction of his fur, but he was wedged so tightly otherwise, there was no question of pulling him back.
To let him slip through, on the other hand, meant one victorious swoosh and a game of Seeley at large in the woods. So we opened the gate with Seeley still in it I holding him suspended while Charles nipped quickly through and pulled from the other side – and Father Adams, who was passing by as usual, said ‘Another couple of feeds, I reckon, and theest have to saw he out.’
It was quite true. Seeley was growing, and he was going to be a very big cat. Already, when they were lying down, it was difficult to tell him from Sheba. But a lot of Seeley’s weight was due to his appetite.
Charles said he thought he ate even more than Solomon.
‘He couldn’t do,’ I said, remem bering Solomon in his heyday. ‘It’s such a long time since Solomon was a kitten you must have forgotten his capacity.’
‘All I know,’ said Charles with firm conviction, ‘is that Solomon didn’t eat his food before he got it.’
That was true, too. Seeley, when he sighted food, would head for it with his tongue already working in and out in anticipation. Hold him back while Sheba ate and you could see him gulping in sympathy. And then, as he watched her, out would come his own tongue. Seeley was eating, too, in imagination.
When it came to eating in practice, his appetite knew no bounds. He would eat his own food, polish off any bits Sheba happened to have left and then look round for more.
He would quest the kitchen, nose to the floor, like an otter exploring new terri tory. (We had seen the Ring of Bright Water film, and the resemblance was really remarkable.) 109