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take Seeley home again. ‘Leave it for another month or so,’
he said. ‘Till we’re sure that this is over.’
‘This’ was the pulmonary type of cat flu. Against the more serious enteric variety there is, of course, a vaccine, and Seeley had been inoculated, as had Solomon and Sheba.
Against the pulmonary variety there is as yet no vaccine, however – and though, said the Vet, most ordinary cats recover from it (just a couple of days’ heavy cold, he said, and then they’re right as rain) Siamese are often very ill.
Thanking our lucky stars we hadn’t taken Seeley into the waiting room, we turned our tracks for home. It was the only thing we could thank our lucky stars for, though. Seeley had kicked up enough fuss on the outward journey – shouting, screaming, chewing piece after piece off the basket. He was supposed not to have anything in his stomach, I wailed.
It would be even worse if he filled it up with wickerwork.
‘Why don’t you stop him, then?’ said Charles, trying hard to concentrate on the winding road. He should try poking his fingers in, I said. I’d almost lost a couple already.
On the way home he surpassed himself, however.
INCARCERATED! he roared at the passing cars in a voice so raucous Charles said it certainly was time he was neutered. DELIBERATELY STARVED! he an nounced
with a pathos that would have done credit to Irving. BEEN
IN HERE FOR HOURS AND I HAVEN’T HAD MY
BREAKFAST! he informed the garage attendant when we stopped for petrol. Heaven help us when we took him down to Halstock, said Charles. Forty miles of this and we’d be lucky to have a car…
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Really, of course, the locals did know what was going on
– just as, after a day or two of surreptitious enquiry, they knew what our frost coverings were for, though they might pretend they didn’t. It was strangers to the place who were genuinely puzzled – and not only by the drapings, either.
‘Well, I’m glad I asked’ said one passing walker when I’d explained about the frost covers and the schoolhouse roof. I thought they had some con nection… And what about that sledge dog up the hill that pulls the pram? Did they get him from Alaska or something?’
There was an explanation for that, too. The Darlings, who owned the Samoyed, were merely putting him to the breed’s original use. He’d inherited an obvious liking for pulling things, they said. Why push the pram when Rob was willing to pull?
Meanwhile, while people were speculating about the schoolhouse roof and the frost covers and a dog apparently practising for the Arctic, I was spending long periods on the hillside behind the cottage. I had discovered that if I sat down somewhere and didn’t chase after him, Seeley, who was becoming increasingly fond of me, would play around within contact distance – which meant that while I watched him we had some peace of mind.
It was very pleasant watching him, too. It was becoming warmer now and this was Seeley’s first spring.
The exuberance with which he chased the butterflies, the wonder with which he regarded the birds, the joy with which he rolled and thrust his paws at me through the grass
– I shared it with him, this heaven that he was discovering daily. This was the place to be, he said. He was glad that he lived with us.
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as he ate. He was indeed, and for the next few weeks it meant we not only had to watch him with Sheba (she didn’t like being jumped on and occasionally there was a noisy free-for-all) but we had to keep a weather eye on Seeley to make sure that he didn’t wander off.
This – seeing there was no guarantee once he vanished into the pinewoods that he was going to reappear again on the same side – led to all sorts of preventive manoeuvres.
Frantic round-ups during which we ran about the lane and hillside like ants; standing over him while he dug holes in the garden because he was particularly likely to streak off as if jet-propelled after that; doing my imitation of a prowling tomcat which, for a while, infallibly brought him back…
At first I’d tried imitating a dog but, as with Solomon and Sheba when they were young, that hadn’t been very successful. Standing in a lane barking ‘Row-row-row’ at a completely empty hillside is not the best way of impressing fellow humans with one’s sanity, either. I got some pretty peculiar looks from passers-by.
I got some pretty peculiar ones when I did my cat imitations, come to that. ‘Mrrrrow!… meeaOOOW…
RaaaaAAAAH!’ I would wail impassionedly while Charles peered anxiously up the Forestry lane. This – performed outside the back gate and followed by a sand-dance shuffle and clapping of hands which was supposed, for Seeley’s benefit, to be me chas ing the tomcat and indignantly shooing him off – was enough to transfix anybody who heard it, and though I always looked to see that the coast was clear before I started, the lanes in our part of the world are very winding and somebody was always catching up with me in the middle.
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On one occasion it was Major and Miss Howland. She was transfixed all right. Even more so, she informed me afterwards, when out of the woods and down the hillside, flat on his stomach like an otter, came a homing Siamese cat. He was growling sinisterly to himself as he slipped in through the gate. What on earth, she wanted to know, were we going to think of next?
It wasn’t so much a case of thinking of things as of necessity leading to invention. After a week or so of my only having to imitate a tomcat to bring him home as if by magic, for instance, Seeley got wise to the fact that it was me. Either that or he decided he was bigger now so he’d go looking for the cat who did it. At any rate, any time I did my imitations now he took no notice whatsoever
– and if I wanted him in because we were going out, he proceeded determinedly, with his ears flat to show he couldn’t hear, in the opposite direction. Thus it was, one morning when I was going riding and the horses would be ready at ten o’clock, that Seeley decided this was the morning when he was going exploring. In the Woods, he said, mounting steadily up the hillside ahead of me. Not Going To, he said when I pleaded with him to come back. That was only for Babies, he said when I desperately did my tomcat call. And, to show what he thought of that ruse, he did a sudden exuberant caper into the trees.
I did an equally speedy caper after him. It was half past nine now and if I lost sight of him, as well I knew, he wouldn’t come out again for ages. He began to saunter beneath the tall, dark groves of the pine trees. Oh Lord, I thought, despairingly; we could go for miles like this. He 128
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did a light-hearted sortie or two up passing tree trunks. My gosh, I thought; if he goes right to the top…
He didn’t. Like Solomon, Seeley couldn’t climb for toffee.
Three feet up and off he’d plop, pretending that wasn’t the one he’d meant to go up after all. Neither was the next one, he said. He was only showing me how he could very well if he wanted to. He then light-heartedly poked a paw down a mouse hole in the pine needles before darting tantalisingly behind another tree a few feet ahead.