We brought him away with us. Something must have told us this was going to be the place and for the first time ever on these kitten-hunting expeditions we’d taken a basket with us. Sheba’s basket In due course we’d get a new one for the kitten.
We’d brought an earth-box, too, because we were going to visit Charles’s brother afterwards and had decided to take the kitten with us if we bought him. And – it could only happen to us, I thought – I was clutching a carrier bag half-filled with turkey legs.
It had been given to us by Mrs S.’s husband – to keep the kitten going till the shops opened, he said. No, they didn’t buy it specially for the animals. It seemed they had a friend who ran a country club. Turkey figured regularly on the menu, when there was any left over it was given to them for the cats… the kittens had been practically raised on turkey and chicken, he said.
So there we were, driving along with an earth-box, a bag of turkey and, squalling his head off on my knee in Sheba’s 46
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basket, the new boy. He’d looked very much like the photograph of Solomon as a kitten when we’d compared them. Big ears, huge paws, the same broad-browed, little black pansy face. Right now he was sounding like Solomon, too. Kidnapped! Claustrophobia! LET HIM OUT! It could have been Solomon en route to Halstock in that basket. The basket itself, too, in which Sheba had tranquilly sat, holding affable conversation with us through the air holes, on so many of her own journeys to Halstock was now giving a remarkable impression on my lap of a landmine about to explode at any moment.
‘At any rate he doesn’t stick his paws out,’ I said, doing my best to lighten the atmosphere. (Some body had to try to lighten it, anyway. Charles, hands gripped grimly on the wheel, was wincing as if a sledge-hammer was hitting him at every bellow.) I should have known better, all the same.
The next moment a black-socked paw shot frantically through an air-hole and hooked Charles’s coat-sleeve like a salmon gaff.
The kitten survived the journey to Charles’s brother’s house at any rate, which was one eventful milestone passed. Then we let him out of the basket in their sitting-room and I had something else to worry about.
Big though he was for his age, he looked so very small and vulnerable sitting there alone. It was years since we’d had a kitten and there were so many dangers to protect him from. Adders… foxes… going up empty water pipes and getting lost out over the hills… And he’d been brought up in all that luxury… with an indoor goldfish pool… on turkey… How could we ever hope to raise him?
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He wasn’t worrying, that was obvious. He sat on everybody’s lap, tried out the furniture for scratching, importantly spent a penny behind the settee when we showed him where we’d put his earthbox. Sit up, paws together and Show People his mother had evidently told him. And alone, very small, among strangers, he sat as tall as he could in his earthbox and performed with the dignity of a prince.
He didn’t eat his food like one, unless it was Henry the Eighth. Even Solomon in his heyday hadn’t guzzled as fast as that. Or had he, perhaps, and we’d forgotten? Anyway, he went through a plate of turkey like a steam shovel, drank several saucers of milk… Occasionally he looked up at his admiring audience and, with his mouth full, blissfully said
‘Waaah!’ And then, having sat for a while and warmed himself, he put himself to bed. His mother being nowhere in sight he selected, as the nearest thing he could find to her, Charles’s brother who was wearing a large cream sailing sweater. Biggest Siamese he’d ever seen, said Seeley, curling like a small white snail on his chest.
Seeley was my name for him. Officially he was Solomon Secundus but I couldn’t say ‘Solomon’ yet without remembering… So ‘Seeley’ I called him temporarily, as befitting a seal-point cat.
Gosh, he was a super little chap, said Charles as we drove back to the cottage that night. To be as brave as that among strangers. He certainly had what it took.
He remained a super little chap even when, from time to time on the homeward journey, he woke up and started to yell. ‘He’s only a baby and it’s dark,’ said Charles benevolently. ‘Gosh, I shan’t half be glad to get to bed.’
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Famous last words again, of course. An hour later, far from being in bed, we were tearing up and down the lane with torches because Seeley had disappeared.
How it had happened we just couldn’t think. Decid ing to leave his introduction to Sheba until the next day (we’d have more strength then, said Charles; he had a feeling it was going to be a bit of an ordeal) we’d fed her up in our bedroom, him down stairs in the living room… we’d shut doors like Davey escape hatches to stop them meeting each other by accident… he was feeling really giddy, said Charles, remembering who was where… we’d made Seeley a bed with a hot-water bottle on the settee (Sheba was sleeping up with us)… we’d given Seeley a clean, fresh earthbox (and another one upstairs, of course, for Sheba)… If we really had finished shutting doors like Secret Service con spirators, said Charles, perhaps we could now go up to bed? With which I fetched the fireguard (the fireplace was empty but we didn’t want the kitten going up the chimney); Charles brought in the key and bolted the door and when I went to show Seeley where his bed was, Seeley had completely disappeared.
We looked. Up the chimney, where Charles was sure he was because I hadn’t put the guard up soon enough. In the garden, where I was sure he was because Charles had opened the door to get the key in. In the bedroom, where with a sudden thought we rushed concertedly in case he’d got up there with Sheba and she’d murdered him. Back down again to the garden because, as he wasn’t in the house, he must have got out.
My imagination worked overtime as I scurried. Surely he couldn’t be trying to walk home again, like Sappho, to his 49
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first owners? I had a heartrending vision of a tiny, brave white figure trudging determinedly along the roads. What would the people we’d bought him from say when we told them we’d lost him? I had an equally heartrending vision of myself (it wouldn’t be Charles) having to ring them up and confess. Supposing a fox were to get him? I turned cold, and started to listen for the screams.
We’d have been hunting all night – flashing torches, frantically hurrying and shouting to scare off the foxes – if I hadn’t, in case somehow we’d managed to miss him, gone indoors again.
Upstairs – no. Nor in the kitchen or the hall or in the bathroom. And the living-room was so completely silent. If he was there, I thought, I would have sensed it. It had been so full of his presence so short a while before.
It was full of him still, as a matter of fact. What made me look there I didn’t know but there he was, curled up where – when, being such a little cat, he could stay up no longer – he’d put himself to bed. Under the table, on the seat of a dining chair. He was Sleepy, he said when I lifted him out. Not in the big, tearer-up-of-baskets voice that had deafened us in the car but with the tiny, beguiling mew of a very small seagull.
We were sleepy, too, but it was several hours before we got any. We’d wanted a kitten like Solomon and now we’d obviously got him. We had years of this ahead of us, said Charles, lying starkly on his pillow. Was he telling me, I replied, lying equally starkly on mine. My mind was a whirl of foxes, adders, passing cars, and – brought back clearly by this initial crisis over Seeley – the panic-stricken hours 50