More Cats In The Belfry

  She still had nervous diarrhoea at the drop of a hat but Pauline's vet, whose practice was twenty-five miles away from me but worth the journey because he had Siamese cats himself and understood them, prescribed charcoal and kaolin granules to mix with her food. That controlled the diarrhoea and she started to put on weight.

  She started to stand up to Saska, too. When he was indoors, where he didn't have to keep up his public image of an Eminently Superior Prince from Siam, he had a habit of trying to frighten her, when he thought I wasn't watching, by lowering his head, flattening his ears and stalking round her in a menacing circle while she crouched at bay on the carpet. Then one day I saw her, instead of crouching, lying on her side with one long back leg extended stiffly against him, fending him off like somebody using a boat-hook, and one front paw outstretched ready to hit him. As he moved round her she revolved correspondingly, as if on a pivot, so that she was always facing him, and when he couldn't find a point from which to pounce on her he gave up and pretended he was just passing by en route for food.

  That was another thing. Fortified by the charcoal and kaolin she began to bolt her own meals and then start eating his, and I had to feed them separately so that he got his share undisturbed. So it was that one morning I came down, gave Saska his breakfast in the sitting-room and Tani hers in the kitchen, nipped out into the yard to change their litter trays, pulling the back door, which had a Yale lock, behind me to stop her following me – all part of a Siamese cat-owner's routine – and realised, even as I slammed it, that I'd locked myself out.

  Normally I kept a spare key in the woodshed, but the previous day I'd gone out in the car, tossed my handbag on to the back seat after shopping and found, when I got home, that its contents had fallen out on the car floor. I'd gathered them up, put the car away and come down to the cottage to discover that the back door key wasn't in its usual place in my handbag. I thought it must be still on the floor of the car, decided to leave it until next day, and used the spare key from the woodshed instead.

  That was the one now marooned indoors on the kitchen dresser – along with the car keys, so that I couldn't go up and look for the original door key on the car floor either.

  Panicking about what the cats might do if left where they were – they normally expected to go out into the garden directly after breakfast – I fetched a ladder and a screwdriver, climbed on to the sloping hall roof, thankful that for once nobody was about to ask what I was doing, and crawled up it to the spare room window. Joy oh joy! As I thought! I'd left the casement slightly ajar for air when I'd cleaned it a few days previously. I raised the catch with the screwdriver, climbed in and belted downstairs – passing a puzzled Saska who had just finished his breakfast and couldn't make out why I'd come in through that door when I'd gone out through the other one, and a claustrophobic Tani who'd been marooned in the kitchen without anybody for company and didn't like it – shot out into the yard to fetch the litter trays which I knew they must by now be in urgent need of – and realised immediately that I'd done it again. Slammed the door behind me without thinking and locked myself out.

  There was no point in trying the spare room window this time. I'd fastened the latch properly when I got in. I moved the ladder and tried the boxroom window over the kitchen. No go. Charles had long ago secured that one against intruders and I had kept it like that, with wire wound round the latch and bar. I climbed down and called to Tani through the back door keyhole to be a good girl. I wouldn't be long getting back to her, I said. I'd Better Not Be, she screeched back with the promise of imminent stomach upset in her voice. Where was Saska? Where was her BOX? she demanded in a rising soprano.

  I rushed round to the sitting-room window and instructed Saska likewise. Where was Tani? Was I taking her out Without Him? he bawled, standing on the window sill with his tail raised threateningly against the curtain.

  'Oh no!' I wailed aloud. 'Don't let him do that!' Saska had an unfortunate habit of spraying when he was upset about anything. I hadn't any idea whom I was asking. I didn't suppose the Almighty would be greatly concerned at my being locked out of the cottage through my own stupidity or the prospect of Saska spraying up the curtains. I often asked Charles for help when I couldn't find things or was in a predicament and it was surprising – sometimes to the point of being uncanny – how often the situation resolved itself. But I couldn't expect Charles to help me over this. And judging by Saska's tail the matter was urgent.