More Cats In The Belfry

  Mrs Binney, once as rare a sight in the valley as a cuckoo in December, had taken to haunting it since the death of my husband Charles the previous year. She'd told me several times that her son Bert fancied the cottage if I was thinking of selling. Whether she was keeping an eye on things from that angle – to see if I showed signs of moving – or whether she didn't want to miss the excitement if, in trying to maintain the place myself, I fell off a ladder, or out of a tree, or did myself a mischief with Charles's electric chainsaw, all of which she forecast constantly – the fact was that whenever I saw Mrs B. coming down the hill, my heart sank like a stone. It was like having Cassandra perpetually around in a po-shaped hat and ankle boots. It didn't help either that, where Shantung was concerned, I was inclined to agree with her.

  Almost from the time we'd first had Siamese cats there'd been a blue-point queen and a seal-point male at the cottage. Our first Siamese had been a blue-point female called Sugieh, and when she'd had kittens one was a seal-point male with big feet and spotted whiskers whom we decided to keep as a companion for her and call Solomon (Solomon Seal, we thought, was rather good). When Sugieh herself died tragically when the kittens were three months old, we'd kept Sheba, her blue-point daughter, as company for Solomon, and the tradition had gone on from there.

  For almost all that time, too, there'd been a donkey called Annabel bawling for peppermints over the half-door of her stable or keeping an eye on us from the hillside behind the cottage – small, wilful, her idea of a side-splitting joke being to butt us from behind when we weren't expecting it; loving us, for all that, as dearly as we loved her. She'd died three months after Charles, whom she'd adored, and Shebalu, Sheba's successor, had followed her within a year. The cottage and its big garden seemed so empty then, with only myself and Saska, the current seal-point boy, in it, that when I was unable to find a blue-point kitten quickly to restore that part of my life, at any rate, to normal I settled for a lilac-point instead.

  There wasn't all that difference between blue- and lilac-points, I reasoned. They often occurred in the same litter. Just so long as there was a prissy little pale-coated girl around the place. Then I drove down to Devon to fetch her, met a twelve-week-old lilac-point for the first time, and wondered what I'd let myself in for. I'd never seen anything so fragile.

  All Siamese kittens are white when they are born. Longer than ordinary kittens, blunt at both ends, they look exactly like those white Continental sausages, boudins blancs. When their colour points start to develop, however, while their bodies remain basically white, there are subtle variations in the whiteness. Seal-point kittens' bodies take on a creamish tinge; the bodies of blue-points have more of a milky hue; the two lilac-point kittens I was looking at were the purest ice-white, with the faintest shading on ears and paws like shadows on a snowfield and – I couldn't take my eyes off them – the oddest-coloured noses. A pronounced pinkish mauve as though they were Orphans of the Storm and not half feeling the cold.

  Actually they were curled together in an armchair in front of a log fire in a huge old country sitting-room, with low-beamed ceilings, rugs on a polished oak floor and adult Siamese everywhere – draped over chairs, squatting on the bookcase, one on its back with its feet in the air in front of the big fire-basket in the inglenook, one coming in from the kitchen, another strolling out through the doorway into the hall...

  Maybe it was the presence of so many big cats in full colour that made the kittens look so frail. One kitten, actually, at second glance. The other was bigger, more solid and confident-looking, regarding me with the calmest of periwinkle blue eyes. I would have picked her like a shot, but she was already spoken for. She was entered in a show for the following weekend and if she won a top award a breeder was going to have her. It was her sister who was for sale – the one who by comparison resembled a small white mouse and seemed just about as nervous. The moment she saw me looking at her she was flat on her stomach under the dresser, cringing away from me as if I were Sweeney Todd.

  She was healthy, I knew. My friend Pauline Furber, a breeder herself, had found her for me. If Pauline said she was good, she was. It was just that she looked so fragile – as if rearing her would be like trying to raise a flower fairy. I thought of Saska and quailed. He was more like a miniature elephant. Rumbustious, clumsy-footed – supposing he stepped on her and squashed her? She looked so solemn, too. I wanted a lively kitten to cheer things up, not one apparently in training for a sainthood.