More Cats In The Belfry

  Hurriedly I scrambled down the ladder and grabbed him before he could find anything else to climb. I'd thought I was alone while all this was happening. I should have known better, of course. No sooner did I start down the path, one hand firmly clutching Saph's scruff, the other under his feet, holding him against my cheek because, despite the fact that he put years on me with every day that passed, he was Saska all over again and I loved him dearly, than 'You shouldn't let him do things like that – he might hurt himself' came a voice from the now darkening shadows of the lane.

  I recognised it at once. Miss Wellington. If it had been Mrs Binney, after all the tales I'd been hearing – mostly from Fred Ferry – ­about her being seen around the country lanes at twilight with a companion in a pork-pie hat, I wouldn't have been so surprised. But Miss Wellington? What on earth was she doing out and about almost in darkness?

SIX

I soon found out. Miss Wellington, having revealed her presence in the lane, obviously thought she'd better explain why she was there before the rumour went round that she, too, was having secret assignations in the gloaming.

  It seemed that her sister, widow of a headmaster and herself recently retired as headmistress of an infants' school in Wiltshire, had bought a cottage which was for sale further up the lane from me and was shortly moving into it. I'd mentioned the cottage to Mrs Binney as a possibility for Bert, but she said Shirl was a town girl and din't fancy living up among all them trees, whereas mine was in a spot where there were more people about and had a proper road running down to it. Shirl wanted her own car when they got settled, she said importantly.

  Which took care of Shirl, and why Miss Wellington's sister wanted to live in such a remote spot, up a side lane off the main one, with a very rough stretch of bridle path to drive over before she got to it and, if it came to that, close to Miss Wellington, was anybody's guess. But she did want it, and had bought it, and Miss Wellington was keeping a self-appointed eye on it. To see that vandals didn't damage it before Poppy moved in, and dusk was the time when they were most often about, she told me, which left me with two thoughts uppermost in my mind: first that from now on I could expect Miss Wellington to be hovering in the lane any time I was in the garden at twilight; and second that if her sister's name was Poppy what on earth could Miss Wellington's own Christian name be? I'd never heard her referred to as anything but Miss Wellington. If I'd been asked to hazard a guess I'd have said something like Augusta or Victoria with that surname. In fact in the fullness of time, when Poppy Richards had moved in and started to refer to her sister in conversation around the village, we discovered at Miss Wellington's name was Pansy. Before long the two sisters' cottages – one at the top of the hill and the other up the valley in the other direction – were known as Pansy's and Poppy's, and Miss Wellington had become Old Pans when spoken of by the more disrespectful locals such as Fred Ferry, while her sister needless to say became Old Pop.

  This is jumping ahead of events, however. For weeks before Mrs Richards moved in Miss Wellington was as consistent a visitor to the valley as Mrs Binney had been, lurking around like MI5 at dusk, marching through proprietorially during the day, picking up loose stones from the bridlepath on her way up to the cottage in case, she explained, she turned her ankles on them; and snapping off odd sticks and branches in the hedge on her way back in case, she said, they scratched her sister's car when she moved in. The stones she dumped on the grass verges of the lane which, as I owned the land on both sides of it, were mine, and I kept the grass on them cut down with the hover-mower and from then on was forever catching the blade on the stones with a horrible scraping noise and using language about Miss Wellington that would have shocked the Rector. The branches she tossed into the wood on her way back up the hill – always at the same spot. The wood, too, was mine and the collection was starting to look like the beginnings of a Guy Fawkes bonfire. I didn't like to say anything to her, but the air was rapidly becoming electric.

  There was also the question of the lawn at Poppy's cottage. It was June, and the grass was growing fast. Miss Wellington mowed her own small patch with a hand-mower but she couldn't possibly cut her sister's much larger lawn that way, so she engaged Ern Biggs to do it, thereby putting another foot firmly through the sacrosanct crust of village etiquette.