More Cats In The Belfry

  So, I unlatched the door and went in, but it wasn't the grey, metal-smooth skin of a sloworm that met my eyes. It was a brownish back with diamond markings, lying in a crack between the paving stones.

  'An adder!' I yelled, leaping into action. Tani was sitting back from it, keeping a wary distance, but Saphra was crouched within inches, one paw raised to hit it if it moved. I grabbed him, rushed to the cat-house at the other end of the run, threw him through the door and latched it. I ran back and grabbed Tani, intending to do the same with her. Jeanine was in the run herself by this time, intent on helping me. She'd field Saphra, make sure he didn't rush out when I put Tani in, she said. Only it didn't work like that. As I put Tani through the door, Saphra erupted through the cat-flap at the bottom of it like a circus rider coming through a hoop. Back to watch the adder he streaked, and I streaked after him, leaving Jeanine to stop Tani from getting out. I ran down to the cottage with him, put him in the kitchen and dashed back with a box which I up-ended over the adder, still down in the crack between the stones, while we got Tani down to the safety of the cottage too. It took some time because Tani, hiding behind one of the deck-chairs stacked in the cat-house, had to be hauled out, screeching up and down the scale like a banshee.

  Frightened by the adder? That was what I imagined, grabbing her by the scruff and rushing her down the path still wailing like a set of demented bagpipes. Jeanine and I then went back to deal with the adder, but when we picked up the box it had gone. Out through the wire netting into the long grass behind the run, we decided, and it wasn't likely to come back. Tani's howling had been enough to frighten off an elephant. When we went back to the cottage, however, to make some coffee to restore our nerves, and Tani started up again, we realised it wasn't the adder she was protesting about. It was Jeanine. A stranger who'd had the temerity to intrude into Tani's Very Own Cat-house: her Refuge when Danger Threatened. And had it threatened! Tani bawled balefully from under the sofa. If she hadn't done her Defensive Call the kidnappers would have Got Her.

  It was at that point that Jeanine realised that her microphone, attached to her belt, was still switched on. The entire incident had been recorded. Tani's screaming opened and closed one episode of 'A Small Country Living', while the recording of our rescuing the cats formed part of it. People listening to it probably thought she was warning off the adder. What she was really doing was warning off Jeanine.

  That wasn't the end of it, either. After Jeanine had gone I cut down the long grass behind the cat-run and laced a foot-deep length of heavy polythene right round the wire netting to stop the adder coming back again, though after Tani's performance it was probably in a hole somewhere having a nervous breakdown. Later events were to show how wrong I was.

  For days I kept constant watch over the cats, going up regularly to check that they were all right in their run and listening, when I wasn't near them, to be sure nobody was screeching a warning. Thus, a week or so later, I came to be on the other side of the cottage from the cat-run, chopping down brambles in the lilac hedge that bordered the lane and stopping every now and then, as I couldn't see the run from that point, to listen to make sure all was well.

  Suddenly I heard the sound of hooves approaching and a voice I recognised booming out her latest achievements in horse-breeding. Not wishing to be caught – it was, I knew, a local female, accompanied by her much-henpecked husband, who would keep me talking for ages about her latest foal if she saw me – I got down on my hands and knees and took refuge under the hedge, only to hear the woman bawl, as she neared the gate, 'What on earth's that noise?'

  'Don't know,' replied her weary spouse.

  'Somebody's calling,' persisted the woman. Then, answering her own question, she announced, 'It's one of the Siamese on heat.'

  'Thank goodness horses don't make that noise when they're on heat,' said her husband with feeling.

  I couldn't hear any howling with the cottage between myself and the cat-run, but Tani had been spayed… it must be another adder. I erupted from under the hedge, much to the couple's astonishment, and tore up the path – to find the two cats side by side, tails bushed like flue brushes, swearing horrible oaths at the ginger cat from up the lane, who'd come down to sit outside their run and tantalise them about being Shut In like Cissies.

SEVEN

That story soon went the rounds as further evidence of my eccentricity. 'Mrs Haskins be tellin' people thee'st come up out of thic lilac like a Jack-in-the-box and frightened her hoss near out of his wits,' Fred Ferry informed me happily later. 'What wust thee doin' on thee hands and knees anyway?' he enquired hopefully.