More Cats In The Belfry

  She was, too, and one day the pair of them gave a memorable performance. I'd made tea for the visitors – a couple and their two young daughters – and brought in a plate of biscuits to accompany it. Saphra adored biscuits and the girls gave him one on the carpet straight away. One bite, of course, and there were better things to do to attract attention – like racing round the room, hurtling along the back of the sofa on which the visitors were sitting, diving to the floor with a mighty plop, then doing it all over again. Everybody was laughing, everybody was watching him. Saphra got quite carried away, and when, on one of his wall-of-death circuits, in diving off the sofa he landed on his abandoned biscuit and it scattered in smithereens, he was overcome by the merriment he caused. They put down another biscuit and round he raced again, leaping off the settee to land on it deliberately, the fragments flying, and the light of supreme achievement beaming from his small black face. Tani meanwhile, unable to bear his hogging the limelight, kept venturing out from under the table to watch and then, having successfully drawn all eyes to her, putting on an act of Realising the Danger she was In, dropping flat and crawling stealthily back to her chair.

  'Like to be the centre of attention, don't they?' said the husband, nearly dropping his teacup as Saphra, zooming along the sofa-back behind him, hurled himself off on to yet another biscuit.

  They certainly did. That, I remember, was a Monday. By Wednesday, with me in panic-stricken attendance, Saphra was the centre of attention at Langford, under suspicion of having eaten a purple towel.

EIGHT

When Saska was at Langford under observation I had asked the vet who was treating him whether there was a nearby practice that specialised in small animals. The local vets I knew of dealt chiefly with horses and farm animals. For years I'd been driving my cats on a round trip of fifty miles when they needed attention, and it was a long journey: I'd done it on occasion in snow, ice and fog, and a cat expert nearer home would be a blessing.

  To my surprise the vet told me that Langford had just opened its own Small Animal Practice. Hitherto they had only accepted animals referred to them, as Saska had been, by a vet baffled as to diagnosis. But they had recently taken over the practice of a local vet who had retired, and so long as the animal needing treatment wasn't on the books of another vet in the district it could now be taken direct to Langford.

  My previous vet being such a long way away, my cats qualified at once. Tani went there when her loose stomach recurred. She was prescribed special bran to be mixed with her food and never suffered from nervous diarrhoea again. (Nowadays they recommend cooked rice mixed with the food, and that achieves the same result.) Saphra had been neutered there… made much of by the staff, but I did wonder why the senior professor, who also presided over the evening surgery, carried him out to the car when I fetched him that night. Was he glad to see the back of him, and if so why? I wondered. And now there was the episode of the purple towel...

  Siamese cats are given to chewing things, and Saphra was no exception. First it was tea-towels, red and white checked ones. He chewed the corners off them any time he could contrive to be on his own in the kitchen, and I used to turn cold at times when I looked at his litter tray and wondered what dreadful malady he'd developed, until I realised it was only the tea­-towels taking their normal course and gave fervent thanks that they had. Then he discovered the purple hand-towels, also belonging to the kitchen, that hung from a rack over the washing machine.

  Sitting on the latter he could reach them comfortably, and apparently they were just the job for filling hungry corners. Before long every purple towel I owned had a pair of parallel holes halfway up it, to the limit of kitten-sitting level, and when I hung them on the line after washing people had even more cause to stare when they went by. They looked for all the world like a row of Ku Klux Klan masks.

  Then, the Wednesday after his exhibition of jumping on the biscuits, Saphra went off his food. He sat about looking worried, didn't want to go out and eventually disappeared. I searched everywhere I could think of, including the space between the side of the freezer and the wall in the kitchen extension which Saphra, odd-minded cat that he was, had adopted as his private lair. Situated where it was, near the back door, I think his main idea was that if I didn't know he was there I might leave the back door open and he could get out. But he would sit there for long periods meditating, as well. So I looked, and he wasn't there either, but something was. A long, mysterious something which, when I hauled it out, turned out to be a purple towel, half of it eaten away.