More Cats In The Belfry

  So I got one of my neighbours to help me lower it, and we carried it down to the lawn so that I could clean it, and unwittingly put it just where it caught the eye of everybody coming down the hill. A graceful sixteen-foot two-­seater, sails, mast and paddles on the grass at its side: half the village appeared at one time or another to speculate as to why it was there.

  Mrs Binney was the first to actually ask me. She hadn't been down for quite a while, but the news had obviously reached her by local grapevine and she must have decided it meant I was moving at last.

  'What be goin' to do with that boat, then?' she began, leaning on the gate to watch me varnishing the decking.

  'Sell it,' I replied.

  'Gettin' ready to move? she queried hopefully.

  'No,' I said. 'It's just a pity to leave it in the garage unused.'

  'Don't forget my Bert'd like to know when you are goin',' she continued single-mindedly.

  ''Tis too big for you.' The cottage she meant. 'You wants one of they little bungalows up Fairview.'

  A little bungalow up on Fairview was the last thing I wanted, but Mrs B. obviously thought she was sowing a seed of thought in my mind and, patting her violet curls, she stumped back up the hill, having imparted a piece of information of her own that she was also patently anxious I should know. The Friendly Hands Club was departing on its communal summer holiday at ten o'clock the following Saturday morning, this time to Edinburgh. She was going, she announced. So was Stan she added coyly, peering at me from under her eyelids to see whether I was impressed. I was impressed, all right. Stan, she'd said. Obviously she meant Mr Tooting. In all the years I'd known her she'd never referred to her husband, alive or defunct, other than as Mr Binney. Things certainly did seem to be moving.

  This I must see for myself, I thought. So I made sure I was in the post office on Saturday morning when the coach arrived in the square ready to observe how our village siren operated. It was simple really. The coach drew up and the passengers gathered to go aboard, Mrs Binney determinedly at the front of the queue. She climbed the steps, subsided heavily on the seat just inside the door, dumped her holdall next to her and leaned back and closed her eyes – firmly, so that the availability of the vacant space brooked no question from anybody until, when the coach was full, Mr Tooting climbed aboard (he, as secretary, had been checking everybody on from a list on a clipboard) whereupon Mrs Binney opened her eyes and transferred her holdall to her lap. Mr Tooting had no option but to take the seat next to her – the only one left with nobody in it and where, as self-appointed courier, he no doubt thought he should be anyway. In front, right behind the driver.

  Father Adams's wife didn't go on the trip. She wouldn't leave the old boy on his own, and wild horses wouldn't have dragged him on it. She was in the post office too, though – wouldn't have missed it for worlds, she said – and together we waved the coach on its way. 'Looks like romance, duunit?' she observed, her eyes glued to Mrs B. and Mr Tooting. I wasn't so sure. To me it seemed more like a female spider weaving a calculated web and Mr Tooting falling inescapably into it.

  I walked back to the valley thinking that anyway, I had a week's reprieve. Mrs B. couldn't come pestering me about the cottage. Country life being what it is, Miss Wellington descended upon me instead. She hadn't gone on the communal holiday either. It wasn't Miss W's style. What she had done was notice the canoe on the cottage lawn from the top of the hill, ask Fred Ferry if he knew why it was there – he was still cutting the grass at Poppy's cottage and calling at Miss Wellington's to be paid – and he, never one to miss a chance of leg-pulling, particularly when the leg was Miss W.'s, said hadn't she heard? I was going round the world. Taking the cats as well, he added as a bonus.

  He'd obviously got the idea from a report in the papers at the time about a man proposing to cross the Atlantic in a barrel. It didn't come off – the authorities prevented him doing it – but Miss Wellington had no doubt read about it too, and the possibility of my trying something equally stupid must have seemed credible to her.

  Down she came, the afternoon of the day the Friendly Hands trip went off, when as luck would have it I was scrubbing the sails, spread out flat on the lawn, while the cats, to be companionable, were sitting one in each cockpit of the canoe, for all the world as if they were ready to take off. Our previous cats had often sat in the canoe like that when it was on the lawn for cleaning. There is nothing Siamese like better than being involved in what is going on. It would have been more unusual if they hadn't been sitting in it.