More Cats In The Belfry

  It worked this time. Three weeks later Connie was on the phone again. She didn't know how to thank me, she said. Ming had given up bawling and accepted the fact that he couldn't get out, though he still peered under the fence for Ginger Bates. So far the latter hadn't peered back, for which she was truly grateful. Ming already had a permanently crumpled ear as the result of an encounter with a magpie whose nest he'd tried to raid in the old free-roaming field days, and she had always been afraid of his getting another from Ginger Bates.

  She gave me a résumé of Ming's eventful history – of his many fights and consequent visits to the vet. He also suffered frequently from tonsillitis on account of talking so much, and had to be treated for that, which was no picnic. The things he'd stolen and brought home to the previous flat to await her return from school, she expounded earnestly, ranged from fillets of steak and a turbot skeleton with its head on to green balls lifted from the public tennis courts when nobody was looking, and parked one on each stair. How he'd carried them home she couldn't imagine, but he had. And only green ones.

  As far as she could she'd tracked down the owners and returned the booty, but sometimes it had been impossible – for instance when she got home and found two pairs of red knickers laid out on the stairs with Ming sitting beside them saying they were a Present. She couldn't go round asking about those, she said: it would have been too embarrassing. She'd put them in the dustbin, but it had always remained on her conscience. Why did Siamese cats do such awful things?

  I roared with laughter. Because they were Siamese, I said. And from what she'd told me I wouldn't mind betting, if we compared pedigrees, that he and Saphra were related. Saphra did things like that because he'd got his character from his grandfather, Saturn Sentinel, of the famous Killdown strain. People were fortunate, or benighted, depending on how one looked at it, if they had one of that line. Life was never the same again. I told her about Saphra and the purple towels and his being expelled from Langford. It was her turn to shudder down the phone.

  By the next post she sent me a copy of Ming's pedigree and sure enough, there it was. Saturn Sentinel was Ming's grandfather, he and Saph were cousins. It didn't matter how far they were removed from their illustrious ancestor, I told her when I rang to break the news. If the genes were there, she was in for trouble.

  We became friends – comrades in distress – at the very thought of it. She came to see my two – Saphra the extrovert Head of the Household, Tani pursuing her role of Fugitive from the White Slavers as usual – and was entranced by them. I went to see Ming, and was immediately captivated by him. Chocolate­-pointed – a paler edition of Saphra – he was very like Saph, except for the crumpled ear. Handsome, tall – impressively so when he put on his Collapsing with the Cold performance, which was one of the first things he tried out on me.

  Connie's flat had gas-fired central heating, with a large electric fire in the sitting-room to boost the temperature when necessary. It was November when I first went to visit her, and I'd met Ming, we'd had tea and were relaxing in the sitting-room when I happened to glance to my left, where there was a long radiator under the window. There, sitting upright, stretched to his full height against it with his head pressed wanly against the metalwork and his eyes closed was Ming. I bent down to look at him. He half-opened one eye, saw me watching him and leaned more heavily still against the radiator. I got the message. He was Suffering. Feeling the Cold. 'Any minute now you'll get the fire routine,' muttered Connie under her breath. A moment later I did. He walked over the electric fire, sat down in front of it and batted the plug, which was lying loose, till it rattled against the wall. 'WOW!' he said with feeling, fixing me with a look.

  To illustrate what he expected to happen next, Connie put the plug in the socket and switched on the fire. As the heat came up and the element began to glow, Ming stretched himself in front of it and rolled on his back. Bliss! said his expression. If he could put the plug in the socket himself he would, said Connie. Any day now she expected him to work out how to do it.

  He'd already worked out one thing that was quite extraordinary. Indeed, it was the most remarkable example of cat intelligence I've ever come across. There was a cat-flap in the kitchen door leading into the fenced-in garden, to which Ming usually had unrestricted access. When Connie was going to be out, however, she brought Ming indoors, put the fastener down on the cat-flap and a small but weighty cupboard in front of the flap. She was afraid that, with plenty of time and no supervision, he might still find a way to scale the fence.