More Cats In The Belfry

  The sitting-room was finished and, encouraged by the result, I decided to get a new carpet. It is a large room and the cost, I knew, would be prohibitive in the ordinary way. So one day I drove down to the Wilton carpet factory near Salisbury and found in their factory shop, just what I was looking for. A hardwearing apple-green broadloom carpet in two sections that would just fit my L-shaped room and which, with a bit of luck, I could lay myself. It would have cost a lot to have it delivered to Somerset, so I had them pack one section into the car boot and the other on to the back seat and got my neighbours to help me unload it into the garage when I got home. There it lay along one side, on top of a stack of ladders, and when Bill the ambulance man rang the next night to say he'd be coming at the weekend to start digging the earth from the back of the cottage – it had slipped down from the hillside over the years, and was blocking the path behind and causing dampness in the kitchen – I told him about the carpet and said I'd like him, when he did come, to help me carry it down to the cottage: it was too heavy for me to manage on my own.

  I should have known better, of course. Ten minutes later Bill, having said yes, he'd help with the carpet at the weekend, came belting down the hill in his car. 'Thought you might like it right away,' he said. 'Then you can get on with putting it down.'

  'It's raining,' I said aghast. 'It'll drag along the ground and get muddy. I can't lift it very high because of my back.' I had arthritis in it – the result, my doctor told me blithely, of doing so much riding in the past. And they tell you to take plenty of exercise...

  He'd carry it, Bill assured me. He'd take the weight in the middle. I need only hold the front end lightly, to guide it.

  You can guess what happened. The rolls were longer than he thought and, held in the middle, they sagged. I supported them in front, he held the middle, and the back ends dragged drearily, unnoticed till we reached the cottage, down the rain-sogged path. I suggested sliding them in through one of the sitting-room windows, to avoid turning a corner with them if we brought them through the hall, and that was another mistake. Bill slid each one over the window frame, came in and pulled them through the rest of the way himself to save me having to haul on them, stacked them one on top of the other along the wall beneath the window, dusted his hands at having accomplished his mission – and I let out a wail.

  'Look at my fresh paint,' I moaned. It wasn't any more. Where the muddied carpet had brushed against the wall there were long black gritty steaks, like a Plimsollline along the side of a ship.

  'That'll wash off,' said Bill complacently, and away he went, glowing with virtue at a good deed well done, leaving me to clean the wall as best I could and try to protect the carpet from the attentions of the two cats who, when eventually let into the room, discovered what they took to be the biggest stropping post in the world laid out along the wall especially for their benefit. It was the hessian backing that was the attraction – specially geared to their claws. They stropped away on it all the evening, daring each other with raised backs, bushing their tails, dashing up and down the length of the roll. It was obvious it was going to have to be laid as quickly as possible If I was to have a carpet left at all, so I rang Dora and Nita who had volunteered to help me put it down after the weekend, asking whether they could come the next day instead. They couldn't. They had an engagement they couldn't alter. Not to worry, I'd put it down by myself, I said, more airily than I felt.

  The next day, with the cats shut in their garden house so they couldn't get in the way, I did. Not without event. I put the first place down in the main part of the room, pivoting the Welsh dresser, the sofa and the heavy carved bureau over it as I worked – and then discovered I'd got the rolls of carpet mixed. The second piece was actually the larger. Fortunately I hadn't cut any of it to fit. I rolled up the first piece, heaving the furniture back over it as I went, had a snack lunch and worked on. It was late afternoon before the room was covered to my satisfaction, and I sat back on my heels to survey the result. White walls, oak beams, deep-piled carpet and the old carved furniture back in place – it looked, as it was, a spacious, comfortable room with two and a half centuries of occupation behind it, needing only one thing to complete the picture – a roaring log fire with two cats in their Snoozabed in front of it, which was what, in next to no time, I had.

  Worn out with the day's efforts, I trundled off to bed accompanied by my furry henchmen, woke around three in the morning and couldn't go back to sleep, and came down to have another look at my handiwork. Saph came with me. I made some tea and we sat there sharing Marie biscuits.