More Cats In The Belfry

  The lights were on at the Reasons' cottage down the lane, too. I phoned them, though it was still not four in the morning. They were probably up and wondering, I thought. And sure enough they were. They'd been to a birthday party, said Janet. Peter had come up with the dog when they got in, and had thrown gravel at my bedroom window, but I hadn't answered so they'd phoned the police in case... I thanked them for doing it, went back to bed, and told the cats it was all their fault and Bill's. Theirs for insisting on looking out of the windows at night and Bill's for making me help unload the cement mixer. My back would never be the same again, I informed the world in general and the bedroom ceiling in particular, and what the police, and now the neighbours, would think...

  I stayed awake the rest of the night worrying about it and next day, believe it or not, I did it again. Went to a local seaside town to do some shopping, took a picnic lunch to eat in the car on the front, sat listening to the news on the radio afterwards – and the next thing I knew, there was a policeman tapping at the car window asking if I was all right. He and his mate had noticed me with my head on the steering wheel as they drove past, he said, and they wondered if I felt ill.

  Only tired, I told them. I hadn't had much sleep the previous night. I didn't tell them about the cats, but I had no doubt that there were two police stations in Somerset that day where I went down in the records as an Incident. With either O for Odd or P for Peculiar against my name. Not, as it should have been if there were any justice in this world, SC for Siamese Cats. A week or so later, too, I looked out of the cottage window and saw yet another police car pulled up outside. I wondered what I'd done this time – went out to see, and it was a young policeman who said he was new on the beat and wanted to get acquainted with the valley. I've often wondered since if he was really checking whether I was still showing signs of strange behaviour.

  My neighbours would probably have assured him that I was peculiar. Always had been. Even Poppy Richards, I was sure, thought I was slightly odd. I was going up the hill in the car one morning when I met her driving down the other way. There wasn't room for us to pass each other, so she drew to one side in a gateway and flashed her headlights for me to go on – which I did, only to spot a blackbird in the road ahead of me, pottering about picking up bits.

  It made no move to fly away. Other than Miss Wellington's doves, birds don't around here. They know that no-one in the valley would hurt them. There are pheasants in the forest who congregate on the woodshed roof like sparrows, and flutter down around my head like homing pigeons when I go out to give them corn. I couldn't wait, though, as I normally would have done, for the blackbird to move at its leisure. Poppy Richards was waiting to come down. So I hooted – something Charles had always told me to do, faced with a non-moving bird. They didn't like sudden noise, he said, and would straightaway take off like rockets. The blackbird did, twittering angrily at my colossal cheek. Blasted Woman Driver, it was probably saying. Poppy Richards wouldn't have noticed the blackbird, though, not as far away as she was. Only that I hooted loudly, zoomed up the hill and passed her, hand half-raised in acknowledgment but looking straight ahead. I couldn't look at her – I was going round the corner, where there is rock sticking out of the bank, but that presumably didn't occur to her. That evening she appeared on my doorstep, extremely frosty-faced, asking what she'd done wrong. 'Nothing,' I said, explaining that I'd been hooting at a bird, but I felt sure she didn't believe me.

  A curt nod and a 'Goodnight then', and she was gone, slamming the gate as she went. It was a pity, because there was something I wanted to ask her. Something which had me extremely curious.

  For quite a while I'd noticed a man going past at weekends, wearing a beard and a wide-brimmed hat like a Bohemian artist and his head bent over a book. A most unusual sight because most people came to the valley to enjoy its beauty and he wasn't looking at it at all. Also, the going is rough past the cottage, with pot-holes and ankle-turning stones. If he really was reading poetry or the classics, as he obviously thought anyone who saw him would think, he'd have fallen flat on his face long before. More likely he was doing it for effect, surreptitiously looking down past the book at the ground – but to what end could he be doing something so ridiculous? And going up the side lane to Poppy's cottage – was he calling on her? She'd been a teacher. Was she running some sort of literary circle in the village of which he was an enthusiastic member?