More Cats In The Belfry

  I longed to know, and now she was annoyed with me and I couldn't ask her. Well, things would sort themselves out, I decided. I shut the door and went back to the sitting-room and the log fire and the cats, which combination gave cause for further development.

  Charles, it will be remembered by my readers, had gone in for growing cobnuts, mostly eaten by Lancelot, our resident field mouse, but this winter Lancelot hadn't put in an appearance. Either age had caught up with him and he was now playing a mouse-sized harp or he'd found better quarters for the cold weather. Anyway, there was the nut harvest, for once unclaimed, across in the wood. I went over and gathered a big basketful, beating the squirrels by a whisker: they moved in next day with much squirrel-barking to herald their arrival and buried the rest of the crop in the lawn.

  I spent about twenty minutes that evening, reading and eating cobnuts, before Saphra decided he ought to try them too. Wanted Some, he wailed, standing against my knee and touching my hand with his paw. 'You wouldn't eat these,' I said, holding a shelled one out to him and expecting him to reject it. He took it, ate it with gusto and immediately demanded more. He, said Tani, sitting by me with her tail wrapped primly round her feet, was Bonkers. Cats weren't monkeys. They didn't eat nuts.

  He did. Not only that, when I got tired of cracking them for him and instead threw one in its shell for him to chase, he ran after it, carried it back to the hearthrug, cracked it with his teeth, his head held sideways – then dropped the whole thing on the rug, sorted out the kernel from the shell and ate it.

  It became quite a party piece with him that winter – all the more so because his audience laughed to see him do it. When Dora and Nita came to lunch one day and afterwards I laid out a line of cobnuts on the rug to show them, thinking Saph would take what he wanted and it would save me giving them to him one by one, he obliged by cracking them along the row one after the other, eating the kernels as he went. 'How did you teach him to do that?' asked Nora, astounded. It was all his own idea, I said.

  He and Tani had lots of ideas between them. Sometimes their perspicacity shook me rigid. Was it, I wondered, because I was alone with them so much, and noticed their behaviour more? Or was it – a theory that occurred to me more than once – that cats were becoming more intelligent with each generation, and therefore gradually becoming more dominant?

  I was provided with further evidence in support of my hypothesis just before Christmas. I wanted to see an American Civil War serial on ITV called 'North and South'. The first episode ran from 8 to 10 p.m. I was allowed to watch that one in peace. It was when subsequent episodes were shown at 10.30 p.m., after the news, that I became aware of disapproval.

  The cats and I normally went to bed around eleven o'clock. When we didn't – when I sat there sometimes till after midnight, taking no notice of their efforts to remind me of the time – boy, did I get the treatment! Saph pacing round the room like a Victorian father, looking at the hall door. Tani informing me from the back of a chair in a cracked soprano that if I wasn't Careful I'd go to the Dogs. The pair of them sitting side by side in front of me trying to hypnotise me into switching off and heading for the duvet-under which, it seemed, Everybody ought to Be by eleven o'clock.

  I found myself feeling guilty. Actually apologising. Sitting on the edge of my chair telling them it was nearly over. Several times I gave in and switched off before the end. Who, I asked them sternly, was boss around here? Two supercilious squints supplied the answer. I had made my bed, now I must lie on it. With them under the duvet, of course.

  Christmas came. Saph was entranced. He hadn't seen Christmas decorations before. He poked the prickles on the holly, gazed riveted at the glass balls and glittering tinsel (hanging from spruce branches threaded through the big wrought iron ceiling candelabra: I dared not have a Christmas tree with him around). He stared entranced at the swags of cards strung on ribbons round the walls – to stop him scattering them as he'd been doing when I first set them out in the windowsills and on the dresser and bureau. I put things in funny places, didn't I? he said.