More Cats In The Belfry

  Probably somebody trying to contact somebody else, I suggested – which was true enough when you analysed it. It had nearly ruined her eardrums, said Miss Wellington, looking indignantly around for the culprit. Unable to spot him, she pattered on up the lane. I withdrew surreptitiously through the back gate and hared fruitlessly up the Forestry track, calling Tanny-wanny-wanny at every bush. Back down again, preparing this time to go up the hill to the Rose and Crown and on round the wide, circuitous sweep where I'd searched, back in the summer, for Saph.

  As I stood at the bottom of the hill, ready to start out on my trek – Christmas lunch was out of the question now, I told myself: I'd have to ring my friends to cancel it as soon as I got back – another friend, Tina, companion of my riding days before I damaged my back, came by on her horse Barbary, taking him out for exercise before the day's festivities started. I told her about Tani. She'd look out for her, she said. Go the circuitous way I'd been about to embark on. She couldn't bring her back if she found her – Tani would have fainted in coils before anybody got her near a horse – but if she did spot her she'd ring me from the stables. Meanwhile I'd be free to scout in the other direction.

  Along the lane, up the track to Poppy's cottage and on to join the circular route, that was. Dejectedly I set out, up the path to the back gate. Passing the cat-run en route, with Saph still sitting forlornly on the paving stones inside. All Alone, he wailed. Nobody to keep him Company. Where was she, his beloved Tani?

  I found out almost immediately. What prompted me to step aside from the path and go and peer through the cat-house window I'll never know. I'd looked through it earlier and she wasn't there. She was now, though. Sitting bolt upright in the cat-bed under the heater, as calm and collected as an ivory statue.

  It was no good asking her where she'd been. Obviously she hadn't been anywhere. She must have tired quite early of roaming about in the cold, and gone into the cat-house for a warm: I always leave the door open for them as a quick retreat should danger threaten, and Tani often goes in and sits under the heater on her own. But she hadn't done it straight away this time. She wasn't under the heater the first time I'd looked through the window. She must have been deliberately hiding on the floor, and got into the bed while I was chasing round the countryside looking for her. And no doubt encouraged Saphra to do his orphaned act. Relief flooded over me like an avalanche. 'Phew,' I breathed, mopping my brow. Nothing, said Tani as usual, was Anything to do with her. Fooled me, hadn't they, said Saphra, abandoning his orphan act and coming into the cat-house to join us rubbing heavily round my legs. That was their Christmas Surprise for me.

  I made it to Jonathan and Delia's, and on to Dora and Nita for lunch. But I was a nervous wreck for the rest of the day. Fooled me they had indeed.

FOURTEEN

Christmas was over and it was time to reply to all the letters I'd received: letters from people bringing me up to date on events in their own lives, from whom I didn't hear all that often. Siamese owners for the most part, whose experiences defied imagination.

  There was the woman who had sent Saphra the home-made adder, for instance. She had a Siamese called Bertie, of whom she'd written to me previously, when he'd kept bringing home white mice. Day after day, and she couldn't think where he'd been getting them, until her husband spotted him one day from the bathroom window going into a shed several gardens away, coming out with a mouse in his mouth and bringing it back over several high walls. On investigation it transpired that the man along the road had rescued the mice from a research laboratory and was temporarily keeping them in an aquarium in his garage, with a box over the top for safety, confident that nobody would know. Bertie had ferreted them out, though – the man had wondered why he kept finding the box off the top of the aquarium – and what with feeling guilty about someone knowing he'd kidnapped them, and Bertie's owners feeling guilty because he kept coming in with them, it was a Siamese ­manufactured mix-up of the first order. The end of the story was cloaked in diplomatic secrecy – I never heard how they sorted it out – but I do know that later she sent me a photograph from her local paper, showing, heads together, a very paternal-looking Bertie with his friend, a live white mouse.