More Cats In The Belfry

  Nonsense, I wrote back. There were always cats around whose owners had died or moved away, and if nobody adopted them they would be put down. She should give a home to one of those. I was sure Daisy would have approved, I told her. She consulted her vet, he agreed, and within a week brought her Daisy's successor. Two years old, timid but becoming friendly: it was nice to have a cat around again, she reported. So there I was, imagining this elderly lady consoling herself with the homeless cat she called Miss Kitty – unable to forget Daisy, of course, but it was someone to cherish... And what had I received in my Christmas mail? A letter describing how Miss K. – the most affectionate, intelligent cat, I understood, that it was possible to meet – was now disrupting the Philadelphia communications system by answering the phone when her new mistress was out.

  It seemed that friends calling Mrs C. would, after waiting while the bell rang, hear a crash at the other end as the receiver was knocked off the cradle, then the sound of a cat purring into it loudly. Realising what had happened they would hang up – and Mrs C. would return home to find the receiver on the floor. To avoid it being smashed, she said, she had taken to putting the phone on the floor anyway before she went out, and had actually seen the cat sidling up to it and sitting watching it, waiting for it to ring.

  In order to amuse her, Mrs C. went on, one day recently she'd taken off the receiver so that Miss K. could hear the dialling tone – which, after a brief interval, changed to a buzz as a warning that the phone was 'open'. After a minute or so the phone would go dead, but could be reconnected by depressing a button on the cradle, when the whole cycle started up again.

  Believe it or not, by being shown how to depress the button (she did it to see it pop up again, said Mrs C.) that cat had now learned not to wait for the phone to ring, but to knock the receiver off, listen for the dialling tone and the buzz, and then re-start the cycle by pressing the button.

  Mrs C. was proud as a peacock about Miss K.'s cleverness, and wondered whether Saphra could learn to do the same. Not if I could help it, I replied. I was thinking of tying my telephone up with string.

  I was soon to learn the depths of mayhem a cat could achieve in England without even trying. Meanwhile there I was answering letters, the cats curled in the Snoozabed at my feet. Every now and then Tani chittered in a dozy, high-pitched soprano with her eyes closed, about the typewriter Disturbing Her Sleep. Immediately Saphra, also without opening his eyes, would echo her in a low­pitched bass. He didn't know what he was complaining about. He only did it to copy her. Saph, bombastic as he was, Head of the House and In Charge of Everything, still liked sleeping with his head on her stomach and her paw protectively across his neck, as if she was his mum. What she did, he did, and keeping me in order was the order of the day.

  So January passed, with indoor occupation. I got a lot of letters written. And Poppy Richards and I were friends again. We'd met up at a neighbour's party and I explained again that I hadn't been hooting at her, but at the blackbird. And I asked her about the man in the wide-brimmed hat who walked through the valley reading, and she said she'd been wondering about him too: she'd thought he'd been visiting me. It showed how speculation starts up in a village, and now Mrs Binney started some more. Well, more than speculation actually. This was straight from the horse's mouth. She appeared one day at the cottage gate in a state of agitation, her emerald coat buttoned all awry. Shirl was expecting, she told me. She didn't know what she and Bert were going to do.

  'But surely...' I began, then stopped myself.

  No point in saying but surely that was the natural outcome of Shirl and Bert living together. In Mrs B.'s eyes it evidently wasn't. Shirl and Bert living together a la mode was one thing. A baby in the offing was another. Shirl and Bert should be in their own place, not a caravan, she insisted. Following, I gathered, a quiet, practically anonymous wedding, Shirl should merge into village life as an accepted ostensibly long-wed, mother-to-be. 'You thinkin' of movin' yet?' she enquired.

  I wasn't, I told her, as I'd told her before. This was my home and I was staying in it. I felt like asking why she didn't marry Mr Tooting and let Shirl and Bert have her cottage, but I thought I'd better not. I didn't know how matters stood with her and Mr T. Fred Ferry had stopped telling me of late that he'd seen them around together in the local trysting places – though that might have been because of the weather.

  Something would turn up for them, I told her, as helpfully as I could. She mustn't worry about it. People looked at things differently nowadays, even in villages. Think how proud she'd be when she was a grandmother.