More Cats In The Belfry

  It was Saphra who solved the riddle of the man in the big hat. Our mysterious visitor was even more in evidence now. At weekends he seemed to be going up and down the lane continually, and it was then that the solution half dropped on me. He must have heard about its being called Daffodil Valley, and he either was an amateur poet or was hoping to be taken for one. I bet the book he was huddled over was Wordsworth, I thought. And sure enough one morning Saph squirmed under the gate, marched up to him, and looked enquiringly up at the hat. The man, bent over his book, saw Saphra at his feet and stooped to pat him, closing the volume abruptly. The Poems of Wordsworth I saw in gilt letters on the spine and reported it to Poppy as soon as he'd gone. He was a poet, or that way inclined: not a spy in disguise as Fred Ferry had insisted whenever the question cropped up. What was there to spy on round here? I'd asked on one occasion. 'Durin' the war they used to put decoy lights up on Black Down,' Fred informed me darkly. What that had to do with it I couldn't think, but Fred always was a one for drama.

  I started gardening – weeding the borders, cutting the grass. I spent hours up by the cat-house, digging between the herbaceous clumps, while Saphra watched intently from the corner of the run. He knew what I was doing, and every day, when I let them out after I'd finished working, he'd make straight for the border and dig an enormous hole himself. It was easy in the earth I'd just turned over, and Saph didn't believe in unnecessary exertion. Sometimes, when he'd finished, he wetted in the hole. Sometimes he dug it simply for the sake of doing what I did. Tani, whom I have never known to dig a hole in her life (ladies always use Litter Trays, according to her), usually walked straight down the path and into the cottage while this was going on. On one occasion, however, she went deliberately in the other direction; up the path and past him towards the garage. He stopped to watch her, forgot what he was doing, and when she'd gone past left his excavation and started after her. Recollecting himself at the edge of the lawn, he turned back, and was digging the hole deeper – he always believed in going down to his elbows – when she sauntered tantalisingly back past him again. He kept his eyes on her as he dug – and was so traumatised that he actually started moving towards her like a miniature plough, paws scooping out the earth as he went.

  Sometimes I wondered whether that cat was in his right mind. He always seemed to dig his holes inordinately deep – but invariably after he'd sat on them, gaze fixed on the distance, busily thinking Higher Thoughts, they'd be filled to the brim like miniature ponds. Sitting on a hole, too – it seemed it had to fit his bottom exactly, and sometimes it didn't, and he had to move away and dig another. He could have written a book on Digging Holes for Cats. I reckon it would have rivalled The Specialist.

  Cat-befuddled as usual, a week or so later I once more went up to London for a Siamese Cat Club meeting. It meant getting up early to drive to Bristol to catch the London train. Getting up even earlier to give the cats their exercise in the garden before I went, otherwise they'd have raked everything out of the bedroom cupboards while I was away. It was six-fifteen in the morning when I opened the door to take them out, and nearly leapt out of my gumboots with surprise. There, milling about in the yard like a crowd in a fairground, was a pheasant cock and ten attendant hens.

  The local pheasants had been coming to me for food for years. The cats knew them, and realised they were too big for them to catch. They – Tani and Saph – would walk round the corner of the cottage and up on the path one behind the other, chittering under their breath at any odd pheasant that happened to be on the lawn, but gazing straight ahead pretending not to see it, which would presumably have undermined their superiority.

  The thing was, the current dominant cock – ­after an absence of several weeks during which he was probably occupied in courting displays in some secluded clearing in the forest – had been coming in the past few days with two or three hens, guarding them, standing back and watching over them proprietorially while they ate with the air of having brought them to his own special restaurant, then shepherding them away again over the wall and into the woods. He came back on his own when he wanted a meal himself – presumably it was infra dig to eat with his wives. I had wondered, though, whether two or three hens was the extent of his harem. And now, at six-fifteen in the morning, here was the answer. He had ten of them!