More Cats In The Belfry

  Meanwhile, more cats were appearing in the valley. There were new people in the cottage up by the forest gate, Tim and Margaret, and they had a lilac-point girl called Suki. Suki, they said, was shy, and nervous of meeting people, but they used to take her for walks further up the valley, by the stream, and she soon began to explore the neighbourhood on her own. I went round the corner of the cottage one day and saw what I thought was Tani sitting bolt upright on the path outside the cat-house looking down at me, while Saphra was sitting inside looking out at her. 'How on earth did you get out?' I asked in astonishment, making a move to pick her up – and she turned and shot out under the gate and up the bridlepath. She wasn't Ours, bawled Saphra when she had gone – which was now patently obvious. 'Ours' was a pair of pyramid ears and two crossed eyes peering Chad-like over the cat-house windowsill. From the inside, of course.

  Tim and Margaret, seeing my two together and thinking Suki was perhaps coming down to sit by their house for company, decided she ought to have a friend of her own and got a seal-point kitten called Cleopatra, who turned out to be of Killdown descent and related to Saphra. I warned them they were in for trouble, and they got it.

  It took, as it usually does, a little while for the two cats to accept each other and then I began to get reports about Cleo turning out to be a minx and having an effect on Suki. Suki still went off on expeditions of her own – down to my garden and up to Poppy Richards, where she used to go into the cottage and pretend it was hers and scared Miss Wellington nearly out of her wits one day when she went in and met a large white cat, like a ghost, gliding silently down the stairs. But at home the two of them were playing together. Cleo was stealing Suki's food. More important, Suki – who'd all her life been a Good girl like Tani (maybe it's inherent in lilac queens) – was stealing Cleo's, and belting about the place like a kitten herself. Obviously the experiment was a success.

  They both went for walks with Tim and Margaret, Cleo prancing along beside them, Suki, pretending not to be with them, shadowing them far in the rear. The only trouble was, said Margaret – already discovering that, with two Siamese, crises are endemic – that she and Tim couldn't nip up for a drink at the Rose and Crown of an evening any more without a protesting duet through the sitting-room window about People being Cruel and Deserting Them. What she and Tim had to do, she said – she would never have believed it, but I'd been right in my forecast – was to go out ostentatiously, start up the car (parked where the cats couldn't see it), run the engine for a minute or two, then switch it off and creep surreptitiously out and up the hill. The cats, thinking they'd gone off in the car, would then shut up and go to bed. Wouldn't think it possible, would I? she asked. Wouldn't I just, I said.

  Adding to the impression that cats were beginning to take over the valley, two new kittens had meanwhile appeared down the lane. The black one with a white star on his chest was called Starsky. His brother, naturally, was Hutch. The Reasons' tabby was now pretty old and given to sleeping a lot, and the kittens had been acquired to look after the place in general and keep the stables free of rats and mice. Hutch, the under-cover kitten, took on that job, and was rarely seen. Starsky, the extrovert, was more of a front man, patrolling the lane, exploring up the hill, and continually coming over the wall to check on my two. He would openly lie under the beech tree on the lawn, calmly studying Saphra, who was threatening him from the cat-house, secure in the knowledge that Saph couldn't get at him. Tani, as usual, was nowhere to be seen. White Slavers, according to her, could come in Disguises.

  Starsky also attached himself to the goose and duck patrols. He seemed to have struck up a friendship with Gerald, and I often saw him going up the hill with the gang, or sitting on the hillside with them behind my cottage. Another hanger-on down the lane at the time was a large Muscovy drake called Charlie, who'd flown in one day from a smallholding over the hill, apparently attracted by the ducks. His owners had another, even bigger, drake, which was why Charlie had left home, and they said he could stay here if he wanted. So he, too, got added to what was beginning to look like a menagerie.

  No prizes for guessing who was eventually to be seen leading them like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, of course. I'd parked my car outside the front gate one morning, ready to take off for town. I'd put the cats in the cottage, gathered up my coat and handbag, gone out to get in the car – and there, surrounding it, were Gerald and the geese and Charlie and the ducks; Gerald as usual admiring his reflection in the car panels.