More Cats In The Belfry

  That was why I put up with Mrs Binney's visits as patiently as I did instead of, as Father Adams and Fred Ferry continually advised me, 'giving she a kick in the pants'. They meant it, metaphorically, of course. Father Adams, who'd been at school with her, always referred to her as Old Mod (her name was Maude). Old Mod, he said, had been a misery for as long as he could remember. She was a widow too, though. Always referring to the fact. Always talking to me of 'people in our position' or 'people of our age' – which at times made me feel like taking Father Adams's advice since she was, I knew, a good twenty years older than I was.

  But she was obviously lonely. Probably felt as bereft of people who cared about her as I did at times – which was why my mouth fell open and stayed that way when she told me one day that there was somebody in the village who was keen on her.

  'Spicy bit of news then?' enquired Father Adams, happening to pass by as usual at the crucial moment.

  'Oh... no...' I managed to get out, while Mrs Binney gave him a look that should have withered him on the spot. It wasn't just spicy, it was electrifying. The revelation that Mrs B., of all people, had an admirer.

THREE

That was her interpretation of events, at any rate. There was, with its headquarters over in the centre of the village so that living a mile and a half away in the valley I knew little of its goings-on except by hearsay, a Friendly Hands Social Club which catered mostly for the over-sixties but, in order to augment its numbers, welcomed widows and widowers of any age. I'd been invited to join it myself after Charles died, but I felt that life held more for me yet than the excitement of a monthly communal visit by a chiropodist from the local health centre, or annual holidays by coach to Aberdeen or Durham, where the party stayed in the unoccupied university hall of residence during the students' vacation and was shepherded on daily sightseeing tours by the enthusiastic element that inevitably emerges as leaders of such organisations, and so I made my excuses. I was fully occupied with the cottage, the cats and writing. I took my van away on holidays. I didn't go out in the evenings if I could help it – not winter evenings, anyway, since in turning in to the cottage driveway in the dark I could easily land myself and the car in the stream.

  Not so Mrs Binney, who went to anything that offered tea, biscuits and the chance of a gossip, especially when it was held in the village hall, a matter of yards down the road from her house. She'd been sitting non-participantly in the front row of what Fred Ferry called the Old Trouts' Knees-up for years until fate suddenly took a hand by arranging the demise of the octogenarian who'd hitherto played the piano for the Singalong Half-hour that wound up every meeting. When nobody else volunteered for the job, Mrs Binney unexpectedly upped and offered her services as accompanist – and, to everybody's surprise, did it very well. Father Adams's wife, who belonged to the club herself and kept me up to date with what went on there, said she didn't remember Maude Binney learning the piano as a girl – maybe she'd done it while she was away in service – but she could play all right. 'Sally', 'Keep Right On to the End of the Road', 'Silver Threads among the Gold'...

  'Ah,' I said, recollecting the evening back in the spring when I'd passed the village hall on foot on my way home from a meeting of the History Society at the chairman's house, where we were planning the reissue of the village history we'd done a few years before, and I'd heard 'Sally' being belted out with such vigour it sounded as if the piano was coming through the corrugated tin roof at any moment. That explained it. I liked to know these things. I'd wondered at the time who was making all that noise.

  Anyway, it seemed that the Singalong leader was a Mr Tooting who, with his wife, had retired to the village from the Midlands some years earlier. His wife had since died and Mr Tooting, distinguishable at any distance around the village by the fact that he was short, wore glasses, a military moustache, an air of supreme self-importance and a checked tweed pork-pie hat, had thereafter thrown himself into helping run local affairs. He was the most active churchwarden the Rector had ever had, always ready to organise beating the bounds, head a sub-committee for repairs to the organ, or personally oversee the men re-leading the roof. He fetched the old people's medicines en bloc from the chemist in the next village if they left their prescriptions in a special box in the post office, and was secretary of the Gardening Club, the Boys' Club and the Friendly Hands Club, at which he conducted the Singalong Half-hour by standing beside the piano, waving his arms at the audience as if trying to levitate them out of their seats, and leading the songs in a hearty baritone.