Reserved for the Cat

When the train pulled into the station, she picked up the bag and the cat and drifted out onto the platform still wrapped in that unreality.

The cat slipped out of the bag and stood beside her on the platform, looking about alertly. Go and sit over there, he directed, with a nod of his head. Don’t move. I’ll be back.

She looked down at him askance, but got no further word from him. The fact of his talking, however, only reinforced her feeling that this was all a dream, that in a moment she would waken in her bed back in Paris, and try to think of some prospect she had not yet considered as the means of paying the rent.

But, because it seemed the right thing to do in a dream, she went and sat as directed, and watched people stream by on their way to and from the ferries. And thought about food. The chocolate and nuts were long gone. Dared she see if there was a café somewhere near here?

Just as she was thinking about looking for one, she felt a nudge at her ankle.

It was the cat, with a thick pasteboard rectangle held daintily in his teeth. She knew, without even looking at it, what it must be.

A ferry ticket.

She could not even manage to protest that she didn’t want to go to England, because by this time, aside from her hunger, this was all too absurd to be real. And in a way her hunger only enforced the absurdity; if she were lying somewhere, mad or delirious, and dreaming all this, well she would be hungry, wouldn’t she?

So she just reached down and took the ticket, wordlessly. The cat climbed into the bag again, and she joined the stream of passengers heading towards the boat.

Finally, once aboard, she found real food; inside the ferry, someone was selling sandwiches wrapped in paper, and hot tea from a window. She bought both, carried them away to the warmest bench she could find, and sat there eating in tiny bites. She heard some complaints around her about the bread being stale, the cheese inferior, but she thought she had not tasted anything so good in a long time.

With a lurch, the ferry pulled away from the dock and began the nearly three-hour trip to Dover.

Ninette got another sandwich.

The crossing was smooth; preternaturally smooth, according to the comments. As late as it was, there was not much to see. Ninette amused herself by observing the passengers and trying to guess which of them was smuggling liquor into England to avoid the duties. The man with the tall hat? He could easily fit a bottle of brandy in there.

And that made her think suddenly that there would be a Customs man examining her bag in Dover. The cat! He would discover the cat, and surely one was not allowed to bring a cat into England!

But then in the next moment, she laughed at herself for being so absurd. She had by now convinced herself that this was all an illusion, a dream built of hunger and maybe fever or madness. It wouldn’t matter. There wouldn’t be a Customs man, or the cat would turn himself into a hairbrush or something. . . .

In fact, when the ferry docked and she joined the long crocodile of people leaving, she realized that her bag was much lighter. The cat had vanished. And when she reached the examining counters, the Customs man poked through her meager belongings with utter indifference before waving her on.

And then she found herself staring at the trains waiting to take on passengers without the slightest idea of what to do next. Where was she to go? Was she supposed to catch another train? Find some place to stay in Dover? She only had French money; where was she to get English money?

She felt herself on the verge of crying, when there was a warm brush against her ankles and she looked down to see the cat—once again with a pasteboard rectangle in his teeth—poking his head from under her skirt. She reached down and took it; he got into the bag as she placed it on the ground. Clearly her next act would be to get on the train. So, lacking anything better to do, she followed his directions, still somehow coming into her mind, to the one he wanted her to get on. It looked very different from the French train: less stylish, more purposeful. She got on and took a seat in the farthest, darkest corner of the compartment.

At this point, she was moving in a fog of exhaustion, and as the sun came up and pierced the windows of her railway car, she stopped thinking altogether. They arrived at an enormous train station, full of noise and smoke and bustle, full of the sound of foreign words in foreign voices. She got off and followed the cat when he jumped down out of the bag. She sat on a bench at his command, until he returned with first a new purse containing strange-looking money, and then another railway ticket. She followed him to the new train, let him get into the bag, and boarded.