A Drake at the Door (15 page)

It was now that the little black cat became a pleasant diversion. It haunted Minack to such an extent that Jeannie and the girls began to taunt me for taking so little notice of it. I was accused by them of all the anticat inclinations I possessed before Monty came into my life. I was being obstinate and cruel. Here was a little black cat that was so obviously seeking affection, but I was not even offering to help it overcome its terror of human beings. Here was an example, they said mockingly, of anti-cat brutality.

‘He’s heartless, isn’t he, Mrs Tangye?’

‘The poor little thing is starving.’

‘Let’s wait until he’s gone to town and then we’ll feed it.’

It was pleasant to be laughed at in this way. It relieved the tension. It helped me to see my problems in perspective. It was foolish to let myself indulge in depression just because I had been disappointed, and was tired, and because I suffered from the sickness of wanting success quickly. I was meeting again my old failing, the belief that endeavour on its own is sufficient to gain material triumph. I was ignoring, as I had done before, the rewards I had won. My eyes were staring at a pedestal so far in the distance that I was blind to what was close to me, the small pleasures which sparkled at me, the glory of awakening every day to an environment I loved. I had no right to demand more than this. The beat of my life was within the truth that men can look for all their lives; and fail to have the luck to find.

Easter was early that year. At the beginning of the week I saw my friend Walter Grose walking through Minack on his way to hoe potatoes in his part of the cliff. Walter for many years had worked one of the three farms whose buildings straddled the top of the hill and through which we passed on the way to the main road. He had now amalgamated his farm with that of Jack Cockram, the young man I had been able to introduce to my landlord. Walter and Jack made a good combination.

‘How are you today, Walter?’ I asked. And he replied in his usual way with his warm smile;

‘Poor but happy.’

But I had a reason other than pleasantries in talking to him that day. Walter had a large assortment of farmhouse cats which roamed his outbuildings and it occurred to me that the little black cat might be one of them. It wasn’t. He had seen it himself down at Minack, but he had no idea whence it came. Why didn’t I ask the travelling fish salesman?

I had the luck to see this gentleman in his van later on in the day when I was going into Penzance. Once a week he visited every farm in the district and the cats always hastened from their hideouts whenever he appeared. At each farm they grouped themselves round the open van doors as he displayed his wares to the farmer’s wife; handsome toms, battle-scarred ladies, cats of every colour and description. He was the most popular visitor of the week. He was the cats’ friend. He knew them all. No one was better placed than he to tell me whether anyone had lost a little black cat. But he could not help. I saw him a week later and he still could not help; and by then he had made special enquiries at every house on his round.

Meanwhile Jeannie, Jane and Shelagh had been active. They waited until I was out of the way, then put down a saucer of milk a hundred yards up the lane; it was just at the spot where the little black cat was in the habit of watching us. An hour or so later the saucer was empty.

The next time they did this I caught them redhanded. They believed I had gone down the cliff to look at the potatoes, and so I had, but I returned quicker than they expected; and I found Shelagh, followed by Jeannie and Jane carrying a saucer of bread and milk into the old barn where Monty used to hide when he first came to Minack. It was the Saturday morning of the Easter weekend.

‘I know very well what you’re up to,’ I said, and I felt angry, ‘you’re trying to make that cat stay here. I won’t have it!’

I was repeating myself. I had said the same thing about Monty. Here was the simmering again of my pro-dog and anti-cat childhood. True, I had loved Monty, but there were exceptional reasons why I should have done so. He had been with us in a turbulent period of our lives and he had reflected to me the comfort of security. I had never become a slave to his species as Jeannie had done. I remained suspicious of cats in the mass and I was not going to have another one just because a stray seemed to be in need of some milk. Yet, and this was lurking at the back of my mind, what were my last words to Monty? Did I not talk about a black cat?

The little black cat lapped up the bread and milk though it waited until there was no one about. Jeannie looked in the barn during the afternoon, found the saucer empty and promptly refilled it.

‘Look Jeannie,’ I said after she had done so, ‘I appreciate your feelings but you must try and appreciate mine. I don’t want another cat. For one thing we can never expect to have a cat again which doesn’t catch birds, and for another I want to keep my independence. After all even with Monty we were pretty tied down looking after him.’

I was aware that my words sounded hollow to her. Indeed I don’t think she even listened. She had ideas of her own so she thought it more convenient to let me ramble on.

‘I’m thinking of Charlie and Tim,’ I said, ‘and all the other birds which now trust us. Are you really prepared to risk their lives by pandering to this stray cat? I can’t understand it. And you know perfectly well that if you go on feeding it, it will want to stay.’

I was particularly concerned about Tim. He spent so many hours of every day on my desk or on the back of a chair or perched high on the top half of the stableshaped front door. He would warble a song, or go to sleep on one leg, or just observe. And when we went outside and we wanted to show him off to a visitor we would shout for him at the top of our voices; and within a few minutes he would wing his way to us, and I would hold out my hand for him to perch on. He was unperturbed by strangers. He was so trustful that it was dangerous; and, having trusted Monty, would he not trust any cat?

Charlie, I felt, could probably look after himself. He was a forceful character, always on the move and, in the spring and summer, a very noisy one. He would endlessly cheep at us and sometimes he got on my nerves and I would yell to him to shut up. Indeed this noisiness was to prove his undoing. He never had the good sense to know when to stop; and there was to be one day when he went on too long. But I did not foresee this on that day when I was telling Jeannie I wanted nothing to do with the little black cat. Nothing at all.

I do not know how long I would have maintained this tough attitude; but the following day, Easter Sunday, something happened which bewildered me. The condition which I fancifully made when Monty was dying was fulfilled. It happened in this way.

About eleven o’clock in the morning Jeannie was sitting in the chair opposite the fire, reading to me her diary of the year before in which she described her earnest efforts to help Monty in his illness. It was a wild day, and perhaps this influenced her to become somewhat upset. I felt distressed for her because she had always secretly believed that she might have been able to have done more than she actually did. This was untrue, of course. Nothing could have saved him.

A tremendous storm was blowing and as I often do when this happens, I switched on the trawler waveband to hear what the ships thought of the weather. The unknown voices came over the air from ships I would never know, and yet so frank, so intimate were these voices that I felt I could have taken part in their conversations. Suddenly I heard a cry at the door.

‘Did you hear that, Jeannie?’

One can imagine cries in a storm, or cars arriving, or planes overhead. When the gales blow I am always saying that I hear someone shouting, or Jeannie believes someone has roared down the lane in his car, or I am imagining an airliner in trouble. This is what happens when you live in isolation and there are no standardised sounds of civilisation to measure against unreality.

‘I thought it was a miaow,’ said Jeannie.

And it was.

I opened the door and there was the little black cat huddled outside in the rain. It did not wait for me to invite it in. It rushed past my feet into the room, and sat itself down at the foot of the bookshelf which hides the sink; and waited there, as Monty had always done, yellow eyes looking up at Jeannie for the saucer she was only too ready to give it.

What was I to do? It had acted according to plan. It had fulfilled the conditions. I had put up a resistance, as indeed I had done when Monty was produced to me at the Savoy as a kitten, but the situation was beyond my control. How could I deny a home to a cat that had come to Minack in such a remarkable way?

It was a female. The vet who dealt with her said she was about three months old. He took her away, performed the necessary operation, and when we collected her she purred all the way home. A dainty little cat, totally black except for a wisp of heart-shaped white on her chest, and with a pretty little head fit for a chocolate box. We never knew where she came from. We made exhaustive enquiries within a radius of ten miles in case she had indeed been loved by someone, and then lost; but not a soul knew anything about her.

We were warned that she would not stay with us. A cat born out in the wild, and this must have been the explanation, always returns to the wild. A wild cat, in fact, is always a wild cat. That is what we were told.

But she is still with us today, three years later, and she is over there now curled in the corner of the sofa, plump and as glossy as a ripe blackberry. I cannot believe she is the same little black cat which hurled itself against the wire netting of the chicken run.

And her name? She is called Lama, after the Dalai Lama who was at the time escaping from Tibet.

Geoffrey, meanwhile, had accepted the sparring which preceded her arrival with solid calm. He had tolerated the interest shown in the cat, but his mind was on his work. He lived in his own world. And I do not think he really approved that girls were working alongside him. He had spent his life making use of his brawn; always on the cliffs, always turning ground, or shovelling potatoes in or shovelling them out, or digging up bulbs or planting them again. His was a world of muscle and long-established traditions. It was a fading world and he had, as it happens, the intelligence to know it. The shovel was a dying instrument and the shovel man was going the way of the horse. The reign of the cliffs was over. Science was replacing brawn. All of us who depended on the little meadows that stared out at the sun and the sea, that for generations had rewarded those who toiled in them, were trying to adjust themselves. Jeannie and I were intellectually aware of this. Geoffrey sensed it. That was the only difference between us.

He was away for seven weeks that spring, first in hospital and then convalescence; and I was on my own again as far as the heavy work was concerned. It was the time of tomato planting, of soil preparation and seeding, and then of potato lifting. Most of my waking hours were spent driving the big tractor, ploughing and cultivating the ground, or using the lurching rotovator or, when May came, stabbing my shovel under the potato plants with the girls and Jeannie picking up behind me.

We only had a half-ton of seed that year; and it was the last year we ever grew potatoes. We had planted them in the meadows of Minack cliff which we had cut ourselves when we first came, a patchwork of meadows of deep soil and high hedges, secret meadows that a stranger would not find unless he was led, meadows so small that you might wonder why they were there. Each one tilting towards the sea, each one so designed to receive the greatest possible protection from the anger of the wind, from the clammy poison of the spray. That was the idea and the hope.

I remember the first of those meadows. We still lived in London but Minack had become tentatively ours in the sense that our friend Harry Laity allowed us to be his tenants. We travelled down whenever we could for a few days; and on one of the earliest visits Jeannie and I became childishly excited because we found a pocket of ground which obviously, long ago, had been a cultivated meadow.

It was right at the bottom of the cliff, edging the last drop to the sea; so when we stood in the shadow of its once-cared-for cultivation, we could look down on the waves when the tide was high, or on rocks and shallow pools when it was low. On one side there was an ancient stone wall, on another a high elderberry hedge; and in the centre was the meadow itself, chest high in undergrowth yet seemingly shouting at us to recognise it. Ghosts were there. Old men with sickles, blazing sunshine, parched soil, gulls’ cries, tempests raging, forgotten harvests, a wren’s song, badgers playing, the scent of primroses on soft spring mornings. We saw this hint of a meadow, and for a glorious two days Jeannie and I with the insane urge of enthusiasm ripped the undergrowth away, broke up the roots, and before we hurried back to civilisation, stared at the sweet earth, thankful for its reality.

Jane loved the potato season, though heaven knows why. Doubtless it was because she was unencumbered by the financial considerations by which Jeannie and I were always judging its progress. We were always worrying whether this meadow or that had had a good yield; or raging because the morning’s post had brought news of a bad drop in prices. My aches brought on by the digging became worse on such occasions, and the half-hundredweight bags when I carried them up to the top of the cliff felt as if they weighed half a ton.

Jane said she liked the sensation of the soil running through her fingers as she searched for the potatoes. She would be on her knees, barefooted as usual, scratching away at the ground like a badger, then call out that she didn’t think much of my digging. It was an old joke of the potato season.

‘You’d better catch some fish, Mr Tangye. We’ve got plenty of chips!’

And by this she meant I had been careless, that I hadn’t dug deep enough under the plant, and the shovel had cut the potatoes in half. Then, a few minutes later, I would get my own back. I would thrust my shovel into the soil a few yards behind her, and find a potato or two which she had failed to find and pick up.