Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (31 page)

And we trudge drearily off to dirty sheets and a mean supper of bread and cheese, all I can steal him, but at least the poor soul manifests a hearty appetite now she knows he’s in the world and not the ugliest of mortals; for the first time since that fateful morning, sleeps sound. But sleep comes hard to Puss tonight. He takes a midnight stroll across the square, soon comfortably discusses a choice morsel of salt cod his tabby friend found among the ashes on the hearth before our converse turns to other matters.

“Rats!” she says. “And take your boots off, you uncouth bugger; those three-inch heels wreak havoc with the soft flesh of my underbelly!”

When we’d recovered ourselves a little, I ask her what she means by those “rats” of hers and she proposes her scheme to me. How my master must pose as a
rat-catcher
and I, his ambulant marmalade rat-trap. How we will then go kill the rats that ravage milady’s bedchamber, the day the old fool goes to fetch his rent, and she can have her will of the lad at leisure for, if there is one thing the hag fears more than a cat, it is a rat and she’ll cower in a cupboard till the last rat is off the premises before she comes out. Oh, this tabby one, sharp as a tack is she; I congratulate her ingenuity with a few affectionate cuffs round the head and home again, for breakfast, ubiquitous Puss, here, there and everywhere, who’s your Figaro?

Master applauds the rat ploy; but, as to the rats themselves; how are they to arrive in the house in the first place? he queries.

“Nothing easier, sir; my accomplice, a witty soubrette who lives among the cinders, dedicated as she is to the young lady’s happiness, will personally strew a large number of dead and dying rats she has herself collected about the bedroom of the said ingenue’s duenna, and, most particularly, that of the said ingenue herself. This to be done tomorrow morning, as soon as Sir Pantaloon rides out to fetch his rents. By good fortune, down in the square, plying for hire, a rat-catcher! Since our hag cannot abide either a rat or a cat, it falls to milady to escort the rat-catcher, none other than yourself, sir, and his intrepid hunter, myself, to the site of the infestation.

“Once you’re in her bedroom, sir, if
you
don’t know what to do, then I can’t help you.”

“Keep your foul thoughts to yourself, Puss.”

Some things, I see, are sacrosanct from humour.

Sure enough, prompt at five in the bleak next morning, I observe with my own eyes the lovely lady’s lubberly husband hump off on his horse like a sack of potatoes to rake in his dues. We’re ready with our sign:
SIGNOR FURIOSO, THE LIVING DEATH OF RATS
; and in the leathers he’s borrowed from the porter, I hardly recognise him myself, not with the false moustache. He coaxes the chambermaid with a few kisses—poor, deceived girl! love knows no shame—and so we install ourselves under a certain shuttered window with the great pile of traps she’s lent us, the sign of our profession, Puss perched atop them bearing the humble yet determined look of a sworn enemy of vermin.

We’ve not waited more than fifteen minutes—and just as well, as many rat-plagued Bergamots approach us already and are not easily dissuaded from employing us—when the front door flies open on a lusty scream. The hag, aghast, flings her arms round flinching Furioso; how fortuitous to find him! But, at the whiff of me, she’s sneezing so valiantly, her eyes awash, the vertical gutters of her nostrils aswill with snot, she barely can depict the scenes inside, rattus domesticus dead in her bed and all; and worse! in the Missus’ room.

So Signor Furioso and his questing Puss are ushered into the very sanctuary of the goddess, our presence announced by a fanfare from her keeper on the nose harp.
Attishhoooo!!!

Sweet and pleasant in a morning gown of loose linen, our ingenue jumps at the tattoo of my boot heels but recovers instantly and the wheezing, hawking hag is in no state to sniffle more than: “Ain’t I seen that cat before?”

“Not a chance,” says my master. “Why, he’s come but yesterday with me from Milano.”

So she has to make do with that.

My Tabs has lined the very stairs with rats; she’s made a morgue of the hag’s room but something more lively of the lady’s. For some of her prey she’s very cleverly not killed but crippled; a big black beastie weaves its way towards us over the turkey carpet, Puss, pounce! Between screaming and sneezing, the hag’s in a fine state, I can tell you, though milady exhibits a most praiseworthy and collected presence of mind, being, I guess, a young woman of no small grasp so, perhaps, she has a sniff of the plot already.

My master goes down on hands and knees under the bed.

“My god!” he cries. “There’s the biggest hole, here in the wainscoting, I ever saw in all my professional career! And there’s an army of black rats gathering behind it, ready to storm through! To arms!”

But, for all her terror, the hag’s loath to leave the Master and me alone to deal with the rats; she casts her eye on a silver-backed hairbrush, a coral rosary, twitters, hovers, screeches, mutters until milady assures her, amidst scenes of rising pandemonium:

“I shall stay here myself and see that Signor Furioso doesn’t make off with my trinkets. You go and recover yourself with an infusion of friar’s balsam and don’t come back until I call.”

The hag departs; quick as a flash, la belle turns the key in the door on her and softly laughs; the naughty one.

Dusting the slut-fluff from his knees, Signor Furioso now stands slowly upright; swiftly, he removes his false moustache, for no element of the farcical must mar this first, delirious encounter of these lovers, must it. (Poor soul, how his hands tremble!)

Accustomed as I am to the splendid, feline nakedness of my kind, that offers no concealment of that soul made manifest in the flesh of lovers, I am always a little moved by the poignant reticence with which humanity shyly hesitates to divest itself of its clutter of concealing rags in the presence of desire. So, first, these two smile, a little, as if to say “How strange to meet you here!” uncertain of a loving welcome, still. And do I deceive myself, or do I see a tear a-twinkle in the corner of his eye? But who is it steps towards the other first? Why, she; women, I think, are, of the two sexes, the more keenly tuned to the sweet music of their bodies. (A penny for my foul thoughts, indeed! Does she, that wise, grave personage in the negligee, think you’ve staged this grand charade merely in order to kiss her hand?) But, then—oh, what a pretty blush! steps back; now it’s his turn to take two steps forward in the saraband of Eros.

I could wish, though, they’d dance a little faster; the hag will soon recover from her spasms and shall she find them in flagrante?

His hand, then, trembling, upon her bosom; hers, initially more hesitant, sequentially more purposeful, upon his breeches. Then their strange trance breaks; that sentimental havering done, I never saw two fall to it with such appetite. As if the whirlwind got into their fingers, they strip each other bare in a twinkling and she falls back on the bed, shows him the target, he displays the dart, scores an instant bullseye. Bravo! Never can that old bed have shook with such a storm before. And their sweet choked mutterings, poor things: “I never …” “My darling …” “More …” And etc. etc. Enough to melt the thorniest heart.

He rises up on his elbows once and gasps at me: “Mimic the murder of the rats, Puss! Mask the music of Venus with that clamour of Diana!”

A-hunting we shall go! Loyal to the last, I play catch as catch can with Tab’s dead rats, giving the dying the
coup de grace
and baying with resonant vigour to drown the extravagant screeches that break forth from that (who would have suspected?) more passionate young woman as she comes off in fine style. (Full marks, Master.)

At that, the old hag comes battering at the door. What’s going on? Why for the racket? And the door rattles on its hinges.

“Peace!” cries Signor Furioso. “Haven’t I just now blocked the great hole?”

But milady’s in no hurry to don her smock again, she takes her lovely time about it; so full of pleasure gratified her languorous limbs you’d think her very navel smiled. She pecks my master prettily thank-you on the cheek, wets the gum on his false moustache with the tip of her strawberry tongue and sticks it back on his upper lip for him, then lets her wardress into the scene of the faux carnage with the most modest and irreproachable air in the world.

“See! Puss has slaughtered all the rats.”

I rush, purring proud, to greet the hag; instantly, her eyes o’erflow. “Why the bedclothes so disordered?” she squeaks, not quite blinded yet, by phlegm and chose for her post from all the other applications on account of her suspicious mind, even (oh, dutiful) when in
grande peur des rats.

“Puss had a mighty battle with the biggest beast you ever saw upon this very bed; can’t you see the bloodstains on the sheets? And now, what do we owe you, Signor Furioso, for this singular service?”

“A hundred ducats,” says I, quick as a flash, for I know my master, left to himself, would like an honourable fool, take nothing.

“That’s the entire household expenses for a month!” wails avarice’s well-chosen accomplice.

“And worth every penny! For those rats would have eaten us out of house and home.” I see the glimmerings of sturdy backbone in this little lady. “Go, pay them from your private savings that I know of, that you’ve skimmed off the housekeeping.”

Muttering and moaning but nothing for it except to do as she is bid; and the furious Sir and I take off a laundry basket full of dead rats as souvenir—we drop it, plop! in the nearest sewer. And sit down to one dinner honestly paid for, for a wonder.

But the young fool is off his feed again. Pushes his plate aside, laughs, weeps, buries his head in his hands and, time and time and time again, goes to the window to stare at the shutters behind which his sweetheart scrubs the blood away and my dear Tabs rests from her supreme exertions. He sits, for a while, and scribbles; rips the page in four, hurls it aside. I spear a falling fragment with a claw. Dear God, he’s took to writing poetry.

“I must and will have her for ever,” he exclaims.

I see my plan has come to nothing. Satisfaction has not satisfied him; that soul they both saw in one another’s bodies has such insatiable hunger no single meal could ever appease it. I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.

“How can I live without her?”

You did so for twenty-seven years, sir, and never missed her for a moment.

“I’m burning with the fever of love!”

Then we’re spared the expense of fires.

“I shall steal her away from her husband to live with me.”

“What do you propse to live on, sir?”

“Kisses,” he said distractedly. “Embraces.”

“Well, you won’t grow fat on that, sir; though
she
will. And then, more mouths to feed.”

“I’m sick and tired of your foul-mouthed barbs, Puss,” he snaps. And yet my heart is moved, for now he speaks the plain, clear, foolish rhetoric of love and who is there cunning enough to help him to happiness but I? Scheme, loyal Puss, scheme!

My wash completed, I step out across the square to visit that charming she who’s wormed her way directly into my own hitherto-untrammelled heart with her sharp wits and her pretty ways. She exhibits warm emotion to see me; and, oh! what news she has to tell me! News of a rapt and personal nature, that turns my mind to thoughts of the future, and, yes, domestic plans of most familial nature. She’s saved me a pig’s trotter, a whole entire pig’s trotter the Missus smuggled to her with a wink. A feast! Masticating, I muse.

“Recapitulate,” I suggest, “the daily motions of Sir Pantaloon when he’s at home.”

They set the cathedral clock by him, so rigid and so regular his habits. Up at the crack, he meagrely breakfasts off yesterday’s crusts and a cup of cold water, to spare the expense of heating it up. Down to his counting-house, counting out his money, until a bowl of well-watered gruel at midday. The afternoon he devotes to usury, bankrupting, here, a small tradesman, there, a weeping widow, for fun and profit. Dinner’s luxurious, at four; soup, with a bit of rancid beef or a tough bird in it—he’s an arrangement with the butcher, takes unsold stock off his hands in return for a shut mouth about a pie that had a finger in it. From four-thirty until five-thirty, he unlocks the shutters and lets his wife look out, oh, don’t I know! while hag sits beside her to make sure she doesn’t smile. (Oh, that blessed flux, those precious loose minutes that set the game in motion!)

And while she breathes the air of evening, why, he checks up on his chest of gems, his bales of silk, all those treasures he loves too much to share with daylight and if he wastes a candle when he so indulges himself, why, any man is entitled to one little extravagance. Another draught of Adam’s ale healthfully concludes the day; up he tucks besides Missus and, since she is his prize possession, consents to finger her a little. He palpitates her hide and slaps her flanks: “What a good bargain!” Alack, can do no more, not wishing to profligate his natural essence. And so drifts off to sinless slumber amid the prospects of tomorrow’s gold.

“How rich is he?”

“Croesus.”

“Enough to keep two loving couples?”

“Sumptuous.”

Early in the uncandled morning, groping to the privy bleared with sleep, were the old man to place his foot upon the subfuse yet volatile fur of a shadow-camouflaged young tabby cat—

“You read my thoughts, my love.”

I say to my master: “Now, you get yourself a doctor’s gown, impedimenta all complete or I’m done with you.”

“What’s this, Puss?”

“Do as I say and never mind the reason! The less you know of why, the better.”

So he expends a few of the hag’s ducats on a black gown with a white collar and his skull cap and his black bag and, under my direction, makes himself another sign that announces, with all due pomposity, how he is Il Famed Dottore:
Aches cured, pains prevented, bones set, graduate of Bologna, physician extraordinary.
He demands to know, is she to play the invalid to give him further access to her bedroom?