More Cats in the Belfry (17 page)

  I laughed a lot about Uncle Walt and, encouraged, Mr Woodrow started off again.

  'They bowlers was handy for a lot of things,' he said. 'There were another fellow – old George Thorn – who used to do the same sort of job over at Tiptree. Then one day, when he was supposed to be workin' in the yard, the farmer noticed 'n disappearin' over the wall. Farmer wondered what he were up to, so he crept up and looked over to see. George had his bowler on the ground and was crouchin' in front of a gleanie's' – guinea-fowl's – 'nest he must have spotted there, and he was ladling out the eggs. "One for Master," he counted (he left he in the nest). "One for I." (He put he in his bowler.) "One for Master..." he went on till there was only one left. And as he was lookin' at that 'un and hesitatin', Farmer put his hand over the wall and took it hisself. "Reckon Master had better have he," he said.'

  I laughed appreciatively again and Mr Woodrow, well into his stride by now, asked if I remembered the old Rector's wife – 'she what had one of they peakyneeses'. I said I did. She and her husband were in charge of the parish when Charles and I first came to the valley. 'Bit of an old flanneller,' observed Mr Woodrow. 'Always soapin' people up.' She was only trying to be friendly, I protested. I'd always had a soft spot for the old girl. She'd been very kind to me.

  'Thass as maybe,' he said. 'Anyway, there was these two men what cleared an old overgrown garden round a ruined cottage in the village and planted it with vegetables – sort of an allotment, like, to help out their own. 'N one day one of 'em was liftin' taters there when along comes Rector's wife with her dog, and she looks over the wall and says "You and the Lord have made a good job of that, Albert." "Dunno about that," says Albert. "Lord had this lot to hisself for a hell of a time, and he din't get much done on his own."'

  With which, and a wicked grin, Mr Woodrow touched the brim of his battered old trilby, called his dog and plodded on past the gate. Not down the lane in the direction of the Reasons' cottage, which was his usual route, but up the hill in the wake of Mrs Binney. Interesting, but I hadn't the time that autumn to follow up the convolutions of village affairs. The inside of the cottage badly needed redecorating and, as I'd been warned never to let Bill the ambulance man do anything indoors, I was busy doing the job myself.

  I started with the sitting-room. It being the only living room, I couldn't empty it and give up several days to the work. I had to do it a wall at a time, taking down the pictures, and the books from the bookshelves, moving the furniture so I could get behind it, and at the end of the day, when the paint was dry, putting it all back in place again. It was wet outside, too, and turning cold – not the sort of weather for Tani and Saphra to be out in their house – so I had a big log fire going in the fireplace to dry the walls as I worked, with the Snoozabed in front of it for the cats to sit on.

  Only they didn't. I had dust sheets over the furniture and the stacked-up piles of books, and the cats spent most of their time underneath them. Leaping about, wiggling their paws through gaps trying to get me to play with them – they thought it was a game put on for their amusement. As fast as I threw a sheet over a chair there would be a rush and a dive and two cats would be squirming about underneath it. Tani knocked over brushes, Saphra got paint on himself – emulsion paint, fortunately, which I could get off with water. Oil-based paints have to be removed with spirit, and turps or white spirit are lethal to cats. I had often worried about what to do if a cat did get gloss or undercoat on itself, and a reader writing to me about the misdeeds of her Siamese supplied the answer. Wipe the paint off with gin or vodka, she said. That would do the trick. She kept a bottle of gin in the paint cupboard specially for use on her cat, Tao, who was always getting paint on himself. Sometimes she thought he did it purposely in order to be rubbed with his favourite tipple – ­and if visitors looked askance at times and sniffed the air... it was part of the price one paid, she said, to live with a Siamese cat.

  Saph had never tasted gin, but he did like whisky and sherry: he turned after his uncle Saska in that. It was bad enough when I had guests and he used to sit in front of them willing them to give him licks off their fingers, but giving him a taste for gin or vodka and letting him associate it with getting paint on himself – ­that would have been asking for trouble. He'd have been stuck to every newly painted door in the place. So, rainy weather or not, on glossing days he and Tani were banished to their garden house with the heater on.

  The sitting-room was finished and, encouraged by the result, I decided to get a new carpet. It is a large room and the cost, I knew, would be prohibitive in the ordinary way. So one day I drove down to the Wilton carpet factory near Salisbury and found in their factory shop, just what I was looking for. A hardwearing apple-green broadloom carpet in two sections that would just fit my L-shaped room and which, with a bit of luck, I could lay myself. It would have cost a lot to have it delivered to Somerset, so I had them pack one section into the car boot and the other on to the back seat and got my neighbours to help me unload it into the garage when I got home. There it lay along one side, on top of a stack of ladders, and when Bill the ambulance man rang the next night to say he'd be coming at the weekend to start digging the earth from the back of the cottage – it had slipped down from the hillside over the years, and was blocking the path behind and causing dampness in the kitchen – I told him about the carpet and said I'd like him, when he did come, to help me carry it down to the cottage: it was too heavy for me to manage on my own.

  I should have known better, of course. Ten minutes later Bill, having said yes, he'd help with the carpet at the weekend, came belting down the hill in his car. 'Thought you might like it right away,' he said. 'Then you can get on with putting it down.'

  'It's raining,' I said aghast. 'It'll drag along the ground and get muddy. I can't lift it very high because of my back.' I had arthritis in it – the result, my doctor told me blithely, of doing so much riding in the past. And they tell you to take plenty of exercise...

  He'd carry it, Bill assured me. He'd take the weight in the middle. I need only hold the front end lightly, to guide it.

  You can guess what happened. The rolls were longer than he thought and, held in the middle, they sagged. I supported them in front, he held the middle, and the back ends dragged drearily, unnoticed till we reached the cottage, down the rain-sogged path. I suggested sliding them in through one of the sitting-room windows, to avoid turning a corner with them if we brought them through the hall, and that was another mistake. Bill slid each one over the window frame, came in and pulled them through the rest of the way himself to save me having to haul on them, stacked them one on top of the other along the wall beneath the window, dusted his hands at having accomplished his mission – and I let out a wail.

  'Look at my fresh paint,' I moaned. It wasn't any more. Where the muddied carpet had brushed against the wall there were long black gritty steaks, like a Plimsollline along the side of a ship.

  'That'll wash off,' said Bill complacently, and away he went, glowing with virtue at a good deed well done, leaving me to clean the wall as best I could and try to protect the carpet from the attentions of the two cats who, when eventually let into the room, discovered what they took to be the biggest stropping post in the world laid out along the wall especially for their benefit. It was the hessian backing that was the attraction – specially geared to their claws. They stropped away on it all the evening, daring each other with raised backs, bushing their tails, dashing up and down the length of the roll. It was obvious it was going to have to be laid as quickly as possible If I was to have a carpet left at all, so I rang Dora and Nita who had volunteered to help me put it down after the weekend, asking whether they could come the next day instead. They couldn't. They had an engagement they couldn't alter. Not to worry, I'd put it down by myself, I said, more airily than I felt.

  The next day, with the cats shut in their garden house so they couldn't get in the way, I did. Not without event. I put the first place down in the main part of the room, pivoting the Welsh dresser, the sofa and the heavy carved bureau over it as I worked – and then discovered I'd got the rolls of carpet mixed. The second piece was actually the larger. Fortunately I hadn't cut any of it to fit. I rolled up the first piece, heaving the furniture back over it as I went, had a snack lunch and worked on. It was late afternoon before the room was covered to my satisfaction, and I sat back on my heels to survey the result. White walls, oak beams, deep-piled carpet and the old carved furniture back in place – it looked, as it was, a spacious, comfortable room with two and a half centuries of occupation behind it, needing only one thing to complete the picture – a roaring log fire with two cats in their Snoozabed in front of it, which was what, in next to no time, I had.

  Worn out with the day's efforts, I trundled off to bed accompanied by my furry henchmen, woke around three in the morning and couldn't go back to sleep, and came down to have another look at my handiwork. Saph came with me. I made some tea and we sat there sharing Marie biscuits.

  'Looks good, doesn't it?' I said to Saph, gazing round the room. WOW, he agreed enthusiastically. Any more Biscuits? he enquired, standing up against my knee to check for himself. At which moment, suddenly, from upstairs, there came a clarion call. Tani was addressing us from the landing. What were we Doing down there? Didn't we know the Time? We ought to be in Bed, she bawled. Obviously she had no intention of joining us. Like a Victorian parent she lectured us sanctimoniously from above and I found myself actually feeling guilty.

  'We're coming,' I shouted defensively, gathering up my cup and saucer. Hurry Up, bawled her ladyship. 'We're coming,' I yelled again. Anyone hearing me would have thought that I was mad. Anyone seeing me would have been sure of it. So harassed was I by Tani's harangue that in a moment of nervous stress I found myself putting the teapot in the refrigerator instead of emptying it.

  Next day it was Saphra's turn to upset our rural tranquillity. Looking again at the newly decorated sitting-room I decided that the one thing needed to complete its appearance of cosy winter country living would be one of my grandmother's honey-coloured brocade draught curtains over the door. I had a pair of them in the chest on the landing. I brought one down, spent an hour taking up the hem to fit the low-lintelled door, inserted the hooks in the runner bar and stood back to admire the effect. Pretty good, I thought, stooping to recover one of the bobbles that had fallen off the curtain edging. The curtain was, after all, very old. I threw the bobble for Saph to chase and he raced after it with delight, tossing it in the air and batting it round the room till eventually he lost it. He came back and sat by the door looking at me expectantly. With apologies to my grandmother, but I could never resist that intent little face, I pulled another bobble off the curtain and threw it for him. The worst thing I could have done, because Saph was no fool. By that time he'd realised where they were coming from.

  When he'd lost that one – at least, I presumed that he'd lost it – he came back and sat down again, and when I pretended that I didn't know what he wanted, he took another bobble off the curtain with his teeth. I laughed, and said how clever he was. Off he went, and in no time was back for another. He was on his hind legs now, reaching up to his limit to get it… at which moment the telephone rang. Immobilised, I chatted to the caller, one worried eye on the curtain on which the bobbles were now missing to above Saphra's reach. As I watched, he shinned up the curtain, climbing like a monkey, pulled off a bobble, came down with it in his mouth, and dissappeared with it round the corner.

  Suspicion began to dawn. He couldn't be losing them at
that
rate. Excusing myself to my caller I rang off hurriedly, rushed round the corner after him and was just in time to see what he was doing. Eating them. With evident relish. Bobbles that were, I calculated rapidly, a good fifty years old or more. Washed, but nethertheless probably containing residue dust of half a century. I dreaded to think what that could be doing to his stomach.

  With more apologies to my grandmother – feeling guilty about it, but she loved cats too, I reminded her – I fetched the scissors, cut off the remaining bobbles (it seemed sacrilege to throw them away so I put them in the bureau drawer) and rang Lanford to ask what I should do. They'd probably go through him like everything else he'd eaten, they told me. Just watch him carefully to see what happened and ring them again if I was worried. Off my own bat I gave him some sardines in oil to lubricate the bobbles – it was helpful in cases of blockage, so I'd read – and every time I passed the bureau during the course of the evening a black-faced cat leapt ahead of me on the to the top of it, breathing sardines heavily on the cottage air and waiting for me to lift the lid so he could help himself to some more bobbles. Some cats never did learn.

  In due course the ones he'd swallowed passed safely on their way. Another Siamese crisis was over. It was no good, though. It just wasn't my week. On Saturday Bill the ambulance man appeared, accompanied by a helper in the shape of a youth called Norm – tall, lanky and decidedly gormless-looking, he reminded me of Rodney in 'Only Fools and Horses'. And in their inimitable, unbelievable way they started digging a passageway behind the cottage.

  It had been dug out previously, years before, but more earth and stones had since slipped down the hillside and piled up against the back wall. It was making the kitchen wall damp, and in places the pile-up reached to quite a height. It needed clearing out and cementing, said Bill. It would be a tight squeeze, working in that narrow space, but he and Norm would do it in two shakes of a turkey's tail. Where would I like the rubble dumped?