The Long Shadow (17 page)

“M
UMMY, WHERE’S
M
INOS
?”

“Daddy, have you seen Minos?”

“Granny, we can’t find Minos, he isn’t
anywhere.
”

Useless to explain to them (as Dot was conscientiously doing) what a big, sensible cat Minos was, and that he must have gone for a walk by himself.

“Cats
don’t
go for walks!” the boys protested indignantly and in unison. “Only dogs go for walks!”

“Do you think he’s gone back to Twickenham? Do you think he hated it here?” enquired Vernon, with a mixture of curiosity and concern.
“Could
a cat find his way, all along by the railway line…?”

“
Of
course
it could!” Timmie interjected knowledgeably. “There was a cat I read about who …”

“Silly! That was just a story …!”

“It was
not
a story! It was in the paper. And when at last, all footsore and tired, it got to the gate that led into its own field, it—”

“It didn’t.”

“It did.”

“Didn’t.”

“Did.”

And there, to the relief of the adults concerned, the matter was allowed, temporarily, to rest.

*

How perverse children were. After all the fuss about wanting Minos here—all the tears and the pleadings: and after all the trouble Imogen had gone to, fetching him all the way from Twickenham, their reception of the creature when they encountered
him in the kitchen the following morning had been
lukewarm
to say the least.

“Oh, Minos is here,” Vernon had commented, glancing for a moment from his plate of cornflakes: and, “Granny, you won’t let Minos get at my goldfish, will you?” Timmie had demanded.

“It’s not your goldfish,” Vernon remarked, “it’s all-of-us’s goldfish.”

“It
is
my goldfish!
I
thought of the name for him.
I
thought of calling him Goldie.”

“Goldie isn’t a name, it’s only a—”

*

And so on and so on. Imogen had felt quite absurdly disappointed. All the way home on the train, and lugging the cat-basket through the dark streets, she had buoyed herself up with thoughts of the children’s surprise and delight when they woke up in the
morning
and found their pet actually here; she’d pictured the squeals of rapture, the hugs and kisses of joy and gratitude.

Nothing of the sort. After that one perfunctory exchange at breakfast, they had taken no further notice of the cat whatsoever. All day they had played their usual games, watched television, and squabbled; and all day Minos had dozed in the best chair by the dining-room fire, getting out of it only once, to stalk, aggrieved, over to the second-best chair. This was when Robin turned up to make an issue of his own claims to the most comfortable seat.

You couldn’t say that Minos was being a nuisance, exactly, but it did seem like a waste of time ever to have fetched him.

“I suppose I’ll have to remember to get in some Kat-o-Meal,” Dot had remarked grudgingly, “it’s gone up, too, 6p for a small tin….”

The children had been no more enthusiastic.

“Why
me
?” Timmie had grumbled when asked to fetch the bag of Kitty-Litter from under the stairs, “why not Vernon?”

*

And after all this, now look at them. Just because the wretched cat had been missing for an hour or two before bedtime, they were both going crazy about him all over again. “We
must
have
Minos!” “We can’t go to sleep without Minos.” “Oh, Granny, will Minos
starve
if he’s out all night?”

“Don’t be silly”—Imogen was quite sharp with them—“and considering you haven’t even
looked
at him all day long, or bothered about him the least bit …”

“Oh, but
Granny
…!”

“Oh, Granny, we
have.
I’ve
bothered about him, anyway.”

“And so’ve I, Granny. Granny, what do you think’s
happened
to him?”

Their concern seemed every bit as genuine as their indifference had been. Those were real tears glistening in Timmie’s eyes; and Vernon’s skinny little arms, protruding from the outgrown sleeves of his pyjama jacket, pushed and prodded with pathetic fervour at the blankets and eiderdown of his bunk in case Minos was
somehow
secreted among them.

No, of course he wouldn’t suffocate. No, of course he’ll find his way back. No, cats never get drowned, they keep away from the water. Now, that’s enough, darlings, that’ll do, you must go to sleep now. Yes, of course I’ll listen for him. Yes, of course I’ll leave the larder window open … yes, of course he’ll be here in the morning when you wake up … of course … of course … of course….

*

But he wasn’t. For a few moments, standing at the back door in the icy January dawn, calling and chirrupping vainly into the inert, frost-bound silence of a winter morning, Imogen was
tempted
to tell them all a big lie. Tell them that Minos
had
come back, and was right now asleep on her bed in the attic. Then, they would lose interest totally and at once, and all the fuss would stop. Certainly, not a soul would bother to go all the way up to her room to look.

Still, you can’t
do
this sort of thing. Not really. You just can’t. And so—just as had happened with supper last night—breakfast was left half-eaten, the scullery door was slammed open and shut constantly into the freezing north wind, and the house echoed with argument and lamentations.

Minos! Minos! Where’ve you
got
to? No, of course he couldn’t have … I never said … Yes you did … Minos! Mi-i-nos!

By lunch-time, Imogen had had enough; and more to give them something to do than with any real hope of success, she suggested they should both come out with her that afternoon and search the neighbourhood.

By the time they set out, she was herself beginning to feel a little anxious about the old cat. She should have kept an eye on him during these first two or three days; but he’d seemed to be settling down so nicely, not bothered a bit by his unfamiliar surroundings. And of course there wasn’t actually anything
remarkable
about him electing to spend a night out—or even several nights in succession; but all the same, he
was
sixteen years old, and the neighbourhood
was
strange to him.

It was cold, too, and getting colder. As they hurried along the nearly-deserted roads, shoulders hunched against the wind, she fancied she could smell snow in the air. Already, Vernon’s cheeks were blotchy with cold.

“Minos! Mi-i-i-nos!” they piped now and then, randomly, into the wintry vastness of the suburbs, scanning, with eyes watering in the cold, the grey, frostbound gardens and the greyer roads, straight and bare, stretching endlessly into the wind.

“Mi-nos! Mi-nos!” The children’s voices, thin as reeds through their numbed lips, made Imogen feel curiously depressed. It was all so pointless, of course Minos wouldn’t come, he wasn’t there. A mounting sense of oppression, of growing anxiety, seemed to be closing in on her, quite out of proportion to the mislaying of a cat. Something in the grey, snow-laden air was filling her with a terrible foreboding.

“Granny, I’m cold. Shall we go home now?”

“My hands are freezing, Granny. Don’t you think Minos might have got home by now, if we went back and looked?”

The two pinched little faces gazed up at her trustingly,
half-guilty
and half-hopeful. She watched heroism and common-sense chasing one another experimentally across the untried, baby brows.

It didn’t do always to give
the victory to common-sense.

“Let’s just go down to the Lanes; all those dustbins out in the street are just what he might like. And then, if you’re not too tired, we’ll walk past Garvey’s Boat-house … there are rats there, people say. Minos would love rats.”

Rats! Real, live rats! The prospect revived their flagging spirits briefly, but all the same, the detour was a mistake, as Imogen realised almost at once. They were already too tired, too cold; and then, to crown all, when the dejected little trio finally reached the boat-house, it was locked. With numbed hands, and half-sobbing with frustration, first Vernon and then Timmie shook and rattled the heavy padlock.

“It’s not
fair …
”
sobbed Vernon—or was it Timmie?—“I
knew
we’d …”

“Stop it! Shut up! Listen!” interrupted Timmie—or was it Vernon?—anyway, the other one, the one that had stopped
crying
; and standing there, in a wind that seemed to come slanting from all directions at once round the old building, they all heard it, or fancied they heard it: a creaking, whining sound, that
could
be a cat mewing. Or a loose board, groaning against its neighbour. Or an old, weathered row-boat creaking on its supports. Or almost anything, actually.

Too cold and disheartened to persevere with the quest, Timmie and Vernon nevertheless complained bitterly when Imogen urged them homewards. Whining, grizzling, and waxing self-righteously sentimental about the just-possibly animate sounds they had heard, they dragged along beside her; and only when she said, losing patience: “All right, let’s go back then”, did the complaints abruptly cease.

*

It was quite a job getting them to bed that night.

“Minos! Oh, poor, poor Minos!” they wailed; and could only be pacified by an escalating series of hasty, cobbled-together
promises
about tomorrow, and about the superhuman efforts that would be put into mounting a renewed search. Gradually, the protests diminished, and ceased altogether when Dot gave them each a banana to eat in bed. Usually, only apples were allowed
after tooth-brushing; but, as Dot said, after such an upsetting day it couldn’t really do their teeth any harm.

*

Altogether, Dot was showing herself surprisingly sympathetic about the whole affair. For one who had been reiterating for years that Minos ought to be put away, her concern was really quite touching. All through supper, and in the sitting-room
afterwards
, she seemed as if she couldn’t leave the subject alone. When had the cat last been seen? Had he eaten his Kat-o-Meal before disappearing? And where, anyway, was the cat-basket in which Imogen had brought him from Twickenham? It had been under the dresser in the kitchen yesterday morning, Dot could swear it had. Someone must have moved it—

And so on and so on. Even after the subject had been talked to a standstill, she remained in a curious, fidgety mood, turning the television on and then off again, sighing, picking up her book and laying it down; and presently just sitting, silent, and curiously intent, as if listening for something.

“Hush!” she said once, quite sharply, when Cynthia, laying down her embroidery, began telling the story of her
recently-capped
molar; and when Cynthia retorted, huffily, that of course, if no one was
interested
—Dot merely said “Hush!” again, even more peremptorily.

By half past nine, Imogen had had enough, and went off to the kitchen to make some tea. She was surprised, and by no means pleased, to find Cynthia clicketty-clacking along behind her,
hell-bent
on helping.

Or so she had presumed. When people follow you out to the kitchen like this it usually
is
because they want to drift around putting things idly in the wrong places while you exert yourself to entertain them, and afterwards thank them effusively. Imogen was already bracing herself for the familiar ordeal when it was borne in on her that she had jumped to her conclusion on
insufficient
evidence: Cynthia wasn’t going to help at all.

“Look, Imogen,” she was saying, in the hushed, exultant tones of one who has dire news to impart, “look, it came this
afternoon! by
post
! I didn’t like to give it you with all the others dress.

She was holding out, as she spoke, a brown manila envelope, slightly battered from its long-ish sojourn in the pocket of her dress.

“What, for
me
—?” and Cynthia had the grace to look a little shamefaced.

“Yes, well, I thought it was so
odd,
you see,” she explained, “I mean, why should she be writing to you at all …? And posting it in London, too: I can’t think when she can possibly have
been
in London, because …”

Imogen was turning the letter this way and that under the light. She had seen, the moment Cynthia took the envelope from her pocket, that the writing on it was Ivor’s—Piggy’s, that is to say.

She took a knife from the dresser drawer, and slowly, with monstrous, mounting terror, she slit the thing open.

“What
is
it, Imogen?” Cynthia kept saying. “What’s the matter?” Too vain, even at this exciting moment, to put her
reading
-glasses on, she peered anxiously and without avail over Imogen’s shoulder. “What
is
it? … Why are you looking like that?… Oh, please, Imogen,
say
something …!”

And at last Imogen did.

“Come along,” she said, her voice sounding hoarse and strange even to herself, “come along, we should have checked on this before…. Oh, what fools we’ve been …!”

*

Piggy was not in her room, but it didn’t matter—indeed, it was best that she shouldn’t be. It was easier—much, much easier—to scrabble through her private notes and papers without her. And anyway, it hardly took a minute—she was, after all, a student, and quite a conscientious one, and so there were samples of her handwriting everywhere.

*

None of it in the least like Ivor’s. Why should it be?

Cynthia’s theory had been plausible, and delightfully romantic: but it just happened not to have been true.

And now, with the implications of the thing staring them in the face, the two women leaned over the brief missive, the one all agog with curiosity, the other filled with a mad, sick hope that the message might somehow have changed since she last looked at it.

But it hadn’t.