The Cat Page 7

  The Rat stayed up late that night, in his room. From time to time he would check the mirror for sight of the Cat. He could hear the Cat in the bathroom, and the sound of the Cat singing, as he tried on different kinds of outfit. Then at last, he saw the Cat flit across the garden – a flash of white jacket and spats in the darkness – and through the hedge to the garages beyond.

  That night, all the animals had sensed that something important was about to happen. The Mouse had seen a small crowd begin to gather, with the Rat at their head, in the flowerbeds that lined the drive. A murmur of conversation rippled the summer air. The garage was dark except for a tiny flickering light.

  ‘Cat’s in there!’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Wait!’ hissed the Rat.

  The Mouse stood in the shadows. The garden seemed drenched in midnight blue. The flowers hung, almost black, over the wild, untrimmed borders. The Mouse strained to see in the darkness, wanting to join the Rat, yet afraid to do so. He was overcome by a sense of foreboding. Then the garage doors whirred open on electric hinges, and he saw the Cat, briefly illumined in the light from the dashboard, studying the controls of the car. Despite himself, the Mouse felt a tremor of something, a feeling, an inspiration, a stirring, an awkward impulse. The Mouse’s mouth felt dry.

  ‘No. Cat! Don’t be a fool!’ he shouted, surprised at how loud his voice had become. Swiftly, the Rat appeared at his shoulder:

  ‘Keep down, Mouse. There’s no telling what may happen,’ he said, gripping the Mouse, pushing him back deeper into the shadows.

  ‘But Rat!’ said the Mouse. The Rat held his fingers to his lips, smiling at his old friend, as an engine fired in the gloom. The engine screamed, the gears engaged and the car jolted forwards then back, then reversed up the drive.

  ‘Keep down! Keep down everyone,’ shouted the Rat, as the Cat reversed crudely onto the lawn, and turned with a crash of gears towards the road. The animals held their breath. The engine roared, the wheels spun, the car disappeared in a cloud of blue exhaust.

  For a long time the animals sat upon the lawn. Some went to the gate, and peered down the now empty road, overhung with trees, towards the main road, where the Cat’s tail lights had turned. The garden was quiet, and they could feel the dew settling on their clothes. Overhead the leaves rustled. Then, faintly, they heard the sound of distant sirens, coming nearer, and the animals sighed, and nodded, and a hubbub of consternation rose from the lawn into the night sky, stirring Mrs Digby where she slept.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A NEW BEGINNING

  The Mouse watched the dawn come up, with a gradual seepage of colour behind the distant hills, until the first rays of the morning sun hit the chimney pots and turretted attics of ‘Chez Maupassant’, warming the Edwardian finials and sculpted ridge tiles. Looking down from an upstairs window, the Mouse could see the garden, still steeped in misty shade. All around he could hear the noise of bird-song, from every bush and tree.

  The Rat was working in the room, behind the Mouse, struggling with the Cat’s papers, which were by now strewn all over the floor.

  ‘I can’t make head or tail of this,’ he said, walking across the carpet, a piece of till roll trailing behind him. ‘What’s this? Three gross of kippers? One pair of pheasants, four bottles of Bollinger champagne?’

  ‘Those were the days,’ said the Mouse.

  ‘Its profligacy. We’re better off without him!’ said the Rat.

  The Mouse could see there was once again a youthful, mischievous lift to his step, and he whistled and sang as he dragged the piles of credit card statements to and fro, without, the Mouse noted, seeming to make any sense of any of them.

  ‘Vets!’ spat the Cat, struggling to get up. Through a blurred penumbra he could see the vet, peering at him under the light from Mrs Digby’s anglepoise lamp, indeed he could see right up the vet’s nose. He could smell the vet’s supper, indeed almost tell which wine the vet had drunk. The Cat drifted, in and out of consciousness.

  He struggled upright, but the tightly buttoned waistcoat had slipped down, and now held him. He could see Mrs Digby’s face leaning over him, and her hair brushed his cheek. Her face was anxious, concerned.

  ‘What happened?’ the Cat asked, but his voice was a dull croak, and seemed far away. He remembered the car, swerving, and the wipers going on, instead of the brakes.

  The vet’s hands were feeling along his body now. Horrid, bony, intrusive, antiseptic fingers, thought the Cat. The Cat scrabbled, but his legs would not move. Someone was holding his legs down! The vet had a syringe out now. They were pointing a syringe at his bottom! There was a sharp, burning sensation in the Cat’s buttocks. The sound of distant barking dogs on a foggy night, the scent of new mown lawn, the cry of birdsong in a summer dawn passed through the Cat’s mind as the penumbra through which he saw the room began to narrow, a closing in, a shutting off, and the Cat felt his fear begin to dwindle, to fade, like a hawk in the high summer sky, flying ever higher.

  Mrs Digby looked in at him, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Why was she crying? Her face was streaked with tears. And then the Cat realised, just as the lights began to dim, the Cat realised that all the birds were singing, and that the garden outside was alive with movement; not a fearful, timid scurrying and a secret, greedy scratching, but a loud and confident, integrated kind of noise, of small creatures, going about their work. The Cat realised suddenly that the Rat had won.

  Then he heard the snap of the vet removing his rubber gloves … The snap of rubber gloves! How terrible a last sound to hear! The room darkened and the human voices faded, and the Cat felt sleep coming upon him, a leaden, closing, deadening, heavy sleep.

  The Rat uncorked another bottle of grappa.

  ‘Mouse!’ he cried. ‘Mouse, we’ll need lists. And a secure store. We need names of all the animals. How much food have we got? To each according to their meanness.’

  ‘Means,’ corrected the Mouse. ‘From each according to their means.’

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Enter,’ barked the Rat, signalling that the Mouse should open up the cat-flap to whoever was outside. The Mouse drew back the latch (‘Just to keep the draughts down’) the Rat had said, and the thin, curious face of a fieldvole appeared in the gap.

  ‘Hullo,’ said the Mouse. The fieldvole seemed nervous, and beset with curiosity.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Mouse,’ he began. The Mouse was surprised by his deferential air. No fieldvole had ever been deferential to the Mouse before.

  ‘What is it Mouse?’ said the Rat.

  ‘Its a fieldvole,’ said the Mouse.

  ‘Let him in,’ commanded the Rat.

  The Mouse lifted the flap. The tiny animal was barely half his size, and slipped on the lino, unaccustomed to its smoothness.

  ‘Careful,’ said the Mouse, helping him up.

  Almost immediately, another knock came at the cat-flap.

  ‘What now?’ barked the Rat.

  ‘There’s another one,’ said the Mouse, opening to find another fieldvole, identical in every respect to the first, standing outside. Looking out into the garden (where by now it was raining), the Mouse could see quite an array of animals: some moles, a sea of voles, three squirrels, assembled there on the patio.

  ‘There’s more here, Rat,’ he cried.

  ‘Ask them all to come in,’ said the Rat.

  Slowly, the kitchen filled with animals. Unaccustomed to the luxuriance of the Cat’s former lifestyle, they dried their feet, and stared, and began to shuffle towards the living room. The Rat jumped up on the occasional table, the anglepoise lamp throwing a bright spotlight upon him, and a cape draped elegantly across one shoulder.

  ‘Welcome,’ he cried. ‘Welcome to a “Chez Maupassant” that is truly ours!’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  REST AND PEACE

  The Cat stumbled to his feet. He felt groggy. His legs were numb. His mouth was dry. How much had he drunk? Where w
as he? He could remember nothing. He felt mysteriously wet. He had had an awful dream. A really awful dream. He shook his head. He tried to wash himself. He was incredibly thirsty. He lurched across the floor of Mrs Digby’s kitchen. Was he dead? The cat-flap tapped in the wind, leading to the outside world. The Cat nosed his way out into a perfect garden of manicured lawn and trimmed borders. A bird-bath stood, in a secluded spot, overhung by dense foliage and a convenient overhanging branch. There were many shrubs of quite beautiful proportions, as if topiaried by an army of gardeners. Indeed everything about the garden spoke of extravagant attention to detail, energy, vision, and wealth.

  But the Cat had other thoughts in mind. What had he been doing in Mrs Digby’s house? Why were his paws wrapped in bandages? Why did he feel so weak? The Cat lurched instinctively across the lawn towards the hedgerows and the shadows. He heard voices through the hedge. He heard Rat through the hedge. What was Rat doing? What was Rat saying? Peering through the hedge, the Cat could see the crowd now, spilling out from the kitchen of ‘Chez Maupassant’, through the cat-flap. They were in his house! The Cat stepped forwards, out across the patio. A murmur of ‘Cat!’ went up. The crowd turned and gaped, but they did not run, as he weakly eased himself up and into the kitchen, through the press of bodies.

  ‘Cat’s finished,’ he heard the Rat say.

  ‘And a new era is opening up!’ He could see them all now, their grubby feet on his carpet, their dull, ignorant faces, listening to the Rat, believing him. Some of them pulled back, to make way for him, only slightly, and the Cat found himself hemmed in.

  ‘Stop it,’ said the Cat. ‘Look what they’re doing to the carpet’. The Rat stopped at the sound of his voice. The Cat tried to stand up, but his legs folded under him. A murmur of consternation filled the room.

  ‘It’s a ghost,’ cried the more gullible creatures.

  ‘Cat,’ said the Rat, suavely. ‘Take a seat at the back, would you’. And when the Cat had settled – all the time watched by the Rat, who took in his condition, the bandages, and the wince of pain as he tried to sit – the Rat said in a loud voice:

  ‘The Cat is not well. And we must decide what to do.’

  ‘Well, what ARE we going to do now?’ shrilled the Mouse. ‘I mean there’s not nearly enough food to go round.’

  ‘You could buy some more,’ said the Cat.

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ snapped the Rat.

  The Cat lay upon the carpet, weirdly bandaged, with one good eye looking out at them all in a rather strange way.

  ‘The accident has somehow deepened me,’ said the Cat, languidly, lying back, half his body covered by a check blanket.

  ‘How d’ye mean, deepened?’ asked the Mouse.

  ‘I’ve been to the very doors of it,’ said the Cat, his one good eye disconcertingly glaring at the Mouse from underneath the bandage. ‘Damn I feel so useless you know, Mouse, with this leg and everything.’ The Mouse felt sorry for the Cat. The Rat snorted rudely in the background.

  ‘The passage of time, Mouse, is painful to me. It always has been, for a Cat. You know, that’s something you maybe don’t know about Cats. Our concept of time, is of the very briefest, and this, well …’ The Cat gestured at the bandages, then looked again at his claws, as if fascinated by them, then back at the Mouse to see what kind of impression he was making.

  ‘Odd how long and pink they are,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’ The Mouse looked. The Cat’s claws were the same as they had always been.

  ‘My goodness! They’re more like hands every day,’ he said, humouring the Cat.

  ‘Ironic!’ said the Cat. ‘Ironic that the deepening begets this. You see, Mouse, I’m becoming human at last,’ said the Cat. ‘Isn’t it fantastic! Love! I will be able to love! You’ve heard the songs! O Sole Mio!’ And here the Cat burst into song, a perfect Italian aria, without a trace of cat, a beautiful, plangent, reverberating tenor, with his claw upon his chest.

  ‘The more I experience, the more I become human,’ he said.

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ said the Mouse.

  ‘You think so,’ said the Cat, and reached for the playing cards, dealing out the Mouse a seven card poker hand with his long finger-claws. The Mouse looked at the hand.

  ‘Five aces,’ he said.

  The Cat winked.

  ‘Don’t listen to him Mouse,’ warned the Rat. ‘Animals only become human in books. Just remember that.’

  The Cat examined the mess the animals had left; the trail of footprints across the lino, and the small fragments of food – a piece of cheese, rejected by a squirrel, vol-au-vents and chocolate. How dare they disobey him? How dare they disregard his arguments? Surely he was right, in himself, in what he had said to them. How stupid animals could be. Munch them up, why didn’t he? The Cat dropped clumsily to the floor, and made off slowly, crab-like, towards the cat-flap and the garden beyond.

  ‘Cat’s grumpy today,’ said the Rat. ‘Has he had his lunch?’

  But the garden seemed to mock the Cat now. Far from a natural order having developed, the whole thing had been engulfed in weeds, their tangled stems hiding laughing faces, laughing at his downfall and the trick the Rat had played upon him. Laughing at his powerlessness. Even though he was still right! What place was there for him now?

  The Cat sat down, but a searing pain struck him in the buttocks. Looking down, he saw a small, sharp, spiny thistle. He heard a snigger. Looking up he could see a fieldvole laughing at him too.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ came the Rat’s voice. ‘Oh damn and blast it!’ The noise from the Rat’s office in the attic echoed in the stairwell. The Cat, who had been resting in the best armchair, moved his one good ear to focus on the sound more clearly. Even from downstairs the Mouse could hear rustling paper, and bills being scrunched into balls and thrown on the floor, and the deep heavy sighs of the Rat as he tried to make sense of the house accounts: to balance the costs of catfood against the considerable costs of his own impulse purchases: the boxes of crackers and the chocolates that the Cat claimed to have seen him eat in secret, and heard him unwrapping under the floorboards.

  ‘D’ye think the Rat knows about accounts,’ asked the Cat, settling himself comfortably, with a histrionic ‘ouch!’ as his bad leg caught in the cushion. The Mouse was quick to leap to the Rat’s defence.

  ‘The Rat’s sharp, Cat.’

  ‘Intellectual, you think?’ asked the Cat, grinning invisibly at the Mouse’s discomfort.

  ‘Oh bloody hell!’ came the Rat’s voice from upstairs.

  ‘Maybe you’d better help him,’ suggested the Mouse, quietly, lest the Rat should hear.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly, with my bad leg,’ said the Cat. ‘Look here, Mouse, is there any of that rabbit left?’ The Mouse knew there was not. The Cat stirred a little restlessly. His stomach growled. The Mouse wished the Rat were not so far away in the attic.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Mouse,’ said the Cat. ‘I’m a changed man, I mean Cat.’ The Cat corrected himself quickly. ‘Although I am not yet a man, Mouse,’ he added gravely. ‘I feel that yes, the accident has deepened my understanding, and made me appreciate frailty, and weakness, without of course necessarily meaning that such things are good,’ said the Cat. ‘Mellow, that’s the word, Mouse. Much more mellow all round,’ and with that the Cat stretched out his claws, and ripped away at the cushions for a moment or so.

  As the days had passed, the Cat’s memory had begun to return, causing him discomfort, for in amongst the unpleasant horror of his encounter with the vet there now began to appear some other images, perhaps from later, from the time between when the vet had left and he had awakened, somewhere between death and life, in which a tiny, recognisable figure would appear, shouting at him, and pouring water on him, and waving a small, plump, pink belly in his face, and crying all the time ‘Cat! Cat! Wake up! Cat! Wake up! Don’t die!’ Damn the Mouse! How could he still wish to eat him? The Cat remembered the Mouse shouting at him, and the clear tumb
le of crystal water as it poured over him, and the Mouse’s voice crying over and over again: ‘Walk! Walk!’

  And as the images of the Mouse’s actions that night hardened into certainty, the Cat found himself more than ever uncomfortable in the old house, and in the Mouse’s presence. Why had the Mouse not let him die when he had had the chance? Far worse to live and wish to eat one’s saviours, thought the Cat. The Cat could not think why the Mouse had rescued him. It was utterly nonsensical, in every way, like something a human being might have done.

  The Cat limped towards the boundary fence, out along the drive, his one bad leg dragging as he went. Overhead, a circling hawk, looking down, paused for a moment, then passed on, flying high in the cold air, the spread of the Home Counties laid out beneath him, and marked the spot in his memory.

  The Cat heard the branches of the trees creaking, and the low rustle of their leaves, and smelt the smell of everything, even of things that could not be seen. His ears were alert, his whiskers bristled. He paused under the hedgerow. Overhead, the old ‘For Sale’ sign eased gently back and forth on its mildewed post. There were no takers for ‘Chez Maupassant’ in the slump. The house was too large, too old, and it had gone down too far.

  The Cat sat there, his oval eyes glazed like yellow earthenware pots, slightly cracked. He heard Mrs Digby’s car in the drive, and the sound of her voice. His eyes seemed to darken. His tummy rumbled.

  Slowly, gently, easing himself along, the Cat slipped back through the hedge, looking one last time at ‘Chez Maupassant’. Already he could see the Rat, fastening shut the cat-flap, and the Mouse, carrying a thin volume under his arm, with a straw in the corner of his mouth, strolling aimlessly towards the garden bottom. He pushed forwards onto the smooth lawn next door. The kitchen door was open, and Mrs Digby stood there, taking some giblets out of a chicken.