Cats in the Belfry Read Free

out of bed muttering that, after all, we had a lot of money tied up in that cat. When we opened the spare-room door she was curled up in her basket, having apparently fallen asleep from exhaustion – though it struck me that there was a decided smirk on her face. Charles, being a man, didn't see that. He saw, as he was meant to, only that she looked small and pathetic lying there in the basket, and said – as he was supposed to – that perhaps, for the first night at any rate, we ought to have her in with us. Tenderly he carried her in and deposited her in the crook of my arm where, with a happy sigh, she fell asleep again at once. Charles, with a clear conscience, flopped into his own side of the bed, pulled the clothes over his head and went to sleep himself. Only I stayed awake. I stayed awake because all night long, dreaming nostalgically of Anna, she kept smacking her lips hungrily and loudly right in my ear.
    Â Â We rose next morning to a pouring wet day and another crisis. Sugieh hadn't used her earth-box. The breeder had advised us, as Sugieh wasn't yet used to a garden, to continue using an earth-box until the weather was better, and we had obligingly provided her with our biggest enamel baking dish filled – as the garden was absolutely sodden and Father Adams said Siamese cats got chills from using damp earth-boxes – with a bag of Shorty's sand. We had shown it to her the night before and she had affected not to see it, which was understandable because Siamese cats are very refined and we had only just met. But now it was morning and Sugieh had been with us twelve hours, and still the sand in her box was as untrodden as the Sahara.
    Â Â All through breakfast Charles and I kept darting out into the hall and dibbling our fingers encouragingly into the sand. Sugieh darted too, and dibbled happily with a small blue paw. But she wouldn't get into the box. When the time came for us to leave for town I was frantic with worry, for we wouldn't be back until evening and by that time, I felt sure, Sugieh would have burst.
    Â Â When we got home that night the box was still unused and Sugieh was sitting firmly on the floor. Unburst, but obviously reluctant to move. We were halfway through supper, anxiously wondering whether we ought to call the vet, when Charles had his inspiration. Perhaps, he said, she didn't like sand. It was still raining, so we tried her with sawdust. She didn't like that either. In desperation we cast Father Adams's theories to the wind, filled the box with mud straight from the garden, and put that in front of her. The result was miraculous. With one yell Sugieh was in the box and had flooded it to high-water mark. Supper forgotten, Charles dashed out into the rain at top speed, refilled the box, and offered it to her again. There was no false modesty about Sugieh. She leapt into it once more, raised her small spike of a tail and speedily reseated herself, thanking heaven at the top of her voice that we had at last realised Mother had taught her it was Dirty to use anything but Earth.
    Â Â That was that crisis over. But there were plenty more to follow. There was the first time she went into the garden, for instance. The path was bad enough – she grumbled all the way out that the gravel was hurting her feet – but when we put her down on the lawn and the stubbly grass prickled her paws for the first time she let out one shriek and fled straight up my leg, swearing something had bitten her. She did the same when she saw her first dog, only this time she went on up over my face and stood on my head for extra safety, bawling at him just to try to get her now , that was all.
    Â Â It was most discouraging. Blondin used to do that too, when he was frightened. One old man I know nearly signed the pledge on the spot the night he met me in the lane just after closing time and saw a squirrel yelling defiance at him from the top of my head with his tail bushed out