The Primrose Pursuit Read Free Page A

manage a little food after all. Don’t suppose F.O. would have done that: just effed and blinded and crunched his humbugs.
    But you know, it still feels a bit off without him; though I’m not too sad as Maurice says he has gone to where all good dogs and vicars go: to the wondrous kennel in the sky, full of gin and bones and really good smells like rotting rabbit and that smoky stuff he used to spray the church with which made me sneeze. Oh yes, he’ll be fine up there all right. In fact I expect I’ll join him one day; you never know, it could be pretty good fun. But meanwhile there are important things to do down here, i.e. get the lie of the land and the measure of our new owner.
    You see it’s all right for Maurice (so far as anything ever is right for the cat) because he has already had one lady owner – the Fotherington woman who the vicar did in. So I suppose he knows a bit about mistresses. But I’ve only had masters, so having the Prim to deal with may be tricky. Maurice says the thing to do is to watch closely and keep quiet. He says it’s all about making the right … uhm … ass-ment or some such, and then acting accordingly. I’m not too good at keeping quiet myself – never seen the point of it – but I think I can make an ass-whatsit all right, it just needs concentration. The great thing is to keep a guard onyour rear. F.O. was always having to guard his, so I expect I’ve learnt a bit from him. Besides, I’ve got what the cat hasn’t: sixth sense. Maurice doesn’t like me talking about that, says he doesn’t believe in it and it’s all non -sense. But I know what I know, and it comes in pretty handy, I can tell you. So I’ll use some of it to get P.O.’s number … A bit of the old dog-nous beats cat-craft any day!
    And talking of getting numbers, I went to inspect the chinchillas this morning, the same ones that were here when we came before – Boris and Karloff. They got a shock all right. I was just strolling casually up to their cage door (well, not strolling exactly – sort of charging), when I heard Boris say, ‘Oh my arse and whiskers, there’s that’s blithering dog again!’ ‘Which one?’ its mate asked. ‘The bouncing bugger,’ roared Boris, ‘take cover!’ And that’s what they did: scuttled into the back of their hutch and stayed there like stuck hedgehogs. All I could see were those pink mad eyes glowing in the dark.
    Ho! Ho! I thought, three can play at that game! So I sat down on my haunches and waited patiently, pretending to be Maurice. In fact I even tried doing one of the cat’s special miaows (you know the sort, those awful rump-freezing ones), but somehow I couldn’t quite get the hang of it and it came out sounding a bit odd – odder even than when Maurice lets fly. Still, it seemed to do the trick as the next moment there was a great thumping and squeaking from inside and I knew it was Karloff having the vapours. And then Boris broke cover and hurled himself against the mesh shouting ‘Swine!’ Personally I thought that was what the cat would call ‘common’ and told him to calm down otherwise he might trip over one of his stupid lugholes. (I mean what self-respecting rabbit has ears that sweepthe ground? Plain daft I call it.) I could see he didn’t like that as he started tearing chunks out of his soppy carrot and spitting them on the ground. A right old mess he was making, and I pointed out that if I made that sort of mess in the kitchen I’d get the slipper. He squeaked back that he had every right to make a sodding mess if he wanted and that if he were my human owner it wasn’t a slipper I’d get but a socking great boot. I thought that was RUDE .
    Just goes to show, anyone can see that these chinchillas are ‘not used to polite society’ as Maurice would say. Still, they are better sport than that Mavis Briggs person who used to plague the vicar; so all in all I think I could get to like it here. As the cat says, it’s just a question