A Cat in the Window Read online

  With Judy, when we came, was Tim the Persian. Tim was the placid old cat with blue-grey fur so thick that it made him look as if he were wearing a muff, whose unwelcome attention on my first visit resulted in me knocking over the table on which stood my cup of tea. I was friends with him now, of course, and he was so placid that even Monty’s sudden appearance could not annoy him. Tim and Monty tolerated each other from the beginning, but Judy, after one look at the evacuee, decided she would not give him a moment’s peace. Monty was an interloper, and Judy was never to allow him to forget it.

  My own opinion is that Jeannie and her mother were partly to blame because of the method of introduction they chose to arrange. I myself favoured a gradual acclimatisation, an interchange of leftover sniffs after one or the other had left the room, a sight of each other in the garden with one of them safely behind a window. I was cautious, I had an instinct of inevitable trouble if suddenly they were placed nose to nose.

  I expect trouble was inevitable in any case, but it certainly exploded with the least delay. I unloaded our luggage, lumbered it up to the bedroom and then heard Jeannie cry out: ‘Come on downstairs, we’re going to introduce Monty to Judy.’ Their theory, and I suppose there was some sense in it, was that as Judy and Monty were going to live in the closest proximity, they might as well learn to be friends as quickly as possible; and I arrived in the room just as the introduction was made.

  It was over within thirty seconds. Judy leapt at Monty and snapped at his paw. Monty then jumped on a table, crashing a vase, remained there for an instant with fur like an upturned brush, then on to the floor, dashing between the legs of Jeannie’s mother who grabbed him, holding him until he freed himself, whereupon he raced across to the blue velvet curtains, up them like a monkey and remained on the pelmet, snarling like a mad thing at Judy yapping hysterically below.

  We ourselves, for a moment, were quite silent. Each of us was thinking how such enmity could possibly be handled during the weeks to come. Jeannie and I, and Monty, despite it being her old home, were guests in the house and we could not be expected to be popular if we brought chaos along with us; and Jeannie’s mother was saying to herself that at all costs the welcome of our arrival must be brought back to normal. She did so by never disclosing that Monty had gashed her so sharply with his claws that the following day she had four stitches in her arm.

  Monty and Judy never came face to face again, yet the atmosphere of their hate remained. If one was allowed free in the house, the other was shut in a room; and the one which was free would be aware of the door behind which was the other. Judy would scratch, Monty would sniff and his fur rise up. It was an unhappy period for both of them, and the immediate effect on Monty was to lessen the affection he had for Jeannie and me. He became remote from us. There were no purrs. It was as if he had lost his personality and was just an animal on four legs that had no thought in its head except to eat and sleep. He would not play. He would not sleep on the bed. His behaviour, in fact, made me lose interest in him. He was a silly, characterless cat.

  This zombie attitude continued for four months until, the cottage repaired, we returned home; and within a few minutes of our arrival Monty’s old self returned too. He proved it by jumping out of the kitchen window. The window had been his own private entrance, not the main casement window but the small one above it, open and shut by a lever. We had always kept it half open for him, day and night, and he would leap to its frame, pause a moment and disappear outside; or at night we would be in the kitchen and become suddenly aware that Monty had silently appeared from the darkness without and was poised up there, watching us. On this occasion he had not been in the kitchen a minute before he jumped up to this window, then down to the garden; and without waiting he was up again to the window and into the kitchen. We watched him repeat this act, as if it were a celebration dance, four or five times; and as we watched we could sense the dull attitude which had developed disappearing, and the old relationship becoming real again. ‘He’s actually glad to be home,’ I said to Jeannie, as if I were surprised such a feeling could exist within him. ‘He really knows he’s home.’

  My simplicity had its reaction later that night when I was lying awake. I found myself thinking that as I had learnt to get on perfectly well without considering Monty while at St Albans, I had better do the same now at home. I was retracing my steps. I was having a midnight revolt against my overindulgence of the cat. I had been hastening to become as cooing as the cat lovers I used to despise, submerging my own personality for Monty’s benefit, becoming a slave to his wayward habits; and it was time for me to stop.

  St Albans had taught me that you could give a roof to a cat without losing one’s own identity; and although Monty had been plainly uncomfortable he did not run away, he remained clean, he had a good appetite. He could, therefore, lead a useful but negative life with us at the cottage, have his meals and his freedom to wander about, but, as at St Albans, there was no need for him to enter the stream of our life.

  I would not, for instance, become excited just because he jumped in and out of the kitchen window. I would not consider myself favoured when he sat on my lap; I would push him off if it suited me. Lying there in the dark I realised I had been showing all the faults of the convert, all the undisciplined enthusiasm the novice displays. I had been behaving, before the change at St Albans, like a fawning servant before its master. It was ridiculous and tomorrow I must set out to regain my independence whatever tricks Monty might produce. Of course Jeannie was going to be difficult; but if I were cunning, if I did not take any positive action against Monty, if I were polite but distant, she would have no need to suspect the great change that had suddenly taken place inside me.

  She was sound asleep, and Monty was also on the bed, down at the bottom alongside my feet. I suddenly thought: why not set the pace of my new attitude towards him immediately? My legs were cramped and had he not been occupying so much room, I could have stretched them and been comfortable, and I might even have fallen asleep. Here goes, I said to myself; and gave him a shove. A second later there was a thud on the floor; then, a few seconds later he was on the bed again. Another shove. Another thud.

  And at that moment Jeannie woke up, shouting excitedly as one does when alarmed from a dream: ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ I said soothingly, ‘only Monty fell off.’

  It’s nice to get home

  6

  Monty’s memory of Judy, had he been human, might have been eradicated on a psychiatrist’s couch; but as it was the rage he felt against her simmered inside him, erupting in an explosion at intervals during the rest of his life. He was determined to fight a ceaseless battle of revenge.

  His first victory, soon after our return, was over a bulldog pup belonging to a friend who lived close by. Outside our front door was a tiny garden, enclosed by a three foot wall to help keep out the high tides of the Thames; and we went over this wall from the garden to the towpath by a ladder of stone steps. These steps were never a particular favourite of Monty’s, indeed he usually avoided the tiny front garden as if he disliked the bustle of the towpath on the other side of the wall; but on occasions he liked to sun himself there, and one pleasant morning he was lying on the top step when along came the bulldog pup.

  The pup was a bandy-legged brindle and he came jauntily down the alleyway from his home with a sniff here and a sniff there, up to the pillarbox and across to the lamp-post. I was standing myself by the open front door and I watched him amusedly; he looked like a schoolboy on holiday without a care in the world.

  But Monty was watching as well. He watched until the pup was within five yards of the steps, then crouching as if to spring at a mouse, he waited for it to come another yard nearer . . . and pounced. I was so surprised that I just stared; but the pup, thank goodness, had been attracted the same instant by the railings on the other side of the towpath; and he moved away as Monty sprang, so his stumpy stern met the onslaught instead
of his back. A yell of fright from the pup and it set off at a gallop for Chiswick Bridge. It was still galloping long after Monty had stopped the chase; for Monty, as if to put fear into a bulldog was victory enough, returned nonchalantly to the steps after a chase of a few yards and unconcernedly began an elaborate wash. He never attacked the pup again, it never came near enough to let him.

  Monty did not seek out his battles with dogs, creating a quarrel because he had nothing else to do. I often, for instance, saw him sitting in contemplation while a dog passed by without his ever making a move. It was when we were about that he became enraged. He either considered himself our protector or, more likely, the memory of Judy ground such jealousy in his mind that for a few moments he reverted to the wild cat of the jungle. No dog was safe whatever the size or breed and, for that matter, no human was safe who tried to stop the attack.

  The first human to suffer was an elderly lady who arrived at the cottage with a small terrier on a lead. We did not fully appreciate Monty’s temper at the time, and we had taken no steps to shut him in a room when the lady and the terrier entered the downstairs hall. Bang! Monty was hurtling out of the kitchen straight at the terrier and in the shambles that followed the poor lady was gashed in the leg. I had to take her to hospital.

  This incident, of course, put us on our guard. We had so to speak to put a notice outside the front door: ‘Beware of the Cat’. We had to meet anyone who arrived with a dog and shout: ‘Wait out there a minute while we put Monty away.’ And if Monty could not be found, the visitor and the dog had to be sneaked in, then rushed upstairs to the sitting room, and the door firmly shut. Then, when the visit was over, I would act as a scout and see whether Monty was lurking anywhere on the stairs. I had to act like a conspirator, and I used to be thankful when the visitor and his dog were safely waved away.

  Yet I never met a dog owner who did not at first believe we were playing a joke. Dog owners inflict their doggy devotion on others more officiously than the cat counterparts, or some of them do. Some dog owners I have found, for instance, are either deaf or peculiarly insensitive. They shut a dog in a house or shed in the garden, and have a sadistic relish in the barks that follow for hour after hour, bringing despair and wild exasperation to the neighbours. It is a form of torture to which I am particularly vulnerable. I lie awake at night and each bark is a hammer blow, and if it comes from a distance, from somewhere unknown to me, I have an uncontrollable desire to get dressed and go searching for the exact source of the hell. The daytime yap, the yap, yap, yap on some afternoon in high summer has seen me seize a stick and march towards the noise, only to halt a few minutes later and go back. For what is the use of action? It is a strange thing about such dog owners, if you complain, if you say you cannot sleep, or get on with your work, or that you are being driven slowly mad, you are seldom met with apologies. You are made to feel it is your fault, certainly not that of the dog or its owner.

  Cats, of course, make a hullabaloo on the tiles but only if other cats are there too. Cats on their own are silent while a dog on its own will still bark. Cats may impose their personalities on visitors to their homes but, as they are too independent to go on visits themselves, strange homes are spared them. Dogs bounce out of the car on arrival, go galloping over the flower beds in excitement, ignoring the cries of discipline; or come on a rainy day, shaking their wet coats, mapping the carpet with muddy paws. In our case, however, we had Monty; and so whenever a dog appeared one of us would cry out the alarm: ‘Look out, Monty’s about!’

  The snag lay in the fact that unless the dog owner had visited us before, the reaction was not what we intended. The answer to our alarm was a display of supreme confidence.

  ‘Oh don’t worry,’ would come the lofty reply, ‘our dog never chases cats!’ We would try to explain how it would be Monty who did the chasing. ‘Don’t you understand?’ we pleaded, ‘Monty will chase your dog!’ Meanwhile the dog would be running around and, in the distance, we would see a menacing Monty approaching.

  At Mortlake we had the front door as the barrier, and so a clash was comparatively easy to avert. But when we came to live at remote Minack, our cottage in Cornwall, Monty could be lying in wait anywhere. Hence the attacks at Minack were more frequent. Monty was only making certain he would never again share his life with a dog.

  It was also at the time of his return from St Albans that he developed a growl. Most cats growl at some time or other but it is a sound that is a close cousin to a purr. Monty’s growl was a deep-throated challenge of such resonance that he might have acquired it from one of the larger dogs he hated. Yet it was not a weapon of war, a threat to frighten an opponent.

  It was a means of self-reassurance, a method of bolstering himself when he found himself in a situation not to his liking. Any odd noise he did not understand would bring forth the growl and, for that matter, any big noise too. He growled at the guns which fired at the flying bombs, and at thunder, and when rockets took the place of flying bombs he growled at them. The first rocket which ever landed in Britain landed within a mile of Mortlake; and it is Monty’s growl I remember, not the explosion.

  Sometimes the growl made us laugh because he uttered it when caught in a predicament. There was an elm tree close to the cottage at Mortlake and up it he went one day, leaping from branch to branch, higher and higher, showing no sign he was soon to lose his nerve. I have never understood this particular blind spot of cats, how time and again they will climb to inaccessible places with the greatest of ease, then become transfixed by the height they have reached. I hate heights myself. I have an occasional nightmare which has me racing to the top of Everest; nothing hinders my climb, no hint of fear, until there I am looking out above the world . . . and quite incapable of descending. Monty too was incapable of descending and I had to fetch a ladder, and when the ladder did not reach him I had to climb up to him branch by branch. He was obviously terrified but he was not miaowing. He was growling.

  A time came when we had chickens at the top of the garden, a dozen Rhode Island Reds penned in a small compound by wire netting on the side that faced the garden. On the other sides were high walls and on some point on these walls Monty would sit looking down on them while they clucked in troubled excitement. He was fascinated by their antics. Hour after hour he would crouch like a Buddha, eyeing them, trying to make up his mind what could be the purpose of their presence. At last he decided to make a closer investigation and he descended from the wall to the compound. I did not see him make his descent but I was in the garden reading a book when I heard the cacophony that hens make when a fox is among them. It was only Monty, an embarrassed Monty, surrounded by twelve furious ladies whom he was keeping at bay with his growl.

  7

  My midnight revolt, my show of independence when I kicked Monty off the bed, was in retreat by next morning. It takes two to sustain a revolt. You cannot keep up a revolt if the opposition insists on showing affection. Monty ignored my offhand behaviour, forcing himself on my lap whenever he wished to do so, kneading my knees with his claws, letting me watch his back bulge like bellows with his purrs. For my part I could not refrain from stroking his silky fur, gently massaging his backbone and tracing a finger round his beautiful markings. I would have been of stone if I hadn’t. His presence was therapeutic, and he brought a calm to the hectic life we led.

  In the years which followed the end of the war we were seldom home in the evenings except at weekends. The nature of our work rushed us from party to party and we used to return home increasingly exhausted as the week developed. One becomes casual in such circumstances. One is so absorbed in fulfilling the basic responsibilities, that one is inclined to be blind to the subtleties that enrich life. Monty was a subtlety, and although we were always sure to give him a rapturous greeting whatever hour of the night we got back, he was, I think, treated by us more as a toy than an animal. It was a period that I look back upon as distressing; and yet it had its value. It helped us in due course to form our decision
to pack up our jobs and leave London. It helped us, for instance, to realise it is more important to be true to oneself than to accept unthinkingly the standards of others.

  Monty, in this period, was like a toy because the haste in our life only spared us the time to bestow affection on our own terms. He was like a child in a Victorian family who was shoved into the drawing room by a nurse only at times when the parents were in a mood to see him. He would be used as a receptacle of our emotions, hugged and kissed in times of distress, expected to play games if we demanded them, shown off like an exhibit to appropriate friends. I have seen many cats, and dogs, treated in this way, and have disliked the sight of it. When human beings use their pet animals as agents of their own exhibitionism it means humiliation both for the human being and the animal; except that the human being concerned is too dumb to feel it. Often, of course, there are people who are frightened to show affection, or think it a curious kind of bad form either in themselves or in others; hence they consider pets should be treated as if behind bars in a zoo. These are the people who bury a cat or a dog one day, and buy a substitute the next, preferably of the same colour or breed so that the sequence of outward appearance remains undisturbed. Sometimes, of course, this is done not because of callousness but of fear, a fear of being unable to live a while with a memory. Either case provides an attitude which is unfair to the pet; for the first suggests it was no more important than an old kitchen chair while the second proposes that the death of a friendship can be swopped for a physical resemblance. I do not advocate a mourning, but I suggest that as a pet is a giver during its life and a human is usually a taker, a human should not accept an animal in his home unless he is prepared to make sacrifices which deserve affection.

  One can also go to the other extreme and behave to an animal like a neurosis-ridden parent to his child; who must not swim because the sea might be dangerous, or own a bicycle, or stay out after dark, or who is fussed over like an invalid. Pampered animals can be observed any day of the week. Yet this other extreme need not be a form of neurosis or, for that matter, of exhibitionism. One can love an animal overmuch because of its vulnerability, because it makes one feel secure in an insecure world, because as it grows older it reflects the years of one’s life. In due course we loved Monty overmuch but at this time, at this brittle period of our life, he was a toy; but a toy which had the merits of an anchor in our restless existence.