Cats in the Belfry Read Online Free Page A

foregone conclusion of course that if we left Sugieh with them Grandma would make my aunt take her to bed too, but we didn't see much harm in that. Sugieh, despite our original resolutions, often slept with us. Within a week of her arrival she had worked out that if she nipped smartly upstairs when she heard the hot-water bottles being filled and hid under the dead centre of the bed we couldn't get her out. Then, when the room was in darkness and she judged we had had time to go to sleep, she would creep out, climb on to the bed and insert herself so gently under the bedclothes and into my arms that I hadn't the heart to move her.
    Â Â Apart from snoring, the only disturbance she caused us was when, promptly at five in the morning, she got up and stropped her claws on the padded top of the blanket box, but as my aunt didn't have a blanket box we thought there was nothing to worry about. How were we to know that Sugieh would choose her visit to develop a Thing about woollen clothes?
    Â Â We learned later that among other dark, Oriental aspects of their nature which only come to light when they have firmly established themselves in some soft-hearted household, Siamese are often confirmed wool-eaters. A breeder who is something of a cat psychologist told us that he believes they do it to comfort themselves when they are lonely, in the same way that children suck their thumbs, and it is a fact that our present cats, having each other for company, never eat wool except when travelling. We put them in separate baskets then and Solomon, Sugieh's big, burly son, invariably drags the end of the car rug in through the wickerwork and chews it steadily, between muffled sobs, all the way to his destination.
    Â Â My aunt, however, was no psychologist. When she went up to bed that night and found that Sugieh had eaten several large holes in her bedsocks she just got so plain, unpsychologically mad that she tucked the sheets firmly round her head and refused to let our dear little kitten get in with her. Sugieh, unused to such unfriendly treatment, got so mad in turn that when Aunt Louisa, who always wore wool next to her skin, woke up in the morning, she found holes in everything she had taken off overnight as well. She got no sympathy from my grandmother, who laughed her head off when she heard about it – and Sugieh, locked in the spare room to prevent further damage, spent the day swearing horrible oaths at the top of her voice and leering under the door at my Grandma's fat black neuter, who sat transfixed with horror on the other side. That upset my aunt too. She worried so much in case the two cats got at each other and had a fight that by the time we arrived, late in the evening, she was practically hysterical with suppressed guilt because she had been too scared to open the door and give Sugieh any food and too scared, afterwards, to confess it to my grandmother.
    Â Â We drove home in silence, shaken by the impact of one small Siamese kitten on that tranquil Victorian household, while in the back seat Sugieh continued happily with her game of Kidnapped. This time, while there was nobody else about, she sat there quite quietly, bolt upright with her paws together, her tail tucked primly round them, and the expression on her face of a dowager duchess returning from the theatre. The moment she saw lights, however, whether in a house or a passing car, she flew to the window, pressed herself pathetically against it and screamed wildly for help. She staged a magnificent performance going past a cinema just when the late-night audience was coming out, beating her paws against the window with a frail, pathetic frenzy that would have done credit to Lilian Gish. But where she really excelled herself was when we drew up at the traffic lights at the busy town centre. Most Siamese sound uncannily like human babies when they cry, but Sugieh that night outdid any Siamese or human baby I have ever known. She sobbed, she wailed,