Cats in the Belfry Read Online Free Page B

she howled, until people on the pavement began peering into the car with set faces looking for the little orphan who was apparently being simultaneously beaten, starved and tortured inside. By that time, needless to say, Sugieh was out of sight, doing her ventriloquist act from under Charles's seat. The only thing that saved us from being mobbed by a crowd of angry passers-by was the last-minute changing of the lights and the fact that Charles, having been something of a racing driver in his gilded youth, was away off the mark like a shot.
    Â Â We never took Sugieh to my grandmother's again. Charles's nerves wouldn't stand it. The next time we went on holiday we arranged to leave her with a family from the next village who fell in love with her one day when they walked past and saw her playing innocently in the garden and pleaded that if at any time we wanted to go away we would send her to stay with their own Siamese, James.
    Â Â We accepted with alacrity. At the last moment our consciences did get the better of us and we rang up explaining that it wasn't really fair to expect anybody outside a lunatic asylum to take our cat and we'd better call the whole thing off, but our new friends wouldn't hear of it. James, they said, who had been a real cat-about-town until the age of three, when he underwent an operation that had become imperative if they were to continue to share the same house with him, had turned so sanctimonious in recent months that they felt somebody like Sugieh about the place might do him good.
    Â Â She did too. The only peace the Smiths got that fortnight was during the evenings, when she and James sat in solemn consultation inside a gramophone console whose works had gone for repair. When the lid was lifted two heads would appear through the turntable hole – one Roman-nosed, dark and aristocratically handsome; the other small, blue and slightly cross-eyed – and gaze reprovingly upon the intruder before vanishing again into the depths. There, it seemed, they planned the mischief for the following day, which began with a free-for-all steeplechase at five a.m. – Sugieh's idea that; James never got up till midday in the normal way – and continued in crescendo until supper time when they appeared, sleek, well-mannered, hair metaphorically parted in the middle, ate their meal with regal dignity and disappeared once more inside the gramophone.
    Â Â In-between they played plain bedlam. We had forgotten to warn the Smiths about Sugieh's addiction to water and she dived into the fishpond three times, followed by the obedient James, before they realised it was no accident and covered it with wire netting, while it took the whole family plus the postman to rescue James from the top of a fifty-foot fir tree where Sugieh had enticed him and then, Delilah-like, left him clinging terror-stricken while she skipped lightly down and taunted him from the lawn.
    Â Â James thought himself no end of a dog when he was safely down though. He stalked around stiff-legged as an Arab, looking up at the tree and bellowing at everybody to see where he'd been, while Sugieh gazed at him with soft, big-eyed admiration. In return he stole one of Mrs Smith's fur gloves for Sugieh to play with, and taught her to dig holes in the garden.
    Â Â A great step forward, that was. We had been trying for a long time to get Sugieh to dig in the garden instead of using an earth-box, but to no avail. Now, with her friend James to guide her, she suddenly caught on. Not, mind you, to what the holes were for; she would break off and rush indoors to her earth-box for that. Just that cats dug holes. For the remainder of the fortnight she and James dug holes so industriously all over the Smith's garden that by the time we came back from holiday the place looked like a battlefield.
    Â Â The Smiths didn't mind, though. They were very long-suffering. As they said, people who keep Siamese have to be if they don't want