On Cats

Then, trying to slide through banisters to drop on to a stair the flight below, she found she could not. She tried again, could not. She was humiliated, pretended she had not tried, that she preferred walking the long way around the bends in the stairway.

Her rushes up and down the tree became slower, then stopped.

And when the kittens moved in her belly, she looked surprised, put out.

Usually, about a fortnight before the birth, a cat will go sniffing into cupboards and corners: trying out, rejecting, choosing. This cat did nothing of the kind. I cleared shoes out of a cupboard in the bedroom, and showed her the place – sheltered, dark, comfortable. She walked into it and out again. Other places were offered. It was not that she did not like them; it seemed that she didn’t know what was happening.

The day before the birth, she did roll herself around some old newspapers in a seat, but the actions she used were automatic, nothing purposeful about them. Some gland, or whatever it is, had spoken, prompted movements; she obeyed, but what she did was not connected with her vital knowledge, or so it seemed, for she did not try again.

On the day of the birth she was in labour for three hours or so before she knew it. She miaowed, sounding surprised, sitting on the kitchen floor, and when I ordered her upstairs to the cupboard she went. She did not stay there. She trotted vaguely around the house, sniffing, at this late stage, into various possible places, but lost interest, and came down to the kitchen again. The pain, or sensation, having lessened, she forgot it, and was prepared to start ordinary life again – the life of a pampered, adored kitten. After all, she still was one.

I took her up, and made her stay in the cupboard. She did not want to. She simply did not have any of the expected reactions. In fact, she was touching, absurd – and funny, and we wanted to laugh. When the contractions grew strong, she was cross. When she had a bad pain towards the end, she miaowed, but it was a protesting, annoyed miaow. She was annoyed with us, who concurred in this process being inflicted on her.

It is fascinating to watch the birth of a cat’s first kitten, that moment, when, the tiny writhing creature having appeared in its envelope of white cellophane, the cat licks off the covering, nips the cord, eats the after-birth, all so cleanly, so efficiently, so perfectly, actions performed by her, personally, for the first time. Always there is a moment of pause. The kitten is expelled, lies at the cat’s back end. The cat looks, with a trapped, wanting-to-escape reflex, at the new thing attached to her; she looks again, she does not know what it is; then the mechanism works, and she obeys, becomes mother, purrs, is happy.

With this cat there was the longest pause I’ve seen while she looked at the new kitten. She looked, looked at me, moved a little, to see if she could lose the attached object – then it worked. She cleaned the kitten, did everything expected of her, purred – and then she got up and walked downstairs, where she sat on the back verandah looking at the garden. That was over, she seemed to be thinking. Then her sides contracted again, and she turned around to look at me – she was annoyed, furious. Her faces, the lines of her body said, unmistakably, What a damned nuisance! Go upstairs! I ordered. Upstairs! She went, sulking. She crept up those stairs with her ears back – almost as a dog does when it is being scolded or in disgrace: but she had none of the abjectness of a dog. On the contrary, she was irritated with me and with the whole process. When she saw the first kitten again, she recognized it, again the machinery worked, and she licked it. She gave birth to four kittens in all, and went to sleep, a charming picture, exquisite cat curled around four feeding kittens. They were a fine lot. The first, female, a replica of her, even to the pencilled dark rings around the eyes, the black half-bands on the chest and legs, the creamy, faintly marked stomach. Then a greyish-blue kitten: later, in certain lights, it looked dark purple. A black kitten, when grown a perfect black cat, with yellow eyes, all elegance and strength. And the father’s kitten, exactly like him, a rather heavy graceless kitten, in black and white. The first three had the light lines of the Siamese strain.

When the cat woke up, she looked at the kittens, now asleep, got up, shook herself, and strolled downstairs. She drank some milk, ate some raw meat, licked herself all over. She did not go back to the litter.

S. and H., coming to admire the kittens, found mamma cat, posed on the bottom of the stairs in profile. Then she ran out of the house, up the tree and back again – several times. Then she went up to the top of the house, and came all the way down by dropping through the banisters of one flight, to the flight below. Then she wove around H.’s legs, purring.

‘You are supposed to be a mother,’ said S., shocked. ‘Why aren’t you with your kittens?’

It seemed she had forgotten the kittens. Inexplicably, she had had an uncomfortable job to do; she had done it; it was over, and that was that. She frisked and frolicked around the house until, late that night, I ordered her upstairs. She would not go. I picked her up and carried her to the kittens. With no grace at all, she got in with them. She would not lie down to feed them. I made her. As soon as I turned away, she left them. I sat with her as she fed them.

I went to get ready for bed. When I came back to the bedroom, she was under my sheet, asleep. I returned her to the kittens. She looked at them with her ears back, and again would have simply walked off, if I had not stood over her, pointing, inexorable figure of authority, at the kittens. She went in, slumped down, as if to say, if you insist. Once the kittens were at her nipples instinct did work, even if ineffectually, and she purred for a while.

All through the night she was sneaking out of the cupboard and getting into her usual place on my bed. Every time I made her go back. As soon as I was asleep, back she came, while the kittens complained.

She had understood, by morning, that she was responsible for those kittens. But left to herself, that great Mother, nature, notwithstanding, she would have let them starve.

Next day, when we were at lunch, grey cat ran into the room with a kitten, tossing it up and down in her mouth. She put the kitten in the middle of the floor, and went up for the others. She brought the four down, one after another, then she lay stretched out on the kitchen floor with them. She was not going to be shut away by herself away from company, she had decided; and through the month the kittens were helpless, any one of us, anywhere in the house, would see grey cat trotting into the room with her kittens, tossing them about in her mouth in what seemed to be the most appallingly careless way. At night, whenever I woke, grey cat would be tucked in at my side, silent, and she stayed silent, hoping I would not notice her. When she knew I had, she purred, hoping I would soften, and licked my face and bit my nose. All no use. I ordered her back, and she went, sulking.

In short, she was a disastrous mother. We put it down to her youth. When those kittens were a day old, she was trying to play with them as a cat does with kittens a month or five weeks old. A minute, blind blob of a kitten would be buffeted about by those great hind feet; and bitten in tender play, while all it wanted was to get to the grudgingly offered nipples. A sad sight, granted; and we all got cross with her; and then we laughed; but that was worse, because if there is one thing she won’t have, it is being laughed at.

In spite of their bad treatment, that first litter were enchanting, the best produced in this house, each remarkable of its kind, even the replica of old Mephistopheles.

One day I came upstairs and found him in the bedroom. He was looking at the kittens. Grey cat, of course, was not there. He was some feet off, his head poked forward, his drooling jaw open as usual. But he did not want to harm them, he was interested.

The kittens, being so attractive, at once found homes. But they were a sad litter, after all. Inside eighteen months, they all came to grief. The much-loved cat who was its mother’s image disappeared from its home one day and was never found. And so with the black cat. Baby Mephistopheles was taken off, for his strength and courage, to be a cat in a warehouse, but died of cat enteritis. Purple cat, having given birth to the most remarkable litter I’ve seen, three perfect Siamese kittens, cream-coloured, pink-eyed, and three London scruff, little ragbags, lost her home. But we hear she has found another in a nearby street.

Grey cat, we decided, should not be allowed to have kittens again. She simply was not suited for motherhood. But it was too late. She was pregnant again. Not by Mephistopheles.

This area is known as cat country to the cat dealers and stealers. I suppose they drive around it and take any animals they like the look of which are not safely indoors. It happens at night; and it is unpleasant to think how the thieves keep the cats quiet so that they don’t wake their owners. The people of this street suspect the hospitals by which we are surrounded. Those vivisectionists have been again, they say; and perhaps they are right. Anyway one night six cats disappeared, among them Mephistopheles. And now the grey cat had her fancy, the tigerish young tom with a white satin vest.

Again the birth took her by surprise, but it did not take so long for her to settle down. She got up from the accouchement and went downstairs and would not have gone back unless ordered; but on the whole I think she enjoyed that second litter. This time the kittens were ordinary, pretty enough mixtures of tabby and white-and-tabby, but they had no special qualities of line or colour, and it was harder to find them homes.

Autumn, the paths thick with brown sycamore leaves from the big tree: cat taught her four kittens to hunt and stalk and jump while the leaves drifted down. The leaves played the part of mice and birds – and then were brought into the house. One of the kittens would very carefully shred his leaf to bits. This is how he inherited grey cat’s oddest trait: she will spend half an hour methodically ripping up a newspaper with her teeth, piece after piece. Perhaps this is a Siamese characteristic? I have a friend with two Siamese cats. When she has roses in the flat, the cats will take roses out of the vase with their teeth, lay them down, and tear the petals off, one by one, as if engaged in a necessary job of work. Perhaps in nature, the leaf, the newspaper, the rose would have been materials for a lair.

Grey cat enjoyed teaching her kittens the arts of hunting. If they had been country cats, they would have been well educated. Also, she taught them cleanliness: none of her kittens ever dirtied a corner. But, still a fussy eater, she was not interested in teaching them to eat. That they learned for themselves.

Of this litter, one was left much longer than the others. For the winter we had two cats, grey cat and her son, who was a rich-coloured browny-orange cat, with a vest like his father.

Grey cat became a kitten again, and these two played together all day, and slept wrapped around each other. The young tom was much bigger than its mother; but she bullied him, and beat him when he displeased her. They would lie for hours licking each other’s faces and purring.

He was an enormous eater, ate everything. We hoped his example would teach her better sense with her food, but it did not. She would always, as cats do, let him, her child, eat and drink first, while she crouched watching. When he was finished, she went over, sniffed at the cat food or the scraps, and then came to me, and very delicately bit my calf to remind me that she ate rabbit, raw meat, or raw fish, in small portions properly served on a clean saucer.

Over this – her due, her right – she would crouch aggressively, glaring at him, eating just so much and no more, without haste. She seldom finishes all the food put down for her; nearly always leaves a bit – suburban good manners, which, observed thus, in a different context, with grey cat, occurs to me for the first time must have a basis in really nasty aggression. ‘I’m not going to finish this food – I’m not hungry, and you’ve cooked too much and it’s your fault it’s wasted.’ ‘I have so much to eat, I don’t need to eat this.’ ‘I’m a delicate superior creature and really above crude things like food.’ The last is grey cat’s statement.

The young tom ate what she left, not noticing that it was much nicer than what he had been given; and then they rushed off, chasing each other through the house and garden. Or they sat on the bottom of my bed, looking out of the window, licking each other from time to time, and purring.

This was grey cat’s apogee, the peak of her happiness and charm. She was not lonely; her companion did not threaten her, because she dominated him. And she was so beautiful – really so very beautiful.

She was best sitting on the bed looking out. Her two creamy lightly barred front legs were straight down side by side, on two silvery paws. Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears – everything, in delicate vibration. If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Oh cat; I’d say, or pray: be-ooootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.

She would ignore me first; then turn her head, silkily arrogant, and half close her eyes for each praise-name, each one separately. And, when I’d finished, yawn, deliberate, foppish, showing an icecream-pink mouth and curled pink tongue.

Or, deliberate, she would crouch and fascinate me with her eyes. I stared into them, almond-shaped in their fine outline of dark pencil, around which was a second pencilling of cream. Under each, a brush stroke of dark. Green, green eyes; but in shadow, a dark smoky gold – a dark-eyed cat. But in the light, green, a clear cool emerald. Behind the transparent globes of the eyeball, slices of veined gleaming butterfly wing. Wings like jewels – the essence of wing.

A leaf insect is not to be distinguished from a leaf – at a casual glance. But then, look close: the copy of a leaf is more leaf than leaf – furled, veined, delicate, as if a jeweller had worked it, but a jeweller with his tongue very slightly in his cheek, so that the insect is on the verge of mockery. Look, says the leaf insect, the fake: has any leaf ever been as exquisite as I am? Why, even where I have copied the imperfections of a leaf, I am perfect. Do you ever want to look at a mere leaf again, having seen me, the artifice?

In grey cat’s eyes lay the green sheen of a jade butterfly’s wing, as if an artist had said: what could be as graceful, as delicate as a cat? What more naturally the creature of the air? What air-being has affinity with cat? Butterfly, butterfly of course! And there, deep in cat’s eyes lies this thought, hinted at merely, with a half-laugh; and hidden behind the fringes of lashes, behind the fine brown inner lid, and the evasions of cat-coquetry.

Grey cat, perfect, exquisite, a queen; grey cat with her hints of leopard and snake; suggestions of butterfly and owl; a miniature lion steel-clawed for murder, grey cat full of secrets, affinities, mysteries – grey cat, eighteen months old, a young matron in her prime, had a third litter of kittens, this time by the grey-and-white cat who, during the reign of the king, had been too frightened to come down off the wall. She had four kittens, and her son sat beside her through the birth and watched, licking her in the pauses of labour, and licking the kittens. He tried to get into the nest with them, but his ears were boxed for this lapse into infantilism.

Chapter Five (#ulink_7cab801d-ea6d-5a4e-8103-0a78422fa450)

It was spring again, the back door was open, and grey cat, her grown son and four kittens enjoyed the garden. But grey cat preferred the company of her son to the kittens; and indeed, had again scandalized S. because, the moment her labour was over, she got up, walked off from the kittens, and then fell straight into her grown son’s arms, when they rolled over and over, purring.

He played the role of father to this litter: he brought them up as much as she did.

Meanwhile there had already appeared, faint and disguised, as the future always is in its first intimations, the shadow of grey cat’s doom as reigning and sole queen of the household.

Above, in the human world, frightful storms and emotions and dramas; and with the summer a beautiful sad blonde girl visited the house, and she had a small neat elegant black cat, a half-kitten really, and this alien was in the basement, only temporarily of course, because her home was not available.

The little black cat had a red collar and a red leash, and at this stage of her life was only an appurtenance and a decorative asset to the beautiful girl. She was kept well away from the queen upstairs: they were not allowed to meet.

Then, all at once, things went wrong for grey cat. Her son was at last claimed by the person who had booked him, and went off to live in Kensington. The four kittens went to their new homes. And we decided it was enough, she should have no more kittens.

I did not then know what neutering a female cat involved. People I knew had ‘doctored’ cats, male and female. The R.S.P.C.A., when asked, emphatically advised it. Understandably: they have to destroy hundreds of unwanted cats every week – every one of which, I suppose, has been to someone ‘Oh what a lovely kitten’ – until it grew up. But in the voices of the ladies of the R.S.P.C.A. sounded exactly the same note as in the voice of the woman at the corner grocery who, when I went around looking for homes for kittens, always said: ‘Haven’t you had her done yet? Poor thing, making her go through that, I think it’s cruel.’ ‘But it’s natural to have kittens,’ I insisted, dishonestly enough, since any instincts of maternity grey cat had were bullied into her.

My relations with the ladies of the street have mostly been about cats – cats lost or visiting, or kittens to be visited by children, or kittens about to be theirs. And there is not one who hasn’t insisted that it is cruel to let a cat have kittens – with vehemence, with hysteria, or at the very least with the sullen last-ditch antagonism of my mother’s: ‘It’s all very well for you!’

The old bachelor who ran the vegetable shop at the corner – now closed because of the pressure of the supermarket, and because he said his was a family business and he had no family – a fat old boy with cheeks red-purple, almost black, like the old woman of the fruit and vegetable barrows, said about the women: ‘They never stop having kids, but they don’t look after them, do they?’ He had no children, and was self-righteous about everyone else’s.

He did have, however, an ancient mother, over eighty, completely bedridden, who must have everything done for her – by him. His brother and three sisters were married and had children and it was his job, they decided, the unmarried brother’s job, to look after the old mother, since their children gave them enough to do.