Black As He’s Painted

‘They shouldn’t be here,’ he thought, confusedly protecting the normality of the Capricorns. ‘People like that. They ought to be in Chelsea. Or somewhere.’

They had crossed the Walk. They had approached his house. He backed further away. The area gate clicked and clanged, they descended the iron steps. He heard the basement flat bell. He heard Mr Sheridan’s voice. They had been admitted.

‘No, really!’ Mr Whipplestone thought in the language of his youth. ‘Too much! And he seemed perfectly respectable.’ He was thinking of his brief encounter with Mr Sheridan.

He settled down to a book. At least it was not a noisy party down there. One could hear little or nothing. Perhaps, he speculated, the Sanskrits were mediums. Perhaps Mr Sheridan dabbled in spiritism and belonged to a ‘circle’. They looked like that. Or worse. He dismissed the whole thing and returned to the autobiography of a former chief of his Department. It was not absorbing. The blurb made a great fuss about a ten-year interval imposed between the author’s death and publication. Why, God knew, thought Mr Whipplestone, since the crashing old bore could have nothing to disclose that would unsettle the composure of the most susceptible of vestal virgins.

His attention wandered. He became conscious of an uneasiness at the back of his mind: an uneasiness occasioned by sound, by something he would rather not hear, by something that was connected with anxiety and perturbation. By a cat mewing in the street.

Pah! he thought, as far as one can think ‘pah’. Cats abounded in London streets. He had seen any number of them in the Capricorns: pampered pet cats. There was an enormous tortoiseshell at the Sun in Splendour and a supercilious white affair at the Napoli. Cats.

It had come a great deal nearer. It was now very close indeed. Just outside, one would suppose, and not moving on. Sitting on the pavement, he dared say, and staring at his house. At him, even. And mewing. Persistently. He made a determined effort to ignore it. He returned to his book. He thought of turning on his radio, loudly, to drown it. The cries intensified. From being distant and intermittent they were now immediate and persistent.

‘I shall not look out of the window,’ he decided in a fluster. ‘It would only see me.’

‘Damnation!’ he cried three minutes later. ‘How dare people lock out their cats! I’ll complain to someone.’

Another three minutes and he did, against every fibre of disinclination in his body, look out of the window. He saw nothing. The feline lamentations were close enough to drive him dotty. On the steps: that’s where they were. On the flight of steps leading up to his front door. ‘No!’ he thought. ‘No, really this is not good enough. This must be stopped. Before we know where we are –’

Before he knew where he was, he was in his little hall and manipulating his double lock. The chain was disconnected on account of the Chubbs but he opened the door a mere crack and no sooner had he done so than something – a shadow, a meagre atomy – darted across his instep.

Mr Whipplestone became dramatic. He slammed his door to, leant against it and faced his intruder.

He had known it all along. History, if you could call an incident of not much more than a month ago history, was repeating itself. In the wretched shape of a small black cat: the same cat but now quite dreadfully emaciated, its eyes clouded, its fur staring. It sat before him and again opened its pink mouth in now soundless mews. Mr Whipplestone could only gaze at it in horror. Its haunches quivered and, as it had done when they last met, it leapt up to his chest.

As his hand closed round it he wondered that it had had the strength to jump. It purred and its heart knocked at his fingers.

‘This is too much,’ he repeated and carried it into his drawing-room. ‘It will die, I dare say,’ he said, ‘and how perfectly beastly that will be.’

After some agitated thought he carried it into the kitchen and, still holding it, took milk from the refrigerator, poured some into a saucer, added hot water from the tap and set it on the floor and the little cat sat beside it. At first he thought she would pay no attention – he was persuaded the creature was a female – her eyes being half-closed and her chin on the floor. He edged the saucer nearer. Her whiskers trembled. So suddenly that he quite jumped, she was lapping, avidly, frantically as if driven by some desperate little engine. Once she looked up at him.

Twice he replenished the saucer. The second time she did not finish the offering. She raised her milky chin, stared at him, made one or two shaky attempts to wash her face and suddenly collapsed on his foot and went to sleep.

Some time later there were sounds of departure from the basement flat. Soon after this, the Chubbs affected their usual discreet entry. Mr Whipplestone heard them put up the chain on the front door. The notion came to him that perhaps they had been ‘doing for’ Mr Sheridan at his party.

‘Er – is that you, Chubb?’ he called out.

Chubb opened the door and presented himself, apple-cheeked, on the threshold with his wife behind him. It struck Mr Whipplestone that they seemed uncomfortable.

‘Look,’ he invited, ‘at this.’

Chubb had done so, already. The cat lay like a shadow across Mr Whipplestone’s knees.

‘A cat, sir,’ said Chubb tentatively.

‘A stray. I’ve seen it before.’

From behind her husband, Mrs Chubb said: ‘Nothing of it, sir, is there? It don’t look healthy, do it?’

‘It was starving.’

Mrs Chubb clicked her tongue.

Chubb said: ‘Very quiet, sir, isn’t it? It hasn’t passed away, has it?’

‘It’s asleep. It’s had half a bottle of milk.’

‘Well, excuse me, sir,’ Mrs Chubb said, ‘but I don’t think you ought to handle it. You don’t know where it’s been, do you, sir?’

‘No,’ said Mr Whipplestone, and added with a curious inflection in his voice. ‘I only know where it is.’

‘Would you like Chubb to dispose of it, sir?’

This suggestion he found perfectly hateful but he threw out as airily as he could: ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I’ll do something about it myself in the morning. Ring up the RSPCA.’

‘I dare say if you was to put it out, sir, it’d wander off where it come from.’

‘Or,’ suggested Chubb. ‘I could put it in the garden at the back, sir. For the night, like.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Whipplestone gabbled, ‘thank you. Never mind. I’ll think of something. Thank you.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ they said, meaninglessly.

Because they didn’t immediately make a move and because he was in a tizzy, Mr Whipplestone, to his own surprise said, ‘Pleasant evening?’

They didn’t answer. He glanced up and found they stared at him.

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ they said.

‘Good!’ he cried with a phoney heartiness that horrified him. ‘Good! Good night, Chubb. Good night, Mrs Chubb.’

When they had gone into the kitchen, he felt sure they opened the refrigerator and he distinctly heard them turn on a tap. Washing the saucer, he thought guiltily.

He waited until they had retired upstairs and then himself sneaked into the kitchen with the cat. He had remembered that he had not eaten all the poached scallop Mrs Chubb gave him for dinner.

The cat woke up and ate quite a lot of scallop.

Entry into his back garden was effected by a door at the end of the passage and down a precipitous flight of steps. It was difficult, holding the cat, and he made rather a noisy descent but was aided by a glow of light from behind the blinds that masked Mr Sheridan’s basement windows. This enabled him to find a patch of unplanted earth against the brick wall at the rear of the garden. He placed the cat upon it.

He had thought she might bolt into the shadows and somehow escape, but no: after a considerable wait she became industrious. Mr Whipplestone tactfully turned his back.

He was being watched from the basement through an opening between the blind and the window frame.

The shadowy form was almost certainly that of Mr Sheridan and almost certainly he had hooked himself a peephole and had released it as Mr Whipplestone turned. The shadowy form retreated.

At the same time a slight noise above his head caused Mr Whipplestone to look up to the top storey of his house. He was just in time to see the Chubbs’ bedroom window being closed.

There was, of course, no reason to suppose they, also, had been watching him.