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.
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
