us?’
‘Now look, Rose! If this is another of your crazy schemes . . .’
But when she rang the number, a neatly arranged pile of silver on the shelf of the phone-booth beside her elbow, she got only the answering machine again, and all her witty replies died within her.
Coming back, a little vexed but not yet alarmed, through a slight rising mist, she saw a cat sitting on the wall. A tabby cat. Not the one Mr. Gotobed had thrown clods at, then . . .
She went out of her way to woo it, as a kind of defiance of all the invincible ignorance that Wallney stood for. She did what the best cat-books told you to do with a stray cat, to avoid alarming it. She did not look at it directly. She yawned and stretched her arms gently above her head; anyone watching her would have thought her a lunatic.
But the only one watching her was the cat. And on the cat, all her efforts were wasted. It made no attempt to flee, but continued sitting solidly on the wall. Its ears neither went down in alarm, nor pricked in curiosity. It needed no assurance that she was harmless. From long instinct, it knew she was harmless. It let her get within a foot; it let her put out her hand to stroke, with apparent indifference.
She was shocked at how solid it was; at the hardness of the muscles under its dark tiger-stripes. She was shocked at the intricate mangling of its torn ears, at the brutal massiveness of its wedge-shaped head.
It did none of the things that cats are supposed to do. It did not rub its cheeks against her hand, or offer its chin; it did not knead its paws on the wall-top, or arch its back. It certainly did not purr. Its eyes studied the flight of birds across some distant field.
In the end, it made her feel irrelevant and powerless. It offered her no threat of violence, but she came to think it was not a nice cat. She even grew a little nervous of its dark indifference to humankind.
She finally went on her way, much put out. Thinking it was another bit of that massive ignorance, that brutal imperviousness that was Wallney.
The cat watched her go. Watched her turn in at the gate where it knew she lived. Then, as if satisfied, it dropped down into the field behind the wall, and went about its own business.
Four
It was good to be home. There was a huge fire glowing in the kitchen range; a little too hot for comfort, but the kids’ willingness was warming, too, after Wallney. They looked up from the books they were reading, and the fire shone on the pleasure in their faces at her return.
‘I went up to turn down the beds,’ said Jane. ‘There’s a mouse in my bedroom.’
‘What did you do?’ said Rose in a flurry. She always felt irretrievably split about mice. You read in magazines that their urine gave children diseases, yet they were so timid, furry and defenceless. She had never had to cope with a mouse in her married life. Mice did not come where Philip was . . .
‘It was sweet,’ said Jane. ‘I took it up some cheese. I thought it might be starving. I mean, what’s it had to live on round here all these years? But it wouldn’t come out of its hole for the cheese.’
‘She bunged the cheese down the hole in the end,’ said Timothy. ‘The lump got stuck. The mouse can’t get out, now.’
‘It can eat its way out,’ said Jane.
‘How would you like to have to eat your way out?’ said Tim. ‘If you opened this door in the morning, and somebody had dumped a ton of liver pâté on the doorstep?’
‘I expect it will survive,’ said Rose hurriedly, before World War III could develop. ‘Want to play something before bed?’ She moved over to the heap of boxes; Monopoly, Othello, Trivial Pursuit Genus II that went with them on every holiday.
‘Can we play Dirty Scrabble?’ asked Jane. ‘Only Daddy won’t let us at home.’ Rose shuddered; they knew so many appalling words she had never known till she went to university. And Jane always objected to Tim’s scientific Latin ones, sticking to awful Anglo-Saxon herself. They never said them out loud, it was true, but as you went on playing, the words already laid down stared at you so, and made you giggle. And