Outlines blurred and indistinct, they seemed to ripple under the natural divider of the vine-trellis, and then they were among the rose bushes right under the window, and quickly out of sight. Anna stood up and craned her neck to see better. Nothing. How odd, she thought. For a moment she had gained the distinct impression that they were decreasing in size as they ran. She put down the phone and without thinking went to the back door. The latch rattled, cold air spilled round her feet. The empty garden awaited her, its softened perspectives greying away into haze and distance. Lights were coming on at the far edge of the pasture.
‘Hello?’ she said.
Nothing. Her voice sounded thin in the silence. She was turning to go back inside when something caused her to look down. There on the doorstep sat two ordinary domestic cats.
One of them was a scruffy old thing, with eyes on the orange side of yellow and a thick tortoiseshell coat blanched by the evening light. He was rather larger than you would expect of an entire tomcat, but properly short-coupled, compact, broad of head. He had been in the wars all his life, by the look of him, and possibly not just with members of his own species (though the scars of such honest social encounters had left the skin around his eyes spectacular with hard dark tissue), for some brief engagement with an object even more durable than himself had pushed in the left side of his face. The muscles of the damaged cheek, contracted permanently by trauma, dragged back his lip to reveal two sharp snaggle-teeth. In the shifty evening light, his face had a lopsidedness at the same time engaging and roguish.
His companion, a female cat younger than him – though not by much – and white all over except for a circular black patch the size of a penny on one thin haunch, stood up and stretched as Anna appeared, revealing a curiously elongated back. Her blue eyes had a marked bulge. When she arched her spine and rubbed her head against Anna’s ankles, she resembled nothing so much as a cat from a sixteenth-century woodblock illustration. Her manner was anxious, and she matched the old tomcat’s serviceable, independent air with a clear need to please.
‘Well, you’re a pair,’ said Anna. ‘And no mistake. What are you doing here?’
She bent down and extended her hand to the tom, who gazed calmly at her for a moment then fluffed up his fur and spat. Anna backed away in surprise. ‘You old devil!’ she said, making ineffectual shooing motions. ‘I was only trying to be friends.’ While her attention was occupied in this way, the female cat slipped past her and into the kitchen. ‘Hey!’ said Anna, turning just in time to see a white rump disappear neatly into the cardboard box of kittens: ‘Come out of there!’
Too late.
The kittens mewed, then fell silent.
‘Oh no,’ said Anna. ‘Oh dear.’
She fled across the kitchen, expecting the worst whatever that might be, afraid of so many things she couldn’t articulate a single one of them. When she looked into the box, with its soiled newspaper and discarded eye-dropper, she was astonished.
The white cat lay on her side, the rather scraggy length of her belly displayed, to reveal rosy pink nipples among the thinning fur. The marmalade kitten had found her, and was already suckling greedily; as Anna watched, his sister struggled up next to him. The white cat looked at Anna – who said in surprise, ‘But you’re lactating!’ – and purred suddenly. Soon, both kittens were settled, pulling with a kind of busy thoughtlessness at their new mother. The box was full of warmth and the smell of milk. It was a different place for them now. Anna said, ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ and reached in to touch them. Immediately the white cat extended one front paw and struck out at the back of her hand. There was some force behind the blow, and though the cat’s claws were retracted the warning was clear. ‘You’re right of course,’ said Anna. ‘I’m sorry.’ Half amused, half rueful, she withdrew her hand. Well, she told herself, I wanted someone to look after them. But I never... what an extraordinary coincidence! This reminded her of the tortoiseshell tom, who, apparently unaffected by these events, had sat himself down on the sisal mat outside the door and begun washing diligently.
‘Why don’t you come in and take over my kitchen, too?’ she invited him.
His dark yellow eyes glittered at her. He let her have the full benefit of them, holding her gaze in that way cats have when they want you to know that they are more intelligent than you; then he got deliberately to his feet and walked off into the darkness. The white cat’s head appeared over the edge of the cardboard box and she stared after his retreating form. For a second it seemed she might follow him. Then the kittens mewled for attention, and she turned philosophically back to her task. Anna watched him cross the garden and disappear into the pasture beyond. The stars were out; night was in the apple trees. She shivered a little. Then she closed the door and laughed. ‘Have it your own way,’ she said. And, to the nursing queen, ‘Is it warm enough in here? Would you like the radio? You know, I think I’ll put the kettle on.’
She made a cup of tea and ate two slices of Marmite toast, cutting off the crusts as if she were spoiling a child. She was ravenous, but still a little too excited to settle. She tried to phone Ruth: Ruth was engaged. She looked round the kitchen. I’ll boil an egg too, she thought. When she next looked into the box, the kittens had finished feeding. Their foster mother’s purr rose rough and loving as she set about them with a determined pink tongue. They held their ground blindly against these attentions, like little swimmers breasting a wave, and slept the moment she stopped.
‘At this age,’ advised Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten, ‘a healthy kitten is either feeding or sleeping.’
‘Well then,’ said Anna smugly.
Later, she opened a can of meat-and-liver dinner and forked half of it into a bowl. At the sound of the can-opener, the white cat’s head came up. She trembled. She jumped on to the side of the box. Balanced there for an instant, paws together in a neat row, she looked hungrily at the can in Anna’s hand, then back at her charges.
‘They’ll be fine,’ Anna reassured her.
She ate with a kind of refined greed, stopping every so often to stare at the food as if something about it had made her think, then setting to again with renewed energy.
‘Where have you come from?’ Anna asked her. ‘What’s your story? How did you end up at my door?’ The white cat ate faster. ‘You like that,’ Anna said. ‘Well, you can always have it. We should call the girl Vita – you know, “life”? As for her brother: to start with I thought he’d be Barnaby, after my old cat who was the same colour. But is that fair? He deserves a name of his own.’
She thought for a moment.
‘Let’s call him Orlando,’ she suggested.
The white cat purred.
*
Next morning Anna found that while she slept something had got into the garden and dug up the dead tabby and her daughter, leaving behind on the bleak little lawn by the pasture fence a steep-sided hole and an extraordinary litter of loose chocolate-brown earth. There was a ferocity in the way the turf had been ripped up and flung about, a rage so pure it could never be described, only enacted. What had become of the pair was impossible to say. ‘How cruel,’ said Anna, blinking down into the empty grave. ‘What a cruel thing to do.’ It was eight o’clock in the morning. Two crows flapped lazily into the air from the pasture and hung there against a sky rinsed blue by early rain. She wiped her eyes.
Later, at the Green Man, she asked Alice: ‘What sort of animal would dig up a dead cat?’
‘Kids,’ said Alice laconically. She noticed Anna’s expression and said: ‘It was a fox, I expect.’
Anna stared at her. ‘Why do you say that?’ she said, more loudly then she had intended. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘I think you’ll find we always blame the fox,’ said Alice, ‘here in the country.’ She made a vague gesture, and went down the bar to pull two halves of Guinness, taking an order for organic lasagne and chips while she waited for the glasses to fill. The Green Man was filling up, breathing on its customers the familiar comfortable breath of beer and food and cigarette smoke. ‘Anyway, what else could it have been?’ she continued when she could next spare the time, concluding less certainly: ‘Foxes dig things up. Don’t they?’
Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t see why it should have been a fox,’ she said. ‘It could have been a badger, a dog: anything.’
‘I expect you saw a lot of badgers in Barnes,’ said Alice demurely. She held a glass up to the light. ‘What do I know?’ she asked herself. ‘I hate the country anyway.’ She brightened up. ‘There’s a DJ on later at the Yelverton in Drychester. You should go along, do you good. Tell you what,’ she suggested: ‘I will if you will.’
Anna thought about it. ‘I want to get an early night tonight.’
‘It’s ten past one in the afternoon,’ Alice pointed out. ‘Just listen to yourself.’
*
The kittens thrived. They ate, they slept, they squirmed about energetically. The white cat – whose regard, though critical, was not without pride – kept them clean and tidy. After about a week, they opened their eyes, and, astonished by the obvious possibilities, redoubled their efforts to walk like proper cats. When, with her own eye on the future, their foster-mother moved them out of the confines of the cardboard box and into the wider world, she chose for their next home the seat of Anna’s favourite chair. ‘I’ll get you a nicer cushion for that,’ Anna said. Dimly remembering the name of a wet-nurse in some old book, she had taken to calling the white cat ‘Dellifer’. Dellifer padded about the cottage at night, putting her nose into things. She was easily persuaded to sit on Anna’s knee, but she wouldn’t leave the house. If Anna opened the back door, Dellifer would hurry across the kitchen, gather the kittens to her and begin grooming them fiercely. ‘How funny you are!’ Anna told her. Then, holding the door open for a moment more: ‘Sure you won’t go out? Oh well. You’ve got the Plastic Palace, I suppose.’ The Plastic Palace, a space-age dirtbox, hooded, two-tone blue and equipped with filters, had come from the pet shop in Drychester. Dellifer, having accepted it with caution, introduced her charges to it as soon as they could walk. The kittens loved it. They went in one at a time and threw gravel about in an important way. The house was full of scratching and scratting noises at inappropriate times. ‘Less of that, you two,’ Anna would call. ‘Or I’ll send you to Hackney.’ The kittens ignored her. They knew she was captivated. Anyway, it was more important to get control of their legs. They wobbled after Dellifer to the bottom of the stairs then, unable to follow her, gazed up in awe and sat down suddenly without meaning to. Soon, though, they had mastered the stairs, too, and discovered again the warm confines of the airing cupboard, where they clambered over clean linen and swung on towels, pulling loose threads out with their sharp little claws. They fell asleep there under the sheets, thinking they could not be seen. They ambushed one another from behind doors, behind the sofa, behind their foster-mother: ambush was a big joke to them. They reared up on their tiny hind legs and sparred with Anna’s fingers. They were hungry from dawn to dusk. Their energy was phenomenal, but when they had spent it they fell asleep where they stood.
From the very outset, the old tortoiseshell tomcat kept his eye on them. Anna could never tell when he would appear on the back doorstep, calling out in a rusty voice until she opened the door. It was the only time he asked for anything – thereafter he barely acknowledged her, or even the nursing queen, but gave his full attention to the kittens, sniffing and licking and breathing on them as if they were his own. At first Anna was anxious. ‘As all breeders are aware,’ Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten warned her, ‘a loose tom will kill any or all the kittens in a litter.’ But it soon became clear that whatever the old boy wanted it wasn’t that. It wasn’t food, either, though he sometimes persuaded himself to eat a morsel from Dellifer’s bowl; neither was it Dellifer herself. She seemed unconcerned by these visits, though she hissed at him if he was too rough with her charges. This he took good-naturedly. He seemed simply to enjoy being with the kittens, though he gave less attention to Vita than to Orlando.
By then, Orlando was the perfect red tabby. His sparse fluffy fur shone exactly like sunshine through marmalade on a spring morning, and flames had kindled along his stubby little sides. His eyes were mischievous one moment, dreamy the next. His legs were unsteady, his paws huge and he was taller than he was long: but he was up for anything. He regarded the old tom with interest. What a smell! What scars! This new creature had appeared at just the right time in his life. He followed it about, jerkily imitating its walk. He buried his face in its thick coat and growled. He fixed it with a beady eye, and engaged it in play battle. Some quite hard blows were delivered during these bouts, but Orlando never seemed to mind.
Anna was less certain. Over the next few weeks she found the old cat’s developing relationship with the kittens difficult to accept. She hated it when he was openly rough with them, because they were so puzzled. When placatory gestures failed, they didn’t know what to do. Vita had some success at avoiding him; but with Orlando he persisted, chivvying him out of the airing cupboard or from under the TV where he liked to have his morning sleep. There was a great deal of hissing and spitting. Anna would come across the marmalade kitten backed into a corner, looking puzzled and hurt, its face turned away so as not to provoke the older cat. ‘Come on. If you can’t play nicely, shoo,’ ordered Anna; but whenever she looked up from her work the tortoiseshell was there, sitting on a windowsill, waiting at the door in the late afternoon gloom, watching the kittens from across the room, with hard, intelligent eyes. Their foster-mother seemed less inclined to confront him, and their encounters became brief and predictable. The tom dropped his head and fluffed his fur. Dellifer edged away, looking comically anxious. ‘Stop that, you old devil!’ Anna ordered. ‘Stop it!’ He regarded her stonily, the fur on his back slowly settling itself. The message was clear. ‘Right then,’ she said: ‘That’s enough.’ But when she stopped answering the door to him, he only got in through the kitchen window. She phoned Ruth Canning.
‘What can I do?’ she said.
‘Close the window.’
‘Ruth, you have no idea how hot that Aga gets.’
Ruth laughed. ‘Have you thought of assertiveness training?’ she said.
‘Oh dear,’ said Anna.
But it is in the nature of kittens to grow up. Soon, Dellifer had taken them out into the garden, where she marshalled their activities as if there were six or seven of them. At all times of day she could be seen walking in a no-nonsense way round the flowerbeds, her tail up like a flag, while Orlando and Vita dawdled along behind, investigating the things they found. They snapped at insects. They tried to eat snails and worms. They tried to eat bees. They fought with one another, tearing round the trunk of Anna’s lilac or tumbling down the terraces of the little rockery. They struck gunfighter poses. They struck poses of death or glory. Dellifer continued their education. ‘This,’ Anna imagined her saying, ‘is a flower. And this is a flower-pot.’ She taught them to freeze and look hard at things. She taught them stalking. Bottoms stuck up in the air, they stalked anything that moved – leaves, paper, the wind in the grass. They stalked Anna’s foot. In all seriousness they stalked the washing on the washing line.
‘They’re so satisfying to watch,’ Anna told Ruth.
‘Anna, you need a man.’
‘Shut up, Ruth.’
Ruth was interested in Orlando’s progress despite herself.
‘What about the old cat then?’ she said. ‘The bane of your life?’
‘He doesn’t come into the house so much. I see him in the garden with them. God knows what he gets up to out there. Orlando seems fine.’
Soon Orlando was more than fine. He had filled out. His legs had grown longer and sturdier. He looked less like a kitten than a young cat. He stood up sniffing the air on the heights of the rockery in the morning light, every orange-gold hair glowing with life. ‘You beautiful thing,’ whispered Anna. Orlando loved his sister, despite their disagreements. He loved the outdoors. Anything else that went on in the garden went on out of sight. Anna had a cat-flap put in, and fretted less because she saw less. She suspected that Orlando was now making excursions outside the garden.
‘Soon you’ll be a grown-up,’ she told him.
She hugged him hard, and he gave her a puzzled stare.
She was happy. She had allowed the cottage to slow her to its own pace; she had allowed the quietness of her new life to seep into her. These mornings she often found herself swirling a cloth about aimlessly in the warm washing-up water, thinking about nothing much at all, while the kettle on the Aga filled the room with steam.
‘The kittens make me feel as if I’ve arrived at last,’ she told Ruth Canning on the phone one night. ‘They make me feel as if I’ve caught up with myself.’
‘That’s very profound, Anna,’ said Ruth.