Home life
Fur flying
Alice Thomas Ellis
Afriend whom I hadn't seen since the summer popped in the other day sporting a new moustache and I said, `Good heavens, what have you got on your face?' Which was rude. He riposted by implying that my earrings were showy, and after that we got on with our usual amity. It has been a week of personal remarks. One morning I came flying downstairs in hot pursuit of the cat, Cadders, before I had pinned up my hair, and Janet, gazing at me thoughtfully, remarked with admirable candour, 'You look very common with your hair down.' I bought a new frock to restore my confidence but have decided it makes me look like Mrs Pooter, or possibly Ethel le Neve before she got into cross- dressing. It is gathered in at the waist, which is dropped to just below the knee. My daughter despises it, so at least it will be all my own. Having had only sons until she turned up, I had not understood what the mothers of daughters suffer. The boys used to pinch my henna and hair spray, but they left my clothes alone. Daughters, who now seem to grow as large as their mothers before they even reach puberty, are a menace, knowing instinctively which shoes you are planning to wear that day and getting in first. My mother was the youngest of seven sisters and in her house it was known as 'first up, best dressed'.
My mother used to tell me that if I persisted in reading the Girls' Crystal under the bedclothes with a torch after lights-out I would undoubtedly lose the sight of my eyes and I'm beginning to wonder if she was right. I keep assaulting my handbag, which I habitually leave on the kitchen table, under the impression that it is the cat, Cadders. They are much the same size and shape and exactly the same colour. Cadders steals meat and cheese and cream and custard. He tears open the bin liners to eat the herring bones. Then he comes in to be sick. He has broken the chimney of an oil lamp, a key-patterned sherry glass, several wine glasses and one of a pair of jugs. He chases our original cat, a charming creature known simply as Puss, all over the house until she ends up leaping from shelf to shelf in the china pantry, through the Asiatic pheasant dish-covers to cower in an alcove. He has also ruined her disposition. Unable to retaliate against him because he is a great big brute, she has taken to beating up the many-toed or arboreal cat, who is not only smaller than her but may well be expecting. For a time we tried putting Cadders out at night. His owner (who seems to have moved away from home again) says he is a nocturnal beast, but when he isn't waging war with the neigh- bouring mogs on the kitchen roof he is hammering to be let in. I have told his owner he will have to take a room in a hotel for either me or Cadders. I don't care which.
The other night the bath plug was missing. For a theft so inexplicable no solution is too bizarre, and I immediately suspected the Russians, since I don't think even that cat would nick the bath plug. These domestic mysteries are most irritat- ing. Why, for instance, is the rug in one of the bedrooms covered in rice and chick- peas? Why is the handle of a plastic hairbrush sticking out of a broken pane in the glasshouse, and what happened to the wooden-backed hairbrushes? Whose is the jacket and set of keys in the boiler room, and how is he managing without them? How did we once accumulate 80 odd socks? Where do the teaspoons go? What is the greenish culture on a plate at the back of a bookshelf? Who rings up and doesn't say anything and why don't I care? Where is the pink-rimmed trifle dish, and, where was J. Bernard last Tuesday at lunchtime? I know where his lunch was It was here, coated in oatmeal and fried to a turn. Someone else had it for his tea. Then I wrapped up its bones in newspaper and a plastic bag and put them in the bin liner and Cadders got them out again . . . .
But, there, I mustn't let myself be driven to paranoia by a cat.
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