‘You crazy cat,’ she said, dusting off her hands. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Cats know what they’re doing,’ the husband said. ‘You’ll never find a cat doing something it doesn’t want. Not cats.’
‘Whose is it? You ever seen it before?’
‘No, I never have. Damn peculiar colour.’
The cat had seated itself on the grass and was regarding them with a sidewise look. There was a veiled inward expression about the eyes, something curiously ominiscent and pensive, and around the nose a most delicate air of contempt, as though the sight of these two middle-aged persons – the one small, plump, and rosy, the other lean and extremely sweaty – were a matter of some surprise but very little importance. For a cat, it certainly had an unusual colour – a pure silvery grey with no blue in it at all – and the hair was very long and silky.
Louisa bent down and stroked its head. ‘You must go home,’ she said. ‘Be a good cat now and go on home to where you belong.’
The man and wife started to stroll back up the hill towards the house. The cat got up and followed, at a distance first, but edging closer and closer as they went along. Soon it was alongside them, then it was ahead, leading the way across the lawn to the house, walking as though it owned the whole place, holding its tail straight up in the air, like a mast.
‘Go home,’ the man said. ‘Go on home. We don’t want you.’
But when they reached the house, it came in with them, and Louisa gave it some milk in the kitchen. During lunch, it hopped up on to the spare chair between them and sat through the meal with its head just above the level of the table, watching the proceedings with those dark-yellow eyes which kept moving slowly from the woman to the man and back again.
‘I don’t like this cat,’ Edward said.
‘Oh, I think it’s a beautiful cat. I do hope it stays a little while.’
‘Now, listen to me, Louisa. The creature can’t possibly stay here. It belongs to someone else. It’s lost. And if it’s still trying to hang around this afternoon, you’d better take it to the police. They’ll see it gets home.’
After lunch, Edward returned to his gardening. Louisa, as usual, went to the piano. She was a competent pianist and a genuine music-lover, and almost every afternoon she spent an hour or so playing for herself. The cat was now lying on the sofa, and she paused to stroke it as she went by. It opened its eyes, looked at her a moment, then closed them again and went back to sleep.
‘You’re an awfully nice cat,’ she said. ‘And such a beautiful colour. I wish I could keep you.’ Then her fingers, moving over the fur on the cat’s head, came into contact with a small lump, a little growth just above the right eye.
‘Poor cat,’ she said. ‘You’ve got bumps on your beautiful face. You must be getting old.’
She went over and sat down on the long piano stool but she didn’t immediately start to play. One of her special little pleasures was to make every day a kind of concert day, with a carefully arranged programme which she worked out in detail before she began. She never liked to break her enjoyment by having to stop while she wondered what to play next. All she wanted was a brief pause after each piece while the audience clapped enthusiastically and called for more. It was so much nicer to imagine an audience, and now and again while she was playing – on the lucky days, that is – the room would begin to swim and fade and darken, and she would see nothing but row upon row of seats and a sea of white faces upturned towards her, listening with a rapt and adoring concentration.
Sometimes she played from memory, sometimes from music. Today she would play from memory; that was the way she felt. And what should the programme be? She sat before the piano with her small hands clasped on her lap, a plump rosy little person with a round and still quite pretty face, her hair done up in a neat bun at the back of her head. By looking slightly to the right, she could see the cat curled up asleep on the sofa, and its silvery-grey coat was beautiful against the purple of the cushion. How about some Bach to begin with? Or, better still, Vivaldi. The Bach adaptation for organ of the D minor Concerto Grosso. Yes – that first. Then perhaps a little Schumann. Carnaval? That would be fun. And after that – well, a touch of Liszt for a change. One of the Petrarch Sonnets. The second one – that was the loveliest – the E major. Then another Schumann, another of his gay ones – Kinderscenen. And lastly, for the encore, a Brahms waltz, or maybe two of them if she felt like it.
Vivaldi, Schumann, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms. A very nice programme, one that she could play easily without the music. She moved herself a little closer to the piano and paused a moment while someone in the audience – already she could feel that this was one of the lucky days – while someone in the audience had his last cough; then, with the slow grace that accompanied nearly all her movements, she lifted her hands to the keyboard and began to play.