The cat made no reply, so Louisa, fearing she might lose the attention of her listener, went straight into the next part of the programme – Liszt’s second Petrarch Sonnet.
And now an extraordinary thing happened. She hadn’t played more than three or four bars when the animal’s whiskers began perceptibly to twitch. Slowly it drew itself up to an extra height, laid its head on one side, then on the other, and stared into space with a kind of frowning concentrated look that seemed to say, ‘What’s this? Don’t tell me. I know it so well, but just for the moment I don’t seem to be able to place it.’ Louisa was fascinated, and with her little mouth half open and half smiling, she continued to play, waiting to see what on earth was going to happen next.
The cat stood up, walked to one end of the sofa, sat down again, listened some more; then all at once it bounded to the floor and leaped up on to the piano stool beside her. There it sat, listening intently to the lovely sonnet, not dreamily this time, but very erect, the large yellow eyes fixed upon Louisa’s fingers.
‘Well!’ she said as she struck the last chord. ‘So you came up to sit beside me, did you? You like this better than the sofa? All right, I’ll let you stay, but you must keep still and not jump about.’ She put out a hand and stroked the cat softly along the back, from head to tail. ‘That was Liszt,’ she went on. ‘Mind you, he can sometimes be quite horribly vulgar, but in things like this he’s really charming.’
She was beginning to enjoy this odd animal pantomime, so she went straight on into the next item on the programme, Schumann’s Kinderscenen.
She hadn’t been playing for more than a minute or two when she realized that the cat had again moved, and was now back in its old place on the sofa. She’d been watching her hands at the time, and presumably that was why she hadn’t even noticed its going; all the same, it must have been an extremely swift and silent move. The cat was still staring at her, still apparently attending closely to the music, and yet it seemed to Louisa that there was not now the same rapturous enthusiasm there’d been during the previous piece, the Liszt. In addition, the act of leaving the stool and returning to the sofa appeared in itself to be a mild but positive gesture of disappointment.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked when it was over. ‘What’s wrong with Schumann? What’s so marvellous about Liszt?’ The cat looked straight back at her with those yellow eyes that had small jet-black bars lying vertically in their centres.
This, she told herself, is really beginning to get interesting – a trifle spooky, too, when she came to think of it. But one look at the cat sitting there on the sofa, so bright and attentive, so obviously waiting for more music, quickly reassured her.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to alter my programme specially for you. You seem to like Liszt so much, I’ll give you another.’
She hesitated, searching her memory for a good Liszt; then softly she began to play one of the twelve little pieces from Der Weihnachtsbaum. She was now watching the cat very closely, and the first thing she noticed was that the whiskers again began to twitch. It jumped down to the carpet, stood still a moment, inclining its head, quivering with excitement, and then, with a slow, silky stride, it walked around the piano, hopped up on the stool, and sat down beside her.
They were in the middle of all this when Edward came in from the garden.
‘Edward!’ Louisa cried, jumping up. ‘Oh, Edward, darling! Listen to this! Listen what’s happened!’
‘What is it now?’ he said. ‘I’d like some tea.’ He had one of those narrow, sharp-nosed, faintly magenta faces, and the sweat was making it shine as though it were a long wet grape.
‘It’s the cat!’ Louisa cried, pointing to it sitting quietly on the piano stool. ‘Just wait till you hear what’s happened!’
‘I thought I told you to take it to the police.’
‘But, Edward, listen to me. This is terribly exciting. This is a musical cat.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘This cat can appreciate music, and it can understand it too.’
‘Now stop this nonsense, Louisa, and for God’s sake let’s have some tea. I’m hot and tired from cutting brambles and building bonfires.’ He sat down in an armchair, took a cigarette from a box beside him, and lit it with an immense patent lighter that stood near the box.
‘What you don’t understand,’ Louisa said, ‘is that something extremely exciting has been happening here in our own house while you were out, something that may even be… well… almost momentous.’