More Cats in the Belfry by Doreen Tovey Read Free Book Online Page B

was a little tear in the cover and she'd put it inside. Louisa telling me all this, was practically crying with laughter, never realising how peculiar, at times, her own actions were.
    Â Â Another of her neighbours, Edward, was a bachelor of about my own age. I had known him since we were children, and after his mother died he had turned part of his house into a very comfortable flat and let the rest. He had a daily woman to clean for him; Louisa kept a motherly eye on him and made him cakes; and Dorine, as another remunerative sideline, did odd bits of washing and mending for him. So I was considerably taken aback one day when Louisa said that Edward had asked her to ask me to dye his bathroom curtains for him. Pale blue towelling they were, but they'd got rather washed out. He fancied them a dark brown and he'd be very grateful if I'd do them.
    Â Â Why hadn't he asked Dorine? I wondered. Was it...? We were about the same age and now both alone in the world... But no it couldn't be, I told myself. He was a confirmed bachelor; I certainly wasn't interested and Louisa knew it. So, out of friendship, I did them. Actually I was quite good at dyeing things: Louisa had probably mentioned it to him, I decided. And the curtains turned out beautifully.
    Â Â I took them back, Louisa and I went across to the flat and hung them while Edward was out, and I drove beatifically home with the thought of a good deed well done – only to have Edward ring me as soon as I got in, apologising so profusely I could practically see him sweating on the other end of the line. He couldn't understand why Louisa had asked me to dye his curtains. 'Never would I have dreamt of it,' he kept protesting. 'Never would I have dreamt of it.' He had meant her to ask Dorine down the road, he explained, and why on earth she'd thought he meant me ...
    Â Â I could understand it. Our names sounded the same, and if anyone was going to misconstrue a thing it would be Louisa, who spent her life confusing words and pronunciations. It was around that time that England played the Cameroons in a World Cup football match and Louisa kept enthusiastically telling me, and everybody else she encountered, that she'd been watching the match against the Macaroons on television. She also persisted in calling rudbeckias rudybeckias, referred to her newly acquired microwave, in which she constantly produced her most ghastly failures, as her microphone and generally pulverised the English language in a manner that reminded me of my grandmother – her mother – who, when I was young, used to speak of Hitler as Herring Hitler and Stalin as Old Stallion. Funnily enough, Louisa had never done it when she was younger. Was it a family trait that developed with age? I speculated apprehensively...
    Â Â I sorted out the confusion of the towel­-dyeing, anyway – to my satisfaction if not entirely to Edward's, who went on apologising every time we met for weeks – and returned to my chief preoccupation at the time, which was to see whether I could get the two cats used to the caravan with a view to one day taking them with me on holiday.
    Â Â When Charles was alive we had planned to do it with Saska and Shebalu. We never got as far as actually taking them. We did try a few days' practice camping in our own caravan field, but that proved so disastrous, and confirmed our neighbours' impression that we were odd even for this village to such a degree, that we eventually abandoned the idea. But Saska was older now, and Tani was such a timid little thing, and I, on my own, would find them such good company on short holidays (I imagined, seeing in my mind's eye the three of us strolling along the sands of my favourite Cornish cove and curled up reading cosily by lamplight in the caravan at night)... and so I started taking them up to the caravan with me when I went up to air it. They would sit side by side in the doorway, gazing out at passing riders like a