Thomasina
Thomasina
Paul Gallico
From the author of “The Snow Goose”.“I was aware, from the very beginning, that I was a most unusual cat…”Thomasina is the beloved pet cat of 7-year-old Mary Ruadh, whose strict father is the town's vet. When Thomasina falls ill, her father sees no other option but to put the cat down. Heartbroken by his cruelty, Mary stops speaking to her father and falls dangerously ill herself.Meanwhile, Thomasina is rescued by Lori, a young woman who lives alone in an isolated glen and is rumoured to be a witch with healing powers.While Lori helps Thomasina recover from her ordeal, Mary's health continues to deteriorate and it is only when Thomasina makes her miraculous return, on a dark and stormy night, and is reunited with her owner that Mary is pulled from the brink of death.
Copyright (#ulink_2a2ac65a-7bd5-5572-b449-3ee96ee9a1d7)
First published in the USA in 1957
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph in 1957
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
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Text copyright © Mathemata Anstalt 1957
Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2011
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Cover illustration © Jarom Vogel 2017
Paul Gallico asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007395187
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007542321
Version: 2016-12-21
To Virginia
There is no such town as Inveranoch in Argyll, nor are there any such people alive or dead as written about herein. This is a work of fiction.
P. G.
Contents
Cover (#u29e6c28b-7812-52d8-964b-89ebde314414)
Title Page (#u11e945b7-b722-5aa4-b755-9feff7b5d167)
Copyright (#udf204f97-a3f3-5800-9a57-1948508e64a3)
Dedication (#u07ee0163-5cb0-51cc-b1a0-dfe63e0f7dd3)
Why You’ll Love This Book by Michael Morpurgo (#u46fe92d5-5b2c-58ab-9b5a-b129ad1c4965)
Chapter One (#u70b361b3-7be2-5ef5-acf7-b248a4d5b48e)
Chapter Two (#udd98c859-fcd7-5594-95d4-acc723bd6ccb)
Chapter Three (#u476f0cd5-edda-5e6f-9571-c8656fea38f7)
Chapter Four (#ub05b6dea-5b27-5d72-8fda-20efc2c87541)
Chapter Five (#uf0618d00-a9da-5fe1-9319-5baf5d343609)
Chapter Six (#u51f77ca2-96e7-5b58-98b4-8e574754f9f4)
Chapter Seven (#u7ab54804-1e57-5c9b-b5a3-f82e0f3362d7)
Chapter Eight (#u1ac10b5f-8bff-5d60-b07f-2e8b7c7ea837)
Chapter Nine (#u0f169635-eae9-5b94-93a4-36f9fb49467a)
Chapter Ten (#ud083e803-6fa8-5071-b7cd-75033912d00c)
Chapter Eleven (#u4d35fa9c-aabf-5fc2-b92b-a78b60f1378e)
Chapter Twelve (#u2bd92da2-d0f0-52cd-8bcf-2911467a4502)
Chapter Thirteen (#uabc9af71-3fd4-5649-89da-932e3f134830)
Chapter Fourteen (#ub5ad6710-4360-5384-89d3-444efd214bd1)
Chapter Fifteen (#uc7ca20e8-0178-5bd4-9b09-e4dc73802df8)
Chapter Sixteen (#u067cffae-fd10-5d19-b347-e2c76c087415)
Chapter Seventeen (#u1c4a6b85-d5c7-52f8-9b57-bb3220c7667f)
Chapter Eighteen (#ue6be851c-6f1d-501f-a2e7-5216db4d74f7)
Chapter Nineteen (#uafc0e793-613c-5ae5-9d1b-61eceeb91c3a)
Chapter Twenty (#u055f446c-e0ca-5eb6-b0d7-4c05bbeaf1ae)
Chapter Twenty-One (#uf3d1765a-6339-56d2-95e2-51e87c09d925)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#u94fb6d3f-5814-5115-bb8b-64c10f1a4e2a)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#uf0bc8ca4-87f1-5f9d-9109-538416d0f342)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#ua7dff5a6-5416-5809-a64f-93d5db189d00)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#u7215bf44-9a84-5b94-9116-10ce3d077748)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#u7fe444af-912d-5ea7-ae45-d453cbce7e6e)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#u39f12644-8dc2-5e99-9d38-4eba2f88341d)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#uad2e8272-7c98-5de7-9e3e-7134f673fc59)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#ud10d697c-a8c2-5fc4-ab8d-428ae2134a15)
Chapter Thirty (#u404f945d-10d8-56e6-a0cf-4d014c56ae70)
Chapter Thirty-One (#u23036984-1b3a-5f45-9e50-72869fdbac54)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#u5f2d0d21-7328-57b4-8641-b2e31e85489b)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#uc22a9232-bd2c-59cc-bf30-48a556cbd1b6)
Footnote
Keep Reading … (#u46128df5-8e7a-5686-8a69-f408ea8ce7a6)
About the Author
Collins Modern Classics by Paul Gallico (#u1fc1a9f5-4500-546c-8c5c-49fd3c26d1f9)
About the Publisher (#ue37d067a-2a29-59c6-9899-d5693f6b1d57)
Why You’ll Love This Book by Michael Morpurgo (#ulink_25628d96-abab-5c68-a38b-59dda741d9f9)
Paul Gallico always brings to his stories the ring of truth. It is what writers of fiction have to do if their stories are to be believed. It must be the first rule of every writer of fiction to make our readers believe. If they don’t, then they simply won’t care. They must have a burning desire to turn the page and find out what happens next. One way to achieve this is for a writer to set the story in a known historical context or against a very specific and recognisable geographical background. In The Snow Goose or indeed in The Small Miracle, two of his most popular stories, this great storyteller does just this, leaning heavily on actual events and places for inspiration as well as credibility.
With Thomasina, as with his other great cat story, Jennie, Paul Gallico leaves the comfort zone of reality, and launches off into an unlikely adventure told by a remarkable cat, Thomasina, Mary Ruadh’s ginger cat. Murdered (put down) by Mary’s father, Andrew MacDhui, a country vet; reincarnated by Lori, Red Witch of the glen, Thomasina becomes Talitha who can trace her ancestry back to an Egyptian goddess. She has only revenge in her heart for her murderer. Unlikely it all may be, but because Gallico is such a compelling and inviting teller of tales, we go with him, we believe it absolutely. Whether or not you like cats, this is a tale you cannot put down. You go where Thomasina takes you – she and Gallico between them practically turn the pages for you.
Like Gallico I’ve written several cat stories, but none as fantastical as this, and none as feline either. This is a story that cats would love as much as I do!
Michael Morpurgo
Michael Morpurgo OBE is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children. He has written over 100 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Whitbread Award. His recent bestselling novels include The Fox and the Ghost King, An Eagle in the Snow and Listen to the Moon. His novel War Horse has been successfully adapted as a West End and Broadway theatre play and a major film by Steven Spielberg. A former Children’s Laureate, Michael is also the co-founder, with his wife Clare, of the charity Farms for City Children.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_90eca056-2703-5a3b-88ea-6b0759e6b591)
Mr Andrew MacDhui, veterinary surgeon, thrust his brick-red, bristling beard through the door of the waiting-room next to the surgery and looked with cold, hostile eyes upon the people seated there on the plain pine chairs with their pets on their laps or at their feet awaiting his attendance.
Willie Bannock, his brisk, wiry man-of-all-work in surgery, dispensary, office and animal hospital, had already gossiped a partial list of those present that morning to Mr MacDhui and which included his friend and next-door neighbour, the Minister, Angus Peddie. Mr Peddie, of course, would be there with, or because of, his insufferable pug dog whose gastric disturbances were brought on by pampering and the feeding of forbidden sweets. Mr MacDhui’s glance dropped to the narrow lap of the short-legged, round little clergyman and for a moment his eye was caught up in the unhappy, milky one of the pug rolled in his direction, filled with the misery of belly-ache, and yet expressing a certain hope and longing as well. The animal had come to associate his visits to this place, the smells and the huge man with the fur on his face with relief.
The veterinary disentangled himself from the hypnotic eye and wished angrily that Peddie would follow his advice on feeding the animal and not be there wasting his time. He noted the rich builder’s wife from Glasgow on holiday with her rheumy little Yorkshire terrier, an animal he particularly detested, with its ridiculous velvet bow laced into its silken top-knot. There was Mrs Kinloch over the ears of her Siamese cat which lay upon her knee, occasionally shaking its head and complaining in a raucous voice, and, too, there was Mr Dobbie, the grocer, whose long and doleful countenance reflected that of his Scots terrier who was suffering from the mange and looked as though a visit to the upholsterer would be more practical.
There were half a dozen or so others, including a small boy, who he seemed to have seen somewhere before, and at the head of the line he recognised old, obese Mrs Laggan, proprietress of the newspaper and tobacco shop who, with her nondescript mongrel, Rabbie, his muzzle greyed, his eyes rheumy with age, was a landmark of Inveranoch and had been so for years.
Mrs Laggan was a widow, and had been for the past twenty-five years of her seventy-odd. For the last fifteen of them, her dog, Rabbie, had been her only companion, and his bulk draped across the doorstep of Mrs Laggan’s shop was as familiar a figure to natives as well as visitors to the Highland town as that of the fat widow in her Paisley shawl. Since the doorstep was Rabbie’s place, nose between forepaws, eyes rolled upwards, customers of the widow Laggan had learned to step over him when entering and departing. It was said in the High Street that descendants of these clients were already born with this precaution bred into them.
Mr MacDhui looked his patients over and the patients looked back at him with varying degrees of anxiety, hope, deference, or in some cases a return of the hostility that seemed to be written all over the well-marked features of his face, the high brow, the indignantly flaring red-tufted eyebrows, commanding blue eyes, strong nose, full and sometimes mocking lips, half seen through the bristle of red moustache and beard and the truculent and aggressive chin.
His eyes and, above all, his manner always seemed cold and angry, perhaps because, it was said in Inveranoch, he was on the whole a cold and angry man.
A widower of the stature and flamboyance of Mr Veterinary Surgeon MacDhui was subject enough for gossip in a Highland town the size of Inveranoch, in Argyll, where he had been in practice for only a little over eighteen months. By the nature of his profession he was a figure of importance there since he looked after not only the personal and private pets of the townspeople, but was responsible also for the health of the livestock raised in the outlying farms of the district, the herds of Angus cattle and black-faced sheep, pigs and fowl. In addition, he was the appointed veterinary of the district for the inspection of meat and milk and hygienic dairies as well.
The gossips allowed that Andrew MacDhui was an honest, forthright and fair-dealing man, but, and this was the opinion of the strictly religiously inclined, a queer one to be dealing with God’s dumb creatures, since he appeared to have no love for animals, very little for man, and neither the inclination or the time for God. Whether or not he was an out and out unbeliever as many claimed, he certainly never was seen in Mr Peddie’s church, even though the two were known to be good friends. Others claimed that when his wife had died his heart had turned to stone, all but the corner devoted to his love for his seven-year-old child, Mary Ruadh, the one who was never seen without that ill-favoured, queer-marked ginger cat she called Thomasina.
Mind you, said the tattlers, no one denied that he was a good and efficient doctor for the beasties. Quick to cure or kill, and a mite too handy with the chloroform rag was the word that went around. Those who felt kindly towards him held that he was a humane man not disposed to see a hopelessly sick animal suffer needlessly, while those who disliked him and his high-handed ways called him a hard, cruel man to whom the life of an animal was nothing, and who was openly contemptuous of people who were sentimentally attached to their pets.
And many of those who did not encounter him professionally were inclined to the belief that there must be some good in the man else he would not have had the friendship and esteem of Mr Angus Peddie, pastor of the Presbyterian flock of Inveranoch. It was said that the minister who had known MacDhui in their student days had been largely instrumental in persuading his friend, upon the death of his wife, Anne, to purchase the practice of Inveranoch’s retiring vet and move thither leaving behind him the unhappy memories that had bedevilled him in Glasgow.
Several of the inhabitants of Inveranoch remembered Mr MacDhui’s late father, John, himself a Glasgow veterinary, a dour, tyrannical old man with a strong religious bent who, holding the purse strings, had compelled his son to follow in his footsteps. The story was that Andrew MacDhui had wished to study to become a surgeon in his youth but in the end had been compelled for financial reasons to yield to his father’s wishes and likewise become a veterinary.
One of these inhabitants had once paid a visit to the gloomy old house in Dunearn Street in Glasgow where for a time father and son practised together until the old man died, and had nothing good to say about it, except that it was not much to wonder at that Mr MacDhui had turned out as he had.
Mr Peddie had known MacDhui’s father as a psalm-singing old hypocrite in whose home God served merely as an auxiliary policeman. Whatever seemed healthy or fun, old John MacDhui’s God was against, and Andrew MacDhui had grown up hating Him and then denying Him. The tragedy of the loss of his wife, Anne, when his daughter, Mary Ruadh, was only three had confirmed him in his bitterness.
His scrutiny completed, MacDhui now pointed his beard at old, fat Mrs Laggan and jerked his head in the direction of his office. She gave a little bleat of fright, picked Rabbie up out of her lap and arose painfully, holding him in her arms where he lay on his back, forepaws bent limply, watery eyes revolving. He resembled an over-stuffed black and grey porker and he wheezed at every breath like a catarrhal old man snoring.
Mr Angus Peddie pulled in his feet to let her by and gave her a warm, cherubic smile of encouragement, for he was the very opposite of the figure that a dour Scots churchman is supposed to resemble. He was short, inclined to stoutness, sweet-natured and extraordinarily vital. He had a round, dimpled face and mischievous eyes and smile which, however, could instantly express the deepest sympathy, penetrating understanding and concern.
Peddie’s pug dog, who, as well as suffering from chronic indigestion, staggered under the name of Fin-du-Siècle, an indication of the kind of humour one might be expected to encounter in the large Peddie family, lay likewise wheezing in the minister’s lap. Peddie lifted him into a sitting position so that he could better see Mrs Laggan and her sick dog go by. He said: “That’s Mrs Laggan’s Rabbie, Fin. The poor wee thing isn’t feeling well just now.” The rolling eyes of the two dogs met for a moment in melancholy exchange.
Mrs Laggan followed Mr MacDhui into the examining room of the surgery and deposited Rabbie on his back upon the long, white-enamelled examining table where he remained, his forepaws still limp and his breath coming in difficult gasps.
The veterinarian lifted the lip of the animal, glanced at his teeth, pulled down its eyelids and placed one hand for a moment upon its heaving belly. “How old is this dog?” he asked.
Mrs Laggan, traditionally dressed as became a respectable widow, in rusty black with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders, seemed to shrink inside her clothes. “Fifteen years and a bit,” she replied. “Well, fourteen, since he’s grown from the wee pup he was the day I got him,” she added, as though by quickly subtracting a year from his age she might lure fate into permitting him to remain a year longer. Fifteen was old for a dog. With fourteen there was always hope they might live to be fifteen, like Mrs Campbell’s old sheepdog, which was actually nearly sixteen.
The veterinarian nodded, glanced perfunctorily at the dog again and said: “He ought to be put out of his misery. You can see how bad his asthma is. He can hardly breathe.” He picked the dog up and set him on his feet on the floor where he promptly collapsed on to his belly with his chin flat on the floor and his eyes turned up adoringly at Mrs Laggan. “Or walk,” concluded MacDhui.
The widow had many chins. Fear set them all to quivering. “Put him away? Put the poor beastie to death? But whatever should I do then when he’s all I’ve got in this world? We’ve been together for fifteen years now, and me a lonely widow for twenty-five. What would I be doing without Rabbie?”
“Get another dog,” MacDhui replied. “It shouldn’t be difficult. The village is full of them.”
“Och, how can you be speaking like that? It would not be Rabbie. Can you not be giving him a wee bit of medicine that will keep him going till he gets well? He’s been a very healthy dog.”
Animals, reflected Mr MacDhui, were never a problem, it was the sentimentality of their owners that created all the difficulties. “The dog must die soon,” he said. “He is very old and very ill. Anyone with half an eye can see that his life has become a burden to him and that he is suffering. If I gave him some medicine you would be back here within a fortnight. It might prolong his life for a month, at the most six months. I am a busy man,” he concluded, but then added more gently: “It would be kinder to make an end to him.”
The quivering of her chins now had spread to her small mouth as Mrs Laggan looked fearfully into the day that would be without Rabbie; no one to talk to, no one to whose breathing she would hearken whilst she had her evening cup of tea, or lay in bed at night. She said what came into her head, but not what was bursting in her heart. “The customers who come to my shop will miss Rabbie sore if he’s not there for them to be stepping over.” But she was meaning: “I’m an old woman. I have not many days left myself. I am lonely. The dog has been my companion and my comfort for so long. He and I know one another’s ways so well.”
“Yes, yes, Mrs Laggan, no doubt. But you must make up your mind, for I have other patients waiting.”
Mrs Laggan looked uneasily to the big, vital man with the red moustache and beard.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be selfish if poor Rabbie is suffering …”
Mr MacDhui did not reply, but sat waiting.
Life without Rabbie – the once cold nose pressing against her hand, the edge of pink tongue that protruded when he was contemplative, his great sigh of contentment when he was fed full – but above all his presence; Rabbie always within sight, sound, or touch. Old dogs must die; old people must die. She was minded to plead for the bit of medicine, for another month, a week, a day more with Rabbie, but she was rushed and nervous and fearful. And so she said: “You would be very gentle with him –”
MacDhui sighed with impatient relief: “He will not feel a thing, I assure you.” He rose. “I think you are doing what is right, Mrs Laggan.”
“Very well, then. Make away with him. What will it be I’ll be owing you?”
The vet had a moment’s pang brought on by the sight of the trembling lips and chins and cursed himself for it. “There will be no charge,” he said curtly.
The widow Laggan regained sudden control of her face and her dignity, though her eyes were wet. “I’ll be paying you for your services—”
“Two shillings, then.”
She paid out of a small black purse, setting the florin on to his desk with a snap that caused Rabbie to prick up his greying ears for a moment. Without another glance at her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs Laggan made for the door. She held herself as proudly and erectly as she could, for she would not be a fat old woman dissolving into grief before this hard man. She bore up to pass through and close it behind her.
Thin women in sorrow have both the faces and figures for bleakness and woe, but there is nothing quite as futile and shaking as the aspect of an obese woman in affliction. The small mouth unable to form into the classic lines of tragedy can but purse and quiver. Grief is bowed, but fat keeps the stout woman’s curves constant, except that the flesh suddenly greys and looks as though the juices of life had gone out of it for all its roundness.
When the widow Laggan emerged from the surgery and entered the waiting-room once more, all eyes were turned upon her, and the Rev. Peddie recognised the symptoms at once, got up and went to her, crying: “Oh, dear – don’t say that something ill has befallen Rabbie. Is he to remain in hospital?” And then he echoed the prior remarks of the widow. “Why, whatever would the town do without the presence of Rabbie across the doorstep?”
Safe within the circle of her own people, Mrs Laggan could let the tears flow freely as she told of the sentence passed upon her friend. “The doctor said it would be better if he were to be put away just now. Why must the ones we love always go while we are remaining behind? Och, it will not be the same any more without Rabbie. But I’m thinking I’ll be following him soon and it will be all for the best.” She dabbed at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief and essayed a smile. “Do you remember how Rabbie would be blocking the door, and all the gentry would be raising up their knees to pass over him?”
It was so small a thing that had happened, yet the waiting-room was stiff with the tragedy of it, and Mr Peddie felt the horror clamped like a hand about his heart, squeezing that member until it felt in some similar measure the pain that was oppressing the widow Laggan. Mr Peddie had one of those awful moments to which he was prone when he could not decide what it was that God would wish him to do, what God Himself would do, were He to stand there with them all in the presence of the misery of the widow Laggan.
For to Mr Angus Peddie there was neither gloom nor sourness, nor melancholy about either the God or the religion he served. Creation and the world created, along with the Creator were a perpetual joy to him and his mission seemed to be to see that his flock appreciated and was properly grateful for all the wonders and beauties of nature, man and beast as well as the great and marvellous unexplained mysteries of the universe. He did not try to explain God, the Father, or the Son, but worked to help his people love and enjoy Him. A man of unusual tolerance and breadth of vision, he believed that man could deny God for a time, but not forever, since God was so manifest in everything that lived and breathed, in things both animate and inanimate, that He was universal and hence undeniable.
And yet, human being that he was, he felt the panic when his God seemed to turn His back upon the likes of the widow Laggan and his own warm heart was riven with pity for her plight.
There stood a weeping fat woman dabbing at her eyes with a small cloth, the tears straggling unevenly over the curves of her cheek and her triple chins quaking and jouncing. And in a moment she would walk out of there and begin to die.
Peddie felt the strong push of the impulse to rush into the surgery of Mr MacDhui crying: “Stop, Andrew! Don’t kill the animal. Let it live out its time. Who are you who hate him to play God?” but he resisted it. What right had he to interfere? MacDhui knew his business, and veterinary surgeons, just as doctors, frequently had to make decisions and break news that was painful to people, except that to the former was sometimes given the additional mercy of destruction to save pain and suffering.
Mrs Laggan said once more, speaking as though to herself: “Twill no be the same wi’out Rabbie,” and went out. Mr MacDhui’s beard came in through the door again and he stood there a moment regarding them all truculently as though experiencing some remnant of the scene that had just taken place and the sympathy engendered for the old woman.
He asked: “Who’s next?” and his countenance took on an even greater expression of distaste when the Glasgow builder’s wife with the Yorkshire terrier half arose irresolutely from the hard, waiting-room chair and the dog gave a shrill yelp of terror.
A small voice said: “Please, sir, could you spare a moment?”
Someone remarked: “It’s little Geordie McNabb, the draper’s boy.”
Geordie was eight. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt and the kerchief of the Scout Wolf Cubs. He had a round, solemn face with dark hair and eyes and a curiously Chinesey cast of countenance. In his grubby hands he clasped a box and in the box palpitatingly reposed his good deed for that day. MacDhui strode over to him overpoweringly, overtoweringly, looming over him like a red Magog, thrusting his bristling beard nearly into the box as he boomed: “Well, lad, what is it you want?”
Geordie stood his ground bravely. Patently, inside the box there was a green frog with heaving sides. The boy explained: “There’s something wrong with his foot. And he cannot hop. I found him by the side of the lochan. He was trying very hard to hop but he couldn’t at all. Will you make him better, please, so that he can be hopping again?”
The waves of old bitterness had a way of rolling up inside Andrew MacDhui at the oddest and most ill-timed moments, causing him to do and say things that he did not mean to at all. Here he was in his waiting-room full of clients and it suddenly came over him as he stood bent over and looking down into the box – “Doctor to a frog with a broken leg, that’s what you are, my great, fine fellow—”
And thereupon the old angers and regrets returned to plague and irritate him. Had there been justice in the world, all of these people in the room, yes, and the child too, would have been there to consult him about ailing hearts, or lungs or throats or livers, aches and pains and mysterious cramps, sicknesses and diseases, which he would combat for them and put to rights. And there they were instead with their pampered, snuffling, mewing and whining little pets kept for their own flattery’s sake or because they had been too lazy or selfish to bring into the world a child on whom to lavish their affection.
The ailing Yorkie was quite near to him and MacDhui, his nostrils already flaring with disgust of himself and all humanity, caught a whiff of the perfume with which his mistress had scented him. He therefore replied to Geordie McNabb out of the black cloud of anger enveloping him: “I have no time for such foolishness. Cannot you see that I am busy with a room full of people? Go put the frog back by the pond again and leave it be. Off with you now.”
Into the dark, round eyes of Geordie came that expression reserved to children who have been hurt by and disappointed in their grown-ups. “But he’s sick,” he said, “he’s not well. Will he not die?”
MacDhui, not less unkindly this time, steered the child towards the door and gave him a farewell pat on the behind. “Off you go, boy. Put it back where you found it. Nature will look after it. Now, then, if you like, Mrs Sanderson –”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_096147a1-053b-57d5-9803-2a4749bcdad5)
If it is family you go by, then you will certainly be impressed with mine, for I am a relative of that Jennie – Jennie Baldrin of Glasgow – about whose life and times and adventures in London, aboard ship and elsewhere, a whole book has been written and published.
We are Edinburgh on one side of my family, several of my forbears not only having been employed at the University in the usual capacity of hunters, but one or two are said to have contributed to scientific knowledge and advance. We are Glasgow on the other, the Jennie Baldrin side.
Jennie was my great-aunt and she was most distinguished and Egyptian-looking with a small, rather narrow head, long muzzle, slanting eyes and good-sized, rounded, well-upstanding ears, and in this I am said to resemble her closely, though, of course, our colouring is quite different. I mention this with excusable pride since it shows that we trace our ancestry back to the days when people had the good sense to recognise us as gods.
That false gods are worshipped today – well, more’s the pity, for in Egypt, in the old days when members of our family were venerated in temples, times were better and people, by and large, seemed happier. That, however, is neither here nor there and does not concern what I have to tell. Yet, if you know that once you were a god, no matter how long ago – well, it is bound to show somewhat in your demeanour.
Nor does Jennie play any part at all in what is to follow, except that I suppose I inherited something of her independence, courage and poise, not to mention elegance, and I brought in her name only as a possible point of interest to you should you happen to be familiar with her story.
I too have had a most curious adventure and experience, one of the most interesting and marvellous things that ever happened, at least that part which concerns myself.
I will not keep you in suspense. It has to do with a murder.
But what makes this story different from any you ever read is that the one who is murdered is – ME.
The name I bear, Thomasina, came about through one of those ridiculous and inexcusable errors committed by so many people who attempt to determine our sex when we are very young. I was originally christened Thomas when I came to live at the home of the MacDhuis in Glasgow to be the pet of Mary Ruadh, then aged three. When the error became obvious the name was simply feminised to Thomasina by Mrs McKenzie, our housekeeper, whether I liked it or not and without so much as a by your leave.
I do not know why people are quite so stupid at determining our sex when we are young. The difference is easy enough to see if you will just look instead of guess, and take a little trouble, for with boys, things are apart, and with girls they are near together, and that’s the rule, no matter how small they might be.
Mr Andrew MacDhui might have told at a glance, no doubt, since he was a veterinary surgeon. But he was a most queer man to follow the profession of doctor to animals, since he had little love for and no sentimental interest in them whatsoever, and hence never paid the slightest attention to me from the moment I came into the house, which I cannot say disturbed me. The disregard was mutual.
We lived in a large, rather gloomy house in Dunearn Street, which Mr MacDhui had inherited from his father, who was also a veterinary, when he died. The two lower floors were given over to the offices, surgery and animal hospital, and we lived on the two upper ones, Mr MacDhui, his wife and Mary Ruadh. They all had red hair. I have too, or rather ginger-coloured with a white blaze on my chest. But what people really seem to find irresistible about me is that I have four white feet, and the very tip of my tail is white to match. I am quite used to receiving compliments upon my looks and bearing.
Although I was then only six months old myself, I remember Mary Ruadh’s mother, Anne. She was beautiful and her hair was the colour of copper pots by the fireside. She was very gay and always singing about the house, which made it less dark and gloomy, even on rainy days. She was forever cuddling and spoiling Mary Ruadh and they would often spend time “giving one another whispers”, which was a kind of love-making. It was not an unhappy household in spite of Mr MacDhui. But it did not last long, for soon after I came Mrs MacDhui contracted a disease from a parrot that was being kept in the hospital and died.
That was a bad time for me, I can tell you, and if it had not been for Mrs McKenzie I do not know what would have happened to me, for Mr MacDhui half went out of his mind, they said, and it certainly sounded like it, the manner in which he raged and carried on, and the love he had had for his wife he now transferred to his daughter, and half frightened her to death with it, and me too, I can assure you. He kept staying away from home and would not go near his animal hospital for days on end and things were getting in a bad state when he received a visit from an old friend of his from the country, a minister by the name of Mr Peddie, and after that things got a little better and soon we had a great change.
It seems that Mr Peddie and Mr MacDhui had known one another when they were both students at Edinburgh University – they might even have known some of my family there – and Mr Peddie told Mr MacDhui that there was a practice for sale in the town where he lived and advised him to go there.
So, Mr MacDhui sold out his practice in Glasgow and the house on Dunearn Street where he was brought up and we all moved to Inveranoch on the west bank of Loch Fyne in Argyll where my tragedy happened to me.
Mary Ruadh then was six years old, going on for seven, and we lived in the last house but one near the end of Argyll Lane. Our next-door neighbour was Mr MacDhui’s friend, Mr Angus Peddie, the minister, who kept a most disgusting pug dog by the name of Fin. Ugh!
Our house was really two houses, one next the other but separated and they were of white-washed stone with slate roofs; they were rather long and narrow; two storeys high, with tall chimneys at each end on which there was usually perched a seagull. In one of these we lived and in the adjoining one was the office, waiting-room, surgery and hospital of Mr MacDhui. But, of course, we never went there for Mary Ruadh was forbidden to do so. After what had happened in Glasgow, Mr MacDhui had sworn he would never again have sick animals in the place where he lived.
I considered myself a good deal better off in Inveranoch than in Glasgow because Loch Fyne was an arm of the sea that pushed up from the ocean down by Greenock right up into the Highlands as far as Cairndow and brought with it gulls to watch in flight and the smell of the sea and fish and queer birds to chase that ran along the beach behind which lay a wonderful dark and scary country of woods and glens and mountains of stone in which to hunt. I was never allowed out in Glasgow, but it was quite different here and soon I became a real Highlander and we Highlanders, of course, looked down on everyone else.
Inveranoch was not as large a city as Glasgow, in fact, it was quite small with no more than a few thousand inhabitants, but to make up for that hundreds of visitors came there every summer for their holidays.
This was the busiest time for Mr MacDhui for the guests often brought their pets with them, mostly dogs, of course, but sometimes cats and birds, and once, a monkey, and the climate did not always agree with them or they would get themselves bitten or stung in the woods, or pick a fight with one of us Highlanders, which was foolish since they were much too soft and then their owners would have to bring them to Mr MacDhui for repairs. He seemed to take this in very ill part, for he was a man who hated pets and disliked being a veterinary and preferred to pass his time in the back country with the farmers and crofters rather than keep office hours.
However, none of this was any of my concern and I was fairly comfortable at this time and living a routine sufficiently to my own taste, except for one thing. Mary Ruadh had become a cat carrier.
If you have had or have a little girl yourself you will know what I am talking about. If not, you may have noticed that, at a certain age, little girls always carry a doll around wherever they go, but some carry their cat. Often they do not even know they are carrying it as they walk or toddle about with it. They hold it around the middle, just below the shoulders, clutched to their breast so that most of the cat dangles a dead weight with head and forequarters hanging over the arm.
Mary Ruadh did vary this most uncomfortable and humiliating position sometimes by placing me across her shoulders like a fur piece where I could rest and even be admired by people who sometimes said it was difficult to tell which was Mary Ruadh’s hair and which was me. I didn’t mind that. Or she would carry me upside down in both arms, like a little baby. I hated that.
If you ask me why I put up with it, I cannot tell you, since my philosophy of life is quite simple. When you find yourself in a situation where unpleasant things, or things you don’t like, occur more frequently than pleasant ones – walk out.
Well, there were other things too, which I wasn’t going to mention, but as long as I am on the subject, I might as well. There was the being made to sit on a chair sometimes at tea with a napkin around my neck and pretend I was a person, or rather, Mary Ruadh pretended. This got me a few caraway seed cakes of which I happened to be fond and a couple of laps of milk out of a saucer, but it didn’t make up for the indignity.
When I had kittens they took them away from me and drowned them.
At night I was forced to sleep at the foot of her bed. Nor could I go away to my favourite chair after she fell asleep for if she woke up and I was not there she would call for me and sob most heart-breakingly. Sometimes during the night, even when I was there, she would wake up and begin to cry softly in the darkness and murmur, “Mummy – Mummy!” for it seems she remembered her too. Then she would reach down in the darkness and wake me up and hold me to her so hard with her face buried in my flank that I could hardly breathe, and you know how we hate to be held.
She would then cry – “Oh, Thomasina, Thomasina, I love you. Don’t ever leave me.” After a little she would become more quiet and I would wash her face a little and lick the salt tears from her cheeks, which made her laugh and giggle and say – “Thomasina – you tickle,” and soon she would go to sleep again.
And I stayed on. Believe me, if it had been a little boy I should not have done so, thank you very much. I should soon enough have run away and not come back, taken to the woods, or found someone else in town to live with, for I am perfectly capable of looking after Thomasina. Though I may look delicate, I am most resilient, have a hardy constitution and can stand almost anything. Once a boy on a bicycle ran over me. Mrs McKenzie came running out of the house screaming that I was killed and Mary Ruadh cried and carried on so that it took an hour afterwards to calm her and all that happened was that the boy fell off his bicycle and hurt himself and I got up and walked away.
Well, and then there was Mr MacDhui himself and there is plenty I could tell you about him, and none of it favourable. An animal doctor who didn’t like animals – there’s a good one. A bit too quick with the chloroform rag when people brought their sick pets to his surgery, was what they said. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want him treating me. Mr MacDhui was jealous of me because his daughter loved me so much, and he hated me. But what was even worse, he ignored me. Mr High-and-mighty-around-the-house. Nose in the air; whiskers bristling all the time. And the medicine smell of him. Ugh! It was the same one that came out of the hospital when you went past. When he returned home at night and bent down to kiss Mary Ruadh, his huge, bristly red face with the medicine and pipe smell would come right close to mine, since Mary Ruadh would be carrying me, and it made me feel sick.
Naturally, I annoyed him all I could, calling attention to myself by washing in front of him, taking care to be on his chair when I knew he would be wanting it, lying in doorways where he would be likely to trip over me, rubbing up against his legs and ankles, leaving hairs on his best clothes whenever I could find them and jumping up on his lap when he sat down to read the paper and making smells of my own. He did not dare to be rough with me when Mary Ruadh was in the room and so he would just pretend I was not there and then get up suddenly to go for some tobacco and dump me off his knees.
Add up all of these things and you might almost say it amounted to sufficient cause for me to move out. Yet I stayed on and was not too unhappy. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else, but if the truth be known, I was rather fond of the child.
I think it could have been because, in some ways, girl children and cats are not un-alike. There is some special mystery about little girls, an attitude of knowing secret things and a contemplative and not wholly complimentary quality about the way they look at you sometimes that is often as baffling and exasperating to their elders as we are.
If you have ever lived with a girl child, you will know that quiet, infuriating retirement into some private world of their own of which they are capable, as well as that stubborn independence in the face of stupid or unreasonable demands or prohibitions. These same traits seem to annoy you in us as well. For you can no more force a cat or a girl child to do something they do not wish to do than you can compel us to love you. We have this in common, Mary Ruadh and I.
Thus I did many strange things I should not have believed myself capable of doing. When Mary Ruadh went to school – this adventure of mine took place during the summer holidays – I suffered her to carry me all the way there, and to be pawed or fussed over by the other children until the bell rang and she went inside, when I was free to run home and look after my business.
But, believe it or not, when it came time for her to come home in the afternoon I would be sitting up on the gate-post with my tail curled round my legs, watching for her. True, it was also a fine vantage point from which to spit on the minister’s pug dog when it went by, but nevertheless, there I was. The neighbours used to say you could always tell what time of day it was by the MacDhui cat getting up on to the gate-post to watch for her wee mistress.
I, Thomasina, waiting on a gate-post for a somewhat grubby, red-haired and not even specially beautiful child, can you imagine?
Sometimes I wondered whether there was not another bond between us: we were each to the other something to cling to when the sun goes down and nightfall brings on fear and loneliness.
Loneliness is comforted by the closeness and touch of fur to fur, skin to skin – or skin to fur. Sometimes when I awoke at night after a bad dream, I would listen to the regular breathing of Mary Ruadh and feel the slight rise and fall of the bed-clothes about her. Then I would no longer be afraid and would go back to sleep again.
I have mentioned that Mary Ruadh was not an especially beautiful child, which perhaps was not polite, since she thought that I was certainly the most beautiful cat in the world, but I meant especially beautiful in the unusual sense. She was a rather ordinary-looking little girl except for her eyes, which told you of some special quality in her, or about her when you looked into them. Often I was not able to do so for long. Their colour was a bright blue, a most intense blue, but sometimes when she was thinking thoughts I could not understand or even guess, they turned as dark as the loch on a stormy day.
For the rest, you wouldn’t call her much to look at, with her uptilted nose and freckled face and a long lower lip that usually stuck out, while her eyebrows and lashes were so light you could hardly see them. She wore her ginger-red hair in two braids tied with green or blue ribbon. Her legs were quite long and she liked to stick her stomach out.
But there was something else pleasant about Mary Ruadh; she smelled good. Mrs McKenzie kept her washed and ironed when she was at home and she always smelled of lavender, for Mrs McKenzie kept lavender bags in with her clothes and underthings.
It seemed as if Mrs McKenzie was forever washing and ironing and starching and scenting her clothes, because it was the only way she was allowed to show how much she cared for Mary Ruadh. Mrs McKenzie was a thin woman who talked and sang through her nose. She would have mothered Mary Ruadh the way we will frequently look after somebody else’s kitten as though it were our own, but Mr MacDhui was jealous and feared that Mary Ruadh would come to love her too much if she were allowed to cuddle her. Oh, Mr Bristle-and-Smelly was allowed to cuddle her all he wished, but nobody else.
I loved the odour of lavender. Smells, almost more than noises, seem to bring on the happiness or unhappiness memories. You might not remember what it was about a smell had made you angry at the time, or afraid, but as soon as you come across it again you are angry or fearful. Like the medicine smell of Mr MacDhui.
But lavender was the happiness smell. It made my claws move in and out and brought the contentment purr to my throat.
Sometimes after putting Mary Ruadh’s things away after ironing them, Mrs McKenzie would forget to close all the chest of drawers, and leave one open. Then I would quickly nip inside and lie there full length with my nose up against a lavender bag, just smelling, smelling, smelling. That was bliss. That was when I was contented and at peace with the world.
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Paul Gallico
From the author of “The Snow Goose”.“I was aware, from the very beginning, that I was a most unusual cat…”Thomasina is the beloved pet cat of 7-year-old Mary Ruadh, whose strict father is the town's vet. When Thomasina falls ill, her father sees no other option but to put the cat down. Heartbroken by his cruelty, Mary stops speaking to her father and falls dangerously ill herself.Meanwhile, Thomasina is rescued by Lori, a young woman who lives alone in an isolated glen and is rumoured to be a witch with healing powers.While Lori helps Thomasina recover from her ordeal, Mary's health continues to deteriorate and it is only when Thomasina makes her miraculous return, on a dark and stormy night, and is reunited with her owner that Mary is pulled from the brink of death.
Copyright (#ulink_2a2ac65a-7bd5-5572-b449-3ee96ee9a1d7)
First published in the USA in 1957
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph in 1957
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © Mathemata Anstalt 1957
Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2011
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Cover illustration © Jarom Vogel 2017
Paul Gallico asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007395187
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007542321
Version: 2016-12-21
To Virginia
There is no such town as Inveranoch in Argyll, nor are there any such people alive or dead as written about herein. This is a work of fiction.
P. G.
Contents
Cover (#u29e6c28b-7812-52d8-964b-89ebde314414)
Title Page (#u11e945b7-b722-5aa4-b755-9feff7b5d167)
Copyright (#udf204f97-a3f3-5800-9a57-1948508e64a3)
Dedication (#u07ee0163-5cb0-51cc-b1a0-dfe63e0f7dd3)
Why You’ll Love This Book by Michael Morpurgo (#u46fe92d5-5b2c-58ab-9b5a-b129ad1c4965)
Chapter One (#u70b361b3-7be2-5ef5-acf7-b248a4d5b48e)
Chapter Two (#udd98c859-fcd7-5594-95d4-acc723bd6ccb)
Chapter Three (#u476f0cd5-edda-5e6f-9571-c8656fea38f7)
Chapter Four (#ub05b6dea-5b27-5d72-8fda-20efc2c87541)
Chapter Five (#uf0618d00-a9da-5fe1-9319-5baf5d343609)
Chapter Six (#u51f77ca2-96e7-5b58-98b4-8e574754f9f4)
Chapter Seven (#u7ab54804-1e57-5c9b-b5a3-f82e0f3362d7)
Chapter Eight (#u1ac10b5f-8bff-5d60-b07f-2e8b7c7ea837)
Chapter Nine (#u0f169635-eae9-5b94-93a4-36f9fb49467a)
Chapter Ten (#ud083e803-6fa8-5071-b7cd-75033912d00c)
Chapter Eleven (#u4d35fa9c-aabf-5fc2-b92b-a78b60f1378e)
Chapter Twelve (#u2bd92da2-d0f0-52cd-8bcf-2911467a4502)
Chapter Thirteen (#uabc9af71-3fd4-5649-89da-932e3f134830)
Chapter Fourteen (#ub5ad6710-4360-5384-89d3-444efd214bd1)
Chapter Fifteen (#uc7ca20e8-0178-5bd4-9b09-e4dc73802df8)
Chapter Sixteen (#u067cffae-fd10-5d19-b347-e2c76c087415)
Chapter Seventeen (#u1c4a6b85-d5c7-52f8-9b57-bb3220c7667f)
Chapter Eighteen (#ue6be851c-6f1d-501f-a2e7-5216db4d74f7)
Chapter Nineteen (#uafc0e793-613c-5ae5-9d1b-61eceeb91c3a)
Chapter Twenty (#u055f446c-e0ca-5eb6-b0d7-4c05bbeaf1ae)
Chapter Twenty-One (#uf3d1765a-6339-56d2-95e2-51e87c09d925)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#u94fb6d3f-5814-5115-bb8b-64c10f1a4e2a)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#uf0bc8ca4-87f1-5f9d-9109-538416d0f342)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#ua7dff5a6-5416-5809-a64f-93d5db189d00)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#u7215bf44-9a84-5b94-9116-10ce3d077748)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#u7fe444af-912d-5ea7-ae45-d453cbce7e6e)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#u39f12644-8dc2-5e99-9d38-4eba2f88341d)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#uad2e8272-7c98-5de7-9e3e-7134f673fc59)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#ud10d697c-a8c2-5fc4-ab8d-428ae2134a15)
Chapter Thirty (#u404f945d-10d8-56e6-a0cf-4d014c56ae70)
Chapter Thirty-One (#u23036984-1b3a-5f45-9e50-72869fdbac54)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#u5f2d0d21-7328-57b4-8641-b2e31e85489b)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#uc22a9232-bd2c-59cc-bf30-48a556cbd1b6)
Footnote
Keep Reading … (#u46128df5-8e7a-5686-8a69-f408ea8ce7a6)
About the Author
Collins Modern Classics by Paul Gallico (#u1fc1a9f5-4500-546c-8c5c-49fd3c26d1f9)
About the Publisher (#ue37d067a-2a29-59c6-9899-d5693f6b1d57)
Why You’ll Love This Book by Michael Morpurgo (#ulink_25628d96-abab-5c68-a38b-59dda741d9f9)
Paul Gallico always brings to his stories the ring of truth. It is what writers of fiction have to do if their stories are to be believed. It must be the first rule of every writer of fiction to make our readers believe. If they don’t, then they simply won’t care. They must have a burning desire to turn the page and find out what happens next. One way to achieve this is for a writer to set the story in a known historical context or against a very specific and recognisable geographical background. In The Snow Goose or indeed in The Small Miracle, two of his most popular stories, this great storyteller does just this, leaning heavily on actual events and places for inspiration as well as credibility.
With Thomasina, as with his other great cat story, Jennie, Paul Gallico leaves the comfort zone of reality, and launches off into an unlikely adventure told by a remarkable cat, Thomasina, Mary Ruadh’s ginger cat. Murdered (put down) by Mary’s father, Andrew MacDhui, a country vet; reincarnated by Lori, Red Witch of the glen, Thomasina becomes Talitha who can trace her ancestry back to an Egyptian goddess. She has only revenge in her heart for her murderer. Unlikely it all may be, but because Gallico is such a compelling and inviting teller of tales, we go with him, we believe it absolutely. Whether or not you like cats, this is a tale you cannot put down. You go where Thomasina takes you – she and Gallico between them practically turn the pages for you.
Like Gallico I’ve written several cat stories, but none as fantastical as this, and none as feline either. This is a story that cats would love as much as I do!
Michael Morpurgo
Michael Morpurgo OBE is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children. He has written over 100 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Whitbread Award. His recent bestselling novels include The Fox and the Ghost King, An Eagle in the Snow and Listen to the Moon. His novel War Horse has been successfully adapted as a West End and Broadway theatre play and a major film by Steven Spielberg. A former Children’s Laureate, Michael is also the co-founder, with his wife Clare, of the charity Farms for City Children.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_90eca056-2703-5a3b-88ea-6b0759e6b591)
Mr Andrew MacDhui, veterinary surgeon, thrust his brick-red, bristling beard through the door of the waiting-room next to the surgery and looked with cold, hostile eyes upon the people seated there on the plain pine chairs with their pets on their laps or at their feet awaiting his attendance.
Willie Bannock, his brisk, wiry man-of-all-work in surgery, dispensary, office and animal hospital, had already gossiped a partial list of those present that morning to Mr MacDhui and which included his friend and next-door neighbour, the Minister, Angus Peddie. Mr Peddie, of course, would be there with, or because of, his insufferable pug dog whose gastric disturbances were brought on by pampering and the feeding of forbidden sweets. Mr MacDhui’s glance dropped to the narrow lap of the short-legged, round little clergyman and for a moment his eye was caught up in the unhappy, milky one of the pug rolled in his direction, filled with the misery of belly-ache, and yet expressing a certain hope and longing as well. The animal had come to associate his visits to this place, the smells and the huge man with the fur on his face with relief.
The veterinary disentangled himself from the hypnotic eye and wished angrily that Peddie would follow his advice on feeding the animal and not be there wasting his time. He noted the rich builder’s wife from Glasgow on holiday with her rheumy little Yorkshire terrier, an animal he particularly detested, with its ridiculous velvet bow laced into its silken top-knot. There was Mrs Kinloch over the ears of her Siamese cat which lay upon her knee, occasionally shaking its head and complaining in a raucous voice, and, too, there was Mr Dobbie, the grocer, whose long and doleful countenance reflected that of his Scots terrier who was suffering from the mange and looked as though a visit to the upholsterer would be more practical.
There were half a dozen or so others, including a small boy, who he seemed to have seen somewhere before, and at the head of the line he recognised old, obese Mrs Laggan, proprietress of the newspaper and tobacco shop who, with her nondescript mongrel, Rabbie, his muzzle greyed, his eyes rheumy with age, was a landmark of Inveranoch and had been so for years.
Mrs Laggan was a widow, and had been for the past twenty-five years of her seventy-odd. For the last fifteen of them, her dog, Rabbie, had been her only companion, and his bulk draped across the doorstep of Mrs Laggan’s shop was as familiar a figure to natives as well as visitors to the Highland town as that of the fat widow in her Paisley shawl. Since the doorstep was Rabbie’s place, nose between forepaws, eyes rolled upwards, customers of the widow Laggan had learned to step over him when entering and departing. It was said in the High Street that descendants of these clients were already born with this precaution bred into them.
Mr MacDhui looked his patients over and the patients looked back at him with varying degrees of anxiety, hope, deference, or in some cases a return of the hostility that seemed to be written all over the well-marked features of his face, the high brow, the indignantly flaring red-tufted eyebrows, commanding blue eyes, strong nose, full and sometimes mocking lips, half seen through the bristle of red moustache and beard and the truculent and aggressive chin.
His eyes and, above all, his manner always seemed cold and angry, perhaps because, it was said in Inveranoch, he was on the whole a cold and angry man.
A widower of the stature and flamboyance of Mr Veterinary Surgeon MacDhui was subject enough for gossip in a Highland town the size of Inveranoch, in Argyll, where he had been in practice for only a little over eighteen months. By the nature of his profession he was a figure of importance there since he looked after not only the personal and private pets of the townspeople, but was responsible also for the health of the livestock raised in the outlying farms of the district, the herds of Angus cattle and black-faced sheep, pigs and fowl. In addition, he was the appointed veterinary of the district for the inspection of meat and milk and hygienic dairies as well.
The gossips allowed that Andrew MacDhui was an honest, forthright and fair-dealing man, but, and this was the opinion of the strictly religiously inclined, a queer one to be dealing with God’s dumb creatures, since he appeared to have no love for animals, very little for man, and neither the inclination or the time for God. Whether or not he was an out and out unbeliever as many claimed, he certainly never was seen in Mr Peddie’s church, even though the two were known to be good friends. Others claimed that when his wife had died his heart had turned to stone, all but the corner devoted to his love for his seven-year-old child, Mary Ruadh, the one who was never seen without that ill-favoured, queer-marked ginger cat she called Thomasina.
Mind you, said the tattlers, no one denied that he was a good and efficient doctor for the beasties. Quick to cure or kill, and a mite too handy with the chloroform rag was the word that went around. Those who felt kindly towards him held that he was a humane man not disposed to see a hopelessly sick animal suffer needlessly, while those who disliked him and his high-handed ways called him a hard, cruel man to whom the life of an animal was nothing, and who was openly contemptuous of people who were sentimentally attached to their pets.
And many of those who did not encounter him professionally were inclined to the belief that there must be some good in the man else he would not have had the friendship and esteem of Mr Angus Peddie, pastor of the Presbyterian flock of Inveranoch. It was said that the minister who had known MacDhui in their student days had been largely instrumental in persuading his friend, upon the death of his wife, Anne, to purchase the practice of Inveranoch’s retiring vet and move thither leaving behind him the unhappy memories that had bedevilled him in Glasgow.
Several of the inhabitants of Inveranoch remembered Mr MacDhui’s late father, John, himself a Glasgow veterinary, a dour, tyrannical old man with a strong religious bent who, holding the purse strings, had compelled his son to follow in his footsteps. The story was that Andrew MacDhui had wished to study to become a surgeon in his youth but in the end had been compelled for financial reasons to yield to his father’s wishes and likewise become a veterinary.
One of these inhabitants had once paid a visit to the gloomy old house in Dunearn Street in Glasgow where for a time father and son practised together until the old man died, and had nothing good to say about it, except that it was not much to wonder at that Mr MacDhui had turned out as he had.
Mr Peddie had known MacDhui’s father as a psalm-singing old hypocrite in whose home God served merely as an auxiliary policeman. Whatever seemed healthy or fun, old John MacDhui’s God was against, and Andrew MacDhui had grown up hating Him and then denying Him. The tragedy of the loss of his wife, Anne, when his daughter, Mary Ruadh, was only three had confirmed him in his bitterness.
His scrutiny completed, MacDhui now pointed his beard at old, fat Mrs Laggan and jerked his head in the direction of his office. She gave a little bleat of fright, picked Rabbie up out of her lap and arose painfully, holding him in her arms where he lay on his back, forepaws bent limply, watery eyes revolving. He resembled an over-stuffed black and grey porker and he wheezed at every breath like a catarrhal old man snoring.
Mr Angus Peddie pulled in his feet to let her by and gave her a warm, cherubic smile of encouragement, for he was the very opposite of the figure that a dour Scots churchman is supposed to resemble. He was short, inclined to stoutness, sweet-natured and extraordinarily vital. He had a round, dimpled face and mischievous eyes and smile which, however, could instantly express the deepest sympathy, penetrating understanding and concern.
Peddie’s pug dog, who, as well as suffering from chronic indigestion, staggered under the name of Fin-du-Siècle, an indication of the kind of humour one might be expected to encounter in the large Peddie family, lay likewise wheezing in the minister’s lap. Peddie lifted him into a sitting position so that he could better see Mrs Laggan and her sick dog go by. He said: “That’s Mrs Laggan’s Rabbie, Fin. The poor wee thing isn’t feeling well just now.” The rolling eyes of the two dogs met for a moment in melancholy exchange.
Mrs Laggan followed Mr MacDhui into the examining room of the surgery and deposited Rabbie on his back upon the long, white-enamelled examining table where he remained, his forepaws still limp and his breath coming in difficult gasps.
The veterinarian lifted the lip of the animal, glanced at his teeth, pulled down its eyelids and placed one hand for a moment upon its heaving belly. “How old is this dog?” he asked.
Mrs Laggan, traditionally dressed as became a respectable widow, in rusty black with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders, seemed to shrink inside her clothes. “Fifteen years and a bit,” she replied. “Well, fourteen, since he’s grown from the wee pup he was the day I got him,” she added, as though by quickly subtracting a year from his age she might lure fate into permitting him to remain a year longer. Fifteen was old for a dog. With fourteen there was always hope they might live to be fifteen, like Mrs Campbell’s old sheepdog, which was actually nearly sixteen.
The veterinarian nodded, glanced perfunctorily at the dog again and said: “He ought to be put out of his misery. You can see how bad his asthma is. He can hardly breathe.” He picked the dog up and set him on his feet on the floor where he promptly collapsed on to his belly with his chin flat on the floor and his eyes turned up adoringly at Mrs Laggan. “Or walk,” concluded MacDhui.
The widow had many chins. Fear set them all to quivering. “Put him away? Put the poor beastie to death? But whatever should I do then when he’s all I’ve got in this world? We’ve been together for fifteen years now, and me a lonely widow for twenty-five. What would I be doing without Rabbie?”
“Get another dog,” MacDhui replied. “It shouldn’t be difficult. The village is full of them.”
“Och, how can you be speaking like that? It would not be Rabbie. Can you not be giving him a wee bit of medicine that will keep him going till he gets well? He’s been a very healthy dog.”
Animals, reflected Mr MacDhui, were never a problem, it was the sentimentality of their owners that created all the difficulties. “The dog must die soon,” he said. “He is very old and very ill. Anyone with half an eye can see that his life has become a burden to him and that he is suffering. If I gave him some medicine you would be back here within a fortnight. It might prolong his life for a month, at the most six months. I am a busy man,” he concluded, but then added more gently: “It would be kinder to make an end to him.”
The quivering of her chins now had spread to her small mouth as Mrs Laggan looked fearfully into the day that would be without Rabbie; no one to talk to, no one to whose breathing she would hearken whilst she had her evening cup of tea, or lay in bed at night. She said what came into her head, but not what was bursting in her heart. “The customers who come to my shop will miss Rabbie sore if he’s not there for them to be stepping over.” But she was meaning: “I’m an old woman. I have not many days left myself. I am lonely. The dog has been my companion and my comfort for so long. He and I know one another’s ways so well.”
“Yes, yes, Mrs Laggan, no doubt. But you must make up your mind, for I have other patients waiting.”
Mrs Laggan looked uneasily to the big, vital man with the red moustache and beard.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be selfish if poor Rabbie is suffering …”
Mr MacDhui did not reply, but sat waiting.
Life without Rabbie – the once cold nose pressing against her hand, the edge of pink tongue that protruded when he was contemplative, his great sigh of contentment when he was fed full – but above all his presence; Rabbie always within sight, sound, or touch. Old dogs must die; old people must die. She was minded to plead for the bit of medicine, for another month, a week, a day more with Rabbie, but she was rushed and nervous and fearful. And so she said: “You would be very gentle with him –”
MacDhui sighed with impatient relief: “He will not feel a thing, I assure you.” He rose. “I think you are doing what is right, Mrs Laggan.”
“Very well, then. Make away with him. What will it be I’ll be owing you?”
The vet had a moment’s pang brought on by the sight of the trembling lips and chins and cursed himself for it. “There will be no charge,” he said curtly.
The widow Laggan regained sudden control of her face and her dignity, though her eyes were wet. “I’ll be paying you for your services—”
“Two shillings, then.”
She paid out of a small black purse, setting the florin on to his desk with a snap that caused Rabbie to prick up his greying ears for a moment. Without another glance at her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs Laggan made for the door. She held herself as proudly and erectly as she could, for she would not be a fat old woman dissolving into grief before this hard man. She bore up to pass through and close it behind her.
Thin women in sorrow have both the faces and figures for bleakness and woe, but there is nothing quite as futile and shaking as the aspect of an obese woman in affliction. The small mouth unable to form into the classic lines of tragedy can but purse and quiver. Grief is bowed, but fat keeps the stout woman’s curves constant, except that the flesh suddenly greys and looks as though the juices of life had gone out of it for all its roundness.
When the widow Laggan emerged from the surgery and entered the waiting-room once more, all eyes were turned upon her, and the Rev. Peddie recognised the symptoms at once, got up and went to her, crying: “Oh, dear – don’t say that something ill has befallen Rabbie. Is he to remain in hospital?” And then he echoed the prior remarks of the widow. “Why, whatever would the town do without the presence of Rabbie across the doorstep?”
Safe within the circle of her own people, Mrs Laggan could let the tears flow freely as she told of the sentence passed upon her friend. “The doctor said it would be better if he were to be put away just now. Why must the ones we love always go while we are remaining behind? Och, it will not be the same any more without Rabbie. But I’m thinking I’ll be following him soon and it will be all for the best.” She dabbed at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief and essayed a smile. “Do you remember how Rabbie would be blocking the door, and all the gentry would be raising up their knees to pass over him?”
It was so small a thing that had happened, yet the waiting-room was stiff with the tragedy of it, and Mr Peddie felt the horror clamped like a hand about his heart, squeezing that member until it felt in some similar measure the pain that was oppressing the widow Laggan. Mr Peddie had one of those awful moments to which he was prone when he could not decide what it was that God would wish him to do, what God Himself would do, were He to stand there with them all in the presence of the misery of the widow Laggan.
For to Mr Angus Peddie there was neither gloom nor sourness, nor melancholy about either the God or the religion he served. Creation and the world created, along with the Creator were a perpetual joy to him and his mission seemed to be to see that his flock appreciated and was properly grateful for all the wonders and beauties of nature, man and beast as well as the great and marvellous unexplained mysteries of the universe. He did not try to explain God, the Father, or the Son, but worked to help his people love and enjoy Him. A man of unusual tolerance and breadth of vision, he believed that man could deny God for a time, but not forever, since God was so manifest in everything that lived and breathed, in things both animate and inanimate, that He was universal and hence undeniable.
And yet, human being that he was, he felt the panic when his God seemed to turn His back upon the likes of the widow Laggan and his own warm heart was riven with pity for her plight.
There stood a weeping fat woman dabbing at her eyes with a small cloth, the tears straggling unevenly over the curves of her cheek and her triple chins quaking and jouncing. And in a moment she would walk out of there and begin to die.
Peddie felt the strong push of the impulse to rush into the surgery of Mr MacDhui crying: “Stop, Andrew! Don’t kill the animal. Let it live out its time. Who are you who hate him to play God?” but he resisted it. What right had he to interfere? MacDhui knew his business, and veterinary surgeons, just as doctors, frequently had to make decisions and break news that was painful to people, except that to the former was sometimes given the additional mercy of destruction to save pain and suffering.
Mrs Laggan said once more, speaking as though to herself: “Twill no be the same wi’out Rabbie,” and went out. Mr MacDhui’s beard came in through the door again and he stood there a moment regarding them all truculently as though experiencing some remnant of the scene that had just taken place and the sympathy engendered for the old woman.
He asked: “Who’s next?” and his countenance took on an even greater expression of distaste when the Glasgow builder’s wife with the Yorkshire terrier half arose irresolutely from the hard, waiting-room chair and the dog gave a shrill yelp of terror.
A small voice said: “Please, sir, could you spare a moment?”
Someone remarked: “It’s little Geordie McNabb, the draper’s boy.”
Geordie was eight. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt and the kerchief of the Scout Wolf Cubs. He had a round, solemn face with dark hair and eyes and a curiously Chinesey cast of countenance. In his grubby hands he clasped a box and in the box palpitatingly reposed his good deed for that day. MacDhui strode over to him overpoweringly, overtoweringly, looming over him like a red Magog, thrusting his bristling beard nearly into the box as he boomed: “Well, lad, what is it you want?”
Geordie stood his ground bravely. Patently, inside the box there was a green frog with heaving sides. The boy explained: “There’s something wrong with his foot. And he cannot hop. I found him by the side of the lochan. He was trying very hard to hop but he couldn’t at all. Will you make him better, please, so that he can be hopping again?”
The waves of old bitterness had a way of rolling up inside Andrew MacDhui at the oddest and most ill-timed moments, causing him to do and say things that he did not mean to at all. Here he was in his waiting-room full of clients and it suddenly came over him as he stood bent over and looking down into the box – “Doctor to a frog with a broken leg, that’s what you are, my great, fine fellow—”
And thereupon the old angers and regrets returned to plague and irritate him. Had there been justice in the world, all of these people in the room, yes, and the child too, would have been there to consult him about ailing hearts, or lungs or throats or livers, aches and pains and mysterious cramps, sicknesses and diseases, which he would combat for them and put to rights. And there they were instead with their pampered, snuffling, mewing and whining little pets kept for their own flattery’s sake or because they had been too lazy or selfish to bring into the world a child on whom to lavish their affection.
The ailing Yorkie was quite near to him and MacDhui, his nostrils already flaring with disgust of himself and all humanity, caught a whiff of the perfume with which his mistress had scented him. He therefore replied to Geordie McNabb out of the black cloud of anger enveloping him: “I have no time for such foolishness. Cannot you see that I am busy with a room full of people? Go put the frog back by the pond again and leave it be. Off with you now.”
Into the dark, round eyes of Geordie came that expression reserved to children who have been hurt by and disappointed in their grown-ups. “But he’s sick,” he said, “he’s not well. Will he not die?”
MacDhui, not less unkindly this time, steered the child towards the door and gave him a farewell pat on the behind. “Off you go, boy. Put it back where you found it. Nature will look after it. Now, then, if you like, Mrs Sanderson –”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_096147a1-053b-57d5-9803-2a4749bcdad5)
If it is family you go by, then you will certainly be impressed with mine, for I am a relative of that Jennie – Jennie Baldrin of Glasgow – about whose life and times and adventures in London, aboard ship and elsewhere, a whole book has been written and published.
We are Edinburgh on one side of my family, several of my forbears not only having been employed at the University in the usual capacity of hunters, but one or two are said to have contributed to scientific knowledge and advance. We are Glasgow on the other, the Jennie Baldrin side.
Jennie was my great-aunt and she was most distinguished and Egyptian-looking with a small, rather narrow head, long muzzle, slanting eyes and good-sized, rounded, well-upstanding ears, and in this I am said to resemble her closely, though, of course, our colouring is quite different. I mention this with excusable pride since it shows that we trace our ancestry back to the days when people had the good sense to recognise us as gods.
That false gods are worshipped today – well, more’s the pity, for in Egypt, in the old days when members of our family were venerated in temples, times were better and people, by and large, seemed happier. That, however, is neither here nor there and does not concern what I have to tell. Yet, if you know that once you were a god, no matter how long ago – well, it is bound to show somewhat in your demeanour.
Nor does Jennie play any part at all in what is to follow, except that I suppose I inherited something of her independence, courage and poise, not to mention elegance, and I brought in her name only as a possible point of interest to you should you happen to be familiar with her story.
I too have had a most curious adventure and experience, one of the most interesting and marvellous things that ever happened, at least that part which concerns myself.
I will not keep you in suspense. It has to do with a murder.
But what makes this story different from any you ever read is that the one who is murdered is – ME.
The name I bear, Thomasina, came about through one of those ridiculous and inexcusable errors committed by so many people who attempt to determine our sex when we are very young. I was originally christened Thomas when I came to live at the home of the MacDhuis in Glasgow to be the pet of Mary Ruadh, then aged three. When the error became obvious the name was simply feminised to Thomasina by Mrs McKenzie, our housekeeper, whether I liked it or not and without so much as a by your leave.
I do not know why people are quite so stupid at determining our sex when we are young. The difference is easy enough to see if you will just look instead of guess, and take a little trouble, for with boys, things are apart, and with girls they are near together, and that’s the rule, no matter how small they might be.
Mr Andrew MacDhui might have told at a glance, no doubt, since he was a veterinary surgeon. But he was a most queer man to follow the profession of doctor to animals, since he had little love for and no sentimental interest in them whatsoever, and hence never paid the slightest attention to me from the moment I came into the house, which I cannot say disturbed me. The disregard was mutual.
We lived in a large, rather gloomy house in Dunearn Street, which Mr MacDhui had inherited from his father, who was also a veterinary, when he died. The two lower floors were given over to the offices, surgery and animal hospital, and we lived on the two upper ones, Mr MacDhui, his wife and Mary Ruadh. They all had red hair. I have too, or rather ginger-coloured with a white blaze on my chest. But what people really seem to find irresistible about me is that I have four white feet, and the very tip of my tail is white to match. I am quite used to receiving compliments upon my looks and bearing.
Although I was then only six months old myself, I remember Mary Ruadh’s mother, Anne. She was beautiful and her hair was the colour of copper pots by the fireside. She was very gay and always singing about the house, which made it less dark and gloomy, even on rainy days. She was forever cuddling and spoiling Mary Ruadh and they would often spend time “giving one another whispers”, which was a kind of love-making. It was not an unhappy household in spite of Mr MacDhui. But it did not last long, for soon after I came Mrs MacDhui contracted a disease from a parrot that was being kept in the hospital and died.
That was a bad time for me, I can tell you, and if it had not been for Mrs McKenzie I do not know what would have happened to me, for Mr MacDhui half went out of his mind, they said, and it certainly sounded like it, the manner in which he raged and carried on, and the love he had had for his wife he now transferred to his daughter, and half frightened her to death with it, and me too, I can assure you. He kept staying away from home and would not go near his animal hospital for days on end and things were getting in a bad state when he received a visit from an old friend of his from the country, a minister by the name of Mr Peddie, and after that things got a little better and soon we had a great change.
It seems that Mr Peddie and Mr MacDhui had known one another when they were both students at Edinburgh University – they might even have known some of my family there – and Mr Peddie told Mr MacDhui that there was a practice for sale in the town where he lived and advised him to go there.
So, Mr MacDhui sold out his practice in Glasgow and the house on Dunearn Street where he was brought up and we all moved to Inveranoch on the west bank of Loch Fyne in Argyll where my tragedy happened to me.
Mary Ruadh then was six years old, going on for seven, and we lived in the last house but one near the end of Argyll Lane. Our next-door neighbour was Mr MacDhui’s friend, Mr Angus Peddie, the minister, who kept a most disgusting pug dog by the name of Fin. Ugh!
Our house was really two houses, one next the other but separated and they were of white-washed stone with slate roofs; they were rather long and narrow; two storeys high, with tall chimneys at each end on which there was usually perched a seagull. In one of these we lived and in the adjoining one was the office, waiting-room, surgery and hospital of Mr MacDhui. But, of course, we never went there for Mary Ruadh was forbidden to do so. After what had happened in Glasgow, Mr MacDhui had sworn he would never again have sick animals in the place where he lived.
I considered myself a good deal better off in Inveranoch than in Glasgow because Loch Fyne was an arm of the sea that pushed up from the ocean down by Greenock right up into the Highlands as far as Cairndow and brought with it gulls to watch in flight and the smell of the sea and fish and queer birds to chase that ran along the beach behind which lay a wonderful dark and scary country of woods and glens and mountains of stone in which to hunt. I was never allowed out in Glasgow, but it was quite different here and soon I became a real Highlander and we Highlanders, of course, looked down on everyone else.
Inveranoch was not as large a city as Glasgow, in fact, it was quite small with no more than a few thousand inhabitants, but to make up for that hundreds of visitors came there every summer for their holidays.
This was the busiest time for Mr MacDhui for the guests often brought their pets with them, mostly dogs, of course, but sometimes cats and birds, and once, a monkey, and the climate did not always agree with them or they would get themselves bitten or stung in the woods, or pick a fight with one of us Highlanders, which was foolish since they were much too soft and then their owners would have to bring them to Mr MacDhui for repairs. He seemed to take this in very ill part, for he was a man who hated pets and disliked being a veterinary and preferred to pass his time in the back country with the farmers and crofters rather than keep office hours.
However, none of this was any of my concern and I was fairly comfortable at this time and living a routine sufficiently to my own taste, except for one thing. Mary Ruadh had become a cat carrier.
If you have had or have a little girl yourself you will know what I am talking about. If not, you may have noticed that, at a certain age, little girls always carry a doll around wherever they go, but some carry their cat. Often they do not even know they are carrying it as they walk or toddle about with it. They hold it around the middle, just below the shoulders, clutched to their breast so that most of the cat dangles a dead weight with head and forequarters hanging over the arm.
Mary Ruadh did vary this most uncomfortable and humiliating position sometimes by placing me across her shoulders like a fur piece where I could rest and even be admired by people who sometimes said it was difficult to tell which was Mary Ruadh’s hair and which was me. I didn’t mind that. Or she would carry me upside down in both arms, like a little baby. I hated that.
If you ask me why I put up with it, I cannot tell you, since my philosophy of life is quite simple. When you find yourself in a situation where unpleasant things, or things you don’t like, occur more frequently than pleasant ones – walk out.
Well, there were other things too, which I wasn’t going to mention, but as long as I am on the subject, I might as well. There was the being made to sit on a chair sometimes at tea with a napkin around my neck and pretend I was a person, or rather, Mary Ruadh pretended. This got me a few caraway seed cakes of which I happened to be fond and a couple of laps of milk out of a saucer, but it didn’t make up for the indignity.
When I had kittens they took them away from me and drowned them.
At night I was forced to sleep at the foot of her bed. Nor could I go away to my favourite chair after she fell asleep for if she woke up and I was not there she would call for me and sob most heart-breakingly. Sometimes during the night, even when I was there, she would wake up and begin to cry softly in the darkness and murmur, “Mummy – Mummy!” for it seems she remembered her too. Then she would reach down in the darkness and wake me up and hold me to her so hard with her face buried in my flank that I could hardly breathe, and you know how we hate to be held.
She would then cry – “Oh, Thomasina, Thomasina, I love you. Don’t ever leave me.” After a little she would become more quiet and I would wash her face a little and lick the salt tears from her cheeks, which made her laugh and giggle and say – “Thomasina – you tickle,” and soon she would go to sleep again.
And I stayed on. Believe me, if it had been a little boy I should not have done so, thank you very much. I should soon enough have run away and not come back, taken to the woods, or found someone else in town to live with, for I am perfectly capable of looking after Thomasina. Though I may look delicate, I am most resilient, have a hardy constitution and can stand almost anything. Once a boy on a bicycle ran over me. Mrs McKenzie came running out of the house screaming that I was killed and Mary Ruadh cried and carried on so that it took an hour afterwards to calm her and all that happened was that the boy fell off his bicycle and hurt himself and I got up and walked away.
Well, and then there was Mr MacDhui himself and there is plenty I could tell you about him, and none of it favourable. An animal doctor who didn’t like animals – there’s a good one. A bit too quick with the chloroform rag when people brought their sick pets to his surgery, was what they said. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want him treating me. Mr MacDhui was jealous of me because his daughter loved me so much, and he hated me. But what was even worse, he ignored me. Mr High-and-mighty-around-the-house. Nose in the air; whiskers bristling all the time. And the medicine smell of him. Ugh! It was the same one that came out of the hospital when you went past. When he returned home at night and bent down to kiss Mary Ruadh, his huge, bristly red face with the medicine and pipe smell would come right close to mine, since Mary Ruadh would be carrying me, and it made me feel sick.
Naturally, I annoyed him all I could, calling attention to myself by washing in front of him, taking care to be on his chair when I knew he would be wanting it, lying in doorways where he would be likely to trip over me, rubbing up against his legs and ankles, leaving hairs on his best clothes whenever I could find them and jumping up on his lap when he sat down to read the paper and making smells of my own. He did not dare to be rough with me when Mary Ruadh was in the room and so he would just pretend I was not there and then get up suddenly to go for some tobacco and dump me off his knees.
Add up all of these things and you might almost say it amounted to sufficient cause for me to move out. Yet I stayed on and was not too unhappy. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else, but if the truth be known, I was rather fond of the child.
I think it could have been because, in some ways, girl children and cats are not un-alike. There is some special mystery about little girls, an attitude of knowing secret things and a contemplative and not wholly complimentary quality about the way they look at you sometimes that is often as baffling and exasperating to their elders as we are.
If you have ever lived with a girl child, you will know that quiet, infuriating retirement into some private world of their own of which they are capable, as well as that stubborn independence in the face of stupid or unreasonable demands or prohibitions. These same traits seem to annoy you in us as well. For you can no more force a cat or a girl child to do something they do not wish to do than you can compel us to love you. We have this in common, Mary Ruadh and I.
Thus I did many strange things I should not have believed myself capable of doing. When Mary Ruadh went to school – this adventure of mine took place during the summer holidays – I suffered her to carry me all the way there, and to be pawed or fussed over by the other children until the bell rang and she went inside, when I was free to run home and look after my business.
But, believe it or not, when it came time for her to come home in the afternoon I would be sitting up on the gate-post with my tail curled round my legs, watching for her. True, it was also a fine vantage point from which to spit on the minister’s pug dog when it went by, but nevertheless, there I was. The neighbours used to say you could always tell what time of day it was by the MacDhui cat getting up on to the gate-post to watch for her wee mistress.
I, Thomasina, waiting on a gate-post for a somewhat grubby, red-haired and not even specially beautiful child, can you imagine?
Sometimes I wondered whether there was not another bond between us: we were each to the other something to cling to when the sun goes down and nightfall brings on fear and loneliness.
Loneliness is comforted by the closeness and touch of fur to fur, skin to skin – or skin to fur. Sometimes when I awoke at night after a bad dream, I would listen to the regular breathing of Mary Ruadh and feel the slight rise and fall of the bed-clothes about her. Then I would no longer be afraid and would go back to sleep again.
I have mentioned that Mary Ruadh was not an especially beautiful child, which perhaps was not polite, since she thought that I was certainly the most beautiful cat in the world, but I meant especially beautiful in the unusual sense. She was a rather ordinary-looking little girl except for her eyes, which told you of some special quality in her, or about her when you looked into them. Often I was not able to do so for long. Their colour was a bright blue, a most intense blue, but sometimes when she was thinking thoughts I could not understand or even guess, they turned as dark as the loch on a stormy day.
For the rest, you wouldn’t call her much to look at, with her uptilted nose and freckled face and a long lower lip that usually stuck out, while her eyebrows and lashes were so light you could hardly see them. She wore her ginger-red hair in two braids tied with green or blue ribbon. Her legs were quite long and she liked to stick her stomach out.
But there was something else pleasant about Mary Ruadh; she smelled good. Mrs McKenzie kept her washed and ironed when she was at home and she always smelled of lavender, for Mrs McKenzie kept lavender bags in with her clothes and underthings.
It seemed as if Mrs McKenzie was forever washing and ironing and starching and scenting her clothes, because it was the only way she was allowed to show how much she cared for Mary Ruadh. Mrs McKenzie was a thin woman who talked and sang through her nose. She would have mothered Mary Ruadh the way we will frequently look after somebody else’s kitten as though it were our own, but Mr MacDhui was jealous and feared that Mary Ruadh would come to love her too much if she were allowed to cuddle her. Oh, Mr Bristle-and-Smelly was allowed to cuddle her all he wished, but nobody else.
I loved the odour of lavender. Smells, almost more than noises, seem to bring on the happiness or unhappiness memories. You might not remember what it was about a smell had made you angry at the time, or afraid, but as soon as you come across it again you are angry or fearful. Like the medicine smell of Mr MacDhui.
But lavender was the happiness smell. It made my claws move in and out and brought the contentment purr to my throat.
Sometimes after putting Mary Ruadh’s things away after ironing them, Mrs McKenzie would forget to close all the chest of drawers, and leave one open. Then I would quickly nip inside and lie there full length with my nose up against a lavender bag, just smelling, smelling, smelling. That was bliss. That was when I was contented and at peace with the world.
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Paul Gallico
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Детская проза
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the author of “The Snow Goose”.“I was aware, from the very beginning, that I was a most unusual cat…”Thomasina is the beloved pet cat of 7-year-old Mary Ruadh, whose strict father is the town′s vet. When Thomasina falls ill, her father sees no other option but to put the cat down. Heartbroken by his cruelty, Mary stops speaking to her father and falls dangerously ill herself.Meanwhile, Thomasina is rescued by Lori, a young woman who lives alone in an isolated glen and is rumoured to be a witch with healing powers.While Lori helps Thomasina recover from her ordeal, Mary′s health continues to deteriorate and it is only when Thomasina makes her miraculous return, on a dark and stormy night, and is reunited with her owner that Mary is pulled from the brink of death.