On Cats. Doris Lessing
there, and the little birds came fluttering down as usual. One, however, flew straight into the top back window, the spare room. And spent a day there, so friendly it sat on a chair and looked at me from the distance of a foot, almost eye to eye. It had no impulse of fear towards human beings – not yet. I kept the door shut while grey cat prowled outside. Late that summer’s evening, when all the birds were already quiet and asleep, the little bird flew straight back from the window to the tree, without going near the ground. So perhaps it survived.
Which reminds me of a story told me by a lady who lives at the top of a seven-storey block of flats in Paris, near the Place Contrescarpe. She believes in travelling light, having no encumbrances, and being free to move anywhere at any moment. Her husband is a sailor. Well, one afternoon a bird flew in from the treetops and showed no signs of wanting to leave. She is a tidy woman, the last to put up with bird droppings. But ‘something got into her’. She put down newspapers and allowed the bird to become friendly. The bird did not leave for the south when winter came, as it should have done; and suddenly my friend understood she was landed with a responsibility. If she threw the bird out now, into wintry Paris, it would die. She had to go on a trip for a couple of weeks. She could not leave the bird. So she bought a cage and took it with her.
Then, she saw herself: ‘Imagine it: me! me! arriving at a provincial hotel with a suitcase in one hand, and a bird cage in the other! Me! But what could I do? I had the bird in my room, and that meant I had to be friendly with madame and the maids. I had turned into a lover of humanity – good God! Old ladies stopped me on the stairs. Girls told me about their love problems. I went right back to Paris and sulked until the spring came. Then I threw that bird out of the window with a curse, and ever since then I’ve kept the windows shut. I simply will not be liked and that’s that!’
Black cat got pregnant with her second litter when the first were only ten days old. This struck me as uneconomic, but the vet said it was usual. The runt of this litter – and runts are for some reason often the nicest in character, perhaps because they have to make up in charm for what the others have in strength – went to a flat full of students. It was sitting on a shoulder at a third-floor window when a dog barked in the room behind it. On a reflex of fright, it jumped straight out of the window. Everyone rushed down to the pavement to pick up the corpse. But there sat the kitten licking itself. It had not been harmed at all.
Black cat, temporarily kittenless, came downstairs to ordinary life. Probably grey cat had imagined that black cat had removed herself upstairs into responsibility and maternity for good. And so she would have the field to herself. She understood it was not so; she could be threatened at any time. Again the battle for position was fought, and this time it was unpleasant. Black cat had had her kittens, was more sure of herself, and was not so easily intimidated. For instance, she was not going to sleep on the floor or on the sofa.
This matter was settled thus: grey cat slept on the top of the bed, black cat at the foot. But it was grey cat who might wake me. Which act was now performed entirely for the benefit of black cat: the teasing, patting, licking, purring was done while grey cat watched her rival: look, watch me. And the tricks over food: watch me, watch me. And the birds: look what I can do that you can’t. I think, during those weeks, the cats were not conscious of humans. They were relating to each other only, like children in rivalry, for whom adults are manoeuvrable, bribable objects, outside the obsession where the children are conscious only of each other. All the world narrows to the other, who must be beaten, outwitted. A small bright, hot and frightful world, like that of fever.
The cats lost their charm. They did the same things, performed the same actions. But charm – lost.
What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift. But there is something uncomfortable here, something intolerable, a grittiness, we are in the presence of injustice. Because some creatures are given so much more than others, they must give it back? Charm is something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away – given. When grey cat rolls on her back in a patch of warm sunlight, luxurious, voluptuous, delightful, that is charm, and it catches the throat. When grey cat rolls, every movement the same, but the eyes narrowed on black cat, it is ugly, and even the movement itself has a hard abrupt quality to it. And black cat watching, or trying to copy something for which she has no natural gift, has an envious furtiveness, as if she were stealing something that does not belong to her. If nature squanders on a creature, as she has done on grey cat, arbitrarily, intelligence and beauty, then grey cat should, in return, squander them as lavishly.
As black cat does her maternity. When she is nested among her kittens, one slender jet paw stretched over them, protective and tyrannical, eyes half-closed, a purr deep in her throat, she is magnificent, generous – and carelessly sure of herself. Meanwhile poor grey cat, denuded of her sex, sits across the room, in her turn envious and grudging, and all her body and her face and her bent back ears saying: I hate her, I hate her.
In short, for a period of some weeks, they were no pleasure to the humans in the house, and surely no pleasure to themselves.
But everything changed suddenly, because there was a trip to the country, where neither had ever been.
They both had memories of pain and fear associated with the cat basket; so I thought they wouldn’t like to travel in it. They were put loose in the back of the car. Grey cat at once jumped into the front, to my lap. She was miserable. All the way out of London she sat shivering and miaowing, a continuous shrill complaint that drove us all mad. Black cat’s plaint was low and mournful, and related to her inner discomfort, not to what was going on around her. Grey cat was shrieking every time a car or lorry appeared in the square of the window. So I put her down at my feet where she could not see the traffic. This did not suit her. She wanted to see what caused the sounds that frightened her. At the same time she hated seeing it. She sat crouched on my knee, lifting her head as a sound increased, saw the black vibrating mass of machinery passing ahead, or falling behind – and miaowed. Experiencing traffic through a cat is a lesson in what we all of us block off every time we get into a car. We do not hear the appalling din – the shaking, the roaring, the screeching. If we did, we would go slightly crazy, like grey cat.
Unable to stand it, we stopped the car, and tried to put her into a basket. She went into a frenzy, hysterical with fear. We let her loose again and tried black cat. She was very happy to be in the basket with the lid shut down over her. For the rest of the journey black cat crouched in the basket, her black nose through a hole in its side. We stroked her nose and asked how she did; and she replied in the low sad voice, but did not seem unduly upset. Perhaps the fact she was pregnant had something to do with her calm.
Meanwhile grey cat complained. Grey cat miaowed steadily, all the way, six hours of driving to Devon. Finally she got under the front seat, and the insensate meaningless miaowing went on, and no talking or soothing or comforting had any effect at all. Soon we did not hear it, as we do not hear traffic.
That night was spent in a friend’s house in a village. Both cats were put into a large room with a dirt box and food. They could not be let loose because there were cats in the house. Grey cat’s terror was forgotten in the need to outdo black cat. She used the dirt box first; ate first; and got on to the only bed. There she sat, defying black cat to get on to it. Black cat ate, used the dirt box, and sat on the floor, looking up at grey cat. When grey cat got off the bed, later, to eat, black cat leaped on the bed and was at once chased off.
So they spent the night. At least, when I woke, there was black cat on the floor, gazing up at grey cat who sat on guard at the bottom of the bed, eyes blazing down.
We moved into a cottage on the moor. It is an old place, which had been empty for some time. There was very little furniture. But it had a large fireplace. These cats had not seen a naked fire. As the logs burned up, grey cat screamed with fright, and fled upstairs and got under a bed, where she stayed.
Black cat sniffed around the downstairs room, discovered the only armchair, and made it her own. She was interested by