A Comfort of Cats Read Online Free PDF Page B

more observant.
    Â Â It was, as I remember, one day in February. Tim and Liz were going to be away for the afternoon. They might be a little late back, said Tim. It would be all right for Polly to be in her yard till it got dark. But could we lock her in, and give her her bottle, around half-past five?
    Â Â Of course we could. Normally I would have heated the bottle in the kitchen and just carried it up the hill. That afternoon, however, we had to go to town to get a car battery, as our current one was patently failing. It was a dismal day and I shrank at the thought of coming home, heating the feed and taking it up the hill again in the cold. It was then that I had my idea.
    Â Â It was, quite simply, to take a thermos of boiling water, the cats' hot water bottle and Polly's feed with us in the car. Before we left town I would fill the hot water bottle from the thermos, wrap it against the feeding-bottle in a car rug... in the half-hour it took to get back to the village Polly's bottle would warm up nicely and we could nip in and feed her before we drove on down the hill.
    Â Â Why didn't I save all that trouble and just put the heated feed in the thermos? Because Charles is particular about germs. Goodness only knew what the composition of the goat-feed was, he said when I suggested it. He didn't want it in a thermos he was likely to drink from.
    Â Â Fair enough. Showing considerable forethought, in fact. Where we slipped up was that neither of us remembered Polly's bottle before we left town and we were half way home before I thought of it. I yelled to Charles to stop. He immediately pulled in at the roadside. Carefully I filled the hot water bottle. OK now, I said, having wrapped it against the feeding-bottle in the car rug. It would be just about right when we got home. At which point Charles pulled the self-starter and nothing happened. The battery had completely given out.
    Â Â 'It could be worse,' said Charles, trying to look on the bright side. 'At least we've got the new one in the boot.' Then he peered sideways out of the window. 'Great Scott!' he said. 'Do you realise where we've stopped?'
    Â Â Outside the local RAF station and it was at the time of the bomb scares. It couldn't have happened to anybody but us.
    Â Â I can see us now. Me shining a dimming torch into the boot while Charles lifted out a black, rectangular object. Cars catching us in their headlights by the dozen while he carried it round to the front. Putting it down by the offside wheel where it managed to look most sinister. And of course the most traumatic moment of all, when he disconnected the old battery and all the lights on the car went out. We must have looked like Guy Fawkes and his assistant, flitting about in the dark, both bonnet and boot of the car up and a black box standing in the road. Any moment we expected to hear the sirens of police cars, or a bugle calling out the RAF guard at the double.
    Â Â Charles tightened the connections like greased lightning. We were in and on our way home as if jet-propelled. So much that we forgot to stop on our way down the hill and had to walk up with Polly's feed after all.
    Â Â 'Everything all right?' asked Tim when he rang later to thank us. Even he could hardly credit it when I told him.

Four

    There were times – just occasionally, when Annabel happened for once to be out of sight around the corner, not watching us like a police-check from up on the hill; when the cats were indoors sleeping the sleep of the contented and there was no goat perched like a mountain chamois on our wall – when the cottage looked as somnolent and non-eventful as if time had passed it by for a hundred years.
    Â Â I was working in the garden one such afternoon, battering away with a fork with one prong missing at a flower bed that was as hard as iron, my mind churning busily over various problems, when a woman came meandering along the lane.
    Â Â She was acting like