Pudding
I walked home from the milestone, three miles, in the dark, with my tail held up out of the verge, and I shall give the journey one sentence, which is this one.
By eight I was on my wall. The drove was empty. The taxi was gone from the hard standing and had left a dry rectangle on the mud, and I sat in the middle of the rectangle and considered my position. My witch was dead. My heir was at Ely, at the far end of a flood, fetching a clerk of the Drainage Board for sixty pounds. And yesterday afternoon, in a kitchen full of crocheted things, a woman had gone white from the scalp down at the word tin.
A duke does not need to be told twice. I had a night to myself, and I resolved to spend it in the detection of crime.
"Pudding!" Mo had her back door open, and the light from it lay down the path like a doormat. "Come in, love. Come in by the warm. I'm not having you out there on your own, not tonight, there's a cold coming off that marsh would take the ears off a brass monkey. I've done you a tomato one."
I told myself I went in for the warmth. It was partly the warmth. It was also detection.
The kitchen was yellow and hot and smelled of toast, and the saucer with the chip in it was on the floor by the cushion. I sat on the cushion and looked at the sardine. Mo sat down with her knitting and the television, a quiz, with a man in it who asked questions as though he were owed money, and she answered them aloud and got them all wrong and was happy.
"The Danube," said Mo. "No. The Rhine. How's she getting on at Ely, do you think? She's a good girl. She'll not tell you she's a good girl. She'll tell you it's sixty pounds."
I said that sixty pounds was an inadequate sum for any journey that involved Ely, and Mo said, "I know, love," and gave an answer about a capital city, which was wrong.
I waited for the second round. She knits without looking at her knitting and watches without looking at the screen, and a woman in that condition could be robbed of her own husband. I came off the cushion and out along the skirting, flat, and up her stairs, which creak on the fourth and the ninth, as one goes up the back stair of a palace in which one has been refused an audience.
The bathroom was the first door on the landing. I took it with the whole of my shoulder.
I intended to look. I did not intend to touch. And I felt, in the dark of that bathroom, with the little light from the landing laid across the lino like a cloth, like smoke. Like a duke of smoke, grey and soft and shapeless, drifting among the furniture, disturbing nothing.
The soap dish went first. It went off the side of the basin with a noise like a plate in a restaurant, and under it the bath mat took my claws and came with me, and with the mat came a small round tin of talc, which rolled, and the lid came off, and talc went across the floor in a long white fan. I stood in it. I looked down at my feet, which were white. Below me in the kitchen the quiz went on. I took one step toward the shelf and knocked a bottle of bubble bath into the bath, where it went round and round on the enamel, shouting.
"Mind yourself, love!" Mo called up the stairs. "Are you all right? Is it the thunder? I know. I know, it's not the thunder, it's the not knowing, I know! I'll be up in a minute!"
She was not up in a minute. The man on the television had asked her for the capital of Peru.
The shelf over Mo Tebbutt's basin is a regiment, and could not be better kept: linctus, ear drops, three kinds of lozenge, a tin of plasters, a jar of something for feet, all with the labels turned outward, all in rows, and over the whole of it, thick, sweet, and chemical, there hung the smell of pear drops.
I knew it. I have known it for years. It is the smell of a paper bag on a bicycle.
I concluded, as any duke would, that the vicar had been in Mo's bathroom.
I did not conclude why. A man may wish to be in a bathroom for any number of reasons, and the Church of England can furnish most of them.
On the landing I tried the airing cupboard. It was a tall door, painted cream, with a catch on it that held by some principle of magnets. I put a paw to it. It said no. I used my shoulder, and it said no in a louder voice, and from below Mo said, "Is that you, Pudding? I'll bring you a bit of ham!"
I went down. I took the ham.
At ten the church clock struck and something went.
Front teeth, the left side: a crack like ice on a trough. It was near the town, behind it, in the back lane where the water had gone round on Wednesday, and I knew it before I felt it finish. Mo had stopped knitting. She put her hand to her chest, as she does, and the telephone in the hall began to ring.
"Hello? Clement? Now? In this? Oh, God love them. Oh, the poor lanes. I'll bring the urn. I'll bring the big one. Yes. Ten minutes." She put the receiver down. She looked at me, with her coat half on. "I can't leave you, love. Not tonight. You'd go straight off after it, I know you. You'll come with me. Come on. In the car, with a cardigan, where I can see you."
I permitted it. The alternative was a house with a bath full of bubble bath in it, and I chose the car.
She drove as she does, with her chin on the wheel. And in the lane behind the Lamb, in the headlights of eleven cars and a tractor, I saw the town do what it does. It is not graceful. It is forty people in coats over their nightclothes, passing sandbags hand to hand, saying "Sorry," and "Mind." The water was already coming up out of the drain at the lane's low end, black, flat and quick, like a thing which had been told to wait and was tired of it.
In the middle of it stood Ned the pump man, in his waders and his yellow coat, with his torch on his head. He had opinions about drains, and told forty people where to put a hundred and sixty bags. "Lovely. Lovely. Stagger them, like bricks. Next one on the top, Clem, no, left of that, that's it, lovely. Not there, there. Mind her, she's seventy. Lovely."
The vicar was in the line. He carried his bags in both arms, pressed to his chest, with the face of a man carrying his own coffin. When he saw me in the car window he stopped, with his mouth going on a sweet, and the line behind him stopped too. Then he went on.
In 1953 there was no telephone, and no rota. In the great flood of that year my witch went down Low Drove at two in the morning with her stick, from the cottage to the bend, and banged on every door with it, once for each house. She did not call a name. She said "Up," and she said "Water," and she went on. The town hated her for it. She woke their children in her nightdress, and the parish said so for sixty years. They lived. Most of them did not thank her, and their grandchildren are still here.
Mo set up her urn on a trestle at the church hall end of the lane and put a cardigan on the passenger seat, and me on it, and wound the window down an inch, and said, "You stop there, my lovely. I'll be an hour." She left the saucer on the dashboard. She went. I watched her carry the big urn like a baby. I sat in the cardigan in the dark with my own company, and I was composed.
At midnight the church clock struck twelve, four minutes late, and the seat went.
The cardigan went soft under me like a loaf under a thumb, and I was down in the footwell with my claws in the carpet and my back legs running on nothing. I said her name twice, to a roof that had no business being there. She was at Ely. Nobody sneezed. It let go of me at last the way a bored dog lets go of a slipper, and I lay with the carpet in my teeth, smelling Fisherman's Friends.
Mo found me there at ten past twelve. She opened the door and said, "Oh, my love," and picked me out of the footwell with both hands, and I let her. I let her put me back in the cardigan. I let her say, all the way home, with her chin on the wheel, "I know, love, I know. I know. It's the water. It's the horrible water."
It was not the water, madam. But I had not the strength to say so.
She carried me up the stairs. I thought she was taking me to the bed. Instead she stopped on the landing, and put her thumbnail to the catch on the cream door, and it opened, and the heat came out at me like a hand, and a smell of clean linen and lavender, and she put me down on the top shelf, in the dark, on a stack of towels hot from the tank.
"There," she said. "That's the warmest place in the house. You have a lie there, my lovely. I'll go and put the kettle on."
I will give you my review.
The airing cupboard. Served at ten to one, on a shelf above a copper tank, on a bed of hot towels. Lavender, and clean cotton, and under both of them Mo, who has put her hand on every object in the house. I know of no better room in England. I turned round on it three times, and kneaded, with my eyes shut, until the shaking in my back legs began to go.
My left claws went in under a towel, and found something that was not a towel.
It was flat. It had an edge. It rang, very faintly, as my claw went along the rim of it, with the noise a coin makes in a hat. I lifted the corner of the topmost towel with my nose and looked, with my cheek flat to the shelf, by the little light that came from the landing through the crack.
It was a biscuit tin, square, old, blue, with the paint worn off the corners by a thumb. On the lid, in capitals, in her hand, in the black paint she used for the sheep numbers on the gate, it said STEPS.
I knew it. I had sat on the shelf over her range since before the boiler and watched her put the coins in. Ten pence in the tin for every pound she spent on herself, for thirty years, for a rail. She was always going to buy it. She said she knew where her feet were.
I had gone looking for it with my whole nose and my whole shoulder, and I had been carried to it. I lay on my side on a stack of hot towels with my cheek against the lid of a dead woman's tin, and I was triumphant, and I was triumphant for about nine seconds, and then I thought of eleven years of tomato.
She had cried on my head every day. She had put the saucer down, and said, "I know you like the tomato," and gone back up her path rather fast, and shut her door.
The telephone rang in the hall.
I heard Mo go to it. I heard her say, "Hello?" and then, "Oh, love," and then, "I don't know, I've not seen him for a minute, he's been in such a state, hold on, I'll look." And I heard the stairs, the fourth and the ninth, and her slippers on the landing, with the handset held out in front of her, and the little cream door opened wide, and she saw a cat on a stack of towels.
She did not see what was under me.
"There he is," said Mo. "Here, love. Say hello. She wants to know you're all right."
She held the telephone down to my head. It smelled of hand cream. Somewhere inside it, a very long way off, there was a noise like a car park.
I had not prepared a remark. I said what was true.
"I am alive, madam," I said, "which is more than I expected at midnight. I am in a warm place. I have found something, and I shall not tell you what, on a telephone, in front of a woman who is holding it."
Mo heard a miaow. "He's pleased to hear you," she said.
There was a silence from Ely, with breath in it, and a car door somewhere behind.
"Go to sleep, you lump," said the blood.
The line went. Mo put the telephone to her chest for a moment, with her eyes shut, like a person who has been handed a lamb, and then she said, "She says goodnight, love," which was close enough that I let it be. She left the door open to a crack. The bed took her weight with a long bad groan, and then there was nothing but the tank ticking and the hot towels under me.
Under my ribs the lid said STEPS. I lay on it until it was light.