Michael Harding: Of cats and treacherous bastards

The General was sitting in the debris of Christmas, with cards from the ex-wife and other relations lying flat on the mantelpiece, which was stained from the bottom of a wine bottle.

There was a tree in the corner that looked like it had been thrown at someone and missed. The General was sitting in his mother’s armchair with his head bowed and his slippers beside his stockinged feet.

“Put your shoes on and we’ll go for lunch,” I said.

“I’m exhausted,” he said.

“I have a new cat,” I said, because I needed to talk about something, but he went into a rage and his face turned beetroot red.

“I don’t care about your cats,” he said. “Do you understand? I couldn’t care less about a cat.”

And then he put in the boot. “What kind of a treacherous person are you?” he asked, glaring at me, because of course he knew that his ex-wife had invited me over for mince pies on Christmas Eve and I had accepted.

In fact, I was on her sofa enjoying a hot whiskey with the mince pie when the phone rang. The son answered it, and I knew it was the General, because the son said, “Do you want to speak to Ma?”

But the caller didn’t want to speak to anyone.

Then the son said, “You’ll never guess who is sitting on the sofa eating a mince pie.”

That was a mistake. I could have done without that. So when I called to the General last week he saw me as a turncoat. Such are the lines that get drawn when a husband and wife go to war.

I suggested we go for lunch to the Greville. Eventually he agreed. As we walked down the street, a line of young women in anoraks approached and not one of them glanced in his direction.

In the hotel foyer I noticed that he had become stooped, his head bowed, his peak cap covering his eyes so that he could not be recognised.

It was difficult to get a subject we could both talk about with ease. So eventually I mentioned the cat again.

“Two years ago,” I said, “the neighbours’ black cat got bored with being a house pet, so he decided to leave. He was a young cat then, with fierce claws and strong legs and a ferocious mouth when he chose to chew the skull of a mouse or to hiss at the dog. So the wilderness beckoned.

“One night he ate an unusually large feed of Whiskas, walked towards the back door and then strolled casually down the avenue without looking back.”

“What is so interesting about that?” the General asked.

“Well, over the past two years there have been many sightings of this black cat along the laneways at night and in the headlamps of oncoming cars, or in the hay barns in summertime or occasionally looking in the window of the house of an old woman. She had one little dainty tabby but no sentimentality for feral toms and she flung a saucepan of boiling water through the window at him. Maybe he was trying to lure her dainty tabby into the wilderness.”

“Would you get to the point?” the General hissed, his eyebrows like the tails of large squirrels.

“Well, he’s arrived,” I said.

“Who?”

“The black cat. He came to me on Christmas Eve. I was alone in the house and heard him outside the back door. When I opened it he screamed from beneath the car. He was cold, hungry and wet, so I found an old box of dry cat food and poured it into a saucer and left it out in the yard.

“He wouldn’t come to it when I was standing over it, but when I retreated to the back door he edged along the wall and eventually dug in to the food with enthusiasm. The following day I set out more food. For a week we met like this, in the yard, one wild animal and one domesticated human, until eventually he offered me his ears to fondle and rub. And after that the rest was easy.

“So now he has taken up residence in the coal shed,” I concluded triumphantly. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

The General's face grew large with bile and he looked like he had a toothache as he leaned over his dinner plate to face me, like a broken human emerging from the Heart of Darkness.

“I prefer dogs,” he whispered. “Dogs are loyal. Cats are treacherous bastards. They just suit themselves.”