For the week that our cat Walter - a female, despite the name - spent in the Marais veterinary clinic, Dr Flachaire was businesslike. But on the day she broke the news to me, the French vet was full of compassion.
She had thought she could treat Walter's heart disease, but her condition worsened and the cat's liver and kidneys no longer functioned. Our pet of 11 years suffered, and risked going into convulsions. Dr Flachaire used the word I'd always heard applied to terminally ill humans - "euthanasia".
I held Walter on my lap while the vet injected lethal pink liquid into her. "A cat represents a whole period of one's life," Dr Flachaire philosophised. "People who don't have pets can't understand." I stroked Walter's velvety fur as her body went limp. "Bye-bye Walter," the vet said sadly. Before I left, she snipped a tuft from one of Walter's tiger-stripes and put it in a glass vial for me.
Who says Parisians are heartless? Before taking the metro at St Paul station, I stopped to buy Le Monde. "Where's the pussycat?" the woman newspaper vendor asked, peering into Walter's empty wicker basket. "She's dead," I blurted out. "It's been 10 years since my dog died," the woman commiserated. "I still haven't got over it," she added, holding out a handful of tissues.
I returned to the clinic the next day to fetch Walter's body. A long-faced assistant handed me a cold cardboard box, sealed with tape. At the end of her life Walter weighed almost nothing, but I was surprised how heavy it felt.
The first driver in the taxi queue, an African, did not want to take me to the suburb of Vanves on the pretext that he didn't have a map. By law, Paris taxi-drivers cannot refuse you, but they hate trips to the Banlieue because they don't want to return with an empty cab. I managed to dissuade the second driver, a Moroccan, from arguing with the African. "What's in the box?" he asked suspiciously, reaching for it as he said, "I'll put it in the boot." Guessing that he would not want to transport a dead cat to the pet crematorium, I ignored his question and insisted that I keep the box with me on the back seat.
During the 50-minute drive out to Vanves, I wrote down pages of memories of Walter. Our Beirut driver Abed brought her to us between bombardments, late in the summer of 1989. She was a frightened little kitten, an alleycat from Mosseitbeh, covered in fleas, with a yellow ribbon around her neck.
We named Walter after an editor at the Herald Tribune. When the US navy had complained about a freelance piece I wrote on a naval exercise in the Mediterranean, Mr Wells cravenly failed to defend me. Naming our cat for him was a journalist's revenge, but the name suited her, and like T.S. Eliot's cats, she would soon have many others: Wally, the Wal, WTP (for Walter the Puss) . . .
When we threw fake mice covered in rabbit fur, Walter ran after them and retrieved them, earning another nickname: "Cadog". She liked to sleep on the telex machine, and more than once I had to ask newspapers to re-send messages that were garbled because she blocked the paper. During that long drive to Vanves, it was hard to believe that I would never again feel her tap my cheek with her paw, or gently nibble my forearm to wake me early in the morning, that she would never again sit on our suitcases in protest at our departure, butt her head against me to show affection, or roll on her back with pleasure.
The pet crematorium is in a leafy street, indistinguishable from other houses save for a discreet sign. In the waiting-room, the owner's ageing bulldog snored on an armchair and a blonde French woman in a fluffy sweater burst into sobs as she received a plastic jar containing the ashes of her Yorkshire terrier. "Give your companion a dignified end," said a poster bearing the silhouettes of cats and dogs. "Spare him the rendering plant."
I handed over the cardboard box holding Walter and a thoughtful young man filled out her certificate of cremation. "There's always a lot of paperwork in France," he said apologetically. "By law, you must wait one year and one day before spreading the ashes. You must keep these papers in case there is an inspection." Inspection? I asked incredulously. In theory, the police could call any time and ask to see Walter's ashes, but he didn't know of it ever happening.
We scattered Walter's ashes on the Mediterranean, in front of the Beirut balcony where she spent so many years contemplating the craic on the Corniche and the changing sea.
