Thomasina

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The quivering of her chins now had spread to her small mouth as Mrs Laggan looked fearfully into the day that would be without Rabbie; no one to talk to, no one to whose breathing she would hearken whilst she had her evening cup of tea, or lay in bed at night. She said what came into her head, but not what was bursting in her heart. “The customers who come to my shop will miss Rabbie sore if he’s not there for them to be stepping over.” But she was meaning: “I’m an old woman. I have not many days left myself. I am lonely. The dog has been my companion and my comfort for so long. He and I know one another’s ways so well.”

“Yes, yes, Mrs Laggan, no doubt. But you must make up your mind, for I have other patients waiting.”

Mrs Laggan looked uneasily to the big, vital man with the red moustache and beard.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be selfish if poor Rabbie is suffering …”

Mr MacDhui did not reply, but sat waiting.

Life without Rabbie – the once cold nose pressing against her hand, the edge of pink tongue that protruded when he was contemplative, his great sigh of contentment when he was fed full – but above all his presence; Rabbie always within sight, sound, or touch. Old dogs must die; old people must die. She was minded to plead for the bit of medicine, for another month, a week, a day more with Rabbie, but she was rushed and nervous and fearful. And so she said: “You would be very gentle with him –”

MacDhui sighed with impatient relief: “He will not feel a thing, I assure you.” He rose. “I think you are doing what is right, Mrs Laggan.”

“Very well, then. Make away with him. What will it be I’ll be owing you?”

The vet had a moment’s pang brought on by the sight of the trembling lips and chins and cursed himself for it. “There will be no charge,” he said curtly.

The widow Laggan regained sudden control of her face and her dignity, though her eyes were wet. “I’ll be paying you for your services—”

“Two shillings, then.”

She paid out of a small black purse, setting the florin on to his desk with a snap that caused Rabbie to prick up his greying ears for a moment. Without another glance at her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs Laggan made for the door. She held herself as proudly and erectly as she could, for she would not be a fat old woman dissolving into grief before this hard man. She bore up to pass through and close it behind her.

Thin women in sorrow have both the faces and figures for bleakness and woe, but there is nothing quite as futile and shaking as the aspect of an obese woman in affliction. The small mouth unable to form into the classic lines of tragedy can but purse and quiver. Grief is bowed, but fat keeps the stout woman’s curves constant, except that the flesh suddenly greys and looks as though the juices of life had gone out of it for all its roundness.

When the widow Laggan emerged from the surgery and entered the waiting-room once more, all eyes were turned upon her, and the Rev. Peddie recognised the symptoms at once, got up and went to her, crying: “Oh, dear – don’t say that something ill has befallen Rabbie. Is he to remain in hospital?” And then he echoed the prior remarks of the widow. “Why, whatever would the town do without the presence of Rabbie across the doorstep?”

Safe within the circle of her own people, Mrs Laggan could let the tears flow freely as she told of the sentence passed upon her friend. “The doctor said it would be better if he were to be put away just now. Why must the ones we love always go while we are remaining behind? Och, it will not be the same any more without Rabbie. But I’m thinking I’ll be following him soon and it will be all for the best.” She dabbed at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief and essayed a smile. “Do you remember how Rabbie would be blocking the door, and all the gentry would be raising up their knees to pass over him?”

It was so small a thing that had happened, yet the waiting-room was stiff with the tragedy of it, and Mr Peddie felt the horror clamped like a hand about his heart, squeezing that member until it felt in some similar measure the pain that was oppressing the widow Laggan. Mr Peddie had one of those awful moments to which he was prone when he could not decide what it was that God would wish him to do, what God Himself would do, were He to stand there with them all in the presence of the misery of the widow Laggan.

For to Mr Angus Peddie there was neither gloom nor sourness, nor melancholy about either the God or the religion he served. Creation and the world created, along with the Creator were a perpetual joy to him and his mission seemed to be to see that his flock appreciated and was properly grateful for all the wonders and beauties of nature, man and beast as well as the great and marvellous unexplained mysteries of the universe. He did not try to explain God, the Father, or the Son, but worked to help his people love and enjoy Him. A man of unusual tolerance and breadth of vision, he believed that man could deny God for a time, but not forever, since God was so manifest in everything that lived and breathed, in things both animate and inanimate, that He was universal and hence undeniable.

And yet, human being that he was, he felt the panic when his God seemed to turn His back upon the likes of the widow Laggan and his own warm heart was riven with pity for her plight.

There stood a weeping fat woman dabbing at her eyes with a small cloth, the tears straggling unevenly over the curves of her cheek and her triple chins quaking and jouncing. And in a moment she would walk out of there and begin to die.

Peddie felt the strong push of the impulse to rush into the surgery of Mr MacDhui crying: “Stop, Andrew! Don’t kill the animal. Let it live out its time. Who are you who hate him to play God?” but he resisted it. What right had he to interfere? MacDhui knew his business, and veterinary surgeons, just as doctors, frequently had to make decisions and break news that was painful to people, except that to the former was sometimes given the additional mercy of destruction to save pain and suffering.

Mrs Laggan said once more, speaking as though to herself: “Twill no be the same wi’out Rabbie,” and went out. Mr MacDhui’s beard came in through the door again and he stood there a moment regarding them all truculently as though experiencing some remnant of the scene that had just taken place and the sympathy engendered for the old woman.

He asked: “Who’s next?” and his countenance took on an even greater expression of distaste when the Glasgow builder’s wife with the Yorkshire terrier half arose irresolutely from the hard, waiting-room chair and the dog gave a shrill yelp of terror.

A small voice said: “Please, sir, could you spare a moment?”

Someone remarked: “It’s little Geordie McNabb, the draper’s boy.”

Geordie was eight. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt and the kerchief of the Scout Wolf Cubs. He had a round, solemn face with dark hair and eyes and a curiously Chinesey cast of countenance. In his grubby hands he clasped a box and in the box palpitatingly reposed his good deed for that day. MacDhui strode over to him overpoweringly, overtoweringly, looming over him like a red Magog, thrusting his bristling beard nearly into the box as he boomed: “Well, lad, what is it you want?”

Geordie stood his ground bravely. Patently, inside the box there was a green frog with heaving sides. The boy explained: “There’s something wrong with his foot. And he cannot hop. I found him by the side of the lochan. He was trying very hard to hop but he couldn’t at all. Will you make him better, please, so that he can be hopping again?”

The waves of old bitterness had a way of rolling up inside Andrew MacDhui at the oddest and most ill-timed moments, causing him to do and say things that he did not mean to at all. Here he was in his waiting-room full of clients and it suddenly came over him as he stood bent over and looking down into the box – “Doctor to a frog with a broken leg, that’s what you are, my great, fine fellow—”

And thereupon the old angers and regrets returned to plague and irritate him. Had there been justice in the world, all of these people in the room, yes, and the child too, would have been there to consult him about ailing hearts, or lungs or throats or livers, aches and pains and mysterious cramps, sicknesses and diseases, which he would combat for them and put to rights. And there they were instead with their pampered, snuffling, mewing and whining little pets kept for their own flattery’s sake or because they had been too lazy or selfish to bring into the world a child on whom to lavish their affection.

The ailing Yorkie was quite near to him and MacDhui, his nostrils already flaring with disgust of himself and all humanity, caught a whiff of the perfume with which his mistress had scented him. He therefore replied to Geordie McNabb out of the black cloud of anger enveloping him: “I have no time for such foolishness. Cannot you see that I am busy with a room full of people? Go put the frog back by the pond again and leave it be. Off with you now.”

Into the dark, round eyes of Geordie came that expression reserved to children who have been hurt by and disappointed in their grown-ups. “But he’s sick,” he said, “he’s not well. Will he not die?”

MacDhui, not less unkindly this time, steered the child towards the door and gave him a farewell pat on the behind. “Off you go, boy. Put it back where you found it. Nature will look after it. Now, then, if you like, Mrs Sanderson –”

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_096147a1-053b-57d5-9803-2a4749bcdad5)

If it is family you go by, then you will certainly be impressed with mine, for I am a relative of that Jennie – Jennie Baldrin of Glasgow – about whose life and times and adventures in London, aboard ship and elsewhere, a whole book has been written and published.

We are Edinburgh on one side of my family, several of my forbears not only having been employed at the University in the usual capacity of hunters, but one or two are said to have contributed to scientific knowledge and advance. We are Glasgow on the other, the Jennie Baldrin side.

Jennie was my great-aunt and she was most distinguished and Egyptian-looking with a small, rather narrow head, long muzzle, slanting eyes and good-sized, rounded, well-upstanding ears, and in this I am said to resemble her closely, though, of course, our colouring is quite different. I mention this with excusable pride since it shows that we trace our ancestry back to the days when people had the good sense to recognise us as gods.

That false gods are worshipped today – well, more’s the pity, for in Egypt, in the old days when members of our family were venerated in temples, times were better and people, by and large, seemed happier. That, however, is neither here nor there and does not concern what I have to tell. Yet, if you know that once you were a god, no matter how long ago – well, it is bound to show somewhat in your demeanour.

Nor does Jennie play any part at all in what is to follow, except that I suppose I inherited something of her independence, courage and poise, not to mention elegance, and I brought in her name only as a possible point of interest to you should you happen to be familiar with her story.

I too have had a most curious adventure and experience, one of the most interesting and marvellous things that ever happened, at least that part which concerns myself.

I will not keep you in suspense. It has to do with a murder.

But what makes this story different from any you ever read is that the one who is murdered is – ME.

The name I bear, Thomasina, came about through one of those ridiculous and inexcusable errors committed by so many people who attempt to determine our sex when we are very young. I was originally christened Thomas when I came to live at the home of the MacDhuis in Glasgow to be the pet of Mary Ruadh, then aged three. When the error became obvious the name was simply feminised to Thomasina by Mrs McKenzie, our housekeeper, whether I liked it or not and without so much as a by your leave.

I do not know why people are quite so stupid at determining our sex when we are young. The difference is easy enough to see if you will just look instead of guess, and take a little trouble, for with boys, things are apart, and with girls they are near together, and that’s the rule, no matter how small they might be.

Mr Andrew MacDhui might have told at a glance, no doubt, since he was a veterinary surgeon. But he was a most queer man to follow the profession of doctor to animals, since he had little love for and no sentimental interest in them whatsoever, and hence never paid the slightest attention to me from the moment I came into the house, which I cannot say disturbed me. The disregard was mutual.

We lived in a large, rather gloomy house in Dunearn Street, which Mr MacDhui had inherited from his father, who was also a veterinary, when he died. The two lower floors were given over to the offices, surgery and animal hospital, and we lived on the two upper ones, Mr MacDhui, his wife and Mary Ruadh. They all had red hair. I have too, or rather ginger-coloured with a white blaze on my chest. But what people really seem to find irresistible about me is that I have four white feet, and the very tip of my tail is white to match. I am quite used to receiving compliments upon my looks and bearing.

Although I was then only six months old myself, I remember Mary Ruadh’s mother, Anne. She was beautiful and her hair was the colour of copper pots by the fireside. She was very gay and always singing about the house, which made it less dark and gloomy, even on rainy days. She was forever cuddling and spoiling Mary Ruadh and they would often spend time “giving one another whispers”, which was a kind of love-making. It was not an unhappy household in spite of Mr MacDhui. But it did not last long, for soon after I came Mrs MacDhui contracted a disease from a parrot that was being kept in the hospital and died.

That was a bad time for me, I can tell you, and if it had not been for Mrs McKenzie I do not know what would have happened to me, for Mr MacDhui half went out of his mind, they said, and it certainly sounded like it, the manner in which he raged and carried on, and the love he had had for his wife he now transferred to his daughter, and half frightened her to death with it, and me too, I can assure you. He kept staying away from home and would not go near his animal hospital for days on end and things were getting in a bad state when he received a visit from an old friend of his from the country, a minister by the name of Mr Peddie, and after that things got a little better and soon we had a great change.

It seems that Mr Peddie and Mr MacDhui had known one another when they were both students at Edinburgh University – they might even have known some of my family there – and Mr Peddie told Mr MacDhui that there was a practice for sale in the town where he lived and advised him to go there.

So, Mr MacDhui sold out his practice in Glasgow and the house on Dunearn Street where he was brought up and we all moved to Inveranoch on the west bank of Loch Fyne in Argyll where my tragedy happened to me.

Mary Ruadh then was six years old, going on for seven, and we lived in the last house but one near the end of Argyll Lane. Our next-door neighbour was Mr MacDhui’s friend, Mr Angus Peddie, the minister, who kept a most disgusting pug dog by the name of Fin. Ugh!

Our house was really two houses, one next the other but separated and they were of white-washed stone with slate roofs; they were rather long and narrow; two storeys high, with tall chimneys at each end on which there was usually perched a seagull. In one of these we lived and in the adjoining one was the office, waiting-room, surgery and hospital of Mr MacDhui. But, of course, we never went there for Mary Ruadh was forbidden to do so. After what had happened in Glasgow, Mr MacDhui had sworn he would never again have sick animals in the place where he lived.

I considered myself a good deal better off in Inveranoch than in Glasgow because Loch Fyne was an arm of the sea that pushed up from the ocean down by Greenock right up into the Highlands as far as Cairndow and brought with it gulls to watch in flight and the smell of the sea and fish and queer birds to chase that ran along the beach behind which lay a wonderful dark and scary country of woods and glens and mountains of stone in which to hunt. I was never allowed out in Glasgow, but it was quite different here and soon I became a real Highlander and we Highlanders, of course, looked down on everyone else.

Inveranoch was not as large a city as Glasgow, in fact, it was quite small with no more than a few thousand inhabitants, but to make up for that hundreds of visitors came there every summer for their holidays.

This was the busiest time for Mr MacDhui for the guests often brought their pets with them, mostly dogs, of course, but sometimes cats and birds, and once, a monkey, and the climate did not always agree with them or they would get themselves bitten or stung in the woods, or pick a fight with one of us Highlanders, which was foolish since they were much too soft and then their owners would have to bring them to Mr MacDhui for repairs. He seemed to take this in very ill part, for he was a man who hated pets and disliked being a veterinary and preferred to pass his time in the back country with the farmers and crofters rather than keep office hours.

However, none of this was any of my concern and I was fairly comfortable at this time and living a routine sufficiently to my own taste, except for one thing. Mary Ruadh had become a cat carrier.

If you have had or have a little girl yourself you will know what I am talking about. If not, you may have noticed that, at a certain age, little girls always carry a doll around wherever they go, but some carry their cat. Often they do not even know they are carrying it as they walk or toddle about with it. They hold it around the middle, just below the shoulders, clutched to their breast so that most of the cat dangles a dead weight with head and forequarters hanging over the arm.

Mary Ruadh did vary this most uncomfortable and humiliating position sometimes by placing me across her shoulders like a fur piece where I could rest and even be admired by people who sometimes said it was difficult to tell which was Mary Ruadh’s hair and which was me. I didn’t mind that. Or she would carry me upside down in both arms, like a little baby. I hated that.

If you ask me why I put up with it, I cannot tell you, since my philosophy of life is quite simple. When you find yourself in a situation where unpleasant things, or things you don’t like, occur more frequently than pleasant ones – walk out.

Well, there were other things too, which I wasn’t going to mention, but as long as I am on the subject, I might as well. There was the being made to sit on a chair sometimes at tea with a napkin around my neck and pretend I was a person, or rather, Mary Ruadh pretended. This got me a few caraway seed cakes of which I happened to be fond and a couple of laps of milk out of a saucer, but it didn’t make up for the indignity.

When I had kittens they took them away from me and drowned them.

At night I was forced to sleep at the foot of her bed. Nor could I go away to my favourite chair after she fell asleep for if she woke up and I was not there she would call for me and sob most heart-breakingly. Sometimes during the night, even when I was there, she would wake up and begin to cry softly in the darkness and murmur, “Mummy – Mummy!” for it seems she remembered her too. Then she would reach down in the darkness and wake me up and hold me to her so hard with her face buried in my flank that I could hardly breathe, and you know how we hate to be held.

She would then cry – “Oh, Thomasina, Thomasina, I love you. Don’t ever leave me.” After a little she would become more quiet and I would wash her face a little and lick the salt tears from her cheeks, which made her laugh and giggle and say – “Thomasina – you tickle,” and soon she would go to sleep again.

And I stayed on. Believe me, if it had been a little boy I should not have done so, thank you very much. I should soon enough have run away and not come back, taken to the woods, or found someone else in town to live with, for I am perfectly capable of looking after Thomasina. Though I may look delicate, I am most resilient, have a hardy constitution and can stand almost anything. Once a boy on a bicycle ran over me. Mrs McKenzie came running out of the house screaming that I was killed and Mary Ruadh cried and carried on so that it took an hour afterwards to calm her and all that happened was that the boy fell off his bicycle and hurt himself and I got up and walked away.

Well, and then there was Mr MacDhui himself and there is plenty I could tell you about him, and none of it favourable. An animal doctor who didn’t like animals – there’s a good one. A bit too quick with the chloroform rag when people brought their sick pets to his surgery, was what they said. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want him treating me. Mr MacDhui was jealous of me because his daughter loved me so much, and he hated me. But what was even worse, he ignored me. Mr High-and-mighty-around-the-house. Nose in the air; whiskers bristling all the time. And the medicine smell of him. Ugh! It was the same one that came out of the hospital when you went past. When he returned home at night and bent down to kiss Mary Ruadh, his huge, bristly red face with the medicine and pipe smell would come right close to mine, since Mary Ruadh would be carrying me, and it made me feel sick.

Naturally, I annoyed him all I could, calling attention to myself by washing in front of him, taking care to be on his chair when I knew he would be wanting it, lying in doorways where he would be likely to trip over me, rubbing up against his legs and ankles, leaving hairs on his best clothes whenever I could find them and jumping up on his lap when he sat down to read the paper and making smells of my own. He did not dare to be rough with me when Mary Ruadh was in the room and so he would just pretend I was not there and then get up suddenly to go for some tobacco and dump me off his knees.

Add up all of these things and you might almost say it amounted to sufficient cause for me to move out. Yet I stayed on and was not too unhappy. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else, but if the truth be known, I was rather fond of the child.

I think it could have been because, in some ways, girl children and cats are not un-alike. There is some special mystery about little girls, an attitude of knowing secret things and a contemplative and not wholly complimentary quality about the way they look at you sometimes that is often as baffling and exasperating to their elders as we are.

If you have ever lived with a girl child, you will know that quiet, infuriating retirement into some private world of their own of which they are capable, as well as that stubborn independence in the face of stupid or unreasonable demands or prohibitions. These same traits seem to annoy you in us as well. For you can no more force a cat or a girl child to do something they do not wish to do than you can compel us to love you. We have this in common, Mary Ruadh and I.

Thus I did many strange things I should not have believed myself capable of doing. When Mary Ruadh went to school – this adventure of mine took place during the summer holidays – I suffered her to carry me all the way there, and to be pawed or fussed over by the other children until the bell rang and she went inside, when I was free to run home and look after my business.

But, believe it or not, when it came time for her to come home in the afternoon I would be sitting up on the gate-post with my tail curled round my legs, watching for her. True, it was also a fine vantage point from which to spit on the minister’s pug dog when it went by, but nevertheless, there I was. The neighbours used to say you could always tell what time of day it was by the MacDhui cat getting up on to the gate-post to watch for her wee mistress.

I, Thomasina, waiting on a gate-post for a somewhat grubby, red-haired and not even specially beautiful child, can you imagine?

Sometimes I wondered whether there was not another bond between us: we were each to the other something to cling to when the sun goes down and nightfall brings on fear and loneliness.

Loneliness is comforted by the closeness and touch of fur to fur, skin to skin – or skin to fur. Sometimes when I awoke at night after a bad dream, I would listen to the regular breathing of Mary Ruadh and feel the slight rise and fall of the bed-clothes about her. Then I would no longer be afraid and would go back to sleep again.

I have mentioned that Mary Ruadh was not an especially beautiful child, which perhaps was not polite, since she thought that I was certainly the most beautiful cat in the world, but I meant especially beautiful in the unusual sense. She was a rather ordinary-looking little girl except for her eyes, which told you of some special quality in her, or about her when you looked into them. Often I was not able to do so for long. Their colour was a bright blue, a most intense blue, but sometimes when she was thinking thoughts I could not understand or even guess, they turned as dark as the loch on a stormy day.

For the rest, you wouldn’t call her much to look at, with her uptilted nose and freckled face and a long lower lip that usually stuck out, while her eyebrows and lashes were so light you could hardly see them. She wore her ginger-red hair in two braids tied with green or blue ribbon. Her legs were quite long and she liked to stick her stomach out.

But there was something else pleasant about Mary Ruadh; she smelled good. Mrs McKenzie kept her washed and ironed when she was at home and she always smelled of lavender, for Mrs McKenzie kept lavender bags in with her clothes and underthings.

It seemed as if Mrs McKenzie was forever washing and ironing and starching and scenting her clothes, because it was the only way she was allowed to show how much she cared for Mary Ruadh. Mrs McKenzie was a thin woman who talked and sang through her nose. She would have mothered Mary Ruadh the way we will frequently look after somebody else’s kitten as though it were our own, but Mr MacDhui was jealous and feared that Mary Ruadh would come to love her too much if she were allowed to cuddle her. Oh, Mr Bristle-and-Smelly was allowed to cuddle her all he wished, but nobody else.

I loved the odour of lavender. Smells, almost more than noises, seem to bring on the happiness or unhappiness memories. You might not remember what it was about a smell had made you angry at the time, or afraid, but as soon as you come across it again you are angry or fearful. Like the medicine smell of Mr MacDhui.

But lavender was the happiness smell. It made my claws move in and out and brought the contentment purr to my throat.

Sometimes after putting Mary Ruadh’s things away after ironing them, Mrs McKenzie would forget to close all the chest of drawers, and leave one open. Then I would quickly nip inside and lie there full length with my nose up against a lavender bag, just smelling, smelling, smelling. That was bliss. That was when I was contented and at peace with the world.