a gallimaufry

cat business

After the death of Mister Puss, we decided to look for a new feline friend for our remaining cat, Clara. Clara is a much more sociable creature than Mister Puss; she enjoyed teasing him (he hated it) and often tried to play with him (occasionally he did play but he was more likely to swear at her or give her a clip round the ear). And while Mister Puss would be furious to think of any other cat on his patch, and so soon, we started this search very quickly. Quite apart from being able to offer an animal a new home sooner rather than later, we were conscious of there only being one week of school holidays left. Cat introductions are not always easy, it seems, and we thought it would be best if we were able to give everyone lots of attention. Also, to be honest, it distracted from missing Mister Puss and his ginger ways.

As luck would have it we discovered an animal rescue centre very near to where we live, and they had kittens! We made an appointment to visit. The centre re-homes all its kittens in pairs, so there would be two new friends for Clara instead of one. I was pleased about this, I think being a kitten and being removed from both your mother and your siblings must be tough. (Though perhaps I project too much.)

Once we’d explained what we were after, Sonja, the lady in charge, told us that they did not recommend introducing kittens to a household where there was already a cat. I was surprised! She explained that it’s hard to tell very much about a kitten’s character, especially as to whether it will be a sociable cat or not, and if it happened that one of the kittens turned out to be aggressive with other cats (it seems there is a genetic factor here, so one sibling may be friendly and another not) then there would be trouble down the line. Instead, she recommended a sociable cat closer in age to Clara.

Or, in fact, two, because we’d sort of forgotten that there was the option of just adopting one cat. Sonja introduced us to some pairs of cats of Good Character. I did have the wit to ask whether she thought bringing two adult cats home would freak Clara out more than one, but Sonja thought not. And of course we were charmed by these sweet-tempered, friendly cats. So Olaf and Nala came home with us.

Olaf is enormous and very curious. He has climbed up every cupboard in the house, not always with very pleasing results, and if you open a drawer or a door his black-and-white face appears at your elbow, having a good nose inside. Sometimes he sits beside me and presses a paw against my chest. I am not sure what this means. The first night someone managed to knock over the cake tin and gnaw on a fruit scone, and I think it was him.

Nala, a little tortoiseshell cat, is more nervous and shy. She loves being stroked and cuddled, and she’ll climb onto your lap but then go completely loopy and knead your legs frenetically and bounce on and off again many times before settling down.

The two of them have played all over the house and spent yesterday evening both sleeping in my lap while I tried to read. They seem pleased with their new home, as far as I can tell, and are settling in.

But what of Clara? Well, she is not exactly overjoyed to say the least, and it is painful to see her avoiding her own home. However, she has taken it much better than Mister Puss did when she arrived three years ago. She stays mainly outside but pops in and out to give the newbies Hard Stares and they stare back. Clara growls a bit at Nala but I think she’s intimidated by Olaf. That may not seem good but I am actually hopeful: I think that these situations are always difficult at first but get better. Still, if anyone has any tips on smoothing the path to kitty friendship, I should love to know them...

(The first three photographs are of Clara, the next of Olaf, the last of Nala)

Fairy Tale, by Alice Thomas Ellis

(Alice Thomas Ellis photographed by Derrick Santani, in the National Portrait Gallery)

The eyes of the watchers were cold and flat and incurious and the watchers were still. Whenever they moved – be it ever so slightly – there was a brief darkness, a shadow behind the leaves, a hint of something that humanity might call loss, equate with pain. But the watchers knew nothing of that, being indifferent to such matters.

With the illness of Mister Puss and worry surrounding it I’ve been comfort-reading, but before that I was feeling the urge to read about fairies, as you do, but spiky rather than sparkly fairies. I’ve been dipping back into Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s collection of short stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, and re-reading Fairy Tale, by Alice Thomas Ellis. Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s fairies are amoral and often cruel, but the horror of what they do is distanced by the cool impersonal tone in which she writes. Alice Thomas Ellis’s fairies are more disturbing because we find them in a novel with developed human characters. Furthermore, Fairy Tale is steeped in Alice Thomas Ellis’s pitch black humour, and it’s the often jagged juxtaposition of social satire with supernatural  horror that gives the book its disquiet. It’s as if Evelyn Waugh wrote an Edgar Allan Poe story.

Nineteen-year-old Eloise and her ‘nice’ boyfriend Simon have moved from London to a small house in the Welsh countryside, where Simon earns a living picking up agricultural work and Eloise stitches exquisite nightdresses and petticoats for a local boutique:

one of those exclusive little shops with a single garment and something imaginatively incongruous – a monkey’s skull or an old boot – arranged in the window. Simon took the clothes in when Eloise had made a dozen. They were all finished by hand, which made them precious and gave them a hint of pathos, as though child labour had been employed: the women who wore them might feel, at once, delicate and ruthless, like some hard-hearted princess.

Eloise is bored but does not wish to admit it because to do so would be to admit that her fantasy of living in the countryside has not worked out. She pricks her finger; she wishes for a baby. But what she does not know that she and her husband are intruders on fairy land. Peculiar visitors arrive at her door. Eloise’s mother and her friend Myriam arrive, bickering and criticising. Soon the cat is having a nervous breakdown, the house is full of branches and herbs and vegetarian Eloise is craving steak and taking long walks in the rain in which she remains bone dry.

I vaguely remembered reading this a few years ago but I had forgotten just how funny but also surprisingly unpleasant it is. If you prefer your novels to contain sympathetic characters and not to shred pretty much every aspect of modern life, this is not for you. Alice Thomas Ellis’s work is strong meat but she was a perceptive and elegant stylist with an eye for the absurd in modern life and a knifelike wit with which to fillet it.

Her fairies are ancient, alien, predatory:

The [fairy] gamekeeper found it incomprehensible – the conflict in the human race between its passion for interference and its basic indifference to its members. Not that he cared. He didn’t think in human terms. Humans were useful for breeding when you could catch one, and every now and then when it seemed safe he ate one, but otherwise he avoided them on the whole ...

There is little room left for them in twentieth-century Britain and they must fight against human encroachment. Underneath the humour and the folklore lurks an eco-fable, though I am sure Alice Thomas Ellis would hate it to be called so. Anyway, it has reminded me of her other novels, which I must re-read...

(Alice Thomas Ellis with Beryl Bainbridge, whose work she edited; photographed by Edward Hamilton West; from here)

Mister Puss

(Drinking from the paddling pool in happier times)

Our beloved Mister Puss is no more. He became ill and there wasn’t anything we could do for him, so he was put to sleep yesterday. We gave him a beautiful funeral: he was buried in a Cornish Hamper box (the most glamorous cardboard box we could find) decorated with pony stickers and surrounded by flowers we picked from the garden; songs were sung and a cross has been raised on his grave.

Not everyone will be sorry at his death; the local rats and birds are probably dancing with joy.

We miss him and his sweary, bossy ways a lot. Our other cat, Clara, seems slightly lost that she has no one to tease now, although Mister Puss disliked being teased on the whole. Not the friendliest of cats, when he was younger Mister Puss used to hunt my toddler daughter, and gardening was always a scary experience as at any moment a tiny ginger tiger might leap out from a shrub and lacerate my arms, squeaking fiercely. However, he mellowed a lot as he got older and occasionally permitted cuddles, although he remained a cat who was happier outside, having a rumble with the neighbouring cats and slaying and eating the local wildlife (he would eat every last whisker of a rat and even the claws and beak of a crow, though this did give him tummy ache afterwards). During the cold winter evenings he enjoyed coming inside to watch the football with K, sitting on his favourite pink blanket on the arm of the sofa.

We have lots of happy memories of Mister Puss, the first cat I have ever ‘owned’ in so far as one owns a cat, and I wish he could have been with us longer. However, with what may strike some as unseemly haste, we have already made an appointment with a nearby animal rescue centre to look for a new friend or friends for Clara. There are a lot of cats looking for homes and it seems silly to make any of them wait longer than they need.

Thanks for everything Mister Puss, and lots of love.

(A last photograph, taken in a favourite spot)

The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin

‘The hands that wash dishes can be soft as your face,’ [the Major] suddenly sang at the Rector in a loud, crackling falsetto, ‘with mild green Fairy Liquid ... Liquid, Liquid,’ he sang. ‘I like that melodic turn, or whatever you call it, on “Liquid”. Very affecting.’
‘It’s your wits it’s affecting, if you ask me,’ said the Rector. ‘I suppose you haven’t been eating properly again. He doesn’t eat properly,’ he reported to Padmore.
‘Ah,’ said Padmore, pretending to have had a suspicion confirmed.
‘You’d better stay to lunch,’ the Rector told the Major. ‘Liver and bacon today, fill you up with vitamin B.’
‘Good,’ said the Major. He liked eating with the Rector, who not only had a first-rate cook but also declined to allow conversation during meals. Explaining this policy to his Bishop, who had been about to dine with him during the course of a visitation, ‘What is the good,’ the Rector had said, ‘of God giving us delicious-tasting foods, if every time we lift a forkful to our mouths we have to break off to cope with the inane prattling of our guest?’ [...]
‘A Dettol home is a happy home,’ the Major sang.
‘Can’t ask you other two,’ said the Rector, ‘because there’s not enough.’

The Glimpses of the Moon is part of the huge bookish plunder I dragged back to my lair with me after my holiday in England. It came courtesy of the Samaritan’s Bookshop in Ipswich, a place from where it is impossible to leave without at least one book, and on the cover the publisher has excitedly proclaimed, ‘Worth waiting for! His first novel for over twenty years’.  Does the book live up to this? Read on and find out, dear reader.

Edmund Crispin, pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, is best known for The Moving Toyshop, but during the 1940s and 1950s he wrote seven other comic detective novels featuring the Oxford professor of English literature, Gervase Fen. A friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, Crisping was invited to join the Detection Club – whose members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr. He was also, under his real name, a composer of film scores; his work includes the music for some of the Carry On films. However, despite early success, Crispin/Montgomery’s life was far from happy. He suffered from ill health, was a chronic alcoholic and was to die of heart failure at only fifty-six. (All of this biographical information is from The Passing Tramp blog, where you can also find discussion of Crispin’s other works.)

The drink and the poor health seem to be the reasons why Crispin’s fans had to wait twenty-six years for The Glimpses of the Moon. The Passing Tramp describes it as ‘a weak book, a succession of sometimes forced comic vignettes strung together by a frayed murder mystery plot’, so if you are new to Crispin’s work it probably isn’t the place to start. I have to say that I enjoyed it on the whole – though I felt the scenes with the hunt and the pylon were an unnecessary indulgence and dragged rather. It is certainly a very odd detective novel, perhaps not really a detective novel at all.

We begin in a Devonshire pub with Fen, the Major and Padmore, a journalist, eight weeks after the gruesome murder of Routh, a local farmer, for which an Australian farm-hand named Hagberd has been arrested and charged. Fen has with him a pig’s head in a sack. All of a sudden, an ancient man named Gobbo starts speaking to them, apparently providing Hagberd with an alibi; Padmore eagerly drags the Major and Fen off in pursuit of corroborating evidence. Soon there has been another murder and the pig’s head in the sack turns out to be not quite what it ought to be...

As The Passing Tramp notes, the structure of the book is indeed a series of comic vignettes involving ever more characters. Everyone is wildly eccentric and bizarrely named; the whole book is completely over the top. The solution to the murder is provided quite perfunctorily at the end of the novel and relies on information that has been withheld from the reader, thus making it impossible to work out in advance as in a more classic, puzzle mystery. Crispin holds back the details of Routh’s death until Chapter 3, which definitely feels like teasing. In a more conventional detective novel the amateur detective would be central; here, Fen is a minor character in the scenes in which he appears and absent for about a third of the book while the police detectives investigate, futilely. Although he does propose the line of inquiry which leads to the identification of the killer, he is hardly involved in the investigation and does not solve it himself – to the exasperation of the Major:

‘Well, my dear fellow, if you say so. But who is the Botticelli murderer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you must know by now, my dear fellow,’ said the Major plaintively. ‘We’re practically at the end of the book.’

There are similar metafictional moments spread out through the book, as when Fen tells Padmore that Crispin ‘writes up’ the accounts of his cases ‘in his own grotesque way’, and there are plenty of literary jokes too. Indeed, Fen explains that the solution to the murder relies on ‘the Chesterton Effect’, named after the author of the Father Brown mysteries. Crispin also pops in a surrogate-Montgomery character, Broderick Thouless, who composes scores for popular films – in this case horror rather than comedy. There is plenty of music in the novel too, from the singing Major to Fen deploring Mahler.

I couldn’t help but come away with the impression that in this book Crispin is really just playing about. The reluctance to divulge basic information about the first murder at the start of the book, the refusal to place his detective centre-stage or provide any clues and the constant divergence into comic scenes that have little to do with the murder plot, the abrupt solution at the end – all of these suggest to me that Crispin is deliberately toying with the reader’s expectations and indulging his own comic instincts (and also his wish to moan about various aspects of modern life, like pylons and hunt protesters). But as a result of jettisoning a more conventional plot Crispin I think loses drive and coherence in the book, and this is compounded by his inability to resist adding more and more characters. Still, it feels as if he was having fun writing it (I hope he was) and that sense of fun does communicate itself; I largely enjoyed it despite its weaknesses and I giggled a lot. It may not be up to his earlier work, but it is still very much worth reading.

Incidentally, the book seems to have no connexion with the Edith Wharton novel of the same title, which seems odd given how literary a writer Crispin is. I am not really sure what it means here, but I think it alludes to the moon as the source of lunacy and so is about flashes of madness.