Mrs Boothby's cat

I like cats. In fact you could say I am very fond of them. I like the way they wind themselves round your legs and the way they do their own thing. They remind me strongly of myself. But I don’t appreciate them when they get in other people’s houses and shit on the floor, which is precisely what our intruder is doing. It is, admittedly, a beautiful creature. I’m more of a moggie man but this is clearly something very upmarket, Burmese perhaps. It is sinuous with a very shiny, brown coat of fur. But it shits everywhere. Yesterday morning I stepped right into a steaming and exceptionally smelly deposit in my new slippers. Monica was furious and accused me of doing it on purpose when I came back to the bedroom with the tea. I can tell you the rest of the day was marked by a particularly angry silence.

We put up with this for several days. No amount of shooing it out seemed to have any effect. The moment it had been ejected, it was back again, god knows how. Old Pierre, our scraggle toothed neighbour claimed not to know who it belonged to, but I could see that he did really know, he just wasn’t telling.

This morning the mystery was solved when a very tall, grey haired woman, dressed straight out of the Home Counties complete with a string of pearls, came knocking on our door. “Have you got Jemima?” she demanded. “It’s her home from home, you know. The Donalds always used to bring her back.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, being rather po-faced I have to admit, “But are you referring to a cat that craps all over the place?”

“It’s only her way of showing you she feels at home,” the woman said. “I’m a breeder, I do know about this sort of thing.”

It turns out that Jemima belongs to Mrs Boothby, who lives a little bit further out of the village than we do. She is clearly an assertive character and has, she informed us rather peremptorily, been here for a very long time. She explained she and her husband, Kenneth, used to be in Tanganyika, doing something with land management, but retired to France more than fifteen years ago. Kenneth is no longer, apparently, but she hangs on here, breeding cats. She talks rather as though she owns the place.

“By the way,” she shouted as she departed, Jemima tucked under her arm, “I’m Patricia, but most people call me P, like pea. I’m sure we’re going to see a lot of each other.”

When she’d stalked up our short drive, Monica said, “Do you think they’re all like that, the English?”

All I can say is that I hope not. I spent the rest of the morning cleaning my slippers. I’m not sure the smell is ever going to go.