But at the same time, this ritual of summoning the devil clearly wasn’t going to plan for Prideaux. On his lap, Roger was purring, and Prideaux was saying, “Not now, Roger! Not now.” He tried to knock Roger off, but the cat clung on, and purred more loudly – menacingly loudly. His purr, in fact, grew so loud and deep and resonant that I could feel the vibration in the floor, and Prideaux’s throne was shaking. Watson, in his corner, started to bark. Meanwhile the smoke was still rising, and the wind still howling round the house, but Prideaux was no longer chanting – he had stopped abruptly, as if silenced by a greater power.
The purr grew louder still, and louder, and then Prideaux screamed. As I watched him, Roger started to make an exaggerated puddling motion in his Master’s lap. And suddenly a geyser of scarlet blood shot high into the air.
“Aaaaah!” screamed Prideaux, as Roger’s claws dug deep into his groin. More blood spurted; Roger ignored it. He kept purring and he kept puddling, his shoulders working up and down, as his claws pierced and ripped Prideaux’s flesh, tearing his life away.
At this point a large, dark figure began to materialise in the middle of the candle flames – a figure with unmistakeable goatish overtones.
“Master!” screamed Prideaux. “Master, stop him!”
But Roger wasn’t to be swayed from his grisly task. His claws dug deeper and deeper. Blood was now spurting in all directions, and the almighty purr was deafening.
“Get off me!” Prideaux screamed (without result) as his blood rained down on Roger, on the chairs, on everything. Meanwhile the huge figure continued to materialise within the circle; it began to look about it; it began to emit a smoky glow. And then –
Bang!
A great knock at the door echoed through the room, and the figure looked round in confusion. Watson, whose barking had got ever more hysterical in his corner, broke free and hurled himself towards the door.
Bang! Bang!
More knocking. The figure noticed me lying on the floor just as Watson turned round and (oh no) noticed him. It was the worst moment of all, as far as I was concerned: to see my brave little dog charging at the satanic figure, barking and growling; skidding and sliding on Prideaux’s blood. “No, Watson, no!” I shouted. “Stop it, Watson! Stop that!”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
And then it all happened very quickly. Just as the figure turned to deal with Watson, Roger leapt from Prideaux’s lap onto the floor, smothered in blood, and confronted the apparition.
“Beelzebub,” he said in a commanding voice. Their eyes met. “Your servant is dying. Look.”
It was true. Prideaux had stopped screaming and his breathing was shallow. His blood had stopped spurting. His life was seeping from him on his throne. The apparition became instantly unsteady. It began to fade, dip, swirl and hum. The force was like a helicopter out of control, spinning to its destruction.
Bang! Bang!
The renewed knocking startled us all, as did the big door opening. As we all turned to see who it was, the huge figure vanished, turning inside out, as if disappearing into a black hole. At the very last breath of Prideaux and the very last tiny wisp of the apparition, a man appeared at the door, and Watson – who never gives up, really – ran off to bark at him, the way he barks at everyone.
“Who is it?” demanded Roger. “Who’s there?”
And thus Wiggy entered, with perfect dramatic timing – to find me prone on the floor, the Devil disappearing, Watson hysterical, Prideaux a corpse and Roger caked head to tail in bright red arterial blood.
But his arrival was not the end of it all, because Wiggy had not come alone. We had scarcely time to get our breath back before “Is this the Captain?” Wiggy said, indicating a large black bundle in his arms. “Can you believe it, I found him in the road! Bloody hell, I nearly ran him over!”
There was no time for introductions – or indeed for explanations. I made a huge effort and got up off the floor, just as the Captain leapt from Wiggy’s arms, and approached Roger on menacing tiptoe, his back hunched high, his tail swishing.
“Hello,” I said quickly to Wiggy.
“Hello,” he whispered back.
Roger stood his ground, but it would have been clear to anyone: he was no match for the Captain in any sort of conventional cat fight.
“What have you done here, Roger?” the Captain demanded.
“I’ve set us free.”
“Who are these humans?”
Roger didn’t answer. They circled round, tails thrashing. Occasionally, one of them would hiss or snatch at the air with their claws. I took advantage of the break in the cat dialogue to introduce myself.
“You must be Wiggy,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he replied. “I got here as quickly as I could.”
Suddenly, the Captain lashed out at Prideaux’s throne, and broke one of the legs of it. Roger didn’t flinch.
“It’s over, Captain,” he said. “Don’t you feel it? We shouldn’t fight. It’s over.”
Astonishingly (and disarmingly), Roger dropped his fighting pose and sat opposite the Captain. It was a very deliberate action – showing extraordinary intellectual control – and the Captain watched him closely in some confusion. Roger pulled his body tight beneath him, and rested his weight very lightly on his delicate front paws. I noticed that his bloodied claws were now thoroughly retracted.
“What’s happening?” I said to Wiggy.
“It looks like he’s going to start telling a story.”
And so he was, in a way.
“For years and years,” Roger said, addressing us all, “all I’ve wanted is to tell my story. I told the first bit to you, didn’t I, Wiggy?” he said.
“That’s right,” said Wiggy. “We got to about 1945.”
“I told the first bit to Jo, too. Also to Michael the potter, and to six other people. Every single time – and there were eight altogether – Prideaux prevented me from telling it all. So I have never told the rest of my story to a living soul, and now – ?” He laughed, effectively. “Now, I never shall. The things that happened here. The way the Captain suffered here under Seeward. The unspeakable things Seeward made the Captain do – to kittens.”
Wiggy gasped and looked at me. I pulled a face to indicate I’d heard about the kittens already, but that I still thought it was shocking. We both looked at the Captain for his reaction. He relaxed his fighting position. He was listening.
“Seeward was a monster,” Roger continued. “But cats trusted him. The Captain trusted him, didn’t you, dear Captain, with your simple nature?”
The black cat closed his eyes and hung his head.
“He used you,” Roger added.
A tear trickled down the Captain’s face.
“And he made you commit the ultimate betrayal. I know you resisted him; I know you tried. But in the end you let him try to ruin me – your own dear Roger! A cat you had created; a cat you had wept for; a cat you had roamed all of war-torn Europe looking for after you got separated from him in Athens.”
Poor Captain! Despite his record of casual homicide, I had often imagined his despair when he got back to the Acropolis from Piraeus to find no trace of Roger – just those skinny Greek cats (those bastards) rejoicing and jeering at his companion’s humiliating capture.
“Tell them where you looked for me,” Roger said.
“Italy,” said the Captain. “Then France, Germany, Poland.” He trailed off.
Roger prompted him again. “How long did you look for me abroad?”
“Six years,” said the Captain.
We all made tut-tutting noises of sympathy.
“And he was only in the British Museum!” exclaimed Wiggy.
All eyes turned on the Captain, who appeared lost in sadness and remorse.
“Wiggy, did you happen to bring that little thing you found at the library?” Roger said, lightly.
“Ooh, yes.”
I was puzzled. What thing?
The Captain was puzzled too
– and a bit suspicious. “Roger?” he said.
But Roger shrugged it off, as if to say that the little thing from the library was nothing at all to worry about.
“When I told the story of my Acropolis abduction to Wiggy,” Roger went on, still addressing the Captain, “I described how you had gone off to Piraeus to find out about the boats to Brindisi.”
“I had. I went on the bus.”
“And do you remember, Wiggy, that I talked about the Captain’s last words to me when he left me that morning?”
Wiggy hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said.
The Captain broke in. “I said, ‘Roger, I’ll always look after you.’ ”
I felt quite choked up. In fact, we all did. Roger, the Captain, Wiggy and myself – we all started sniffing. The only one of us quite unmoved was Watson, who – I’m embarrassed to say this – had happily gone to sleep.
Roger approached the Captain and put his paws on the big cat’s shoulders.
“You gave me everything, Captain,” he said, steadily. “You showed me what a cat could be! Our ancestors were like you and me. They were strong and clever, and if someone had told them that cats of the future would be so feeble, they would have wept. We are the last of the Great Cats, Captain. But the price we paid for our immortality was subjection to the Cat Master – and now he’s gone.”
“Isn’t there another Cat Master to take over?” I asked. (It had been worrying me.)
“No. Prideaux was too arrogant to name one.”
The Captain sighed. “Do you remember when we were on a boat once, at night, in the Aegean?”
Roger nodded.
“It was the happiest moment of my life,” the Captain said. And then he started to recite the lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses (“That which we are, we are”) which I needn’t dwell on because everyone in the world knows them quite well by now because of Judi Dench doing them in Skyfall.
Over the Captain’s shoulder, Roger made a signal with his head to Wiggy, and Wiggy withdrew something from his pocket. It looked like a cat collar.
Roger nodded. Wiggy reached down and stealthily put it round the Captain’s neck. Lost in emotion (and Victorian poetry), the Captain hardly noticed what was happening.
Roger withdrew his paws from the Captain’s shoulders. “Shall we all go outside?” he said.
Watson woke up when I opened the door. He trotted along to join me, and we all went outside in the snow – Roger leading the way, with the Captain – dazed and subdued – behind him, then Wiggy, Watson and me in a line behind.
“What’s with the collar?” I whispered to Wiggy.
“It’s the Great Debaser,” Wiggy explained, evidently surprised that I didn’t know.
“Where did you get it?”
“You saw it in that card drawer in the library, Alec; but you didn’t know what it was. I went and got it! I wrote to you about it this morning – but of course you didn’t get the email.”
I was impressed. Wiggy had really come up trumps. Meanwhile Roger’s plan had gone extremely well. He had now deprived the Captain of both his powers and his immortality. It seemed to me, in fact, that the work had been done, and we should perhaps break it up now, head for the nearest conurbation, get warm, have a big dinner, and either all go our separate ways, or maybe Roger would come and live with Watson and me, and finally get the rest of his story off his chest. As we crunched our way through the fresh snow in the wintry orchard, I did a new calculation.
Alec 0 Cats 1
It looked as if this would be the final score.
By now we had reached the famous well – the one I’d seen Seeward posing beside, with the Captain sitting in the bucket. Roger jumped up on the stone wall; the Captain jumped up beside him.
“I feel really bad,” said the Captain. “I’m so sorry about everything, Roger.”
He then looked at me and Wiggy. “Was it your wife I met in that garden in Cambridge?” he asked me.
I was seriously taken aback.
“I was only looking for Winterton,” he said. “I didn’t hurt her. I just gave her a shock, I think. She fell down and then she didn’t move.”
I felt furious. “What do you mean, you gave her a shock?” I snapped. “How did you give her a shock?”
“Well, I’m not sure exactly,” he said, still sounding quite apologetic. “But probably by saying, ‘Hello, I’m looking for Winterton.’ ”
Roger decided to re-take control of proceedings.
“I have a few last words to say to you all,” he said. He looked so beautiful in the moonlight; in a magnificent manner, he addressed us each in turn. “Alec, Hamlet is right. A man’s life’s really is no more than to say one. Wiggy, give up on the screenplays.” Then he turned to Watson. “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.”
And with that he placed his paws either side of the Captain’s neck once more. Then, with the barest effort, he bent them both sideways over the well, and they both fell in. If I live to be a hundred, it’s a sight I will never forget.
“Roger, no!” I cried.
“Roger, no!” yelled the Captain as well, arguably with even more reason.
We rushed to the well, and Watson jumped up but I caught him – thank God I caught him before he fell in after them – but I also caught the fleeting sight of the two cats falling, together, locked in each other’s limbs, the Captain’s eyes huge with fright.
Wiggy and I stood there, too shocked to move. Roger had gone. With a magnificent final Watson address from Sherlock Holmes, he had taken the Reichenbach Falls way out, and the final score was, after all, 2-1 in favour of Alec.
So that’s nearly the end, and I’d like to finish my account with an apology. Reading it all back, I realise that at times I have been a tad flippant in the way I have written this, and I have also told the story with what appears to be a lamentable lack of narrative organisation. To these quite reasonable objections, I shall return (when I’ve decided what to say).
I am back at home in Cambridge now, and the adorable Watson is safely at my feet. We are both recovering from our respective ordeals, but I often wake up sweating, remembering how I caught his little body as he tried to jump after those evil cats into that fateful well. I wish I could say that spring is round the corner, but it isn’t. It is still absolutely freezing, and the weather forecasters have run out of jocular ways of breaking the miserable news that this state of affairs will continue for the next two months at least. Speaking of the weather, Wiggy and I were snowbound in Dorset for three days after the events at Harville, and I think we helped each other through it. He’s a chap with hidden depths, I think, despite the predicted floppy hair and mustard-coloured trousers. It was amazing that he understood from Seeward’s pamphlet what the Great Debaser was, and even more amazing that he remembered my description of a bit of a leather with a buckle in the Seeward card catalogue drawer in Prideaux’s office.
Having reached the end, I feel I must now revise my answers to the quiz I set myself earlier.
1. Did things turn out well, generally speaking, Alec?
Yes, very well No Not really Don’t ask
I think you will agree this is much nearer the mark than “Not really.”
2. If NO, was it your own fault? (Think carefully)
Yes, I feel terrible No Not entirely Don’t ask
Yes, I have come to terms with my own lack of responsibility, at last. My only sin, in retrospect, was to be so obsessed with this story.
3. Was anyone hurt?
Yes No Not really Don’t ask
I feel sorry for the cats, especially Roger. But I have no sympathy at all for Julian Prideaux. After all that eyeball-flashing, I quite enjoyed seeing his blood flying about like that. It seemed like his due come-uppance for a) being an Evil Cat Master in league with Beelzebub, doling out death to innocent humans just in order to punish the wilful Roger, and also b) all those bloody departmental meetings he didn’t turn up to. I had n
o idea my professional resentment went so deep.
4. Has the world been rid of the evil cats?
Miraculously, yes Worryingly, no Too early to tell
Wishful thinking, this. It’s just that I have dreams of Roger somehow climbing out of that well and coming to live with us. After all, unlike the Captain, he was not wearing the Great Debaser and therefore retained his powers, perhaps. What a team we would make: me, the loyal Watson and a brilliant talking cat.
5. How do you feel about cats now?
Love them Indifferent Conflicted Hate them
Yes, no change there.
6. How do you feel, facing the future?
Happy Relieved Numb Don’t ask
Not so numb, now that I’ve written my account.
7. Would you consider a holiday in Dorset in the near future?
Yes No Not on your life
No change there either, I’m afraid.
I no longer care much about the gaps in this story, so I hope you don’t either. I think I’ve made it clear that I asked everybody for enlightenment on even some of the niggling smaller details; I truly did my best. As you will have guessed, I did invent one small section of the narrative – Roger’s telepathic “emiaow” exchange with Prideaux – but I feel it is authentically what must have happened, and I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, so there you are.
I did finally see the clip on YouTube that Wiggy kept forgetting to send the link for. I now watch it over and over again. It’s in colour, with sound, and it’s a re-run of the rabbit experiment. It was filmed in 1964, just before Seeward killed himself. He uses the same curtain and a similar rabbit, but the cat this time is Roger. Seeward speaks to the camera – a thin, nasty voice; he pulls the curtain and Roger leaps up onto the table opposite the hapless bunny. But he doesn’t kill it. He sits beautifully, serenely, while Seeward orders him to do it. He lifts a paw and examines its underside, before putting it down again. Such nonchalance. He even reaches out and gives the rabbit’s flank a little pat. Seeward is evidently incensed, and the film ends. It’s my conclusion – and there is now no one left alive from whom I can get any collaboration, so I’m on my own with it – that Roger’s bold (and moral) refusenik attitude was the thing that broke Seeward’s cat-master spirit and caused his suicide. The photograph of the two cats in the grass is not about hedonistic animals callously lazing about in the shadow of a corpse (as it seemed on first sight); it’s a moment of great emotional importance to Roger, as he comforts the enslaved Captain whom he will shortly leave behind, to become a cat fugitive for ever.