Madness

No, she told herself. I don’t think that’s what it is. On second thoughts, it seemed to her that the cat’s attitude was not one of fear. There was no shrinking or backing away. If anything, there was a leaning forward, a kind of eagerness about the creature, and the face – well, there was rather an odd expression on the face, something of a mixture between surprise and shock. Of course, the face of a cat is a small and fairly expressionless thing, but if you watch carefully the eyes and ears working together, and particularly that little area of mobile skin below the ears and slightly to one side, you can occasionally see the reflection of very powerful emotions. Louisa was watching the face closely now, and because she was curious to see what would happen a second time, she reached out her hands to the keyboard and began again to play the Vivaldi.

This time the cat was ready for it, and all that happened to begin with was a small extra tensing of the body. But as the music swelled and quickened into that first exciting rhythm of the introduction to the fugue, a strange look that amounted almost to ecstasy began to settle upon the creature’s face. The ears, which up to then had been pricked up straight, were gradually drawn back, the eyelids drooped, the head went over to one side, and at that moment Louisa could have sworn that the animal was actually appreciating the work.

What she saw (or thought she saw) was something she had noticed many times on the faces of people listening very closely to a piece of music. When the sound takes complete hold of them and drowns them in itself, a peculiar, intensely ecstatic look comes over them that you can recognize as easily as a smile. So far as Louisa could see, the cat was now wearing almost exactly this kind of look.

Louisa finished the fugue, then played the siciliana, and all the way through she kept watching the cat on the sofa. The final proof for her that the animal was listening came at the end, when the music stopped. It blinked, stirred itself a little, stretched a leg, settled into a more comfortable position, took a quick glance round the room, then looked expectantly in her direction. It was precisely the way a concert-goer reacts when the music momentarily releases him in the pause between two movements of a symphony. The behaviour was so thoroughly human it gave her a queer agitated feeling in the chest.

‘You like that?’ she asked. ‘You like Vivaldi?’

The moment she’d spoken, she felt ridiculous, but not – and this to her was a trifle sinister – not quite so ridiculous as she knew she should have felt.

Well, there was nothing for it now except to go straight ahead with the next number on the programme, which was Carnaval. As soon as she began to play, the cat again stiffened and sat up straighter; then, as it became slowly and blissfully saturated with the sound, it relapsed into that queer melting mood of ecstasy that seemed to have something to do with drowning and with dreaming. It was really an extravagant sight – quite a comical one, too – to see this silvery cat sitting on the sofa and being carried away like this. And what made it more screwy than ever, Louisa thought, was the fact that this music, which the animal seemed to be enjoying so much, was manifestly too difficult, too classical, to be appreciated by the majority of humans in the world.

Maybe, she thought, the creature’s not really enjoying it at all. Maybe it’s a sort of hypnotic reaction, like with snakes. After all, if you can charm a snake with music, then why not a cat? Except that millions of cats hear the stuff every day of their lives, on radio and gramophone and piano, and, as far as she knew, there’d never yet been a case of one behaving like this. This one was acting as though it were following every single note. It was certainly a fantastic thing.

But was it not also a wonderful thing? Indeed it was. In fact, unless she was much mistaken, it was a kind of miracle, one of those animal miracles that happen about once every hundred years.

‘I could see you loved that one,’ she said when the piece was over. ‘Although I’m sorry I didn’t play it any too well today. Which did you like best – the Vivaldi or the Schumann?’

The cat made no reply, so Louisa, fearing she might lose the attention of her listener, went straight into the next part of the programme – Liszt’s second Petrarch Sonnet.

And now an extraordinary thing happened. She hadn’t played more than three or four bars when the animal’s whiskers began perceptibly to twitch. Slowly it drew itself up to an extra height, laid its head on one side, then on the other, and stared into space with a kind of frowning concentrated look that seemed to say, What’s this? Don’t tell me. I know it so well, but just for the moment I don’t seem to be able to place it. Louisa was fascinated, and with her little mouth half open and half smiling, she continued to play, waiting to see what on earth was going to happen next.

The cat stood up, walked to one end of the sofa, sat down again, listened some more; then all at once it bounded to the floor and leaped up on to the piano bench beside her. There it sat, listening intently to the lovely sonnet, not dreamily this time, but very erect, the large yellow eyes fixed upon Louisa’s fingers.

‘Well!’ she said as she struck the last chord. ‘So you came up to sit beside me, did you? You like this better than the sofa? All right, I’ll let you stay, but you must keep still and not jump about.’ She put out a hand and stroked the cat softly along the back, from head to tail. ‘That was Liszt,’ she went on. ‘Mind you, he can sometimes be quite horribly vulgar, but in things like this he’s really charming.’

She was beginning to enjoy this odd animal pantomime, so she went straight on into the next item on the programme, Schumann’s Kinderszenen.

She hadn’t been playing for more than a minute or two when she realized that the cat had again moved, and was now back in its old place on the sofa. She’d been watching her hands at the time, and presumably that was why she hadn’t even noticed its going; all the same, it must have been an extremely swift and silent move. The cat was still staring at her, still apparently attending closely to the music, and yet it seemed to Louisa that there was not now the same rapturous enthusiasm there’d been during the previous piece, the Liszt. In addition, the act of leaving the stool and returning to the sofa appeared in itself to be a mild but positive gesture of disappointment.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked when it was over. ‘What’s wrong with Schumann? What’s so marvellous about Liszt?’ The cat looked straight back at her with those yellow eyes that had small jet-black bars lying vertically in their centres.

This, she told herself, is really beginning to get interesting – a trifle spooky, too, when she came to think of it. But one look at the cat sitting there on the sofa, so bright and attentive, so obviously waiting for more music, quickly reassured her.

‘All right,’ she

said. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to alter my programme specially for you. You seem to like Liszt so much, I’ll give you another.’

She hesitated, searching her memory for a good Liszt; then softly she began to play one of the twelve little pieces from Der Weihnachtsbaum. She was now watching the cat very closely, and the first thing she noticed was that the whiskers again began to twitch. It jumped down to the carpet, stood still a moment, inclining its head, quivering with excitement, and then, with a slow, silky stride, it walked round the piano, hopped up on the bench, and sat down beside her.

They were in the middle of all this when Edward came in from the garden.

‘Edward!’ Louisa cried, jumping up. ‘Oh, Edward, darling! Listen to this! Listen what’s happened!’

‘What is it now?’ he said. ‘I’d like some tea.’ He had one of those narrow, sharp-nosed, faintly magenta faces, and the sweat was making it shine as though it were a long wet grape.

‘It’s the cat!’ Louisa cried, pointing to it sitting quietly on the piano bench. ‘Just wait till you hear what’s happened!’

‘I thought I told you to take it to the police.’

‘But, Edward, listen to me. This is terribly exciting. This is a musical cat.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘This cat can appreciate music, and it can understand it too.’

‘Now stop this nonsense, Louisa, and let’s for God’s sake have some tea. I’m hot and tired from cutting brambles and building bonfires.’ He sat down in an armchair, took a cigarette from a box beside him and lit it with an immense patent lighter that stood near the box.