On Cats. Doris Lessing

going to let her keep more than two kittens, since she was in no state to feed them. That meant we would have to kill some.

      On the Sunday she started labour about ten in the morning. It was a slow exhausting business. The first kitten was born about four in the afternoon. She was tired. There was a long interval between the expulsion of the kitten and the reflex when she turned to lick it. It was a fine kitten. But we had agreed not to look too much at the kittens, not to admire these vigorous scraps of life. At last, the second kitten. Now she was very tired, and gave her mournful Please-help-me cry. Right, we said, that’s it: she can keep these two and we’ll get rid of the rest. We got out a bottle of Scotch and drank a lot of it. Then the third kitten: surely, surely, that was enough? The fourth, the fifth, the sixth. Poor black cat, working hard, expelling kittens, then licking, and cleaning and tidying up – in the depths of the armchair, such activity. At last, she was clean, and the kittens clean and nursing. She lay stretched out, purring and magnificent.

      Brave cat, clever cat, beautiful cat… but it was no use, we had to get rid of four kittens.

      So we did. It was horrible. Then two of us went out into the long field in the dark with torches and we dug a hole while the rain fell steadily, and we buried the four dead kittens and we swore and cursed at nature, at each other, and at life; and then we went back to the long quiet farm room where the fire burned, and there was black cat on a clean blanket, a pretty, proud cat with two kittens – civilization had triumphed again. And we looked incredulously at the kittens, already so strong and standing up side by side on their back paws, their minute pink front paws, kneading at their mother’s side. Impossible to imagine them dead, but they had been chosen by chance and at random; and if my hand had picked them up an hour ago, descending from above, the hand of fate – then these two would now be lying under heavy wet soil in a rainy field. It was a terrible night; and we drank too much; and decided definitely that we would have black cat operated on, because really, really, it was not worth it.

      And grey cat climbed on the arm of the chair, crouching there, and put down a paw to touch a kitten; and black cat lashed out with her paw; and grey cat skulked off out of the house into the rain.

      Next day we all felt much better; and drove off to visit the sea, which was blue and calm, the weather having changed during the night.

      Black cat’s proud purring could be heard all over the big room.

      And grey cat brought in several mice, which she laid out on the stone floor. I had realized by then that the mice were part of the one-upmanship, a gift; but it was no use: dead mice are hard to see attractively. As she brought them in, I threw them out; and she looked at me with ears laid back, eyes blazing resentment.

      Each morning when I woke up, grey cat was sitting on the bottom of my bed, and on the floor a newly killed mouse.

      Oh kind cat. Clever cat. Thank you so much, cat. But I threw them out. And black cat went after them and ate them.

      I was sitting on the stone wall of the garden when I saw grey cat hunting.

      It was a day of thin fast-moving cloud, so that across fields, cottage, trees, and the garden fled sunlight and dark; and grey cat was a shadow among the shadows under a lilac tree. She was very still; but looking closely, you could see faint movement in her whiskers and ears; so she was no stiller than was natural when leaves and grass shivered in a light wind. She was looking, eyes shifting, at stubble a few feet off. As I watched, she moved forward in a low fast crouch, as a shadow moves under a swaying branch. There were three little mice creeping about in a litter of drying grass. They had not seen her. They stopped to nibble, moved on, sat up again to look about. Why, then, did not cat pounce at once? She was not four feet from them. I stayed there; cat stayed there; the mice went on with their lives. Half an hour passed. The tip of cat’s tail moved: not impatiently; but the visible expression of her thought: There’s plenty of time. A dazzling cloud with the midday sun behind it shed a couple of dozen fat drops, each one gold. A drop fell on cat’s face. She looked annoyed, but did not move. The golden drops splashed among the mice. They froze, then sat up, and looked. I could see the tiny black eyes looking. A couple of drops fell on cat’s head. She shook it. The mice froze, and cat pounced, a grey streak. A small miserable squeaking. Cat sat up with a mouse in her mouth. It was wriggling. Cat dropped the mouse; it crept a little way; she was after it. Out darted a paw; with all her wicked claws extended, she made a scooping movement inwards, bringing the mouse towards her. It squeaked. She bit. The squeaking stopped. She sat licking herself, delicately. Then she picked up the mouse and trotted across to me, throwing it up in her mouth and catching it exactly as she had done with her kittens. She laid it at my feet. She had seen me there all the time: had given no sign of it.

      People went away from the cottage, and I was alone. There was more time for petting and talking to the cats.

      One day in the kitchen I was cutting up their food in the saucers on the table when grey cat leaped up and began eating from one of them. Black cat waited on the floor. But when I put down the two saucers, grey cat walked away: she was not going to eat off the floor.

      Next day, the same. Grey cat was trying to make me feed her on the table, a superior place, while black cat stayed on the floor to eat. I said to her, No; it was absurd; and for three days she ate nothing from the house; though perhaps she ate mice. Certainly not when she could be seen, however. On the fourth day she leaped up as usual to the table, and I thought: Well then, it’s interesting, let’s see. She was pleased to eat all there was in the saucer; and all the time she was glancing down at black cat who was eating on the floor: Look at me, I’m favoured.

      In a few days, black cat leaped on the table, trying to get the same privilege. At which grey cat, ears back, got on to the windowsill above the table, and waited for me to put the saucer up there for her. If black cat had achieved the status of the table, she decided, then she was going to demand one better.

      At which I lost my temper, and told the pair of them they were a nuisance, and they would eat on the floor or not at all.

      Grey cat then went off out of the house and ate and drank nothing for some days. She was out of the house all day; then day and all night – she was away two, three days at a time. It is at this point, on the farm in Africa, that we would have said: Grey cat is going wild. And we would have taken steps, fussed over her, locked her up, reminded her of her domestic nature. But probably, in highly populated England, going wild is not so easy. Even on Dartmoor there must always be the lights of a house gleaming somewhere not too far off.

      Next time she came back, I gave in; and fed her on the table, and praised her; and snubbed black cat just a little – after all, she did have her kittens. And grey cat came back into the house, and settled at nights on the foot of my bed. And when she brought in mice, I made a short flattering speech over each one.

      Black cat ate the dead mice. Grey cat never did. It was interesting that black cat did not start eating a mouse until I had seen it. Once a corpse had been accepted by me, and grey cat praised, then black cat got down off the chair, and ate it, tidily, methodically, while grey cat watched, and made no attempt to stop her. Though she did try putting them on a table, a windowsill, where it seemed she hoped black cat would not see them. Black cat always did: always climbed up and ate the mouse.

      Then, one morning, something extraordinary happened.

      I had gone shopping in Okehampton. I came back and saw, in the middle of the floor, a little cairn or mound of greenery. Grey cat sat near it, watching me. Black cat was waiting with her kittens in the armchair. They both wanted me to pay attention to the green mound.

      I went to look. Under the green stuff, a dead mouse. Grey cat had caught the mouse, and had put it on the floor as a present. But I had been longer coming back than she expected; and so she had had time for decoration – or perhaps it was a warning to black cat: leave the mouse alone.

      She must have made three journeys to the hedge, which was freshly sickled, to carry in three sprays of wild geranium, which she had placed carefully over the mouse.

      As I complimented her, she never took her eyes off black cat – a nasty, superior, triumphant look.

      I’ve been told since that