On Cats. Doris Lessing

without haste. She seldom finishes all the food put down for her; nearly always leaves a bit – suburban good manners, which, observed thus, in a different context, with grey cat, occurs to me for the first time must have a basis in really nasty aggression. ‘I’m not going to finish this food – I’m not hungry, and you’ve cooked too much and it’s your fault it’s wasted.’ ‘I have so much to eat, I don’t need to eat this.’ ‘I’m a delicate superior creature and really above crude things like food.’ The last is grey cat’s statement.

      The young tom ate what she left, not noticing that it was much nicer than what he had been given; and then they rushed off, chasing each other through the house and garden. Or they sat on the bottom of my bed, looking out of the window, licking each other from time to time, and purring.

      This was grey cat’s apogee, the peak of her happiness and charm. She was not lonely; her companion did not threaten her, because she dominated him. And she was so beautiful – really so very beautiful.

      She was best sitting on the bed looking out. Her two creamy lightly barred front legs were straight down side by side, on two silvery paws. Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears – everything, in delicate vibration. If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

      Oh cat; I’d say, or pray: be-ooootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.

      She would ignore me first; then turn her head, silkily arrogant, and half close her eyes for each praise-name, each one separately. And, when I’d finished, yawn, deliberate, foppish, showing an icecream-pink mouth and curled pink tongue.

      Or, deliberate, she would crouch and fascinate me with her eyes. I stared into them, almond-shaped in their fine outline of dark pencil, around which was a second pencilling of cream. Under each, a brush stroke of dark. Green, green eyes; but in shadow, a dark smoky gold – a dark-eyed cat. But in the light, green, a clear cool emerald. Behind the transparent globes of the eyeball, slices of veined gleaming butterfly wing. Wings like jewels – the essence of wing.

      A leaf insect is not to be distinguished from a leaf – at a casual glance. But then, look close: the copy of a leaf is more leaf than leaf – furled, veined, delicate, as if a jeweller had worked it, but a jeweller with his tongue very slightly in his cheek, so that the insect is on the verge of mockery. Look, says the leaf insect, the fake: has any leaf ever been as exquisite as I am? Why, even where I have copied the imperfections of a leaf, I am perfect. Do you ever want to look at a mere leaf again, having seen me, the artifice?

      In grey cat’s eyes lay the green sheen of a jade butterfly’s wing, as if an artist had said: what could be as graceful, as delicate as a cat? What more naturally the creature of the air? What air-being has affinity with cat? Butterfly, butterfly of course! And there, deep in cat’s eyes lies this thought, hinted at merely, with a half-laugh; and hidden behind the fringes of lashes, behind the fine brown inner lid, and the evasions of cat-coquetry.

      Grey cat, perfect, exquisite, a queen; grey cat with her hints of leopard and snake; suggestions of butterfly and owl; a miniature lion steel-clawed for murder, grey cat full of secrets, affinities, mysteries – grey cat, eighteen months old, a young matron in her prime, had a third litter of kittens, this time by the grey-and-white cat who, during the reign of the king, had been too frightened to come down off the wall. She had four kittens, and her son sat beside her through the birth and watched, licking her in the pauses of labour, and licking the kittens. He tried to get into the nest with them, but his ears were boxed for this lapse into infantilism.

       Chapter Five

      It was spring again, the back door was open, and grey cat, her grown son and four kittens enjoyed the garden. But grey cat preferred the company of her son to the kittens; and indeed, had again scandalized S. because, the moment her labour was over, she got up, walked off from the kittens, and then fell straight into her grown son’s arms, when they rolled over and over, purring.

      He played the role of father to this litter: he brought them up as much as she did.

      Meanwhile there had already appeared, faint and disguised, as the future always is in its first intimations, the shadow of grey cat’s doom as reigning and sole queen of the household.

      Above, in the human world, frightful storms and emotions and dramas; and with the summer a beautiful sad blonde girl visited the house, and she had a small neat elegant black cat, a half-kitten really, and this alien was in the basement, only temporarily of course, because her home was not available.

      The little black cat had a red collar and a red leash, and at this stage of her life was only an appurtenance and a decorative asset to the beautiful girl. She was kept well away from the queen upstairs: they were not allowed to meet.

      Then, all at once, things went wrong for grey cat. Her son was at last claimed by the person who had booked him, and went off to live in Kensington. The four kittens went to their new homes. And we decided it was enough, she should have no more kittens.

      I did not then know what neutering a female cat involved. People I knew had ‘doctored’ cats, male and female. The R.S.P.C.A., when asked, emphatically advised it. Understandably: they have to destroy hundreds of unwanted cats every week – every one of which, I suppose, has been to someone ‘Oh what a lovely kitten’ – until it grew up. But in the voices of the ladies of the R.S.P.C.A. sounded exactly the same note as in the voice of the woman at the corner grocery who, when I went around looking for homes for kittens, always said: ‘Haven’t you had her done yet? Poor thing, making her go through that, I think it’s cruel.’ ‘But it’s natural to have kittens,’ I insisted, dishonestly enough, since any instincts of maternity grey cat had were bullied into her.

      My relations with the ladies of the street have mostly been about cats – cats lost or visiting, or kittens to be visited by children, or kittens about to be theirs. And there is not one who hasn’t insisted that it is cruel to let a cat have kittens – with vehemence, with hysteria, or at the very least with the sullen last-ditch antagonism of my mother’s: ‘It’s all very well for you!’

      The old bachelor who ran the vegetable shop at the corner – now closed because of the pressure of the supermarket, and because he said his was a family business and he had no family – a fat old boy with cheeks red-purple, almost black, like the old woman of the fruit and vegetable barrows, said about the women: ‘They never stop having kids, but they don’t look after them, do they?’ He had no children, and was self-righteous about everyone else’s.

      He did have, however, an ancient mother, over eighty, completely bedridden, who must have everything done for her – by him. His brother and three sisters were married and had children and it was his job, they decided, the unmarried brother’s job, to look after the old mother, since their children gave them enough to do.

      He stood in his tiny shop behind racks of swedes, turnips, potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbages – other vegetables, as happens in such streets, being unobtainable unless frozen – and watched the children rushing about the streets, saying unkind things about their mothers.

      He was in favour of the grey cat’s being ‘done’. Too many people in the world, too many animals, too little food, nobody bought anything these days, where would it all end?

      I rang up three vets to ask if it was necessary for a cat’s womb and tubes to be removed – could they not tie up her tubes and leave her sex, at least? All three, with emphasis, insisted the best thing was to have the whole lot out. ‘The whole job lot,’ said one; exactly the same phrase was used to a woman friend of mine by a gynaecologist. ‘I’ll get rid of the whole