Cleo

A smug tortoiseshell stretched himself in front of a professor’s open fire and yawned. He opened one eye, licked his chops, ran a lazy paw over one ear and fell asleep. His claws snapped open and shut. His tail twitched. No doubt he was dreaming of mice.

Homesickness was such a full-time job during the first few weeks there was hardly time for research. I wrote to Philip, sent postcards and letters on tape to the children every day. Cleo made regular appearances in my dreams. One night I saw her three times the size of the Ardmore Road house. With her head resting on the chimney, she stretched her front paws around the windows and meowed. Her meow was like the roar of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. Maybe it was her way of saying she was safe and fulfilling her duty as protector of the home. Unable to sleep, I pulled on two pairs of socks and stumbled down the stairs. The one black phone that house residents shared was mercifully free. I listened for the pulse of the phone ringing at the other end and was about to hang up when someone answered.

“Andrea?” I shouted.

“What time is it?” she mumbled in a voice heavy with sleep.

“Sorry. Have I woken you?”

“It’s all right.” Damn. I had woken her up. “I was sleeping in. It’s Saturday morning. Where are you?”

“Still in the UK. I was just wondering how Cleo, I mean, you are getting on. Any problems with the cat, I mean house?”

“I had a rugged night,” she replied. “Cleo jumped through the skylight onto my bed when I was fast asleep. It was terrifying. I thought she was a burgler.”

That was the start of a series of phone calls across the globe focusing on the topic of an eccentric black cat. Andrea soon discovered Cleo’s three great passions: expensive items, anything made with love, and stolen goods.

“I was heading out to work the other morning when my handbag—not the cheap copy I bought in Bangkok, the genuine Gucci one—anyway, it seemed extra heavy,” she said. “Lucky I looked inside. Cleo was curled up in there! She looked all expectant, like she was sure I was taking her to work with me. She loves that bag. But honestly, how can she tell the difference between the copy and the genuine article?”

She’d always had a nose for quality. If Cleo was looking for something to sharpen her teeth on she’d favor cashmere over wool, Egyptian cotton over polyester, leather over plastic, even high-class expensive plastic.

The next phone call featured the tablecloth Andrea’s mother had embroidered for her twenty-first birthday present. Andrea had arrived home one evening to find Cleo had dragged it off the table and was curled up asleep on it.

“She” s got this sixth sense,” I explained apologetically. “She knows when something’s been made with love.”

A few weeks later Andrea complained the laces of her running shoes, left and right feet, had disappeared.

“Go into the garden and look in the ferns behind the goldfish pond,” I said.

Following instructions Andrea discovered not only both shoelaces (soggy and frayed) but several socks she” d assumed had been stolen off the clothesline by a neighborhood foot fetishist.

“I’m so sorry,” I echoed across the oceans. “I didn’t realize she was going to be such a handful.”

Andrea was surprisingly forgiving. In fact, she” d found Cleo so interesting she” d enrolled in night classes in animal behavior.

“Cleo has classic separation anxiety,” she said. “She needs lots of activities to make her more independent. I’ve bought her a few toys to keep her occupied. They seem to be helping, but she still prefers my shoelaces. As for jumping up on the table…”

“We’ve tried to stop her, Andrea, but she thinks she runs the joint.”

“Well, I’ve developed the perfect solution. A water pistol.”

“You squirt her?”

“Only when she’s up on the table. Right up the backside. She’s a fast learner.”

I felt like the mother of a delinquent child receiving reports from its correctional institution. Nevertheless, Andrea was obviously fond of Cleo and it sounded like her methods were working. I wasn’t going to complain if she ironed out some of our cat’s quirks in our absence.

The next time we spoke Andrea told me about the personal trainer she’d hired. Roy visited the house twice a week and, according to Andrea, Cleo always knew when it was Tuesday or Thursday—a Roy Day. She waited in the front window until Apollo in a tracksuit opened the front gate. She then bounced to the front door, eager to find out what he’d brought her to play with this time—stretchy bands, balls? The moment Roy unfurled his exercise mat on the floor Cleo spread herself on it and rolled on her back, stretching her arms and legs, flicking her head side to side, watching for Roy’s admiration.