How I found perfect happiness

The view from the upstairs window was of other large and secluded houses perched on other still-green Surrey Hills. I spent six days here. Every day the owner would go to London leaving me alone with two rare and valuable prick-eared, six-toed house cats called Tio and Luna.

The only instructions I was under concerned these low-slung, vividly marked cats. Under no circumstances were they allowed outside except on a lead. I was to be especially careful not to let them slip out between my feet when I opened the front door. A well-rehearsed system of ‘air lock’ door opening and shutting, if punctiliously observed, rendered the possibility nigh on impossible. Every window must be kept shut, including upstairs windows, to prevent a break for freedom over the rooves and down one of the iron drainpipes.

The pair certainly looked athletically capable of such a feat, having Scottish wildcat and some sort of lynx near-ancestry and that extra climbing toe. However they appeared resigned to their palatial prison, even content. There was an electric water fountain in the kitchen, which their refined sensibility preferred to still water in a bowl. Scattered about the patterned wood-block floors were various toys, lures, puzzles and scratching posts to occupy their minds. Toys and puzzles could never replace murder and torture for a pastime, and these cats partially sated their bloodlust by indefatigably stalking, killing and eating any flying insect that was foolish enough to make its presence felt, no matter how small or inoffensive. A paltry kind of sport, one would think, for highly bred killing machines, and I for one would have liked to have seen with what lightning reflexes or sadistic aplomb they would have handled something more worth their while, such as a rash or insouciant mouse.

How much exactly they had set the owner back I never found out. Several grand each, I gathered, which is far more than I am worth, and I accorded them due deference. Not only was I worth less but I am also less well bred. Moreover, I was an interloper in their solid Victorian interior half an acre. Nevertheless they both appeared to like my company and I, a noted lifelong cat hater, warmed to theirs. This volte-face might have been due to an ineradicable streak of social snobbishness in my ill-bred nature.

I altogether enjoyed my week alone in that high-ceilinged, airy house. With my fingertips I can feel a hardish mass developing above my left bosom, which is where the sharpest intermittent pain is now centred. I cup my breast in my hand when I cough, sneeze or laugh. Standing or sitting quickly tires me out. But lying down is fine. And a French painkiller or two easily numbs the pain. And the view from my bedroom bow window across the countryside had the burgeoning, romantic quality of one of C.F. Tunnicliffe’s illustrations for the Ladybird book What to look for in Summer. I found perfect happiness looking out for hours at a time and watching the light change on distant green wood and yellow stubble, while the mind drifted, pleasantly free on its terminal-illness licence from anxiety and striving. From the house owner’s library I had chosen Roy Jenkins’s fat biography of Churchill. I read it once before with pleasure. This time, Churchill’s great energy mocked my own dire lack of it and I could read only a page or two at a time before letting the paperback drop and returning my diffuse attention to the pleasant view.

Perhaps the greater part of my popularity with Tio and Luna stemmed from a misapprehension that I was all day patiently watching for trapped flies on the windows, bought in as an extra high-summer pair of eyes. Occasionally one or the other would pop in while on patrol and glance at me as if to say, ‘Seen any yet? No? Well, keep up the good work.’

Finally the great glad morning. The taxi to the airport was booked. The flight to France was going ahead. The new passport had come. My son, with his two sons in the back of the car, said he was five minutes away.

‘I’ll be standing outside in the road to guide you in,’ I said.

I performed the airlock procedure but the front-door lock obstinately refused to give way, in spite of all pleas and insults. I ran to the kitchen door, which was to be opened only in emergencies. The cats were basking a yard away. Could I slip out without releasing five figures worth of exotic pedigree cat into the Surrey Hills? I could. Could I open the electronic gates from the inside? There was a large green button. The doors swung back. My boy’s tyres crunched the beach pebbles. The back doors of his old Beamer swung open, my dear lads were in my thinning arms. Our holiday had begun. Joy!