closed his eyes and took a small and tentative nibble.
To his intense surprise, it was simply delicious.
It was so good that before he realised it, Peter had eaten it up from the beginning of its nose to the very end of its tail. And only then did he experience a sudden pang of remorse at what he had done in his moment of greediness. He had very likely eaten his benefactress’s ration for the week. And by the look of her thin body and the ribs sticking through her fur, it had been longer than that since she had had a solid meal herself.
But she did not seem to mind in the least. On the contrary, she appeared to be pleased with him as she beamed down at him and said, “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? My tail, but you were hungry!”
Peter said, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve eaten your dinner.”
The tabby smiled cheerfully. “Don’t give it another thought, laddie! Plenty more where that one came from.” But even though the smile and the voice were cheerful, yet Peter detected a certain wan quality about it that told him that this was not so, and that she had indeed made a great sacrifice for him, generously and with sweet grace.
She was eyeing him curiously now, it seemed to Peter almost as though she was expecting something of him, but he did not know what it was and so just lay quietly enjoying the feeling of being fed once again. The tabby opened her mouth as though she were going to say something, but then apparently thought better of it, turned, and gave her back a couple of quick licks.
Peter felt as if something he did not quite understand had sprung up to come between them, something awkward. To cover his own embarrassment about it, he asked: “Where am I – I mean, where are we?”
“Oh,” said the tabby, “this is where I live. Temporarily, of course. You know how it is with us, and if you don’t, you’ll soon find out. Though I must say it’s months since I’ve been disturbed here. I know a secret way in. It’s a warehouse where they store furniture for people. I picked this room because I liked the bed. There are lots of others.”
Now Peter remembered having learned in school what the crown and the ‘N’ stood for, and couldn’t resist showing off. He said, “The bed must have belonged to Napoleon, once. That’s his initial up there, and the crown. He was a great emperor.”
The tabby did not appear to be at all impressed. She merely remarked, “Was he, now? He must have been enormously large to want a bed this size. Still – I must say it is comfortable, and I don’t suppose he has any further use for it, for he hasn’t been here to fetch it in the last three months and neither has anybody else. You’re quite welcome to stay here as long as you like. I gather you’ve been turned out. Who was it mauled you? You were more than half dead when I found you last night lying in the street and dragged you in here.”
Peter told the tabby of his encounter with the yellow tomcat in the grain warehouse down by the docks. She listened to his tale with alert and evident sympathy, and when he had finished, nodded and said:
“Oh dear! Yes, that would be Dempsey. He’s the best fighter on the docks from Wapping all the way down to Limehouse Reach. Everybody steers clear of Dempsey. I say, you did have a nerve, telling him off! I admire you for that even if it was foolhardy. No house pets are much good at rough-and-tumble, and particularly against a champion like Dempsey.”
Peter liked the tabby’s admiration, he found, and swelled a little with it. He wished that he had managed to give Dempsey just one stiff blow to remember him by, and thought that perhaps some time he would. But then he recalled the big tom’s last words: “And don’t come back. Because next time you do, I’ll surely kill you,”and felt a little sick, particularly when he thought of the powerful and lightning-like buffets of those terrible paws that had so quickly robbed him of his senses and laid him open for the final attack which but for a bit of luck might have finished him. Assuredly he too would steer clear of Dempsey, but to the tabby he said:
“Oh, he wasn’t so much. If I hadn’t been so tired from running—”
The tabby smiled enigmatically. “Running from what, laddie?”
But before Peter could reply, she said: “Never mind, I know how it is. When you first find yourself on your own, everything frightens you. And don’t think that everybody doesn’t run. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. By the way, what is your name?”
Peter told her. She said, “Hm … Mine’s Jennie. I’d like to hear your story. Care to tell it?”
Peter very much wanted to do so. But he found suddenly that he was a little timid because he was not at all sure how it would sound, and, even more important, whether the tabby would believe him and how she would take it. For it was certainly going to be a most odd tale.
BY AND LARGE, Peter made about as bad a beginning as could be when he said:
“I’m not really a cat, I’m a little boy. I mean actually, not so little. I’m eight.”
“You’re what?” Jennie gave a long, low growl, and her tail fluffed up to twice its size.
Peter could not imagine what he had said to make her angry, and he repeated hesitantly, “A boy—”
The tabby’s tail swelled another size larger and twitched nervously. Her eyes seemed to shoot sparks as she hissed: “I hate people!”
“Oh!” said Peter, for he was suddenly full of sympathy and understanding for the poor thin little tabby who had been so kind to him. “Somebody must have been horrible to you. But I love cats!”
Jennie looked mollified, and her tail began to subside. “Of course,” she said, “it’s just your imagination. I should have known. We’re always imagining things, like a leaf blowing in the wind being a mouse, or if there’s no leaf there at all, then we can imagine one, and when we’ve imagined it, go right on from there and imagine it isn’t a leaf at all but a mouse, or if we like, a whole lot of mice, and then we start pouncing on them. You just like to imagine that you’re a little boy, though what kind of a game you can make out of that I can’t see. Still—”
“Oh, please,” said Peter, interrupting. He could feel somehow that the tabby very much didn’t want him to be a boy, and yet, even at the risk of offending her, he knew that he must tell her the truth. “Please, I’m so sorry, but it is so. You must believe me. My name is Peter Brown, and I live in a flat with my mother and father and Nanny, in a house at Number 1A, Cavendish Mews. Or at least I did live there before—”
“Oh, come now,” protested Jennie, “don’t be silly. Anybody can see that you look like a cat, you feel like a cat, you smell like a cat, you purr like a cat, and you—” But here her voice trailed off into silence for a moment and her eyes grew wide again. “Oh dear,” she said then. “But there is something the matter. I’ve felt it all along. You don’t act like a cat—”
“Of course not,” Peter said, relieved that he might be believed at last.
But the tabby, her eyes growing wider and wider, wasn’t listening. She was going back over her acquaintance with Peter and enumerating the odd things that had happened since she had found him exhausted, wounded and half dead in the alley and had dragged him to her home, for what reason she did not know.
“You told off Dempsey, and right on his own premises, where he works. No sensible cat would have done that, no matter how brave. And besides, it’s against the rules.” She almost seemed to be ticking items off the end of her claws, though of course she wasn’t. “And then you didn’t want to eat mouse when you were literally starving – said you’d never had one,