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“Cathy! Oi! Cathy!” The call comes through the open window, accompanied by a patter of gravel against the sill. Cathy looks up reluctantly from the mystery she's reading and cranes her neck to find Caro down on the grassy strip between the dormitory and the science building.
“What are you on about?” She calls down.
“Meet me down by the kitchen door in five minutes!"”Caro calls back, before disappearing around the corner.
Cathy sighs and closes her book. The unmasking of the jewel thief will just have to wait because she's incapable of saying no to any of Caroline Mackenzie's schemes.
It’s a warm afternoon in May, the waning days of spring before the summer holidays. The Easter holidays had ended a fortnight ago and Cathy is already looking forward to returning to the relative freedom in Edinburgh and from there to the magic world of Ardalainish where she and Caro could disappear from morning until tea time. When in Edinburgh, Caro's Uncle Laurie has promised them a second trip to the Royal Botanic Gardens to which they had gone during the Easter vac; Cathy is already planning how to convince him they will need multiple days to do it justice.
She pulls on her blazer and ties the laces of her plimsoles, then makes her way down the back stair in hopes of avoiding the housemistress whose habit it is to leave her sitting room door open on Sundays and invite “her” girls in “for a little chat.” Cathy doesn’t feel like Miss Stephens girl, and their chats always make her certain she has disappointed Miss Stephens in some fundamental way. Miss Stephens, she feels certain, thinks Cathy dull. Cathy herself agrees with Miss Stephens much of the time -- except when she is with Caro. When she is with Caro she feels daring and adventurous and not the least bit dull. She feels like someone whom people feel it is worth paying attention to. Therefore she spends as little time with Miss Stephens and as much time with Caro as the constrictions of term-time at Dunleavy allows.
She reaches the kitchens and gives a little wave to Cook as she dodges passed the coal scuttle and out the back door open to the harsh spring sunlight. Caro is waiting.
“What is--” Cathy starts to ask, but Caro interrupts with a “Come see!” and grabs her hand to pull her down the walk.
Cathy looks around, wondering if they are about to do something secret and a little bit naughty. Caro has a flexible attitude toward school expectations -- something her high marks and family influence have made possible. Cathy, on the other hand, would probably face discipline more regularly if Caro hadn’t made it clear if Cathy was to be punished Caro must be too -- and what would Caro’s parents say to that?
“Where are we going? Cathy asks.
“You’ll see,” Caro says, the mischievous smile twitching on her lips suggesting a good surprise, one she thinks Cathy will especially like.
They’re skirting the edge of the playing fields where the ground is sodden from the spring rains and full-to-bursting river. Cathy’s left shoe gets sucked off by a mud puddle and they have to pause so she can do her best to wipe the muck off with dry leaves from the previous autumn.
They scrabble through a gap in the stone wall that demarcates the western boundary of the school grounds. On the other side is the right-of-way along the edge of the Waverley farm.
Mr Waverley has taken a liking to Cathy; she reminds him of a daughter lost long before Cathy was born, to the 'flu pandemic. Her name had been Joy and he keeps a tiny snapshot of her, curled and spotty with age, tacked above his work bench in the stable. They had found one another in the early days of Cathy's arrival at Dunleavy School for Girls, before she and Caro had become Cath-and-Caro.
Cathy had spent a lot of time in those early days hiding from the other girls who represented everything foreign to her, and seeking out the wild places that -- although the growing things in England were nothing like the growing things in Kenya -- at least didn’t mock her accent or her freckles or her questions about the strange foods she encountered at table.
It had been on a particularly horrid Sunday afternoon that Cathy had climbed through that fateful gap in the stone, with a seven-year-old’s determination to run away back to Africa. She had only got as far as the end of the lane before Mr Waverley’s cart had trundled past. Not three lengths beyond where Cathy stood, weeping, at the edge of the road, Mr Waverley had brought the horse to a halt and stepped down from his cart to kneel before her and ask her name and wipe the angry tears from her face with his red kerchief.
“There now,” he’d said. “There now. Nothing that a bit of tea can’t fix and that’s a fact.”
That had been five years ago. Cathy was now teetering on the edge of adolescence, her thirteenth birthday the day afternoon tomorrow. Caro, who had shot up like a weed in the previous summer, now stands inches above stooped Mr Waverley, whose son Gil -- along with hired hands -- has taken over the more physical labor of the farm. Mrs Waverley, who had made up that pot of long-ago tea and served it with a piece of bread and butter spread thick with jam, had passed away of a weak heart two years ago.Nevertheless, Mr Waverley still tends his horses and walks the fields with his sheepdogs on a daily basis rain or shine. And Cathy has continued to visit him, technically speaking without permission of the school staff -- although Cook, whose youngest son is one of the Waverley's hired hands, has been known to wrap up a packet of scones or pass along a jar of gooseberry jam as Cathy makes her way through the kitchens.
It’s to the stables that Caro is leading them know. She’s caught up Cathy’s hand in her own as they walk and Cathy, as always, feels a little flutter of excitement in her chest. She’s trying to give up wondering exactly why Caro finds her worthy of interest; Caro’s interests are as inexplicable as they are passionate and enduring -- and Cathy appears to be one of them. The world always seems a bit brighter and righter with their clasped hands swinging between them and Caro whistling a wandering tune, probably something scandalous from one of her Billie Holiday records, to the neighborhood crows.
“Mr Waverley!” Caro calls when they arrive at the door of the stable, both of them blinking as they step out from under the bright afternoon sun into the cool interior of the barn. Cathy breathes in the scent of fresh hay and horse manure, tack oil and mud with a happy sigh. She pulls her hand from Caro’s and goes over to rub the nose of Stella, her favorite mare, who dips her head and whuffles into Cathy’s palm.
“I’m sorry, Stella, no apples today,” Cathy says with a pat.
“We’re here Mr Waverley!” Caro calls again, and Cathy wonders if she’s somehow found a way to telephone ahead. The Waverleys have a telephone in the farmhouse, installed when Mrs Waverley was ailing, but arranging a call from Dunleavy would have been difficult. It’s Caro, though. So entirely like she’s found a way.
“I can see that, Miss Mackenzie,” Mr Waverley says, emerging from the shadows at the far end of the barn. “You’ve come about the kittens, have you?”
“Of course!” Caro always manages to sound shocked that anyone expects she would do other than exactly what she’s currently doing.
“Kittens?” Cathy pulls she hand away from Stella with and apologetic pat. “There are kittens? How do you know about kittens?” She glares at Caro. Caro only knows the Waverleys because Cathy has befriended them. If there are kittens, Cathy feels she ought to be the first to know.
“It’s a surprise! For your birthday!” Caro grins and grabs her hand. “Gil rescued them from the hayloft last week and says you get to name them!”
Cathy should be used to Caro’s surprises by now, but she isn’t. She still cherishes each and every one of them. Caro’s generosity feels like a fragile gift that Cathy, in her perpetually clumsy way, is forever in danger of fumbling. “But ... I'll be thirteen,” Cathy says, as if this somehow contradicts Caro’s statement. Ever since Caro’s fifteenth birthday in January it has felt to Cathy as if their friendship is stretched thin across a great chasm, Caro no longer a child while Cathy is left stranded in childhood. Thirteen seems sophisticated. Practically grown up. Kittens seem ... childish. Something Cathy shouldn’t want to indulge in (even as she’s already thinking of names...).
“Pfft,” Caro waves a hard in front of her face, at once acknowledging and dismissing Cathy’s objection. “C’mon, I can't wait for you to see them! And Gil says they can stay here until we get a flat of our very own!”
A flat of our very own is a story Caro likes to tell. Sometimes, Cathy will sneak into Caro's room after lights out so they can keep each others' toes warm and Caro will spin her stories about how they'll move to London and live together in Bloomsbury in a building full of artists and writers and socialists! Perhaps, Caro whispers, they will travel to America and live in the Chicago of Carl Sandburg’s poems, or the New York City of Zora Neale Hurston, or the San Francisco of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Perhaps, thinks Cathy, someday they will travel back to the Kenya of what feels, already, like her long-ago childhood. She thinks Caro would like the high plains, the spring rains, the houses with their long verandas, the songs the workers on the plantation her father managed taught her. With each passing year, she sees her parents more as photographs -- the snapshots her mother sometimes encloses in letters -- than in the three-dimensionality of true memory. But she remembers the scent of wet earth, and the voices of women, and the taste of ugali and sukuma wiki.
Kenya seems far away on this May day in Sussex. So does London, New York, San Francisco. But that’s okay, because Caro has caught up Cathy’s hand again and is dragging her down the length of the barn in the direction of the tack room from which Mr Waverley first appeared. And when they round the corner, there they are: a collection of tiny, wobbly kittens in a bed of old rags at the bottom of an apple crate. The mother cat -- a sleek black barn cat named Circe -- stalks over from where she’s been cleaning herself beneath Mr Waverley’s workbench and puts herself between Cathy and Caro and her litter.
“Ooh,” says Cathy, dropping to her knees.
“See?” Caro asks, smug. “I said it was a good surprise.”
There are five kittens, just a few weeks old (Mr Waverley says maybe three). Their mews aren’t much more than squeaks and they fall eagerly, if still uncertainly, over one another as their mother settles back into the crate, heavy with milk, and allows them to latch on for a feed.
Cathy is enraptured. The tiny creatures aren’t much bigger than her two fists put together. There’s two nearly black, like their mother, one white with a black splotch across its left ear, and two charcoal grey.
“They’ll be good mousers, someday,” Mr Waverley says, peering over her shoulder, “Circe, there, she's a mighty huntress. And judgin' by the coloring their papa is Old Man Fog.”
Cathy has seen both cats around the farm; she remembers, in fact, when Circe was a kitten herself, though not this young.
“We could name them after clouds," she says, thinking of Old Man Fog. Cirrus, Stratus, Nimbus..."
“Or herbs,” Caro says, settling down next to Cathy and reaching out to Circe a rub behind the ears. “Circe was an herbalist after all: yarrow, foxglove, thyme, turmeric…”
“They aren’t orange tabby cats,” Cathy points out. “What about grey things ...Pepper? Shale? Tempest?”
Cathy picks ap a squirming bundle that has detached Itself from its mother. “Gale?”
“Smudge,” Cathy counters. “On account of the black spot.”
“You are the best at names,” Caro says serenely. Cathy glows.
“So…” Caro points to the nursing kittens in turn. “Pepper, Smudge, Tempest, Shale...you’ve one black one left.”
“Inkblot,” Cathy says, and giggles. “Perhaps he should be Inkblot.” She takes the white kitten up from where he is attempting to scale the front of Caro’s frock.
“Are you an Inkblot?”
The kitten sneezes.
“I declare that a yes,”Caro says. “Inkblot it is.”
"You'll never guess who I've a letter from today,” Cathy says, tucking the telephone between her chin and her shoulder as she picks up the threadbare sweater of Leonard's she's seized for darning.
“Oh? Do tell,” Caro says. Cathy can hear the bells of Great St. Mary's calling all to the evening service.
“Susan Waverley, of all people,” Cathy glances over at the letter sitting unfolded and held down by a cup and saucer of half-finished tea. “Gil Waverley's wife, do you remember her?”
Caro laughs down the telephone line, “My God, however did she find you?”
“The secretary at Dunleavy, apparently. She'd been doing a bit of spring cleaning and came across some of the letters I wrote Mr Waverley during the war. Thought I might want them.” The packet of letters, tied together with a bit of kitchen twine, sits unopened next to the thin blue leaves of stationary on which Mr Waverley's daughter-in-law had penned her letter. You may not remember me, the letter had begun, but I remember you and that school friend of yours, and thought you might remember Da Waverley. He spoke so fondly of you.So I took the liberty of asking Mrs Thwaite, the secretary who works up at the school, for an address.
The letter, read at the kitchen table when Cathy had finished weeding the vegetable garden, had transported her back over twenty years to a time when she wasn't much older than Esme. She still hasn't seen New York, or San Francisco, though she and Caro had lived on London -- not that far from Bloomsbury -- for those brief few months at the end of the war. She had yet to take Caro to Kenya, and now with the uprising it seems likely she may never return. Even if they did, she knows it would not be -- should not be -- the Kenya of her childhood.
“It made me think," she says to Caro in her office at the other end of the line. "Do you think it's time we got a cat?”