Downton Tabby Read online

  —SIR ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  Love Signs

  FOR THE WELL-BRED ENGLISHMAN, ROMANTIC love was so difficult to arrange, it’s a wonder there was any breeding at all. And things were scarcely easier for the servants, as we know from Kazuo Ishiguro’s magisterial work The Remains of the Day (Vom Kriege), in which a butler and housekeeper almost kiss once in thirty years, but don’t, which says something about fascism, but I forget what.

  Which is why, if you watch The Remains of the Day on Netflix, it hardly ever recommends that you might also like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

  By the Regency era, the whole rigmarole of romance had become so subtle and complex that gentlewomen developed the Language of the Fan—a system of communication still used, in a modified form, by cats today.

  THE LANGUAGE OF THE FAN

  Drawing the fan across the cheek: “I love you.”

  Drawing the fan through the hand: “I hate you!”

  Twirling the fan in the right hand: “I love another.”

  Rapidly closing the fan: “I am jealous.”

  Fanning quickly: “I am engaged.”

  Fanning slowly: “I am married.”

  Spinning the head: “I am possessed.”

  Changing the fan from left hand to right: “You are impudent.”

  Rapidly opening and closing the fan: “You are cruel.”

  Sliding the fan across the forehead: “You have changed.”

  Twirling the fan in the left hand: “Go away, please.”

  Twirling the fan in the left hand, drawing it though the right hand rapidly, opening and closing it rapidly, drawing it across the forehead and eyes, and tapping: “I hate you, you’re cruel, you’ve changed, go away, don’t let the door hit you.”

  THE LANGUAGE OF THE TAIL

  (Note: The Language of the Tail differs from the Language of the Fan in that cats don’t know where to buy fans, and wouldn’t be able to hold one, anyway. Also, while the Language of the Fan was used by women and their suitors, the Language of the Tail is used by cats to “speak” to their “masters.”)

  Resting the tail: “I love you.”

  Resting the tail: “I hate you.”

  Swishing the tip of the tail slowly left: “Feed me cold cuts.”

  Swishing the tip of the tail slowly right: “No one knows you as I do.”

  Tapping the tail: “I meant it about the cold cuts.”

  Tapping the tail rapidly: “Our bond is stronger than death.”

  Tapping the tail slowly: “I pooped in the shower.”

  Tapping the tail slowly while making eye contact: “I adore you, even in those sweatpants.”

  Drawing the tail in, and to the left of the body: “Each moment away from you is torment; each in your company, ecstasy.”

  Drawing the tail in, and to the right: “Have you lost weight?”

  Tapping the tail slowly, stopping, breaking eye contact to look at a point just behind you: “Oh, God! It’s a murderer!”

  Tapping the tail slowly, stopping, breaking eye contact to look at a point just behind you: “Oh, God! It’s a june bug!”

  Touching the top of the tail with the tongue: “I shall forgive, but never truly forget.”

  Touching the underside of the tail with the tongue: “I ate your underpants.”

  Turning around and leaving, tail in air: “This never would have happened if you’d given me the cold cuts.”

  1914

  IN ENGLAND, THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT fought for women’s rights, while in America, Arthur Wynne’s “word-cross,” the first crossword puzzle, appeared in the New York World and opened up a whole new class of things for humans to try to see in the newspaper while their cats tried to prevent them.

  At Downton, electricity was finally installed in the upstairs rooms, a blessing and a curse, because the cords were delicious. Before that, illumination had been provided by coal gas—filthy, dangerous, and unreliable, like the New York Post, but still a hundred times better than energy-saving fluorescents.

  Now I feel I should say something about the other daughter, Lady Etcetera.

  Lady Etcetera’s life had been one long variation on being the first person at a party, and then someone else comes in and sees you and says, “Oh good, no one’s here yet.” She was the strawberry stripe in the Neapolitan ice cream. When she put her paws over her mother’s eyes and said “Guess who,” she had to give hints. She had lived in her sisters’ shadows for so long, she had mushrooms. What I’m saying, dear reader, is she didn’t get a lot of attention. Now she was in heat, too, and I would have mentioned it back in chapter 1, if it had happened to Minxy or Serval.

  This happy time of catting around came to an epoch-shattering end on August 4, 1914. The whole family was sitting on the dining room table when Lord Grimalkin announced: “Cats, I have bad news and good news and good news that’s bad news. The bad news is about technology—”

  “Not another vacuum cleaner!”

  “Let me finish, Minxy. The bad news is that advances in smokeless powder, rifling, and the machine gun mean the next war, if it ever comes, will be fought in trenches.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “The good news is, trenches equal rats, and rats are delicious.”

  “What’s the good news that’s bad news?”

  “The world is at war.”

  à Verdun

  à Verdun

  J’ai mangé beaucoup de rats

  —BENJAMIN PÉRET

  1915

  THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT ALL OVER EUROPE.

  —British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey

  . . . HEY, WAIT A SECOND . . . cats can see in the dark! Let’s send them!”

  So, like a cat in midair, the Clowders’ world was turned upside down again.

  No English cat wanted war. It involved travel. But the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, in Bosnia, by a Serb, meant Germany had gone too far.

  That much was clear.

  Five hundred thousand British cats were sent to war, where they were used as ratters in the trenches and, more important, as an early-warning system for mustard gas attacks. This gruesome fact, which I wish I were making up, may explain why present-day cats refuse to get into any kind of transportation without a fight, and why gas is now always blamed on the dog.

  On the British home front, milk was rationed, and feeding it to cats was prohibited. Meat was severely rationed, and in an act of pure spite—I swear I’m not making this up—a zeppelin raid on London in September 1915 dropped seventy bombs and a hambone.

  A bitter day for cats and another victory for German humor.

  But it wasn’t all bad news for cats. War meant hospitals, and hospitals meant bandages. And bandages are like two of the things cats love the most—toilet paper and socks—rolled into one.

  “You’ll be all right, Cat. I know you’ll be all right.”

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY,

  A Farewell to Arms

  1915–1918

  IN THE DARK YEARS THAT followed, tanks, aircraft, and the machine gun—the vacuum cleaners of war—added loud and awful new dimensions of terror to the battlefield.

  And the throat of war had one more hairball of anguish to dislodge for the Clowders. Matthmew Clowder injured his tongue in a heroic attempt to stay properly groomed in a shell hole at the Somme. He found himself covered in mud with no means to remove it, and, being a cat, vanished in shame. They checked under all the beds, nothing. There was nothing to do but list him as Messy in Action.

  Russia had a revolution and the Mewsitania sank, bringing hundreds of thousands of Americans into the war, which promptly ended, because it wasn’t cool anymore.

  And F. (Scat!) Fitzgerald missed the whole thing.

  When the guns fell silent, and the indoor cats came out from under the couch, Prime Minister Lloyd George asked, “What is our task?” And because he was a politician, he answered his own question: “To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.”

>   “Homes fit for heroes” was his promise to the men who had protected Great Britain from Germany, Turkey from other parts of Turkey, and/or Serbia from Austria . . . I forget. And since the definition of a fit home is a place with a lot of cats, the cats who hadn’t had kittens yet had their work cut out.

  1919

  WITH THE WAR OVER, AND the laser pointer still decades in the future, the cats of England turned their thoughts to love.

  As they were cats, their thoughts also turned to grooming and bacon. And moths. Those moths weren’t going to eat themselves. But mostly love.

  One beautiful English day in April—drizzle, with a chance of rain—Matthmew Clowder returned to Downton Tabby.

  He was muddy, and his tongue was in a cast, but the cat came back.

  “I thought you were a goner,” said Minxy, cleaning his ears first, and gently spitting into a linen handkerchief. Matthmew said nothing, because of the whole tongue thing.

  Could love heal what veterinary medicine could not?

  Would he ever be whole again?

  For weeks Matthmew just stared out the window at nothing, so that was a good sign.

  Then, one miraculous morning, he got up on the dining room table, went down on one knee, and handed Minxy a small, green velvet box.

  “This is tiny. How am I supposed to get my head in this?” she asked.

  “No, you don’t put your head in it. Look inside.”

  She opened it. It was a ring. “I was hoping for bacon. Or at least a moth.”

  “Will you wear my ring?”

  “I don’t have fingers.”

  “We’re going around in circles.”

  “You’re sitting on the lazy Susan.”

  That was the moment that Matthmew gave up on ever trying to understand Minxy. She was a secret to him, as every cat is a mystery to every other. A dear book that would shut with a spring when he had read but one page. A glimpse of treasure through unfathomable water, while he stood in ignorance on the shore. Because he was a cat, and he hated water.

  He had never loved her more.

  If you can love cats, you can love human beings, because you have to be able to love them without getting them at all.

  And that being said, Matthmew and Minxy finally got married.

  And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.

  —EDWARD LEAR,

  “THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT”

  How to Argue with Lord Grimalkin About His Most Deeply Held Beliefs

  A PLAY IN ONE ACT

  You: Papa, I know you won’t approve, but a wirehaired terrier has asked me to go ratting with him on the wharf.

  Lord Grimalkin: You most certainly will not.

  You: My mind’s made up.

  Lord Grimalkin: Go to your room.

  Lady Korat: Dear . . .

  Lord Grimalkin: Oh, fine. But I never thought I’d see the day.

  You: The wirehaired terrier has also asked me to marry him.

  Lord Grimalkin: Go to your room.

  Lady Korat: Dear . . .

  Lord Grimalkin: Very well, then. I suppose I’m an old stick-in-the-mud. You have my blessing. Good dogs, wirehaireds. Hate rats. We can build on that.

  You: Did I say “wirehaired terrier”? I meant “cigarette-smoking chimp from the zoo.” And did I say “ratting at the wharf”? I meant “blowing up Parliament.”

  Lord Grimalkin: Go to your . . .

  Lady Korat: Dear . . .

  Lord Grimalkin: Very well. Let’s meet . . .

  You: Koko . . .

  Lord Grimalkin: Koko . . .

  You: . . . the Jackal.

  Lord Grimalkin: Fine.

  UNINVITED BUT NECESSARY WORDS FROM

  The Dowager

  My children have all been disappointments in one way or another, except for the ones I ate at birth.

  I can’t be responsible for your lack of initiative. If you don’t want me to lie on your face, don’t sleep on your back.

  What part of “aaaaaaack-aaaaaacaackaaaaack” didn’t you understand?

  I poop in this shoe not because it is easy, but because it is difficult.

  The only thing I cannot resist is temptation. And rubber bands. Rubber bands and temptation. But that’s it.

  I’m sorry, did I say stop patting?

  1922

  TIMES WERE CHANGING. GANDHI WENT to prison. Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize and James Joyce published Ulysses, a book that was probably dirty. (The first dirty book cats could understand, Lady Catterley’s Lover, was still six years away.)

  For the cats of Downton Tabby, life was changing too.

  Boots was framed for gnawing on an elephant-foot umbrella stand and sent to the pound, where his cagemate framed him for gnawing a bar of soap into the shape of a gun. Lady Etcetera took an interest in newspapers, mostly by lying under one and hissing. Electric lighting was finally installed in the kitchen, where the cook, Mrs. Catmore, stared at a moth flitting around a bulb for twenty-two hours, at which point she went blind.

  Lady Serval had a beautiful litter of kittens and died, to pursue a career in film.

  They say the test of this [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say “Can he name a kitten?” And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

  —SAMUEL BUTLER

  1923

  SOME FAMILIES MOURN THEIR PETS when they go; others get a new one the next day. No cat could ever replace the young, beautiful, feisty, and headstrong Lady Serval, except maybe the young, beautiful, feisty, and headstrong Lady Replacey McCaracal, whose cat bed and scratching post were moved in that afternoon.

  Although the Clowders’ troubles—dying in childbirth, self-healing war wounds, evil maids, strange inheritance laws, scandalous rumors, inconvenient corpses, sisters fighting over beaus, Catholicism, blackmail, prison—were like nothing that had ever happened in any other British mansion, they weren’t the only stately home in turmoil.

  At Misselthwaite Manor, Mary Lennox nursed her cousin Colin, whose mother had died in childbirth, and who thought he couldn’t walk, but really he could. (The Sneak-Cat Garden)

  At Brideshead Manor, Lord Marchmain’s daughter Julia was disinherited and then reinherited, after marrying outside the church. (Brideshead Dander)

  At Manderley, the malicious housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, tricked the second Mrs. de Winter into wearing the same dress Rebecca once wore. (Rebeccat)

  At Sedley Mansion, Rawdon Crawley foolishly married the social-climbing governess, Becky Sharp, and was disinherited. (Vanity Fur)

  And at Norland Park, Mr. Dashwood died suddenly, and obscure inheritance laws meant the estate went to a distant relative, while his three daughters were left to find husbands. (Stoats and Sensibility)

  When war had broken out in Europe, it hadn’t been a minute too soon for Becky Sharp. Her husband and the man she loved both went and one of them died. Marianne Dashwood fell down in the rain and met two eligible men, attracting the attentions of a dashing cad and a stolid old bore, while Elinor developed feelings for her cousin, Edward Ferrars, who was engaged to someone else. Manderley caught fire, the flames spread to the Vicar of Wakefield’s house, and pretty soon his daughters had to find husbands while he went to prison.

  Marianne Dashwood finally fell in love with Colonel Brandon, but it took forever, and a war wound made Frederic Henry (A Furwell to Arms) think he’d never walk again, but he did, thanks to his beautiful nurse, Catherine Barkley, who died in childbirth.

  At Gossington Hall, the maid, Mary, rushed in with terrible news: There’s a body in the library!

  Miss Marple was on the case.

  Tragically for cats, 1923 was also the year Henry Ford built his 10,000,000th automobile.

  UNINVITED BUT NECESSARY WORDS FROM

  The Dowager

  I must be going. These baby toys won�
�t urinate on themselves!

  Yes, sometimes I’m going to bite you for patting my stomach. If you want consistency, get a dog.

  Stoats have died from time to time, and cats have eaten them, but not for love.

  The size of my head is neither here nor there. It is the hole that it is stuck in that is too small.

  “What should we call each other?” “Call me anything you like. I shan’t respond. I’m a cat.”

  I’m sorry I bit you, dear. In that terrible suit I thought you were a penguin.

  “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.”

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, AS QUOTED BY A CHARACTER PLAYED BY DAN STEVENS IN SOME TV SHOW

  1924–1929

  THE 1920S WOULD SEE A stock market boom and bust in America, the rise of fascism and communism in Europe, and, worst of all, a servant shortage in England, as Robert Graves notes in his magisterial work, Vom Kriege. (No, that can’t be right. Let me check my notes.) I mean The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939:

  Any girl who had earned good wages in factories, and had come to like the regular hours, the society of other workers, and the strict but impersonal discipline, was reluctant to put herself under the personal dominion of “some old cat” . . .

  So that was an issue.

  At Downton, Minxy had trouble showing warmth to her kitten, surprising no cat who had ever met her, even in passing. Lady Korat’s mother visited again, to great fanfare and diminishing returns, and other guests included American jazz musicians, Australian opera singers, and Virginia Wolf, because the class system was crumbling, and with it the old rules against stunt casting.

  Boots was stopped on his way to St. Ives with seven sacks full of cats and the kidnapped Lindbergh baby (“How did that get in there? Officer, I swear I’ve never seen it before . . .”) and the Crash of ’29 gave Lord Grimalkin a perfect chance to lose his shirt again. Luckily, he had fur.