‘Please don’t! I like him here.’

Penelope’s controlled tones were so utterly without tolerance that the shopwoman gave a start of surprise. Looking more carefully at this customer, she said assuagingly, ‘We call him Monty because he was got for the rats. Not that he goes after them, for he don’t. It’s cake he likes.’

‘What sort of cake?’

‘Anything so long as it’s rich, any sort of wedding-cake mixture. As for a simnel, he’d give his whiskers—’ She would have gone on, for she could see the poor girl needed distracting from whatever was biting her, but at that moment the soprano called out, ‘Mrs Barry. Shop!’ So after 76moving forward the sugar-bowl, she went away. Penelope sighed with relief.

At the end of the room was the suitcase, coyly peeping out from under a tablecloth. On the table in front of her was the coffee, steaming. In the opposite mirror, this way and that reflected, was a girl waiting. The cat, whose tenure had been defended, now, being a cat, got up, and considered going elsewhere; but on second thoughts it lay down again with its back against her thigh. How haggard I look, she thought. How haggard, and how harsh! Though she continued to stare towards her reflection, she was too far lost in the maze of endurance to notice when the reflected countenance softened. The cat, lying against her thigh, had begun to impart its warmth to her and to receive hers in exchange. A process of communication had been set up between them.

A man’s tread in the shop recalled her to the actual. She noticed that the coffee was no longer steaming. Her glance slanted round to the cat and dwelt with a copyist’s attention on the pattern of its tabby markings. Presently, her forefinger began to inscribe on the air the scrolled stripes of the central ebony that tapered down over a maplewood gold which, as it rounded the curve of the belly, became a pure sulphur yellow. On the haunch was a design like the eye on the wing of a peacock butterfly. It was hither that her finger was drawn and descended into the thick fur. Her hand bedded itself in repose, and presently she began to stroke the cat with a regular impersonal pressure, meeting and remeeting the variations of texture 77which corresponded, like changes of vegetation on the globe, with the different colours of its coat. The darkest fur was also the sleekest, the maplewood gold was softer and more airy, and where the peacock eye of the haunch included a half-circle of drab, the texture changed to a feral roughness and crudity. Her hand did not venture so far as the sulphur yellow of the belly, but she knew that to do this would carry her into yet another zone, an innocent and youthful fur which was almost fluff.

Quite suddenly the cat transcended a passive pleasure and rose to its feet beside her, arching its back and rubbing its head against her sleeve. Where its warmth forsook her thigh, she felt a physical desolation that corroborated the desolation of her thoughts. She looked at the clock and the cat went on rubbing itself against her and kneading the velvet of the bench. She felt incompetent to deal with such ecstasy, but she continued to stroke it and presently she began to praise it.