The Cat Between Page 11

  “Did the police tell you what they were?”

  “No. A white power, as you saw.”

  “Could be cocaine,” Prudence mused.

  “Cocaine? That’s so old-fashioned,” Gerry said. “And anyway, how would you know? Prudence?”

  “How do you think?” her friend replied. “I was a teenager all through the 1960s. You think sex, drugs and rock’n’roll bypassed Lovering? What I don’t know is what drugs people do now. Crack? Pills?”

  “Yeah,” Gerry said absently. “And grass. Mostly grass that I’ve seen. But not here,” she added hastily. “In Toronto. When I was a student.”

  “So who does cocaine?” Prudence mused. “It’s expensive, right? So. Rich people. But they don’t want to traipse up into the woods to buy their drugs. Or into empty houses in the middle of the night. What if the drugs were delivered to them by respectable Nolan Shrike? Or his wife?” She finished her lunch and stood up. “Well, the police seem to have made the connection. We stay well out of it, right, Gerry?”

  “Well out,” Gerry agreed.

  When they met again for a tea around two, Gerry, trying to keep off the topic of drugs, casually asked, “How was Mrs. Smith?”

  Prudence put down her teacup sharply. It clanked in the saucer. “Mrs. Smith was fine. But I do not expect, when I’m spending my money, for her to do nothing but talk about you. Your house. The house next door.”

  “I’m—sorry?” Gerry said, bewildered.

  Prudence backed down. “No, I am. I wanted to talk to Mother, tell her about the house being repaired and about my vacation. But all Mrs. Smith kept saying was, ‘a child, a child next door,’ and when I asked on which side of my house, she said, ‘not at your house but at one of the ones you visit—lots of cats.’ Well, I knew it must be this place.”

  At that moment, lots of the cats sauntered into the room so as to be close to the kitchen in case signs of supper preparation began. Gerry knelt down and prepared to light a fire. “No children at Blaise’s place and no children in the house next door. What could she have meant?”

  Prudence looked at Gerry in exasperation. “Uh, she’s a medium, so maybe the spirit of a child?”

  “Oh? Oh. A spirit child next door. Meaning a child who died when they were a child? That’s kind of sad.” She lit a twisted piece of newspaper and applied it to the kindling. “Did she say anything else?”

  “That the child was only playing and never meant to hurt anyone.” There was a pause. “You haven’t felt anything when you’ve been over there, have you?” Another group of cats entered the room, looking even hungrier than the first.

  “Me? Nope. I was looking for a cat. Bob was with me and poked his nose in everywhere; probably got a shock from the Christmas lights in one bedroom. And when I went over with the police, it was all about Nolan Shrike’s body, which was not spiritual at all but very real. In a body bag.”

  “Mrs. Smith didn’t mention any of that. But she doesn’t get to choose who or what comes through.” Prudence appeared to tire of the subject. “Have you enough students coming to your drawing class on Wednesday?”

  “How many are enough? Two or three. Judith I can count on. Someone named June Conway can’t seem to make up her mind. And another lady—Sharon Wolfe—with an ‘e’—the Wolfe not the Sharon. It’s just occurred to me, Prudence, by only offering classes during the day on a weekday, I’m making it impossible for working people to attend. Maybe I should do a class on a Saturday morning or something.” She looked around her at the assembled cats and grinned. “I swear these guys know when I’m making a fire even if they’re upstairs.”

  “I think while you’re teaching two days a week at the college, you should take your weekends off. Re-evaluate in the spring.”

  Gerry raised her arms, then lowered them and her head. “Yes, oh wise one.” She quit fooling and asked, “Are we going to get any more work done here today?”

  “I’ve done the minimum. I’ll have a really good clean on Thursday. Do you know what you’re going to bake for the drawing class?”

  “I thought I’d look through Aunt Maggie’s recipe file. Do you want to help me? Look at recipes, I mean, not bake.”

  Prudence sighed. “No. She and I used to do that. It’s too soon. It would only be sad. Maybe someday.” She went to finish her chores. Some of the cats, realizing that no supper was yet on offer, dispersed back into the rest of the house. Some, drugged by the warmth of the fire, lingered.

  Gerry, welcoming a distraction from drugs and murder and spirit children, opened the drawer in the kitchen table where she knew her aunt’s recipes lay. She carried them through to the living room table and plunked herself down.

  Aunt Maggie had collected her recipes in a scrapbook. Some were handwritten, some clipped out of magazines or newspapers, and some had been typed. Most pages of the book were stained with brown splotches. Tea? Vanilla?

  “Gingerbread Men, Sugar Cookies, Spice Cake,” Gerry murmured. “How funny! Cowboy Coffeecake. For cowboys or a cowboy recipe? Marble Butter Cake. Oo, that sounds good.” She read the recipe. “Nah, too complicated. But someday.” Salivating, she reluctantly turned the page. “Fat rascals! What on earth are fat rascals?” She read the recipe, at the top of which Aunt Maggie had written “Delicious” and “Wow!”, then found Prudence vacuuming under the dining room table, an assortment of cats resting on nearby chairs. “Prudence,” Gerry said excitedly, “I’m going to make fat rascals!”

  Prudence switched off the vacuum and looked at the recipe. She nodded. “You should be able to manage that. Don’t overwork the dough. A light hand.” She switched the machine back on, then shouted over its noise, “Check if you have enough butter. You can use raisins if you don’t have currants.” She smiled when Gerry saluted.

  Back in the kitchen, Gerry checked her ingredients. Butter and raisins: okay. Annoyingly, she was low on flour. She decided to do a grocery run and, calling to Prudence, “back soon,” left.

  As she drove past the empty house next door, she noticed first that a path had been shovelled to the front door, and second, that someone had replaced the Christmas wreath. Could Mrs. Shrike be continuing the work her husband had been doing? Who else?

  When she returned home, Prudence gave her a message. “A man phoned to say June will be coming to art class on Wednesday.” Gerry opened her eyes wide. Prudence continued. “And, Blaise phoned to say Graymalkin is home but should be quiet for a couple of days.”

  “That’s great!” Gerry exclaimed, any exasperation she might have felt at the waffling behaviour of her would-be new art student subsumed in her joy at hearing her neighbour’s cat was better.

  Splash!

  Gerry, sedately doing lengths in her lane at the college’s pool, hadn’t thought diving during the noon free swim was allowed. It wasn’t. The miscreant was escorted by a lifeguard out of the pool and pool room. Gerry caught sight of her second cousin David, Doug’s youngest son, like her, watching the scene. She beckoned.

  He crossed to her lane, flicking his blond hair out of his eyes. Eyes like Doug’s: brown, friendly. “Hi, Gerry.” They both treaded water.

  “Hi, David. It’s good to see you. Whatcha been up to?”

  “Oh, you know. Christmas holidays I did some skiing.” He grinned. “Mostly just played games at home and ate.”

  She assumed he meant video games. “What kind of games?”

  “The ones where you create a world are fun, but I play the exploding head ones with my brothers as well.”

  “Ew. How’s your dad? And your mum?”

  A shadow passed over David’s face. “Mum isn’t doing well. Dad says not to expect much when we visit. She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t seem to know we’re around.”

  Gerry paused. “I’m sorry. That must be difficult. Is your grandmother involved with you at all?”

  “Oh yeah. She likes us to come fo
r a meal. Not Dad. Just the three of us.” Gerry’s cousin Margaret, the boys’ mother, had been recently institutionalized, and, as Gerry knew, there was a good reason for her silence and for her never getting out. But David didn’t know any of that. That Margaret’s mother, Gerry’s Aunt Mary, was even minimally involved with the boys was, in Gerry’s opinion, a mixed blessing. But again, David wasn’t to know that either, so Gerry just said an innocuous “that’s nice,” before querying him about school. “How come you’re not in my art history class?” she asked.

  “Couldn’t fit it in. I’m taking three required courses this term: English, French and physical education. Depending on when you sign in, the computer does the scheduling.”

  “What are your art courses?”

  “Painting, printmaking and photography.”

  “And what’s your favourite?”

  “Ah, it’s between printmaking and photography. I like to do things, make things, rather than paint.”

  “Like your dad,” said Gerry, thinking of Doug’s sculpting in neon. “How’s the kitten?”

  David’s face lit up. “She’s a terror! She mostly sleeps on my bed. Wakes me up. Wants to play in the middle of the night.”

  “I know that feeling,” Gerry admitted ruefully.

  “Hey, you know her brother? The one you gave to the Parsley kids?”

  “Yeah. Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but it turns out it’s not the kids the cat likes. It’s their dad. It sleeps with him and follows him around. He even lets it into the bar.”

  “Aw.” Gerry envisioned the diminutive kitten Gee attaching itself to the large figure of the recently widowed restaurateur Phil Parsley.

  “He calls it Gregory.”

  “Gregory!?” They laughed. “So everybody who got a kitten changed its name except me. Jay is still Jay.”

  “Hey, Gerry, I’ve got a class at one so I’ve got to go.”

  “Oh, no! So do I! Race you!” They swam to the shallow end, David won and each darted away to the changing rooms. Gerry wondered, will I ever arrive at this class without being out of breath?

  12

  “While Turner flirted with abstraction—look at Landscape with a River and Bay in the Background, making the lyric landscape fuzzy with warm colours—he was essentially Romantic. Artists today still use these techniques.

  “Now, in The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Burne-Jones, we find symbolism in full flower. The male and female figures in counterpoise and all around them the sensuous natural world. The tension between the two can be seen at the centre of the canvas where their eyes meet. And there, also at the centre, is the perspective away in the distance. I like the shine of dark fabric and the dull white of skin and flowers. The dreaminess of the artist’s treatment was the new thing here.”

  Gerry paused and took a sip of water as they all stared at the image on the screen. She clicked to von Schwind’s The Knight of Falkenstein’s Exploit. “Germany, even as it became a nation, looked back with nostalgia to a more bucolic time. There were paintings like this one—knights on horses as an ideal.” She clicked. “I think even without the title we know what this is about.” The painting was Arnold Böcklin’s The Plague. “Death rides a dragon, dead or dying townspeople lying everywhere. It’s kind of rough. Kind of crude. Almost…modern.

  “And so to France. To ‘les Primatifs,’ who thought art should go back to the Greek ideal for symbolism. Symbolism was their goal. It doesn’t get more basic than this.” Amaury-Duval’s The Birth of Venus came up in the darkened room, the girl’s white body startling in its purity against a blue background.

  “So the title makes us think of Botticelli’s version. But look how natural Amaury-Duval’s Venus is. No shell. No hair from her head coyly covering her private parts. No fabulous attendants. Just a perfect girl standing on the beach, wringing out her wet hair.”

  She let them admire the painting before continuing. “Another group of painters were the Troubadours. For those who don’t know, although you’re supposed to have read this section, troubadours were poets and musicians in late medieval times in France and Italy and their theme was courtly love.

  “So these artist Troubadours painted small scenes of everyday life that referenced symbols from chivalry. Their faithful rendering of nature was perhaps an indication of things to come. Isn’t it fascinating that depending when an artist is born, and where, will influence his or her development profoundly? We artists work away, never knowing if our work will be remembered or sink from view.” She paused, reflecting on her own work. Would anyone care about Mug the Bug in 100 years?

  She snapped back to attention when the sound of a chair being scraped told her someone was restless. “An example of geography influencing artists’ content can be seen by considering the city of Lyon in France. From the mid-nineteenth century on, a religious centre, it was where religious symbolism flowered. This resulted in some ‘sweet’ work such as The Flight of the Soul by Janmot, but also in some more powerful work by two artists.

  “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes reduced his content to a primitive style that was yet modern. In The Poor Fisherman, painted in 1881, the man stands in his boat waiting for something to bite while his wife gathers wild plants from the barren shore. The absence of colour gives this drab scene some of its power, but it is the central triangle between the man, the woman and their baby sleeping on the ground that draws our eye. We feel how important it is that he catch something.

  “The other artist is Gustave Moreau who died in 1898. This painter, like Puvis de Chavannes, was both referencing the past and going forward at the same time. Look at Helen Before the Scaean Gate, done around 1880. There’s the classical figure, the classical architecture. But look at the brushwork on the red and rusty black bits down here. What energy! That and the wisp of white smoke rising tell us we might be looking at a disaster. A fire? When we investigate the mythology, we find the story involves Helen appearing during a lull in the fighting between the Trojans and Achaeans and acknowledging people from her past, some living, some dead. A moment of great personal sadness.” Gerry paused.

  The chair scraped the floor again. Gerry looked up sharply. The texting girl was half out of her seat. “And that wraps up symbolism,” Gerry said. “We’ll get into painting reality on Thursday, and after that, Impressionism. Jerry, could you stay a second?”

  Jerry, looking worried, slowly came to the front of the room. “Is it my homework, Miss? I meant to…”

  Gerry hastened to relieve his mind. “Didn’t get it done? Hand it in on Thursday. I wanted to ask about your weekend.”

  He looked surprised. “Oh, well, you know. We skied and ate and skied some more. Then, just, ah, partied at the chalet.”

  “Mm. Sounds like fun. Did you notice—were you aware someone went missing?”

  “Yeah, yeah. They were talking about it Sunday when we went to the restaurant for breakfast.” He blushed. “More like lunch, actually.”

  Gerry laughed. “Do you know who was missing?”

  “Some guy who worked in the restaurant, I heard.”

  Gerry felt a bit relieved. At least the foreign boy wouldn’t be teased for getting lost on the mountain if and when he returned to college. She didn’t know why, but she felt protective of him. “Okay, Jerry. I was just curious.”

  He left and Gerry slowly packed her bag. Like the kids, she used a knapsack and, as she hoisted it up to one shoulder, she still felt worried about the boy and the two girls in Mrs. Shrike’s care. Were they involved with drugs? Was Mrs. Shrike? Why would Mrs. Shrike threaten them? In any case, what could Gerry do?

  Gerry twirled the catnip mouse in a circle above Jay’s head. The kitten’s white paws flashed as she spun in response. At five months, she was three or four times the size she’d been when she arrived with her brothers and sisters last fall. Then they’d been the size of adult mice.

 
; Mother, the most maternal of the cats in Gerry’s tribe, had brought the kittens one by one to Gerry’s house through the cat flap and onto the dining room carpet. Gerry had nursed them, getting up at night to feed them special cat milk by eyedropper until they could eat solid food. Mother had provided the warmth of her large marmalade-coloured body.

  Between them, Mother and Gerry had made a good job of the kittens and four had been adopted into good homes.

  Gerry had fallen in love with Jay. She was the most energetic of them all and Gerry loved her white boots and belly and shiny black everything else. Like Bob, Gerry’s other favourite, a tuxedo cat, Jay had white whiskers.

  These whiskers now twitched as Jay, tired by their game, climbed back into the banana box on the hearth and snuggled into Mother’s warmth. The sound of a contented double purring arose from the box.

  Gerry leaned over and stroked the adult cat. “Don’t worry, Mother, we’re keeping little Jay.” Mother blinked a couple of times before going to sleep.

  Gerry stared at the fire and sipped coffee with a sigh of happiness. This time of day—three, four, four-thirty in the afternoon—was when she almost always paused for breath. What with all her various freelance assignments, and the cats, and shopping for them all, and the daily chores, she sometimes felt that she, like Jay had been, was spinning in circles.

  What was really important? Talking about long dead artists and their influences had bothered her. Who was she to evaluate them? They had had rents to pay, children to raise, commitments, chores. Yet they had made fine art while she dabbled with cartoon strips and ideas for children’s books.

  Her stomach growled. She put a slice of store-bought meat pie in the oven and felt virtuous as she peeled and sliced potatoes, carrots and broccoli. She quietly ate her supper staring out at the frozen lake, at the few lights far away on the opposite shore. Then she changed her clothes and went to get Prudence. She wondered what film they were going to see.