Surbiton
Fiction, built around real print. A letter signed “W. R., Surbiton” appeared in Notes and Queries on May 15, 1852 (No. 133, p. 465), asking why there are almost never male tortoiseshell cats. The phrases quoted from it, the neighbouring items in that issue, the June 12 notice and the June 26 reply (No. 139, p. 618) are real, and you can read them on Project Gutenberg (ebooks 41465, 42039 and 42780). W. R. himself, his book, his cats and his feelings are imagined. The answer he wanted came long after him: the orange colour is carried on the X chromosome, which females have two of and males one; early on, each cell of a female silences one of her two at random, and so she grows a patchwork (Mary Lyon proposed this in 1961, working on mice). The rare male tortoiseshell has an extra X, and is usually sterile.
The kittens came in March and again in August, and for fifty years he had looked at every one of them the same way: he lifted it in one hand, turned it to the window, and parted the fur with his thumb.
At first he was looking for a tom. He wanted a male tortoiseshell the way other men wanted a particular beetle, and he went about it like a breeder. He crossed his orange toms with his black-and-white queens, and his black toms with his ginger-and-white. He bought a Maltese from a ship’s officer at Gravesend and a long-haired Persian queen from a widow in Kingston who would not stop crying over her. He kept a book. Each litter got a line: the date, the mother, the supposed father (“supposed” underlined, because cats are cats), and the colour and sex of every kitten.
Somewhere in the second decade he stopped looking for the tom and started looking at the rule.
It was so clean. A kitten that was white and orange all over, perfectly respectable, with a single black hair at the root of the tail, a hair you had to hunt for with a glass: female. Every time. Black and white, with one orange thread behind the ear: female. He had never known anything in nature to keep its word like that. Rain didn’t. The cats did.
He asked a famous naturalist by letter, who was very kind and knew nothing. He asked another great man in person, at a dinner, and that one smiled and said that Nature delighted in her little mysteries. W. R. had gone home and written in the book, under the August litter, Nature does not delight. Nature has a reason and is not telling it.
Twice in fifty years he heard of a tortoiseshell tom being shown, and twice he went, and twice he found the silver nitrate on the man’s fingers, and on the cat.
In the spring of 1852 a nephew mentioned that there had been a male tortoiseshell among the wonders at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park the summer before. He hadn’t gone to the Exhibition. He was seventy, and the crowds were said to be terrible, and the glass palace made him think of a cucumber frame for people. He did not believe in the cat. He found he wanted to, a little, and that bothered him.
So he wrote to the magazine. He had taken it since its first number, for the pleasure of watching strangers answer each other’s small questions: where Cromwell was buried; whether anyone in England was really named Devil. He wrote it plainly. Fifty years. The mixing of breeds “in every way.” The black hair, the orange hair. The horses and cows, which came tortoiseshell in both sexes, so the rule belonged to cats alone. The silver nitrate. And at the end: it will much gratify me, even if it should prove that I am making much about nothing.
It was printed on the 15th of May, between someone asking where Anne Boleyn was buried and someone asking how to pronounce oasis. He bought three copies. In the same number, at the back, other people’s questions were being answered. There was a man named Devil after all, a labourer in a hamlet near Hope, in Derbyshire. There was a movable pulpit in Norwich Cathedral. An angler reported that the nightingale, when she builds her nest, puts a thorn about an inch long in the middle of it, “probably to lean her breast against.” He read that one twice.
Nothing came the next week, or the week after. On the 12th of June, in the small type of the notices to correspondents, among the replies received, he found his question had become a name in a list: The Death Watch—Baxter’s Shove—Tortoise-shell Tom Cats—Tregonwell Frampton. Somebody had written. He waited two more weeks to find out who.
On the 26th of June a correspondent signing himself M. W. B. said he had always thought the tortoiseshell tom a rare animal, but hadn’t known it was unknown to natural history. He had no explanation to offer. What he had instead was a song. More than forty years ago, the actor Jack Bannister had done a comic turn about an auction, a Mr. Catseye in Cateaton Street, selling a tortoiseshell tom to a room full of fine ladies and gentlemen:
Who but an auctioneer would ever think of selling us,
For two hundred yellow-boys, a trap for mice?
The bidding got hot, politeness was nearly banished, and the cat went for two hundred and thirty-three. The bells rang. The mousetrap makers put their prices up.
He laughed out loud, alone in the parlour, and the cat on the hearth looked up. He had asked for light and had been sent a song.
He went on parting the fur with his thumb. The August litter that year was two tortoiseshells, both female, and one black tom with a white bib, which he kept. In the book he wrote the date and the colours and then, after some thought, still.