for Vera, his first person singularfor Celia, who did not give up hopeand for Annie, whose cat it was

And in after years, if you would blame

His sadness, he was used to say,

‘It’s dull in our town since my playmates left!’

Robert Browning

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Once upon a time there were two old ladies. Their names were Kitty and Miss McGee. Kitty was tall and thin and liked to sit in a tall, thin chair. Miss McGee was little and round and preferred sitting on a plump, soft settee with puffy cushions. Kitty’s real name was Katherine, but Miss McGee called her Kitty. Her own name was Florence, but Kitty called her “McGee”; she only used Florence when she got cross with her, but this didn’t happen very often. It was normally Miss McGee who got cross.

This was because Kitty was a bit vague and dreamy, and went round saying little poems to herself. Her pale, oval face, the exact shape of an egg, was so calm and quiet-seeming that looking into it was like looking into a deep, calm lake.

Kitty and Miss McGee were very old. When they were little girls, there were no televisions or computers or mobile phones. In those days, a cart came along pulled by a little horse, and a man threw the coal for your fire down a hole in the pavement. The streets were lit by pretty lamps, worked by gas, and every night, before the dusk came, another man came round with a long stick and switched them all on. He was called the lamplighter. “Remember the lamplighter, McGee?” Kitty would say dreamily, as they sat in their chairs after tea, watching the darkness fall. “Remember the coalman’s horse?”

But you mustn’t think that Kitty and Miss McGee were two fuddy duddies. It’s true that they didn’t have a television or a computer and their telephone was a very old-fashioned one. It was black and it weighed a ton and it had a loud, clanging bell. But they certainly kept up with things. They listened to the radio and they read the newspapers and they both kept a very sharp eye on what was going on in Golden Square, which was where they lived, at Number 19.

It was called “golden” because in spring the garden in the middle was full of daffodils. This garden was private with black railings all round, stuck with iron spikes, and you got inside by unlocking a gate. The old ladies had a key to it but they didn’t go there much. It felt too lonely, sitting in the garden all by themselves.

Once there had been lots of families living in Golden Square. There had been a little school close by, too, and all the children used to play in the garden. They played hide-and-seek in the shrubbery, they climbed the trees and they skimmed pebbles across the small, round pond. But then the school had closed down and the families had all gone to live in new, shiny houses on the edge of the town. Apart from Number 19, all the houses in Golden Square had been turned into offices for dentists and doctors. In the evening everybody went home and there was silence.

“It’s dull in our town since the children went,” said Kitty to Miss McGee. “Even Debbie Springer seems to have deserted us. I really do miss Debbie.”

Debbie Springer was a little girl whose mum did cleaning for some of the dentists and doctors who had offices in Golden Square. They used to live in a flat in the very bottom of one of the houses, but one day a water pipe burst and there was a flood. The water had turned the bottom of the house all dank and smelly and mould had begun to grow on the walls. But the man who owned it was a bit of a miser and wouldn’t pay anybody to put the house right. So Mrs Springer, who had bright red hair and rather a hot temper, said “Right, then, we’ll go and live somewhere else, somewhere nice and light and airy. You can keep your rotten old flat – we’ll find another place!” And she had marched away with Debbie, refusing to pay the miser his last bit of rent: for which nobody blamed her one bit.

They soon found a new home and it was certainly airy. It was on the very top floor of the Town Flats. These looked a bit like skyscrapers and stood right in the middle of the town, quite dwarfing the Town Hall and the parish church. These were tall buildings but they looked tiny next to the Town Flats. To get to Debbie’s flat you took a lift and whizzed up dozens of floors till you reached the very top. They didn’t have a garden, of course, just a balcony full of plants, and nobody was allowed to have a cat or a dog, not living up there, almost in the sky. It wouldn’t be fair. That was why Debbie had liked visiting the two old ladies who did have a pet.

They tried very hard to keep fit. Kitty tended their tiny garden, Miss McGee did the cooking and they both walked up and down the stairs a lot, because theirs was that sort of house. They also took little walks but they got tired more quickly than when they were young, and soon came home again.

“If only Nicholas could talk,” Miss McGee said wistfully one day. “He takes very long walks: I expect he picks up all the gossip.”

Nicholas was their cat and one of the reasons Debbie had liked visiting the old ladies, on the days when her mum dropped by to do a bit of cleaning for them. This hadn’t happened very often as Mrs Springer had so many other cleaning jobs and needed the money. But she refused to take any from the old ladies because they were her friends and they only had their pensions.

Nicholas was very handsome. He was pale ginger, the colour of a lightly baked biscuit. His fur was soft and fluffy and his tail was fat and plume-like and rather resembled a feather duster.

“Who does your Nicholas belong to then?” said Mr Plackett the postman one day. He liked cats; they didn’t snap at him like dogs did. Nicholas was not only handsome, he was also very friendly; he would talk to anybody.

“He’s both of ours,” explained Miss McGee. “We share him.”

“But who owns the tail end?” said Mr Plackett. “That’s the bit I’d like. I mean, you could dust all the cobwebs away with a tail like that. You could just tuck him under your arm, and get to work.”

“Nobody owns it,” Kitty told him rather coldly. She was alarmed at the idea of using Nicholas’s tail to clear cobwebs. “And nobody owns him. You can’t own a cat. Nicholas belongs to himself alone.”

“Don’t get it,” grunted Mr Plackett, walking off down the path. But Kitty wasn’t listening. “The tail of Nicholas is the glory of God,” she murmured. It was one of her poetry things.

It was certainly true that Nicholas was for ever going out, in fact, he was very sociable, and sometimes he did very bold things. Once, seeing a tasty-looking bird, he leaped from a first-floor window right down into the square, to try and catch it. He could have been squashed flat, but he wasn’t. You probably know that a cat has nine lives. Well that day, Nicholas certainly lost one of them.

But there was one thing that always frightened him. If ever he heard a loud noise, he went pelting off to hide in some very secret place where he stayed for ages and ages – sometimes for hours.

It was because loud noises terrified Nicholas that everything went wrong, and it all started because of a silly quarrel. One day Miss McGee lost her temper with Kitty, and shouted and, rather to her surprise, dreamy Kitty shouted back. Then they threw things at each other and shouted more loudly, and it all made a very big noise indeed.

Kitty blamed Miss McGee and Miss McGee blamed Kitty and they both stormed off to sulk in their own rooms. But Nicholas didn’t creep up the stairs to comfort them both, one by one, in his usual purry way, and this was because he had vanished.

But before we get on to that, there is something more pleasant to tell you, something quite exciting that happened in Golden Square, only days before the old ladies quarrelled.

Chapter Two

The excitement happened just a few weeks before Christmas. Miss McGee was busy, mixing her pudding. She normally made it on Bonfire Night so that it could sit for a good long time on the cool pantry shelf, and develop all its lovely flavours of fruit and spice and best brandy, and be just perfect for Christmas Day. But she had been ill in bed with a nasty cold so the pudding making had been delayed.

Kitty offered to make it for her. “I could do it, McGee,” she said one morning, “if you will give me exact instructions.”

But Miss McGee, who was still feeling rather ill, called out from her bedroom, “Oh no, thank you. When it comes to cooking, you’re hopeless.”

Poor Kitty crept away, feeling very crushed, and went to sit in her front room, quietly, among her plants, with Nicholas on her knee. “Dear McGee must be feeling very bad indeed,” she confided, “or I don’t think she would have said such a thing to her oldest friend, do you?” And while Nicholas purred, in an understanding kind of way (the old ladies told him all their troubles, both separately and together), a little tear trickled slowly down her cheek.

Kitty, who was not very good at forgetting hurtful things, such as being told she was “hopeless”, was unhappy for the whole of that day, and into the next and the next. The unhappiness was like very bad toothache, just gnawing and gnawing, and it only went away when something unusual suddenly caught her eye, down in the square. It was a big, silvery furniture van with Friendly Ghost Removals painted on the side in bold blue letters.

“McGee,” she called. “McGee, come quickly. Somebody’s moving into Number 26.” In spite of her creaky little legs, Miss McGee came up the stairs quite fast, to look for herself. People never moved into Golden Square, they always moved out.

For example, just as they had got used to little Debbie Springer running in and out of their house, calling them her “special grannies” (even though she had a perfectly nice gran of her own, who lived by the sea at Blackpool), the flood happened, and the green mould, so that, almost overnight, Debbie and her mum had gone. Much as Kitty and Miss McGee liked Debbie, they were both nervous about going to the top of the Town Flats in that lift, so they didn’t see her any more. And all this was part of the reason that the two old ladies, who loved families and pets and, most of all, children, felt lonely.

They stood side by side at the window and peered down into the square where three men in brown overalls were carrying things into the house. Kitty removed her spectacles, to see better, and Miss McGee put hers on, for the same reason.

“There goes the ironing board,” Miss McGee cried. “And there goes the washing machine.”

“And there goes a bicycle … no, two bicycles,” said Kitty. “And they’re quite little ones.” She turned to her friend with shining eyes. “You don’t suppose a real family’s moving in, do you, McGee? Real people, after all those dentists and doctors? Might it be a real family at last, with real children?”

Miss McGee screwed her nose up, and her mouth and her eyes, till her face was one big scrunch. She didn’t want Kitty to be disappointed, in case it wasn’t a real family and she didn’t want to be disappointed herself. They both liked children. Kitty had once been a teacher, in the school that had closed down. She had been used to little boys and girls playing round her feet all day. Miss McGee had been a special nurse and had cared for sick children in hospital. “I wouldn’t like to say, Kitty,” she replied. “It could be some young people moving in. They might keep us awake all night, with their noisy parties.”

“Oh surely not,” said Kitty (though secretly, she rather liked parties), “not in Golden Square.”

The fetching and carrying went on for quite a long time, then there was a great slamming of doors. The driver whistled and soon the silvery van was moving away from the pavement. Just for an instant, the old ladies saw two grown-ups standing outside the door of Number 26, a man and a woman hand in hand. They were staring rather sadly at the disappearing removal van. Kitty and Miss McGee held their breath because the front door was still open; a handful of leftover autumn leaves was scurrying over the doormat.

“Where are the children?” whispered Kitty. “Perhaps they’re inside, unpacking their toys. Perhaps, if we wait, they’ll come out. They might even ride their bicycles round the square,” and she pressed her nose against the window pane.

“I don’t think so, dear,” muttered Miss McGee and she hid her own disappointment by going back to the pudding making, down in her kitchen. “There probably aren’t any children,” she added, under her breath.

Chapter Three

Kitty decided that there had got to be children. Hadn’t she seen two bicycles? So instead of doing her jobs, she spent a lot of time in her sitting room, lurking behind the curtains and peeping down into Golden Square. But nobody ever came out of Number 26.

Miss McGee got quite cross with her. It was now two whole days since they’d seen the removal van and all that time the pudding mixture had been soaking in a big, brown bowl, covered with a clean piece of cloth to keep out any flies or spiders. It was now time to boil it.

Kitty had funny feelings about this bowl because it was the very bowl that Miss McGee’s grandfather, who had been a farmer, used to soak his poor tired feet in at the end of the day. The pudding was always delicious but each year, when she took her first mouthful at Christmas lunch, Kitty always thought of a pair of big, sweaty feet swishing about in the bowl it had been mixed in. But she never dared tell Miss McGee.

“Come along!” her friend called to her from the kitchen. “I’ve got the pudding ready, and it’s time to start boiling. Stop mooning about by that window, Kitty, I need help.”

“I’m not mooning,” Kitty replied. “I’ve been waiting for those children to emerge from Number 26.”

“I’ve told you, there are no children. Now put your finger on this knot for me, please. I want a really nice, tight top to the pudding.”

Miss McGee had spooned her mixture out of the feet bowl into a white pudding basin. She had cut out a neat circle of greaseproof paper for the top then wrapped it all up in a big, special pudding cloth, the size of a tea towel. She had tied a string round this cloth, to keep it in place, and now, with the help of Kitty, it was secured with a very complicated knot.

The Christmas pudding, cocooned in its cloth, was quite heavy. Between them, Kitty and Miss McGee lowered it into a large saucepan which was ready waiting on the cooker. They filled the pan halfway up with water, then lit the gas. Five minutes later the water around the pudding was boiling fast and Miss McGee turned the heat down until it was bubbling gently.

“Now then,” she said, “we must keep the water topped up till it’s thoroughly cooked, and we must NOT let it boil dry.” She said this bit very loudly, as if poor Kitty was as deaf as a post. She wasn’t deaf, but it was true that she sometimes forgot things.

“When we leave this kitchen, we must both take our pingers with us,” continued Miss McGee. “Here’s yours, Kitty.” The “pingers” were things that made a noise when the food you were cooking was ready, or needed looking at. Kitty’s was a smart white one with digital numbers that shone in the dark. It was called Big Time and it bleeped rather than pinged. She had bought it one day in Mr Moat’s corner shop. He sold all kinds of useful items.

Sometimes they saw Debbie in the shop. Mr Moat was her mum’s brother and he was Debbie’s “Uncle Ted”. When it was the holidays, Debbie sometimes helped him, putting things in bags and weighing things, but it was so long since the old ladies had seen her, or her mum, they were beginning to wonder if they had left the town altogether and gone to live somewhere else.

Big Time was the latest thing in pingers. In her quiet wag, Kitty could be quite trendy. Miss McGee’s pinger was a wind-up red one and it was an old and trusted friend, like the feet bowl. It had timed many puddings.

The old ladies never stayed in the kitchen at boiling time because the process took ages and the room got much too hot and steamy. With their pingers in their pockets, they went off into their own parts of the house. Miss McGee’s was set to ping in half an hour when she would go and top up the water in the pan. Kitty’s was set to bleep half an hour later, when she would do the same. Turn and turn about, every half hour, they would make sure the precious pudding never boiled dry. Only Nicholas remained in the kitchen, curled up in his basket next to the cooker. He kept looking up at the boiling saucepan; he was better than any dog.

“He’s guarding our pudding,” said Miss McGee. “Good old Nicholas.”

“Good, dear cat,” whispered Kitty. “What would we do without you?”

Kitty had plenty of time to spare before Big Time bleeped so she went back to sit in her chair by the window and stared down into Golden Square. She was a patient sort of lady. She believed that if she stayed there long enough, something was bound to happen. It was just a question of waiting.

She had learned about waiting from Nicholas. He would sit for hours, patiently waiting for a mouse to creep out from under a table or chair, where it had gone to hide (19 Golden Square had quite a few mice). He knew that, if he waited long enough, the mouse would reappear in the end. He was a brilliant mouser. Miss McGee said that Nicholas’s paw control was the best she had ever come across, and she knew about cats because she’d been brought up on a farm. Kitty, who was a town person, had only ever known one cat, Nicholas, but she loved him with all her heart.

So did Miss McGee, but she never said it aloud, neither of them did, though each knew what the other was feeling. In this way, although very different from each other, the two old ladies were exactly the same.

Now perhaps Kitty had nodded off in her chair, or perhaps she had been looking away at the moment the person appeared on the scene. She couldn’t remember afterwards. But what was for certain was this: on the afternoon of the pudding boiling a real child appeared down in the garden, in the middle of Golden Square.

It was a boy and he was very small, about three years old perhaps. He had a red something on his top half, and a blue something on his bottom half, and a floppy yellow something on his head. From her upstairs window Kitty couldn’t see what any of these things were.

The minute she saw him, she stood up and made her way downstairs to the front door. From the hook where it had hung for years and years she took the large, heavy key which unlocked the gate into the gardens. She only had one pocket in her skirt and it was quite little so, to make room for the key, which she absolutely must NOT lose, she removed Big Time and put it on the hall table. After all, she would only be out of the house for a very few minutes.

Chapter Four

The spiky, black gate which let people into the garden was not only shut, it was locked. This meant that the little boy must have climbed over the spikes or that he had been lifted inside, and left there. Kitty did not approve of either of these things: the iron spikes were dangerous and the garden was lonely and the boy was very small indeed. She could see him clearly now; he was wearing a bright red jersey and ting, bright blue jeans and a floppy woollen hat the colour of a daffodil. Underneath, his hair was a great mass of golden curls; it looked as if he’d not yet had his first grown-up haircut.

Kitty unlocked the gate and went into the garden. She shut it behind her carefully, locked it again and walked up the path towards the child. “My name’s Kitty,” she told him. “I live at Number 19 with my friend Miss McGee and we have a cat called Nicholas. Do you have a pet?”

The small boy looked at her uncertainly. He had enormous, glossy brown eyes and a small, sweet mouth, all folded like the petals of a flower, but his lips were quivering. Kitty turned away, pretending she had lost all interest because she knew all about that particular look; it meant that he was about to cry.

Ignoring him, she started to poke about under the leafless shrubs on the edge of the little pond. “You find lovely things here,” she said, as if to herself (but just loud enough for the little boy to hear, which of course was the whole idea). “Look … here’s a lovely leaf that’s slowly turning into a skeleton … and here’s a perfectly round pebble … and here’s … here’s a frog! My goodness me …” The little boy was following her now and every time she bent down to look at something he bent down too. Round and round the garden they went, peacefully collecting things.

This game went on for quite a while but then it was as if the little boy suddenly remembered something quite different, or had decided to play his own game. He started to make a very particular kind of noise. “Chu … chu … chu …” and as he did so he lifted up the dry, twiggy branches of the shrubs, to peer underneath them. “Chu … chu … chu …” he kept calling.

“Is that a train game?” asked Kitty. “Can I play too? Chu … chu … chu …” she went, up and down the paths and round the pond. “We’re great big steam trains,” she told him, “we’re not silly diesels … chu … chu … chu …” But at this the little boy slowed down, shook his head very solemnly and began to chew his fingers. Then he let out the most enormous HOWL.

It was quiet in Golden Square, and already quite dark. There were no doctors or dentists around in any case, because it was Saturday. In the silence, the cry of the little boy felt as big as an earthquake, and Kitty panicked. “Please don’t cry, dear,” she said, going up to him. “Please don’t cry—” and then something suddenly burst out of the bushes, something resembling a big, red, flapping monster.

“Timothy!” it bellowed. “Timothy Joe! Come here this minute! We are terribly late. Your daddy’s been sitting in the car for a whole ten minutes and he’s extremely cross.”

Kitty took a few steps backwards. She didn’t like loud noises, or people that shouted. In this respect she was like Nicholas. But the red monster (who turned out to be a rather tall lady in a raincoat the colour of holly berries, with a red hat to match and curly fair hair), came right up to her. “What are you doing here?” she said, quite rudely.

“I … I live here,” Kitty whispered, her insides turning into wobbly snakes, as they tended to do when she was nervous. “I live at Number 19, with my friend Miss McGee. We are your neighbours. I was so pleased to see your little boy in the garden that I came down to say hello. It’s lovely to have a family in the square again. We so miss Debbie and her mum, you see. They’ve gone to live in the Town Flats, to escape the damp. Debbie was like a granddaughter to us.”

For a second the very red lady looked slightly less ferocious, but then somebody nearby sounded a car horn three times. The driver was getting impatient. Without a word she swept the small boy off his feet and stuffed him under her arm like a large parcel. “I’m sorry but we really are horribly LATE,” she said, moving off towards the gate.

Kitty ran ahead of her and unlocked it, but the lady did not say thank you, not even when Kitty called out, “I’ll see to the gate – let us know if we can be of any help to you,” because she really did want to be a good neighbour.

She watched the woman strap Timothy Joe into a car seat and climb into the car herself, next to a worried-looking man with spectacles who was the driver. She watched the car move away from the pavement and disappear from the square. Then she went back into the garden and sat for a while by the little pond, thinking about how angry the mother had been, how roughly she’d stuffed the little boy under her arm and how she’d not said thank you for anything.

Perhaps she wasn’t his mother. Perhaps she was his nanny, or an “au pair” person, or even an aunt. Perhaps she was cross because she thought he’d got lost. But Kitty had been in the garden too, they had both been there, with the gate locked. She couldn’t understand it at all. Next time she saw Debbie’s mum in the square she would ask her if she knew anything about this fierce lady. Mrs Springer got to hear all sorts of gossip as she did her cleaning jobs.

Kitty sat for ages by the pond, turning the mystery over in her mind, then started to walk home very slowly, swishing the fallen leaves about with her flat, brown shoes. Little children liked swishing through leaves, especially when they were nice and crunchy, but these particular leaves had turned soggy. They had been on the pavement rather too long; it was too near Christmas for good crispy leaves.

Christmas! Kitty suddenly remembered the pudding, and Big Time, ticking away on the hall table in Number 19. Even though she was quite an old lady, she was still quite fit and so, picking up the hem of her long coat so as not to trip, she ran all the way home.

Chapter Five

As she puffed up the steps to the front door it opened all by itself, as if by magic. But Miss McGee was standing just behind it, her face all swollen with red rage, and there was a sickening smell and a haze in the air, as if the house had recently been on fire.

“I’m sorry, McGee,” Kitty whimpered, knowing that her friend was about to explode about the pudding. “But I got held up in the garden. There really is a family with children at Number 26, well, there’s a child, a dear little boy called Timothy Joe. It’s wonderful.”

But Miss McGee took no notice. “You went out, Kitty,” she said, through gritted teeth, “and you left your timer behind you, and you forgot. My pudding’s boiled dry, my beautiful pudding that cost me all that time and effort and money. There’s a horrible mess all over the kitchen. It’s a tragedy.”

Kitty didn’t answer, there was no point. She had seen Miss McGee in this angry mood before. What she must do was to put matters right as quickly as possible. She walked past her friend and went down the basement stairs into the kitchen, to see what she could do.

The haze down below was worse than in the hall: it was like thick fog and the horrible burnt smell made Kitty cough. She pulled out a hanky, squashed it against her nose, and spluttered into it. Her eyes began to stream but she could see, though everything was rather blurred, McGee’s very best saucepan, all blackened with soot, and the pudding basin cracked right in half and, on the ceiling, a huge, dark ring, like a thundercloud.

“It’s a tragedy,” McGee repeated. “It’s a real tragedy.” Sagging down on to the nearest chair, she began to cry.

One part of Kitty was very sorry indeed but another part wasn’t. Yes, it was terrible that she had forgotten the pudding but it wasn’t the end of the world. She pointed this out to Miss McGee. “I’m really sorry, McGee,” she told her, “but I was so excited about the new family. Listen, I’ll paint the ceiling this afternoon; I’ll stand on the table and I’ll paint it, and I’ll buy you a new pan for Christmas. It’ll be an extra present. And I’ll make another pudding for us, I’ll do it right now.” Picking up a cookery book, she started to turn the pages, she even started to hum.

It was the humming that did it, the humming was the last straw to her friend McGee. “I don’t want you to make another pudding,” she wailed. “It’s a tragedy.”

It was Kitty’s turn to get cross now. “Don’t be silly, Florence,” she snapped. “If you call spoiling a silly old pudding a tragedy, what do you call it if something really awful happens? What do you call it if someone has a terrible accident, or even dies? Now that’s what I call a tragedy.”

McGee did not reply. Instead she snatched up the lid of the saucepan, which was lying on the kitchen floor, and hurled it at Kitty’s head. She missed and the lid hit a row of plates on a dresser and broke two of them. McGee, who had been sniffing miserably, now started to howl in earnest. In complete silence, like a person on television with the sound switched off, Kitty raised the cookery book she had been reading to find the pudding recipe, and threw it across the room in her friend’s direction. She missed, too, (neither of the old ladies was a very good shot), and the book plopped into the sink where the pages spread out like wings. “Now my best cookery book’s ruined as well!” McGee wailed, and she buried her face in her hands.

“You are RIDICULOUS!” screeched Kitty.

“Not so ridiculous as YOU,” screeched Miss McGee.

Then she threw a wooden spoon at Kitty, then a nutmeg grater, and Kitty threw another cookery book and an egg, and they both screeched and screeched.

In the middle of it all, Nicholas, who had come running in through his cat-flap for tea, ran out again, and pelted right along all four sides of Golden Square and away, and was gone all that night.

And in the morning, when the two rather shamefaced old ladies met in the kitchen for their breakfast, he was still missing.

Chapter Six

They didn’t notice at first, they were too busy being embarrassed, creeping around the kitchen and making their separate breakfasts. Normally they helped one another and shared things.

“Excuse me,” grunted Miss McGee, “but I need to get the sugar basin down from that shelf,” and “Excuse me,” muttered Kitty, “I need to get myself some butter from the fridge.” But in reaching for this and that, they bumped into each other. Miss McGee burst out laughing and patted Kitty’s shoulder and Kitty squeezed Miss McGee’s arm (though they were not huggy people) and they both said, “Aren’t we silly?” and the quarrel was over. They had known each other for so long, you see, and they were such good friends. Having arguments was a waste of time.

Soon they were sitting at the kitchen table making a list. Christmas was coming and everybody made lists at Christmas; there was so much to do and to buy, even when you lived very quiet lives like Kitty and Miss McGee. The first thing was to get another pudding and they decided to buy one from Mr Moat at the corner shop. He sold excellent puddings, “as good as homemade”, or so he told his customers.

Kitty said she would pay because she’d burned theirs, but Miss McGee said no, because that wasn’t right, and that they would both pay. A tiny new quarrel was just starting up when Kitty suddenly interrupted herself and said, “McGee, it’s extremely quiet. Where is Nicholas?”

Miss McGee stared down at her feet. “I don’t know, I’ve not seen him this morning. Didn’t he come in when you boiled the kettle, for your first-thing cup of tea?” (Kitty always woke early and took a cup back to bed with her, till it got light.)

“No,” Kitty said. “I thought he might be with you.” (Nicholas adored the fat pillows on Miss McGee’s bed and sometimes snuggled right underneath them, especially during cold weather.) “I’ve not seen Nicholas since—” then she stopped because the rest of the sentence was going to have been “—since I threw the saucepan lid and the wooden spoon and the nutmeg grater and we shouted.” She didn’t say any of this because it was too embarrassing.

Nicholas didn’t come in for his breakfast and the rest of the morning was spent looking for him. They looked in their bedrooms and they looked in their sitting rooms and they looked in their spare rooms. Kitty climbed up to the dark, cobwebby attic on her long legs and searched among all the empty boxes and spare rolls of this and that which might come in useful one day. She unfolded all the spare paper shopping bags which they had hoarded away, and shook them out because Nicholas liked hiding in bags. It had occurred to her that he might have decided to hibernate this winter, like hedgehogs and tortoises. The weather was very cold and going to sleep until it warmed up again was such a good idea. But she couldn’t find Nicholas.

Meanwhile, Miss McGee was searching in the cellar which ran all the way under the house. She didn’t much like it down there; it was clammy and cold and there were lots of spiders. She only went into the cellar to get her jam jars when it was time for making jellies and jams and marmalade. Nicholas liked warm, snug places. He would only be down in the cellar if someone had shut him in by accident. But nobody had.

“Nicholas!” dumpy Miss McGee called into the echoey darkness and “Nicholas!” echoed the chilly damp walls in a kind of mockery.

“Nicholas!” shouted skinny Kitty who had climbed daringly on to the roof, through the attic skylight (after all, most cats loved climbing). “Nicholas!” mimicked the red roof tiles, spitefully. Upon Golden Square and the streets all round, an unearthly quiet had fallen. Kitty closed up the skylight and went downstairs to find Miss McGee. In her heart she knew that Nicholas was nowhere in the house. He had run away, because of their noisy quarrel.

All this looking had made the two old ladies very tired so, after their lunch, they dozed in their chairs. But when the church clock in the square bonged loudly, four times, they didn’t put the kettle on for tea, which was their usual habit, they wrapped up warmly and went walking in the cold December air. Miss McGee went towards one end of the little town and Kitty went towards the other.

Up and down the wintry streets they plodded, calling and calling for their little lost cat. They called “Nicholas” high and they called it low. Miss McGee used her silky-soft voice, the kind she used when she was spoiling Nicholas and had a special treat for him, and Kitty used her silly, high-pitched voice which always brought him running in from the garden because it meant food. But no cat came bounding along in response to either of these voices, and no one at all had seen him. They stopped every person they met and asked.

Then, when it was almost dark, and they were walking disconsolately to meet each other from opposite ends of Golden Square, they saw what looked very like a fluffy little cat, all gingery pale and making a rolling, haphazard progress along the pavement towards them.

“Nicholas!” exclaimed Kitty with joy and she bent down to stroke him. But because of the rain and the mist, she wasn’t wearing her spectacles, and what rubbed up against her legs wasn’t a nice, warm, furry thing at all, it was a big, wet, torn, brown paper bag that the wind had blown along the pavement. “Ugh!” she cried, and kicked it away. Normally she would have scrunched it up very small and taken it to the nearest litter bin, but she didn’t. Instead, she pretended she had something in her eye and she turned away from Miss McGee who had been scurrying up, all hopeful. She wanted to hide her tears.

“Now come on, Kitty,” Miss McGee said sensibly when she saw the bag, and she tucked her arm into her friend’s. “It’s no good crying over spilt milk.”

This is nothing to do with spilt milk, Kitty said to herself, while allowing Miss McGee to propel her along the pavements of Golden Square. It’s to do with a burnt pudding and throwing pan lids and shouting and a lost cat. But she didn’t say any of this out loud because Miss McGee was being so kind and, after all, it was Kitty who had burned the pudding and made the quarrel. So instead she said what, in her heart, she did not actually believe, which was, “He’ll come back, McGee, when he’s forgiven us.”

“Oh, I’m sure he will,” murmured Miss McGee, not believing it either, because Nicholas always came in very promptly for his meals, he was a greedy little cat. Something must have happened to him, something was wrong.

As they passed Number 26, the front door suddenly opened and the tall lady with the curly fair hair, the one whom Kitty had taken to be an angry, all-in-red monster, came out and peered down the street. She held Timothy Joe in her arms and he was wearing white pyjamas with blue dots on. In a lighted window, they could see the head of a great, black rocking horse.

Kitty tried to slow Miss McGee down. “Hello,” she called out in a friendly voice. “Horrid old evening, isn’t it?” And she was just going to ask the lady if she’d seen a cat resembling Nicholas when, having looked quickly down the street again, to left and to right, the red lady went inside and shut the door with a loud slam.

“Charming!” said Miss McGee, quickening her pace so that Kitty was almost sliding after her along the pavement. “If that’s the kind of neighbour she is, then I don’t want neighbours, thank you very much.”

But Kitty was thinking how very sad the lady’s face had looked, and how sad it had looked in the garden, under the crossness. “I think they might have some sorrow, McGee,” she whispered. But her friend didn’t hear, she was too busy trying to find her door key in one of her many pockets. She believed you could never have too many pockets in your clothes, a view with which Kitty didn’t always agree, though if she had had two pockets in her skirt the day before, she would have been able to put Big Time into one of them and taken it with her into Golden Square. Then the pudding wouldn’t have burned. Then Nicholas wouldn’t have run away.

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