Vicar’s Wife or no Vicar’s Wife, That Woman is a Cat

The new vicar was well-established in St Mary Mead. He’d conducted several funerals (all elderly), and a spate of christenings, (all of the infant variety), and was limbering up for the summer wedding season which would be particularly busy this year. He was thought to be a most genial man and, as such, had been invited to numerous social gatherings all of which he’d duly attended, arriving alone but armed with a bottle of cider or shop-bought sponge, in order to express his grateful thanks. There was a wife. The vicar did not deny her. Neither did he bring her along to parties or even insist upon her presence at Sunday services though her absence was considered most irregular.

 It was customary, when a new vicar first arrived in the parish, for his wife to host a little soiree and invite the well-heeled ladies of St Mary Mead. Nothing too formal. A coffee morning or light fork supper. If the weather was fine and the laburnum in bloom, afternoon tea in the vicarage garden. When the calendar reached Easter and there was still no sign of the vicar’s wife, people really began to talk. They wondered if she might be an atheist. Or a communist. There was speculation -actual audible muttering- that the vicar had gone and married a papist. There were only Anglicans in St Mary Mead. This was not law, but it might as well have been. It required a further two years of furious probing, of eavesdropping, spying and steaming letters before the horrid truth came out. The vicar’s wife was actually a cat.

 The vicar’s wife had not always been a cat. First, she’d been a regular girl. Then, a rather average woman and finally a vicar’s wife, which was to say, unremarkable in every aspect, aside from her eyes which were green and almond shaped and equally sharp during night and day. And her tastes which ran to lapping cream and clawing the drapes in the front parlour. And her dreams which were almost always of mice. Now, the vicar truly loved his wife. She was above averagely fond of him. She was certain he’d never get rid of her and thus when presented with the opportunity to finally make the leap from female to feline, did not, for a second, hesitate. She paid the gypsy woman five pounds stirling and two jars of jam and her wedding ring. She crouched down on the backdoor step and arched her back beneath the mumbled incantation and knew she’d never walk upright again.

 It was a relief of sorts to be a cat. She no longer had to hide her natural bent. It was acceptable -expected even- to chase the mice round the vicarage and lick her own mud-saddened fur and curl up at night in her husband’s lap, purring demurely against his pleasure. It was exceedingly good to be a cat. At first the vicar found it troubling. He didn’t know how to talk to his wife. He missed the length of her pale, white body, lying next to him in bed. He did not know how to make decent custard and could no longer expect her to prepare it for him. He soon grew used to his wife’s new ways. He liked to carry her around the vicarage, tucked like a French stick beneath his arm. She curled round his ankles while he sat at his desk, composing the following Sunday’s sermons and no longer cost him a fortune in frocks. He was also pleased to notice the house no longer plagued with rodents or half-read paperback novels. He never had to wait for the bathroom. There were advantages to having a cat for a wife.

 The people of St Mary Mead took a very different stance. They said it was perverse. Unnatural. Downright evil. A vicar was meant to lead by example, yet here he was making a mockery of holy matrimony. What next? Would people be permitted to marry their chickens, their hamsters, their vacuum cleaners? Would people bother with marriage at all? They demanded a stoning: a dose of proper Biblical justice, administered with pebbles and builders’ bricks. It was not clear who they wished to see stoned: the vicar or the vicar’s wife.

 The vicar was not one bit bothered. Cat or no cat, he loved his wife. He shook the dust off his vicar’s sandals, packed his bags and left St Mary Mead. He would find a position in a different parish; one more open to the love of cats. He carried his wife in a weekend bag slung casually over his shoulder. There was hardly any weight in her. She was purring away companionably. Now, the vicar was a genial man; thankful for even the smallest of mercies. He considered his situation as he walked. Before, he couldn’t have fit his wife into a weekend bag. Surely, if he put his mind to it, he could come up with a host of other reasons why cats made for jolly good wives.