Tableau

I came upon it in the garden, quite by accident – a small patch of grass transformed into a macabre tableau. At first glance, it might have been an illustration from one of Beatrix Potter’s lesser-known works, “Rodney Rat’s Unfortunate Encounter with Mr Tibbs.” There he lay, paws arranged with an almost theatrical delicacy, tail draped just so, as if auditioning for the role of “tragic victim” in an Edwardian morality play.

Only the eye gave the game away – fixed, glassy, staring not at the reader but into eternity, like a character who has finally realised that he won’t be appearing in the sequel. One could half expect him to sit up, brush himself down and remark, “Well, that’s quite enough fresh air for today.” But no, the cat had made sure the curtain had fallen for good.

The sheer artistry of the pose was what struck me most. Beatrix Potter spent hours sketching hedgerows and country cottages to get her settings just right, yet here was a creature laid out as though she herself had positioned it: the limp paw for sympathy, the fur ruffled for drama, the tail curled as an afterthought. My cat, apparently, has a sense of composition that would put some illustrators to shame.

And what moral should we draw? In Potter’s tales, the lesson was usually something along the lines of “Listen to your mother” or “Don’t pinch cabbages.” Here the only possible moral is: “Do not cross the cat, for she has both a taste for blood and an eye for mise-en-scène.”