Cat

The Cat is a symbolic figure drawn from Aesop's Fables, a book Aunt Lydia read as a child. In the fable, the Fox boasts of having a whole bag of tricks to evade hunters and their dogs—doubling back on his tracks, running through water to destroy his scent, diving into a den with several exits. The Cat replies that she has only one trick: when in extremis, she knows how to climb a tree. When the hunters arrive, the Fox exhausts his ruses and is killed, while the Cat climbs a tree and watches with equanimity. Lydia recalls this fable during her years at Ardua Hall, asking herself whether she is Fox or Cat—whether she should twist and turn, using the secrets in her possession to manipulate others, or zip her lip and rejoice as others outsmart themselves. She concludes that she has been both: she still has a bag of tricks, and she is still high in the tree. The Cat thus becomes a figure for Lydia's political longevity: the one essential skill—knowing when to stay still, when to wait, when to let others exhaust themselves—that has allowed her to survive three waves of purges while more ambitious rivals have fallen. The fable also appears in Lydia's conversation with Aunt Elizabeth, when she asks Elizabeth whether she would be a fox or a cat, and Elizabeth, not understanding the reference, says she might be a cat. Lydia then tells Elizabeth that she must now draw upon her inner fox, setting in motion the plot to frame Aunt Vidala. The Cat, in this context, is not merely a fable but a practical philosophy of survival: the one trick that never fails, the one tree that is always there to climb.