Even that wouldn’t have been so bad – it certainly needed doing, Sidney said he’d help him, and between them they might, with luck, have finished it in a month.
But unfortunately Charles decided that while he was at it he would do the thing properly, with drainage. A simple, Y-shaped system, he said, with rainwater pipes running 64
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underground from either corner of the cottage and ending in a soakaway inside the back gate. And that was where Sidney resigned from the scheme. Yards was all right, he said firmly, but he was hoping one day to get his pension, and he had the twins to think of. He weren’t digging no more soakaways for us.
So Charles, undaunted, set out to do the job himself.
Very well he did it, too, as far as it went. Two professional-looking trenches converging towards the centre, filled in as he went along and with the paving, flat and smooth as a spirit level could make it, growing before our very eyes. He was just past the water-butt when the thought struck him that pretty soon it would be tree-planting time, and that the site for the fruit trees he’d ordered back in the gay, carefree days of summer wasn’t ready yet.
‘Another hour at this and I’d better start digging the holes,’ he announced one morning, swinging his pickaxe practisedly through the air. He was as good as his word.
An hour later, with four more feet of trench opened, drainpiped – but not, seeing that the allotted time was up, filled in again – Charles departed to dig holes up on the hillside. Unfortunately it is rather stony ground up there.
Very difficult indeed to find a depth of soil sufficient to take fruit trees. A week later, when a card arrived to say the trees were now ready and when would we like them delivered, Charles was still delving feverishly away on the skyline.
The kitchen remained unfinished. One night, when we had some special visitors coming, he did get around to putting the doors back on the cupboards. Unfortunately he didn’t put the screws back in the hinges – what was the point, he said, when he’d only have to take them off again as 65
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soon as he started painting? He had, in fact, merely tucked them in for show. A fact which, full of bonhomie, I forgot when the visitors were actually there, and when I opened one to get out the coffee cups the damned thing fell down and nearly brained me.
Despite my apprehension the trench, too, remained unfilled. Charles said the main thing was to get the trees in, and the yard was a job he could do in the winter. Only an idiot could fall down that little hole, he said, when I suggested perhaps we should put a plank over it in case of accidents.
He fell down it himself the next night, coming through the gate in a hurry. The neighbours were always having narrow escapes, particularly as the weeks went by and the nasturtiums spread across the gap. And Solomon went down it practically every day, chasing Sheba round the garden for exercise.
That, of course, was funny. It was obviously deliberate, too, from the way his big black head peered through the nasturtiums a second later, waiting for the laughs.
It wasn’t funny, though, the night we heard a crash and a howl and rushed out to find the baker in the trench.
Not our regular baker, who knew the route through the nasturtiums and was a nice little man with corns and three children, but a rather unfriendly substitute who had, he informed us as we helped him out, already done a full day’s round and was doing our end of the village because his mate was sick. What did we think we were up to, he demanded as we dusted him down and handed him back his basket. Catching ruddy elephants or trying to break his neck?
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Charles filled in the trench before breakfast next morning without a mention of the fruit trees. He did say now he’d have to leave the soakaway till Spring – to which Father Adams, leaning reflectively on the gate to watch him, said
’twas just as well. Somebody might fall down there afore then, he said.
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SEVEN
And So to Spain
Something, said Charles, would have to be done about those cats. He said that quite regularly. It came in jolly handy for changing the subject at times, particularly when there was a slight suggestion in the air that something ought also to be done about Charles.
Like that very morning, for instance, when, moving a large bottle of pickling vinegar out of the way with his foot so that he could get on with sandpapering the kitchen wall, Charles had knocked it over and smashed it. With speed born of experience – Charles had knocked quite a lot of things over in his time – he had immediately locked the kitchen door. With speed also born of experience I nipped quietly round the front, in through the back door which he hadn’t thought of locking – and there, sure enough, was 68
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Charles gingerly pushing a cloth round in a sea of vinegar with his toe.
Not that he was at all perturbed when he was caught out. All he said, lifting the sopping cloth expertly towards me on the end of his shoe, was that this one was wet now and could he have another. Even when, breathing fire and slaughter, I wrung it out and got down to the job myself he was quite undaunted. Wonderful how vinegar brought the tiles up, wasn’t it? he said admiringly as I mopped away. If I asked him we’d made a discovery there.
We’d just made one about Solomon, too, which was the cause of his latest remark about the cats. At that moment there was a car parked outside our garden wall with its occupants gazing absolutely entranced at Solomon, who was apparently giving a solo ballet performance on the lawn. He leapt, he pranced, he postured – every now and then adding a variation where, for no apparent reason, he lay on the ground and stuck his paw down the clock-golf hole.
‘Dancing nicely, isn’t he Mummy?’ asked a small treble voice through the car window after one particularly effective pas de seul. To which Mummy replied – sadly, for obviously she liked cats – that she was afraid the poor little chap wasn’t feeling well.
Solomon was all right. He was just showing off with a mouse. The reason his audience couldn’t see it was because it was about the size of a mothball and the reason for that was that he had caught it himself. It was one of the few he had ever caught – the only size, alas, he was ever likely to catch. Even that had taken him a whole morning of sitting on a mole-hill in an adjoining field gazing hypnotically at a 69
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clump of grass – at the end of which, if we knew anything about it, the poor little mouse had had to come out or die of starvation and Svengali had probably fallen on it and squashed it flat.
Not that that worried Solomon. Even if it was only a moth he captured he went round like Trader Horn. Even when he couldn’t catch anything he still showed off.
Lately he’d taken to hunting under the blackberry hedge in the lane. Being Solomon it was naturally the most inaccessible hole he wanted to look down – and being a mug where he was concerned, I naturally helped him. Time and again I was caught by passers-by holding up the brambles for him while he explored underneath, either poking down the hole with his paw or else, which looked even more impressive, sitting intently by it waiting for his quarry to come out. Time and again people stopped to watch, obviously expecting – what with him and me and the raised brambles – that something big was about to be caught at any moment. And time and again after collecting his audience and keeping them on tenterhooks for ages, Solomon got up, stretched, and strolled nonchalantly away.