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supported on the blocks he provided not only to level them up but presumably so we could throw water under them as well.
Not, as Charles said, that we could have told Sidney that. It might have given him ideas. Not that we had much chance to dwell on our kitchen floor, either. That was the morning Sheba got bitten by an adder.
I know it was October and that adders usually bite in the Spring. That was what the vet said when I rang him up and told him – though as an afterthought he said our cats were capable of finding anacondas in January if they felt like it and he’d better come over right away. I know it was always Solomon we’d worried about over adders. Solomon, whose idea of capturing anything from a grass snake to a wasp was to poke it first to see if it moved and then sniff it to see if it was good to eat. Solomon, who when we took him for a walk dived impressively into every clump of grass we came to and then got so excited, seeing his own black paw emerge on the other side, that if an adder had been there he would have been a trophy on its totem pole before he could look round.
Not that Sheba was a snake-catcher either. It was just that
– being so good at everything – we’d always imagined that if she did go in for snaking she’d come home wearing them like leis. Which was why when she crept sadly into the cottage on three legs, holding one paw in the air and looking pitifully at us as she passed, to begin with we didn’t worry too much. There was always the chance she was imitating Solomon; apart from which we’d had so many false alarms with one or other of them falling off walls, the vet rushing over to diagnose sprains, and cats’ liniment at 7/6d a time 104
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The Defeat of Samson simply piling up in the bathroom – unused, because they hid the moment they saw the bottle – we informed her the slings were in the first-aid cabinet and continued talking to Sidney.
It wasn’t till we discovered she was under the bed and that her paw, normally so small and neat, was the size of a balloon that we realised there was something wrong –
and by that time it was almost too late. When we got her out from under the bed she was already in a coma. She lay in Charles’s arms as if she were dead while I phoned the vet. Completely limp she lay there – though by this time her eyes were slightly open – while he examined her, said it did indeed look like snakebite and we could take no chances, and swiftly injected histamine into her rump.
That was to stop the swelling. For the next half-hour our world stood still, while we waited to see if it acted and the vet arranged to get snake-serum, if it were needed, from the local hospital. I had her by this time – close in my arms for warmth, with Charles and Sidney standing by and Solomon, always to the forefront in a drama, peering curiously from a nearby chair.
Never had she seemed so dear to us as she lay there while the minutes passed and the swelling rose slowly to her shoulder – not even in those long night hours when she was lost. Then at least there was a chance that she was safe somewhere. Now we could only watch her and know that if she left us – wicked, destructive, maddening as she was
– part of our hearts would go too.
There was, as Charles said when it was all over, no need for us to have worried. Sheba was made of tougher stuff 105
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than that. Quite apart from anything else she wasn’t going to bequeath all the fish to Solomon if she could help it.
Half an hour later, with the swelling miraculously halted and Sheba herself happily playing Camille on a hot-water bottle, the vet pronounced her out of danger. All that remained now, he said, patting her gently on the cheek, was for the little girl to get better.
The little girl did that all right. After a couple of days’
convalescence on our bed, with Charles carrying her up and down stairs because her foot still swelled when she walked – and the only thing she could eat, she assured us casting triumphant glances at Solomon every time she saw him gloomily chewing cod, was gallons and gallons of crab paste – she was as right as rain. When she did get up she nearly drove us mad for days drinking water non-stop with the noise of a St Bernard – but that, said the vet when we reported it, was just her system counteracting the effect of the histamine. After we’d opened the kitchen door for her about fifty times in an evening it seemed to us more like Sheba being cussed, but eventually, just before our legs gave out, that wore off too.
All that remained was Sheba telling everybody ad nauseam how she’d been bitten by an adder and nearly died; a certain cogitation on the part of ourselves and the vet as to whether it might, after all, have been a wasp; and a firm conviction on the part of Sheba that Sidney – when we looked back we realised that he had indeed been standing behind her at the time – was the one who stuck the hypodermic into her. Right in the Bot, she reproached him every time he appeared. Right where it Hurt. Just when she was Almost 106
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The Defeat of Samson Dying. Sidney did his best to make it up, but she wouldn’t go near him for weeks.
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ELEVEN
Solomon’s Friend Timothy
The next thing that happened to us was Timothy. The boy with the catapult. One morning he broke our kitchen window with a deft shot round the coalhouse and while he was still gazing admiringly at the hole Charles nipped out of the back gate and grabbed him. We had been wondering for days who he belonged to. Now, when we marched him off, cowboy hat and all, to try and find who owned him, nobody was more surprised than we were when he suddenly fled howling up Father Adams’s path.
He was, it seemed, the Adamses’ grandson, and he was staying with them to give his mother a rest. The reason we hadn’t found it out before was that we personally had been busy with our own problems over the cats; in the winter we only saw Father Adams (to talk to, anyway) at 108
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Solomon’s Friend Timothy weekends; and Father Adams, when we said fancy our not knowing about a thing like that, said he believed in keeping his troubles to himself.
That I remembered as one of Grandma’s favourite opening remarks, too – and sure enough next moment we were hearing the lot. The things Timothy had done at home – the last of which, nearly prostrating his mother for good and all, had been to swallow the axle off a toy motorcar. It wasn’t that so much that upset her, explained Father Adams – though she did faint off a couple of times when she thought of it going round in Timothy’s stomach.
It was the fact that when the doctors got him to hospital and had him X-rayed they couldn’t find it.
They said he hadn’t swallowed it. He said he had. His mother, beside herself with worry, was expecting it to puncture his vitals at any moment. When, following a hunch, a doctor and nurse accompanied them home and said now what about the little man showing them where it was – and he, bright as a button, produced it from the table drawer – she practically had hysterics. Why, she wept, before fainting off for the third time, had he told her he’d swallowed it? Laughing happily at his little joke on Mum he said he had. And then he’d sicked it up.