They made admirable foils for each other, Timothy and Solomon. One moment so wistful – like the time Timothy, gazing round-eyed up at the craggy hill behind us, said if they fell off there they’d be dead wouldn’t they and go to heaven, and never eat any tea again ever
’cos they’d only be bones – whereupon I blew my nose hastily and the Rector’s wife went straight out and bought him three boxes of caps for his pistol. The next so aggravating – like the time I found him standing on his head on our stairs, walking complicatedly up and down the wall in his gumboots while Solomon sat proudly by like a ringmaster – I could have spanked the pair of them.
Everybody admired the picture they made together.
Everybody, that is, except Sheba, who went round them in a wide semicircle when she met them in the lane, assured everybody she met that she didn’t know them at all, and forecast darkly to us when she came in that before long Solomon would be using a catapult too and the pair of them would end up behind bars. Everybody – even Father Adams – said how it had improved Timothy. Darn he if he wouldn’t get ’un a kitten for hisself when he went home, he said – whereupon Sheba squawked her approval and immediately offered him Sol.
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Solomon’s Friend Timothy What was worrying us was how Solomon would react when Timothy did go back to town. Animals, they say, form strange attachments for children. Only recently we had heard of a Siamese called Augustus who had been an absolute terror in his original home. Shouting, stealing, fighting cats and intimidating dogs – in the end they’d had to practically give him away to get him adopted at all. In his new home, however, they had a little girl, with whom Augustus had fallen in love so completely that when she went into hospital to have her tonsils out it wasn’t she her parents worried about but Augustus, who went into a decline on her bed, said his heart was broken, refused to get up or eat, and pretty nearly died. In the end, for his sake, they had to get her home from hospital at the first possible moment and let her convalesce in bed – where, we gathered, she and Augustus ate ice cream and arrowroot together, eventually got up together, and when last heard of were living very happily indeed.
It wouldn’t be like that for Solomon. Even if Father Adams’s summons went off all right Timothy wouldn’t be back at least until the Spring. How, we wondered, would our black man manage when he went away?
As it happened, very well indeed. Solomon did wait by the gate for him the first morning – until he spotted me in the greenhouse trying to let out a blue tit which had flown in and was trapped. He soon forgot Timothy in the excitement of trying to help me catch it – and of being bundled, yelling his head off, indoors, where he sat in the window roaring furiously about not being allowed to be a Sportsman.
I thought he looked pathetic the next morning, too, hunched motionless on the garden wall with Sheba – out 115
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of sympathy I supposed, since even she must have a heart somewhere – sitting silently beside him. I even went up to comfort him. It was quite needless. Absolutely entranced, they were watching a litter of piglets which had just arrived in the next field. Solomon turned his head to greet me as I went up. I knew the great big pig that lived at the farm, he said excitedly, his eyes as round as bottle tops. WELL. She’d just had kittens!
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TWELVE
Highly Entertaining
The cats didn’t like the winter. Sheba, who had rather a thin coat, complained because it was cold. The first sign of a frost in our house was indeed not the pipes bursting or the dahlias turning black but Sheba sitting hopefully in front of electric fires waiting for them to be switched on.
Solomon, on the other hand, having a coat like a beaver, a circulation that was apparently oil-fired and an insatiable desire to be out, complained because he was kept in.
He was kept in – comparatively speaking, that is, as against his ranging freedom of the summer – for three reasons.
Firstly that cold, wet weather was supposed to be bad for Siamese and, as Father Adams said the day he saw him sitting on the wall watching the pigs, if we didn’t watch out he’d get a chill in his backside. Secondly that after an hour 117
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or so with the back door open and the east wind cutting through like a knife Charles would suggest that we got him in and shut it before we got a chill in ours. And thirdly that it wasn’t safe for him to be out after dark on account of foxes and badgers.
It was the last part that annoyed him most. Darkness, with the foxes barking in the woods and the sound of badgers grunting their way up the track to their playground in the clearing on the hillside, was just when Solomon wanted to be out.
Every night after supper he would make a tour of the windows. Hear that? he would demand, sticking his head indignantly through the curtains as a mournful hooting came from up in the oak tree. Owls. People let them out.
Hear that? he would wail as a vixen called way off in the darkness. Foxes. Nobody kept them in. Hear that? he would entreat as the sound of cracking branches told of animals with white striped snouts lumbering clumsily through the undergrowth. Badgers. Supposed we never wanted him to see a badger, he would complain, his voice rising to an aggrieved wail. Knowing his propensity for poking things with his paw and, as Charles said, not wanting a cat with a wooden leg around the place, he was certainly right there.
What with outbursts like this from him and Sheba eternally complaining that her Ears were Freezing (they were too; like most Blue Points they had hardly any fur on them at all, five feet from the fire and you could practically see the icicles) our cats certainly didn’t like the winter. Neither did the Rector’s, who marched indignantly indoors with the first frost, announced that they were half Siamese and this 118
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Highly Entertaining was when it showed, and promptly went to earth under the eiderdown.
Neither, if it came to that, did the Rector. The electricity supply wasn’t too good at our end of the village. This was the time of year when he was faced with the tricky little problem that if he switched on the heating in the church the villagers complained because their lights went down, and if he didn’t the organist complained because the damp made the keys stick on the organ – when, passing his study window, he could be seen with a decidedly unecclesiastic expression on his face writing to the Electricity Board.
We liked the winter. Hope, as several people said when they heard about our adopting Samson, certainly sprang eternal in our breasts – and never did it spring more strongly than when winter came upon us. When, after a long and arduous summer we looked forward to a period of rest. Dormant, as Charles poetically put it, as the season itself. Reading our books. Relaxing by the fire. Entertaining our friends.