The fact that it never turned out like that – that the long and arduous summer was invariably followed by a longer and even more arduous winter – meant nothing to us. This year, we told ourselves annually, was going to be different.
This year, as a matter of fact, Solomon opened the proceedings the day the clocks went back by swallowing a prawn’s head. Celebrating the beginning of the season in our own quiet manner, we had invited friends round to supper. Making sure Solomon was well out of the way – he was, to be exact, sitting on a notice board up on the hillside; a notice board which was there to stop people going up a private road but which, since he had adopted it as his 119
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personal crow’s nest, now leaned so far forward nobody could read what it said – I was shelling prawns for scampi.
The wind was in my favour, Solomon I thought was scanning the horizon for Sheba – that, of course, was where I made my mistake. Solomon was actually scanning it for prawns. I left my post for just two seconds to check that the table was properly set, and by the time I got back there he was going backwards round the kitchen with one jammed firmly in his throat and that was the end of relaxation for that evening.
Supper was late, our guests arrived just in time to help hold him down while the vet got it out, and hardly was that little crisis safely over than Solomon was sick. Not on account of the prawn but as a reminiscent afterthought, halfway through the coffee.
Solomon was often sick when people came. Not because he felt ill. It just happened that when we had visitors his favourite place was on the bureau, keeping an Oriental eye on them. After a while, when nothing exciting happened like somebody eating something or somebody wanting a game with his Ping-Pong ball, he would get bored and yawn. When he yawned, being Solomon, he did it in style.
A great big noisy yawn about a foot wide that invariably over-reached itself – and there he was. Sick. Usually down the front of the bureau, where he sat and watched entranced while it trickled round the carving and looked most hurt when people moved away.
When he wasn’t sick, Sheba quite often bit her nails for us. When we were spared that, Solomon could be depended on to want his earth box. In the spare room it was. Out of sight but not, unfortunately, of sound. However loudly we 120
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Highly Entertaining talked – and crescendo had nothing on us when we saw him disappearing into the hall – there was always somebody to peer at the ceiling a moment later and ask what on earth that noise was. Always somebody, too, to say ‘Niagara Falls’.
Not, mind you, that the cats were responsible for everything that happened to us on social occasions. The time Charles fell through a chair, for instance, in somebody else’s house – we could hardly blame them for that. We could hardly blame our hosts, either. All they said by way of friendly conversation was that they had picked it up at a sale last week for ten bob, and didn’t we think it was a bargain.
It was a shock to them, too, when Charles, who was sitting in it, seized the arms, braced himself rigidly against the back to test it – and before anybody could do anything about it, there was a sudden crack and the seat collapsed.
Neither was it the cats’ fault the night the same people came to visit us back and Charles offered them gin and lime.
They were quite happy with gin and tonic. We hadn’t touched lime juice ourselves for months – not since the day I spilt some on a table and it took all the polish off, and Charles got worried about its effect on his stomach. Why he offered it right then I couldn’t imagine, but unfortunately he did.
Unfortunately, because when he went out to the kitchen and found that what we did have had gone peculiar he didn’t leave it at that and say we’d run out. He brought it in to show them. Sorry chaps but it was a bit high, he said, waving before their astonished eyes a bottle absolutely covered in dust and containing what looked like a flotilla of long-dead fish. Would they perhaps rather go without?
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Not only that but, covertly eyeing the remains of their gins and tonics to make sure there weren’t any peculiar things in them, it wasn’t long before they went home as well.
Things like that happen to everybody at times, of course.
A neighbour of ours was making ham croquettes one night for her visitors and got the mincer stuck, and when she called her husband and he couldn’t unjam it he threw it out through the door. Because he was naturally mad with it and, according to him, because he thought the jolt might loosen it. What in fact did happen was that the mincer pitched in a bed of stinging nettles, they couldn’t get it out without cutting the whole lot down and there wasn’t time for that, so she had to rush up and borrow ours. Did things ever go wrong like that for us? she asked tearfully as I hauled it out of the cupboard and blew the cobwebs off. Almost every day, I assured her.
With us, as a matter of fact, things could go wrong even when we were not having visitors. Not having them, that is, in the sense of trying to put them off. Most people do that at some time or other – on account of being tired, or having booked up two lots of people by mistake, or, when the time comes deciding that they just can’t face up to it.
That was what happened with the Joneses. Charles himself had invited them round for the evening. Charles himself, every time I groaned at the thought, kept saying we had to ask them some time and if we played cards or something it wouldn’t be too bad. And it was Charles himself who, the day they were due to come, had a vision halfway through tea of old Jones being hearty and bellowing the place down like a foghorn and Mrs Jones being coy and wanting to play whist, and said he couldn’t stand it. Not today, he said. Next 122
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Highly Entertaining week perhaps – but not today. He wasn’t feeling strong enough. Couldn’t I ring up and say he was dead?
What I did say, going hot and cold all over and quite certain they knew I was cramming, was that I thought he had a cold. An excuse that has probably been used a million times before – but I bet this was the only time it was greeted at the other end by the assurance that they didn’t mind a bit; never caught colds; hadn’t had one for years; what old Charles wanted was somebody to cheer him up and not to worry, they were coming right on over.
That put us on the spot all right. There was Charles saying his reputation was ruined. There was I – after all, I was the one who’d made the excuse – thinking mine was too. There was the clock ticking on to seven-thirty. When suddenly I had an idea. In the circumstances it was a jolly good one, too. All it involved was Charles taking a really sound pinch of snuff.
It worked all right, though I had to stand over him to see he did it thoroughly. By the time the Joneses came –
throwing wide the windows, slapping him on the back and simply dying, they said, for a nice game of whist – he was sneezing so hard he wasn’t worrying about his reputation.
All he was worrying about was whether he’d ruined his nose.
Winter pursued quite a moderate course after that.
Nothing untoward happened at all that I can remember.
Friends came and went, and played canasta with the cats sitting on their laps, and talked of world affairs. The only thing of note at all was the night somebody went into the bathroom and tugged and tugged, and just as it got to the stage (owing to the acoustics you can, unfortunately, hear 123