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the tugging all over the cottage) where we usually yell through the door to give one good pull and wait, then it’ll work – just as we reached that stage the door of the sitting room opened and in came the visitor, rather red in the face, clutching the chain. Come off in her hand, she said it had
– but it wasn’t exactly surprising. Mighty tough was our flush. People’d been tolling it like a bell for years.
Nothing unusual, in fact, had happened for ages – until the night we went to see Charles’s friend Allister, and Allister got Charles interested in Yoga. Allister is always getting Charles interested in something. Once, when Solomon and Sheba were small, it was archery and they nearly winged the kittens. Once it was the proposition for removing rock from behind the cottage with dynamite. Fortunately for the cottage the proposition fell through. Now – unfortunately for me – it was Yoga.
Allister hadn’t done any himself. So far he’d only read a book about it. A jolly interesting book, as he said, and when I heard his description I was quite keen to read it myself. I wasn’t at all surprised when Charles said he was going to get it from the library. What did alarm me – knowing from experience what Charles’s enthusiasm could mean – was when, after several sessions of intense study, he announced that he was taking it up.
I spoke to Grandma, who had a lot of influence with Charles, about that. But all she did, after listening to him intently with her spectacles on the end of her nose, was encourage him.
Most interesting she said it was, and there was a great deal in some of these things. Charles might learn much from it. If she were younger she would take up Yoga too.
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Highly Entertaining Well, there we were. Charles meditating all over the place with Grandma’s blessing and practising deep breathing.
The cats sitting importantly by him meditating as well and announcing that they used to do this in Siam. Any minute now I expected to see the three of them wearing turbans.
Until, once again, I had an idea.
This, like the snuff one, was also born of desperation.
We were visiting some friends who lived on the moors at the time – staying with them, as the weather was bad, for the night. It was winter still, of course, and all the evening Charles had been talking happily of Yoga – how it mentally lifted one… raised one above bodily things… he didn’t, he announced (wonderful indeed, seeing there were several degrees of frost) even feel the cold.
I did. When we went to bed – without bottles because we’d been talking so late and Charles said we really didn’t need them, not feeling the cold – I was absolutely perished.
Round about two o’clock in the morning I got out and put the floor-rugs on the bed, but it made no difference. I was still perished.
Charles, who had rolled over while I was getting the rugs and was now comfortably cocooned in at least three-quarters of the bedclothes, informed me once more that he didn’t feel the cold. Mind over matter, he assured me, snuggling cosily into his pillow. I ought to take up Yoga. I ought to meditate too.
I did. After a little meditation I put my hand on one of the bedposts – one of those old-fashioned brass ones it was
– until it was icily cold. Lovingly I burrowed through the cocoon with it in search of Charles. Tenderly I placed it 125
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in the middle of his back. There was a loud, excruciating yell… And Charles gave up being interested in Yoga.
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THIRTEEN
With Solder and Crowbar
That was the winter Grandma’s parrot Laura died. As a result, according to Grandma, of the coalman looking at her through the window.
Everybody else said it was old age. To the family’s knowledge Grandma had had Laura for thirty years, and she hadn’t been first-hand even then. Grandma had bought her from a pub in the belief that parrots from licensed premises (or, she said, from a sailor if you could get one) talked – and had kept her, when she turned out to be completely dumb except for screaming like a maniac at mealtimes, on the grounds that it was wicked to keep birds in such places and she couldn’t send her back.
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her happily for thirty years. Until, in recent months, she had begun to droop, and lose her feathers, and develop a wheezy little cough. When we reminded Grandma of that, and how for weeks now Aunt Louisa had been putting whisky in her drinking water and tying a hot-water bottle to her cage every night and still Laura had gone on failing, Grandma said it was rubbish. Laura always got bronchitis in the winter, she said; Louisa always put whisky in her drinking water (a statement which we had to clarify when there were strangers present for the sake of Aunt Louisa’s reputation) and it was no use our arguing. With her own eyes she had seen the coalman looking through the window with his great black face, it had frightened poor Laura, and now she was dead.
She was indeed, and there wasn’t much we could do about it except change the coalman the following week and offer to get her another parrot. After which – the management of Grandma being rather wearing at times – Charles and I went down with flu.
It wasn’t so bad to begin with, when only Charles had it.
True it was unfortunate that the first day he took to his bed I had to go to town. When I got back the cats, whom I had left sitting happily on his chest enjoying his temperature
– the first time, Sheba announced, that she had been really warm this winter – were waiting anxiously for me in the hall window. Charles hadn’t fed them, complained Solomon, regarding me indignantly through the glass.
Charles was groaning, said Sheba, and they’d had to come downstairs because they couldn’t stand it. Charles hadn’t let them Out, roared Solomon, whose idea of anybody staying home, even with double pneumonia, was to let him 128
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With Solder and Crowbar in and out of doors all day long. Charles was hardly a little ray of sunshine either. When I went up to see him all he said – presumably in case it helped at the inquest – was that he’d taken his temperature at three o’clock and it was a hundred and two.
For three days he lay there wilting heroically. With his knees up most of the time because Sheba had decided that in the bed, in a little cave under Charles’s knees if he would kindly raise them for her, was the warmest place to be.
Calling feebly for more food – not because he was hungry but because by the time he’d braced himself to tackle his soup or his poached plaice Solomon, who didn’t believe in this weaker brethren business, had appreciatively eaten the lot. Assuring me, when I asked how he was, that he felt very frail indeed… very frail.
It was on Monday, however, when Charles was on the convalescent list and I had taken to my bed, that the fun really started. Not that it was exactly fun for me. I had a temperature too, and to my poor, flu-befuddled mind it seemed more like one of those symbolic plays where people keep walking in and out.