We'd been out on the Saturday afternoon. When we came back the paddock was strewn with apples and cake. A large bag of bread was propped at the paddock gate. Another bag of bread and a box of sugar were at the kitchen door. That evening practically the entire village either called or telephoned to enquire after Annabel's health. And at ten o'clock the Vet rang up.
What was this about our donkey being in foal? he demanded. He sounded rather brusque for someone ringing up to congratulate us. Perhaps he was annoyed at not being told, I thought. Hastily I assured him that it wasn't true. If it had been, of course he'd have been the first to know, I told him consolingly.
First his foot, said Mr Harler. It was just that they didn't give cortisone to animals in foal. There could be all sorts of complications and it would be just like us not to know. When I explained that it was a false alarm – about people seeing her shed shut up and her romance the previous winter with Henry – he said that was just like us too. We certainly got no uplift from our donkey.
TWO
So Do Siamese Cats
At first sight, of course, the cats more than made up for the prestige we lost over Annabel. People who would have passed the cottage with scarcely a glance stopped as if struck when they saw them in the yard. Solomon sitting tall and straight behind the fish-pool like a statue of Bast, eyeing them with the incomparable hauteur of a Siamese tom who knows how handsome he is. Sheba beaming cross-eyedly at them from her favourite spot on the coal-house roof 'Oh look – Siamese!' they would exclaim, gazing with new eyes at this little valley cottage which, for all its apparent modesty, housed two such aristocrats of the cat world.
That was all they knew about it. Those elegant creatures, looking as if the only way they moved from place to place was in a royal litter with Charles and I carrying the poles, regularly got us into as much trouble as a posse of donkeys put together and were, just around then, involved in a feud with a black and white tom.
He was an immigrant from a neighbouring village.
People knew who his owners were and he'd been taken home to them several times with the suggestion that they have him neutered. Miss Wellington, a neighbour of ours who worried about these things, even offered to pay for it. His owners wouldn't hear of it. Apparently they liked a feline Captain Blood around the place. Old Butch wouldn't be the same if they did that, they said, fondling his black and white bullet head affectionately. Too right he wouldn't, and the valley would have been a far more peaceful place in consequence. As it was he'd be back within hours, looking up his girl friends and fighting with the boys, and Charles and I, when we knew he was around, had to keep a non-stop watch on Solomon. Other cats, after one encounter, had a wholesome respect for Butch. Solomon, our black-faced Walter Mitty, had the idea that he, not Butch, was Captain Blood and was prepared to fight till he dropped to prove it.
Why a neutered Siamese – particularly one so gentle-natured as Solomon, who would kick heftily at my arm with his back legs in play and then, worried in case he'd hurt me, look at me anxiously with his deep blue eyes, and thereafter kick deliberately wide so as not to touch me, should have such designs to be a fighter was inexplicable, but there it was. As a kitten he'd defied, and had to be rescued from, practically every cat in the neighbourhood. As a cat his howls – as of someone being sawn in pieces and if we didn't hurry up we wouldn't have a Solomon at all – sent us haring up the valley invariably to find that it was the other cat who was cornered. Solomon was merely practising psychology; telling his opponent what he'd do to him if he dared to move an inch.
When Butch came on the scene, however, it was a different matter. Butch wasn't intimidated by Oriental war-songs and bushed-up tails and somebody walking sideways at him like a crab. Butch just pitched in and fought. To our amazement, Solomon fought back. He came home with bleeding ears, with scratches on his face, occasionally with blood on his sleek cream chest – it made no difference. The very next time he heard Butch's troubadour love-song filtering down the valley – so small and high-pitched compared with a Siamese voice that, as Charles so often said, you'd hardly think Butch had the wherewithal to be a tom if we hadn't seen him swaggering past in the wake of his song like a miniature Minoan bull – and Solomon was off.
Sheba, on the contrary, was in. In and watching, Rapunzel-like, from the safety of the hall window. Sheba had once been bitten on the tail by a tom. She'd had an abscess the size of a tangerine on her rear as a result and hadn't forgotten it – until the day we were sitting on the lawn having tea.
Solomon was in the vegetable garden, which we'd cased thoroughly for signs of Butch and decided was safe for a while. Sheba – we didn't know where she was, except that it wouldn't be far away. No bold adventuress was Sheba. No further than the garden wall and run if a strange cat spoke to you was our blue girl's motto for safety. So we finished our tea, and Charles lay back in his deck-chair and said 'Now for five minutes' relaxation' – which is a favourite saying of his and one usually guaranteed to set things moving like a depth-charge – and sure enough, no sooner had he said it than there was the sound of a tremendous catfight and round the corner, and on to the lawn, rolled what appeared to be a large fur comet. It was going so fast we couldn't distinguish its component parts, but we had no doubt as to who they were. We were up, leaping the flowerbeds, shouting 'Solomon!' at the top of our voices to let him know help was at hand and hoping Butch wouldn't hit him too hard before we got there, when the comet suddenly stopped. Butch was there all right – a cowering, chastened Butch, with his head flat to the ground to escape the flailing paws. But his opponent – we nearly dropped when we realised it – wasn't Solomon. It was Sheba. Caught, presumably, sun-bathing in the yard and determined to defend her virtue to the end. Even as we watched she drew back, landed him a right-hook bang on his nose, and Butch disappeared over the gate.
Sheba fled indoors to consider her shame. Solomon arrived as fast as his legs would carry him from the vegetable garden, enquiring which way did he go and what – sniffing interestedly at Sheba – had he Done? You'd think they'd be glad that after that Butch never darkened our yard again. But no. Half an hour later Sheba – having apparently thought it over and decided that Butch had been paying her a compliment – appeared sleekly purring through the kitchen door and went and sat on the back gatepost in case he wanted to see her again. What was more, any time after that she heard Butch's boy-soprano in the distance, instead of running into the house for safety she nearly fell over herself rushing out of it to stand on the post and crane her neck up the lane to see if she could see him. While Solomon sat night after night in the open drive gateway, waiting for Butch to come by so he could fight him and complaining loudly, every time we spoke to him, that Sheba had spoiled everything as usual and why we kept her he didn't know.
He was there, looking in the wrong direction as usual, the night Miss Wellington came past with a dog the size of an elephant and the dog, spotting Solomon, chased him playfully through a row of cloches. We were having supper at the time and the first we knew of it was the sudden appearance of Miss Wellington in the lane outside our front gate, wringing her hands and yelling something we couldn't hear because the windows were shut. When we opened them she was wailing 'He's not my dog! He's not my dog!' and when we rushed out to see what had happened, Solomon was on the woodshed roof with his leg bleeding; the dog – a mastiff, who, so his owner told us later, wouldn't harm a flea but the silly clot would try to play with cats – was streaking up the hill as if the devil was after him; the row of cloches over the strawberries was completely smashed; and there, still wringing her hands in the lane and saying he wasn't her dog, was Miss Wellington. She'd brought him for a walk out of kindness. Let him off his lead for a run out of kindness. According to Father Adams she'd let a camel off his lead in the Sahara out of kindness if she got the chance and a good thing Lawrence hadn't had her along on his expedition. And there were we, out of surgery hours again, ringing up the Vet to say Solomon had had an accident and please could we bring him over at once.