It was only after I’d seen the adder going into the pipe that we realised the worst danger, however. It would be damp inside still, said Charles. The adders would go up there to get what water there was…
So that was how I started going ahead on walks, blocking the ends of the water-pipes so that Solomon couldn’t go up them. We knew the stream wouldn’t start running again till the swallets filled up again, of course, and that, even if it did, it would filter through the brushwood. But other people walking through the Valley didn’t. So, thinking they were helping, they unblocked the pipes as fast as I blocked them. Life was one long nightmare in case Solomon went up one and encountered an adder; many a time I grabbed him by his tail just as he was vanishing up a pipe like the White Rabbit… it was a great weight off our minds when the stream began to run again.
It just doesn’t seem possible now, Solomon bound ing around like that. We went on holiday a few weeks later. I can remember, when we came back, Solomon accompanying me joyously up and down the garden in the rain while I helped unpack the car… Solomon rolling on the lawn, full of exuberance at being home… Solomon, less than a fortnight before he died, leaping through the air to catch a ping-pong ball… He liked that sort of game, he said. Hadn’t played it for a long time, had we?
We’d been home for about a month when we noticed he was drinking a lot more water. Not just longer draughts when he did drink, but coming back to his bowl again and 31
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again. He went off his food, too – quite quickly. Yet he didn’t appear to be ill.
To be on the safe side, we called the Vet. It was his kidney trouble stepping up a bit, we thought. Treat ment like Sheba had had would probably clear it.
This time it didn’t. The Vet told us afterwards that in Sheba’s case her system had achieved its own com pensation.
She was getting by with a lessened kidney area, as human beings are known to do. Sooner or later the trouble would come again, though, he said, and eventually there’d be nothing he could do.
With Solomon, this state had already been reached. He must have compensated on previous occasions, without our knowing. The Vet came every day for four days. For four nights Charles and I stayed up with him. On the fourth day, my birthday, we thought that we had won. His breathing had become laboured the previous night and it had worried us, but, in the early hours of the morning, it suddenly calmed. There was recognition, too, in his eyes when he looked at us, and, when I called him, he lifted his head and turned it in my direction.
‘Happy Birthday,’ said Charles and I thought it was my happiest birthday ever.
During the day, however, the laboured breathing began again. He was in no pain, said the Vet when he came at lunch time, but he was afraid that he was dying. As a last resort he gave him cortisone, but it was all to no avail. At five next morning, with my arms around him, Solomon left us. And it still seemed impossible that it could have happened.
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FOUR
We buried him in our wood. In the clearing opposite the cottage, where the daffodils bloom in springtime and where once, when he was young, we’d watched him leap through the air like a salmon in pursuit of a wildly clucking pheasant. We buried him in his basket through whose air-holes, as a kitten, he’d once got his head stuck on a journey to Halstock and I’d had to push it back. It had been his basket all his life. He lay so very still now in the bottom of it.
Then we went back to the cottage and Sheba and another problem. How was she going to react to his loss?
Not too badly, it seemed at first. She purred at us, talked to us, ate her food as if nothing had happened. That night, however, unable to settle with our thoughts in the cottage, we went out for a while to visit friends. We left Sheba with a hot-water bottle on our bed, in a nest of sweaters as we’d 33
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always done. In the old days when we’d come home there’d been a thump as we opened the back door – Solomon jumping preparatorily off the bed – the sound of strenuous stropping on the stairs and, when we opened the door into the hall, the pair of them waiting side by side to greet us.
Never were they crying, unless it was to tell us to Hurry Up. This night, however, as we came down the path, we heard a sound inside that struck to our very hearts. Sheba was crying with loneliness in the darkness.
She cried again that night when we went to bed. She hadn’t always slept with Solomon. He liked his armchair in the living room with a blanket and a hot-water bottle in it, but Sheba, if it was a warm night or she was cross with him or he wouldn’t stop snoring, would go off on her own on the settee. She never slept with him if he was ill, either. She hadn’t slept with him now for almost a week.
Always, though, they’d been in the same room together and that must have given her comfort. Either that or she now thought he was up with us and she was being left out of things. Anyway, there she was, crying downstairs so that we could hear her. So Charles went down and brought her up.
For the next four weeks she slept on my shoulder every night. In the old days, if we had them up with us, Solomon had that place while Sheba lay beyond him in touchy acceptance, ready to leap from the bed at once and Be an Outcast if Solomon or I so much as moved an inch. Now she stretched in my arms, luxuriated, purred whenever I spoke to her. First Cat at Last, she said.
If that had been that, I don’t know what we would have done. Always in our minds had been the thought that if 34
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we did lose one of the cats we’d get another immediately.
A rumbustious seal-point male, we’d said, or a little blue-point queen… The place just wouldn’t be right without a pair of them. But was that fair now, with Sheba happier at nights than she had ever been…? Except that she was so unhappy during the day…
For the first couple of days presumably she thought Solomon was out somewhere. Then, realising she hadn’t seen him for a while, she began to search. She would pause when she was eating and look round for him. Under the table? Coming through the door? But he wasn’t there. She would sit upright in front of the fire in the evenings and look over her shoulder. Why didn’t he come and sit by her?
her expression demanded. She couldn’t understand it – he always did.
One of their favourite places had been on our bed in the nest of sweaters. If it was cold, if they thought we were going out or if they just happened to feel like it, somebody would appear in the bedroom while I was there and hopefully inspect the bed. Up – being a sucker
– I’d go with a hot-water bottle; the two of them would follow along behind me; I’d make up the nest while they sat and watched me and there, side by side on the bottle like a pair of Trafalgar Square lions, they’d stay happily for hours.
Now only one little cat asked for a bottle – and, when I gave it to her, sat day after day only on her own half of it, leaving the other space for Solomon and looking towards the door for him to come. At other times, when the waiting and wondering grew too intolerable for her, she’d go off on her own and start to call him. That was the worst thing 35
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of all for us to listen to. The lonely, heartbroken moaning, because she was Looking and he Wouldn’t Come.
One night she was crying upstairs and we went to fetch her. We couldn’t find her at first. She was hiding behind the armchair in the spare room, as she’d done so often as a kitten, calling him to come and waiting to pounce on him when he did. It was so many years since they’d played at ambushes round that chair. She must have been missing him to the very depths of her being to have remembered it and hoped it might bring him back.