Raining Cats and Donkeys (14 page)

  He'd gone up behind the cottage all right – and so, for once, had his enemy. When Solomon came back a while later he had the most dreadful fight wounds I have ever seen on a cat. His ears were bleeding, his stomach gouged by ripping claws, his paws so savagely bitten that the bites went right through his pads. But for the mud and the smell, where Robertson had apparently rolled him on the ground and sprayed him in defeat, and the tell-tale fur-tufts, ginger and Siamese mixed, that lay like drifts of dandelion clocks where they'd met and fought under the rowan tree, I'd have thought he'd met up with a fox.

  The fight had been so fiendish that that was obviously why it had been so silent. Nobody had had the breath to howl. The smell was fiendish, too. Solomon reeked like a Venetian canal. I sponged him as best I could without disturbing him, but when Sheba joined him on the hot-water bottle that night, just when our wounded warrior was at his lowest ebb and Sheba cuddling up to him would have given him comfort, she positively reeled. He Stank, she said, spitting at him and fleeing from the chair in horror.

  No Florence Nightingale was Sheba. For days, while Solomon lay in his chair unable to walk, feeding wanly from our hands, struggling weakly to his haunches when he wanted to use his box, which was a signal for us to lift him down, and looking mutely at us when he'd finished, which was the signal to lift him back, Sheba slept relentlessly on the settee. Want her to catch something? she bawled, leaping indignantly from the chair if we tried to put her with him. Want her to smell like that? she demanded, when Charles said why wasn't she kind to him.

  Three weeks later, however, when the sequel to the fight occurred, Solomon no longer smelled, Sheba was back to sleeping with him – and that was how our next traumatic drama took place.

  We'd had to take Solomon to the Vet. He'd recovered by now from his wounds. He had countless bare patches where they'd been, of course, and eventually, as well we knew, he'd grow white hairs there for a while as a result of the shock. He had done since he was a kitten, this time he was going to look spotted as a rocking horse and Sheba would no doubt start nattering about catching those too, in due course – but it wasn't that that was worrying us.

  Solomon was off his food. Badly off his food. As a result of shock, we'd thought at first, or maybe because of his distress at being defeated. Now, three weeks later, he wasn't eating at all; he was thin and light as a feather; and, most ominous of all, we hadn't heard him speak for days.

  Vitamin deficiency said Mr Harler when, for the umpteenth time, Solomon once more stood woefully on his surgery table being gone over with thermometer and stethoscope. But wasn't it the same as last year? I suggested anxiously. When Solomon fought Robertson, if he remembered, and caught a virus, and he'd given him aureomycin? It was the aureomycin I wanted to remind him of. By now I was expecting Solomon to collapse at any minute, aureomycin had pulled him round before, and I didn't want any mistake about it.

  Mr Harler eyed me sternly. Last time, he said, this cat had had a temperature. This time he didn't. Aureomycin wouldn't have any effect. He didn't have a virus. Maybe this was the result of shock – such deficiency sometimes was – but it was Vitamin B he needed, and it was Vitamin B he was going to
get
. Saying which he got out a syringe, fixed an ampoule to the end of it, tested it, applied it practisedly to Solomon's rear – and the contents shot straight through the back of the syringe and over Charles.

  'Stuck' said Mr Harler resignedly, obviously wondering how we did it. He fetched another syringe and ampoule, fixed things up again, and this time Solomon got the dose intended for him. Within minutes Mr Harler was seeing us relievedly off from the surgery steps, telling us to let him know tomorrow if he wasn't any better but he thought that would do the trick.

  It did so far as Solomon was concerned. He ate some meat from my hand as soon as he got home. He was wolfing food the next morning as if we'd been starving him for a month. It was the rest of us who suffered.

  I'm afraid I wasn't very sympathetic when Charles, driving home from the Vet's, came over queer when we reached the cottage. He'd been nattering so much about the stuff spraying into his mouth and the putrid taste of it and wondering whether it was poisonous or not, that I put it down to his imagination. When, as he went to get out, he suddenly sat heavily on the running-board and said that he felt giddy, I said 'Don't be silly, it didn't make Solomon giddy' and never gave it another thought.

  Not till the following day, that was, when we were in the sitting-room just before tea – Solomon, with a solid meal of rabbit inside him, curled recuperatively in the armchair, Sheba spread like a little blue buffalo robe on top of him, and a log-fire blazing comfortingly in the grate. Outside, which made things seem even cosier, it was snowing heavily. A late snowfall we hadn't anticipated, which by now was a good ten inches deep.

  'Thank goodness we took Solomon to Harler yesterday', I said with relief. 'We'd never have got through in this.' Charles agreed; we looked with a common thought towards the chair in which, just at that moment, Sheba was reaching out to give Solomon a loving lick on his flanks – and in that very instant it happened. Sheba leapt from the chair before our eyes, gnashed her teeth in frenzy and, foaming alarmingly at the mouth, started tearing round and round the room.

  'She's having a fit!' I whispered, almost too scared to speak. 'How can we get her to Harler?' cried Charles, his thoughts on the impassable roads. And there we were once more like a scene from Tchekov. The snow slanting down outside, Sheba going round and round in circles, Charles and I wringing our hands and Solomon – visible only as a pair of big round eyes – hiding under the table.

  It came to us eventually, of course. That some of the spilt injection must have gone over Solomon's coat, that Sheba had just licked it off and that – allowing for the fact that Charles hadn't actually foamed at the mouth or run in circles himself (a lot of notice I'd have taken if he had, he said, when I wouldn't even believe he'd been feeling giddy) her reaction had been much the same as his. We caught her, wiped the taste from her mouth with a towel, and in seconds she'd recovered. Except – trust Sheba – that when she tried to tell Charles about it, thanks to all the frothing she'd done and all the lick she'd lost, nothing came out but a squeak.

  Meanwhile the snow came implacably down; Solomon spoke for the first time in weeks, wailing from under the table that he was Convalescent if we remembered, and he'd like some food if we'd finished playing; and our lives returned to normal.

  More normal than they'd been for a long time, for in the interim Robertson had been adopted. By a family new to the district who wanted a cat and who, when they heard the story of our ginger outcast, offered to give him a home. It was the only possible solution. Sorry for him as we were, we couldn't have kept him any longer, with his terrible hatred for Solomon. So Robertson – fed, sheltered and with a family at last to call his own – went to live at the top of the hill, and we, with Solomon and Sheba, returned to peace once more in the Valley.

  For a little while, at any rate. No sooner was Solomon on his feet and out again than we heard, one day, the old familiar war-cry from the hillside. 'Robertson!' we cried in unison, making as one for the door.

  It wasn't Robertson. It was a strange black cat who, after one close-up howl from Solomon, fled for his life into the trees. We grabbed Solomon, brought him back, set him down, with warnings about fighting, in the yard... It was no use, of course. Solomon – King of the Valley again what with Mr Harler's vitamins, a successful wrestling bout or two with Sheba and now this strange cat running away from him, was back up on the hillside like a longshot.

  I was up there like a longshot after him, too, and so it was that I was on hand when Annabel, grazing blissfully a dozen yards or so away, suddenly decided to charge him. Only in fun, no doubt, seeing that everybody else seemed to be running after him and there he was so temptingly standing on a tussock. But Solomon had his back to her – and Annabel, these days, was temperamentally unpredictable.

  There was no time to get between them. At top speed I raced after her, gave her a push from behind that sent her

  flying down the hill away from Solomon, unable to stop myself I went flying down behind her...

  Now we were really back to normal said Charles as with Annabel snorting derisively from the pathway and Solomon, calm as a cucumber, still surveying the land for the other cat from his tussock, I retrieved myself from a clump of nettles.

  Thank goodness, indeed we were.

T
he trouble between Father Adams and Fred Ferry resolved itself around this time, too. Quite simply through Father Adams's television set catching on fire. If they'd thought of it somebody could have arranged it afore, said a wit in the Rose and Crown that night when, after their vicissitudes of the past few months, the pair of them sat sheepishly quaffing their cider side by side at the table by the fire.

  But nobody had thought of it, and it had taken spontan­eous combustion on the part of the ancient set while Father Adams was, as Fred kept joyfully informing his audience, 'Out in the little old outhouse', to bring about the desired reunion. Fred, passing by and seeing the flames, had rushed into the house and pulled out the plug. Mr Carey had rushed in after him and smothered the fire with a rug, which explained why the third member of the trio at the table, looking more sheepish even than the other two and assuring everybody who spoke to him that it was only ginger ale he was drinking, was the Rose and Crown's erstwhile bête noir.

  Not any more, though. The brewery-men had long grown accustomed to taking the beer through the other door which, to tell the truth, was more convenient. The fact that the heather had taken root on his banks showed Mr Carey to be a man who knew his gardening. The County Council's decision not only that it was legal for him to alter his entrance if he wished but that people who used his entrance for passing in were in point of fact committing trespass, proved that he knew his rights (and of nobody does a country-dweller approve more heartily than the man who knows those). All it needed was something like the fire to break the ice and there he was. Discussing the best way of planting rhubarb crowns with Alby Smith. Where the new post-box ought to be (as against where the authorities had recently put it) with Harry Freeman. One of the village at last.

  As fast as one door closes another opens, however, as Miss Wellington is fond of saying, and never is it truer than in a village. No sooner had that little problem settled itself than the Duggans were in the soup.

  It was Spring, of course, when ventures start up like snowdrops, so it was hardly surprising when the Duggans woke up one morning in their bungalow on the hilltop to find that someone had started building on the steep, wooded slope below them.

  They wouldn't have minded normal building, said Alan Duggan a few days later. Cement mixers and men dropping planks and lorries coming past with piles of bricks – it had happened with their own bungalow and they'd have stood it, in their turn, with other people's. But a
bulldozer
, he said (for the hillside had to be dug out to level the site). Working at
weekends,
he said (for the construction, we soon discovered, was being done by a part-time builder). Working at
night
, he howled, when an arc-light went up while the bulldozer chugged on without respite.

  Trees crashed, bonfires blazed, the bulldozer thudded. At intervals the barrage appeared to be intensified by mortar fire which was, Charles happily insisted, old Alan firing back. Actually it was the quarry a mile away blasting rock for the next day's work, but it fitted into the cacophony like the guns in the 1812 Overture.

  What really convinced the Duggans that it wasn't their year was when, in the middle of all this, the people on their other side started building a boat. A nice young couple they were, whose cabin cruiser, rising from their driveway like Venus from the foam, roused admiration on the part of all but the local diehards who wanted to know what they wanted it for in the middle of the country, and the Duggans, over the fence, who had to listen to the Seraph being built.

  Peaceful as doves for six blasted years and now
they
had to blasted well start, said Alan. He hoped they sank at sea, he muttered savagely, listening night after night to the sawing. It was the hammering, however, that really got him. Hammering which in the normal way he'd never have noticed, but which, added to the clamour of the building, fell on his anguished ears like water torture.

  We called on them one Saturday afternoon and heard it ourselves. From one side came the powerful thud of the bulldozer. From the other, gentle, spasmodic tapping.