Raining Cats and Donkeys (16 page)

  I knew what the instructions said without looking at them.

  'Remove birdcages and fishbowls... cover children's cots... not to be used on cats and dogs...' We never used it at home ourselves. The only reason we had it was that we'd taken it on a trip to the Camargue in the mosquito season – and the only reason it happened to be on hand, which was how I'd picked it up, was that I'd got it out the previous day to give the name of it to Louisa, who was going on her first-ever trip abroad and had visions of deadly insects everywhere from Calais onwards.

  When I told Charles what I'd done, his opinion, based on the observation that I'd used it enough on the old etangs and he was still around himself, was that it probably wouldn't hurt her at all. She was big, he said. She didn't lick herself as a cat or dog would. Better just watch her for a while, he advised. There was nothing else we could do.

  There was, though. After ten minutes of waiting for her to collapse – sure at one moment that she had because I couldn't see her, but it was all right, she was only hidden temporarily behind a tree – I rang up Boots in the nearest town and asked to speak to one of their chemists.

  'A what?' was the astonished comment when I told him what I'd done. 'A donkey', I worriedly confirmed. It was like confiding one's troubles to a policeman. When he said hold on a moment while he consulted his colleagues and incredulous voices saying 'She's sprayed a
what?'
came from the room behind him, the equanimity with which he in turn replied 'A donkey' was really magnificent. There was a muttered conference, after which he returned to the phone to report that the general opinion was that if she were their donkey they'd wash her. 'With what?' I enquired puzzledly. 'Oh, the usual thing – soapflakes or detergent and plenty of hot water', he said, speaking by now as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  It wasn't, of course. I thanked him, told Charles, and the pair of us started slogging up behind the cottage with buckets of detergent. Better to do the job up there, we decided, where the water could sink into the ground, instead of in the yard where the next thing would be Solomon paddling in it and we'd be ringing up Boots about him.

  Which was how – elevated on the hillside as on a stage we were next to be seen industriously bathing a donkey. Rubbing in the detergent till she foamed; running up with buckets of water to rinse her; running up again with the proper fly spray when we'd finished because, having got off all the original repellent, the horse-flies were pitching on her in hundreds as she was now so attractively wet.

  'What be doin' up there then?' came Father Adams's voice inevitably, in due course, from the bottom, and when we told him he said we fair beat cock-fighting. When, a few weeks later, he looked over the wall one day and saw me fitting a striped canvas bag with a rubber sole over one of Annabel's feet it was too much even for him, however. 'Don't tell I thee bist making her
boots
!' he declared. And when I confessed that as a matter of fact I was – 'God Almighty!' he breathed incredulously.

  There was a logical explanation, of course. There was for most of our actions. It was just the appearance of what we were doing that so often looked peculiar – the snag being that in most cases it is the appearance by which one is judged.

  In this case I'd noticed Annabel limping and, thinking maybe one of her hooves needed trimming, I'd called in the farrier. Twudn't her hooves, he reported after his examination. The little old girl had trodden on a nail. He'd never known it afore with a donkey, he said. Horses, yes – but not donkeys, who usually trod so lightly. There were the hole though, he said, gently squeezing the upturned hoof at which pus came out of it and Annabel whimpered with pain. Us had better get the Vet.

  I did. Harler, when he came, expressed no surprise at all on hearing that Annabel was the first donkey the farrier had ever known to get a nail in her foot. He'd never known of one either, he said, but if anybody was going to be first it would undoubtedly be her. Would I mind holding her head?

  Actually there was no need. Just as Annabel had stood unmoving for the farrier, so she now stood like a slave in a Roman forum for Mr Harler. He examined her, cleaned her foot and gave her an anti-biotic injection in the rump. All we had to do now, he said, ruffling her fringe when he'd finished and telling her that she was a far better patient than a certain Siamese cat he knew, was to soak her foot three times a day in hot water to bring out the pus, and keep it covered to fend off the dirt.

  All we had to do indeed. If
he'd
put her foot in a bucket she'd no doubt have stayed there batting her eyelashes at him till the water froze. When we attempted to do it she either took it out again and stuck it determinedly in the dirt, kicked the bucket over, or, if the fancy took her, strolled around the lawn while we strove to move the bucket with her like an outsize Wellington boot.

  If we kept her foot in water for a minute we were lucky, and as for covering it afterwards – in the corner of an old nail-bag or something like that, said Mr Harler; heavy canvas so she could walk on it, and tied round her fetlock so she couldn't get it off – we managed that all right. The trouble was, Annabel kept wearing through the canvas.

  Whether it was relief at being able to stand on the foot again or a desire to show off about having seen the Vet, she stumped up and down her field so solidly that in two days she went through both corners of the only nail-bag we could get and after that I was reduced to making her foot covers out of a piece of deck-chair canvas. These she went through even more quickly, until I hit on the idea of sewing a rubber heel to the bottom with string – back to front, like a miniature horseshoe, to fit the shape of her foot.

  It worked. It was perfectly logical. Even Father Adams had to admit that when it was explained to him. Unfortunately we couldn't explain it to everybody, however, and when Annabel discovered that the rubber heel made a useful digging implement... It wasn't so much that she dug holes all over the lawn with it – what with molehills and drains our lawn was pretty well past praying for in any case. It was the fact that people saw her. In a green and orange-striped boot with a back-to-front rubber heel on it. You can guess what they thought about that. What Miss Wellington wanted to know when she heard we'd had the Vet was what he'd said about Annabel. 'About the
baby
', she urged insistently. 'Did you ask him if it was
true
?'

  As a matter of fact I hadn't. For one thing I didn't think it was fair, having got him along to see to her foot, to ask him to throw in a confirmation that she was in foal – and for another I was perfectly certain she was. The way she bulged, the way she acted – only that very week Janet and I had watched entranced as she stood in the lane, her sides jumping like a Mexican bean with what we were sure was unquestionably Julius.

  He would have thought I was nuts, asking him if a donkey bulging so much she looked as if she was wearing panniers under her skin was in foal, I replied to Charles when he in turn, on coming home that night, said but why hadn't I asked Harler to confirm it. All I'd done was
tell
him she was in foal, to make sure the injection wouldn't harm her, and he had said it wouldn't.

  It was my fault entirely, therefore, that we still didn't definitely know. July came and went, but no Julius. August came and went, but no Augustus. One night in August I sat with her for ages in her stable, watching her sigh and stamp her feet as she ate and feeling her stomach at cautious intervals for signs of movement. We'd just been told that it took fifty-four weeks – a year and a fortnight – for a donkey to have a foal, as against a horse's eleven months. A year and a fortnight from the time Annabel had been mated would have been that very day and there were signs of movement now all right. Annabel's stomach twitched and she stamped her back feet irritably every time I touched her. Towards midnight, awed by the thought of what the morrow might bring, I went back down to Charles. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Augustus were here by morning, I told him.

  He wasn't. Septimus wasn't there by September, either. We put off our holiday week by week just in case, but by mid-September we'd completely given up hope. We went on holiday and Annabel went to the farm. Not entirely uneventfully. She had her foot in a plaster casing.

S
he'd trodden on another nail. He could believe it, said Mr Harler when I rang him once more to tell him. Nothing about our lot would ever surprise
him
. I reckon it would have done if I'd told him how she'd covered everything from eating Yorkshire pudding to side-twitching and still hadn't produced that foal, but I forbore. For his part, either he'd forgotten the foal, decided it was some time in the future – or could it have been, come to think of it, that he knew the story as well as we did and was being professionally tactful? Anyway, neither of us mentioned it.

  There was no need for us to postpone our holiday, was all he said. He and his assistants would see that she was all right. So her foot was drained and dressed, swathed in bandage upon bandage like a gout-wrapping, painted with plaster of Paris to keep the bandages dry, and off she went to the farm where Mrs Pursey said anything the little soul wanted, she, too, would willingly do for her. In that case, said Annabel, hopefully pouting her mouth, she'd like some bread-and-butter like Mrs Pursey always gave her, and she got it on the spot.

  So there we were again. A perfectly logical explanation about the plaster, but one which was of course quite un­known to the onlookers who saw a small, fat donkey trudging up the hill in what appeared to be a plaster cast, making the most of it as usual and playing the Wounded Donkey Heroine being Taken Into Captivity.

  By the time we came back the bandages were off, her foot was completely healed, and our name was mud with the faction who, still under the impression that she was in foal, had decided that she'd had to have the plaster on to support her growing weight, and in that condition...
Poor
little donkey, said one of her sympathisers, at which Annabel snorted in soulful agreement... we'd gone away and heartlessly left her.

  Time proved that wrong, as the weeks went by, no foal appeared, and Annabel remained as bulgingly plump as ever. We just couldn't win, though – and neither, so far as that period was concerned, could the Duggans. On one side of them the boat was almost finished, the hammering had long since stopped, everybody was admiring the trim little craft that sat buoyantly in the driveway – and Alan was now worrying in case someone wanted to buy it and the Foots started boat-building all over again. On the other, though the bulldozer was silent at last, the Duggans were now suffering heavily from bonfires as the builder and his helpers cleared the undergrowth.

  Not only from the smoke, either. Alan swore that one afternoon he and Carrie were sitting on the lawn – used by now, he said, to being kippered – when an adder four feet long came travelling across it at speed. Definitely an adder, he said, when we queried whether it might not perhaps have been a grass snake. Coming straight for them with its head raised, and by Harry it was touch and go, when he got up and shooed it off, as to whether it jumped at him or not. His theory was that it had been annoyed by the bonfire. It had hissed at him angrily, he said, and then turned tail and slid into the rockery. How many more of the perishing things, he wanted to know, might be there, lying in wait, ready to attack?

  None so far as we heard. With the Duggans' star in such temporary eclipse, however, we should have known better than to ask them to look after our garden while we were away. Since everything happened to us, and what didn't happen to us appeared to be happening at the moment to them, it was obviously asking for trouble.

  It was, too. We came back to find that Carrie had of all things fallen on our path and dislocated her elbow, and scarcely had we digested that catastrophe – it wasn't our fault, she kept heroically telling us; she hadn't tripped or anything; just one moment she was putting down her basket at the conservatory door and the next she was flat on her face – when I happened to mention Alan and we heard the news about him. He'd nearly poleaxed himself on our plum tree.

  It was the very first morning we'd gone, she said. Alan had gone down to open the tomato house, and near the garage he too had fallen down. Why she couldn't imagine, unless it was all that smoke affecting him. Anyway, getting up, irate as anybody would be in the circumstances and with a badly grazed knee, he'd forgotten for the moment where he was and, coming up directly under the plum tree, had caught himself a thumping crack on an overhanging branch and gone down again practically for the count.

  Carrie was annoyed with him when he got back. All he'd been asked to do was open the greenhouse door, she said, and he came back limping, mud on his trousers, a cut on his bald head and moss off the plum tree all over him like woad. Just like a man, she'd informed him; she'd much better go herself.