Raining Cats and Donkeys (4 page)

  It all worked out in the end, though. Monday was hell.

  Tuesday – the day Pixie got colic – our bruises came out and I found the insides of my legs were black from knees to ankles and I couldn't wear nylons for a week. By Wednesday, however, we were all of us back in form. We rode on long excursions through the countryside. It was raining still, but we lit fires and ate our lunch around them and enjoyed the feeling of trotting, ruddy-faced, back to tea past weaker mortals sheltering in their cars. We rose to the trot now, too, with the ease of oiled pistons, and sang as we trotted with no thought of breathlessness, and discussed the merits of our horses as if we'd owned them for years.

  Charles was particularly lyrical about Warrior. One morning we'd been riding across a moor, with nobody apparently in view for miles, when just as he leaned down to open a gate a shepherd suddenly appeared on the other side of the wall. Warrior, never having seen anybody at that particular spot in his life before, promptly bolted, and Charles, caught leaning half out of his saddle, was hard put to it for a minute or two to get control of him. Just like Cossack riding it was, the way he pulled himself up in the saddle, reined Warrior gradually to a halt and then, wheeling in his tracks, brought him trotting back to the rest of us. The instructor held this up to us as an example – how not to lose our heads and to keep tight control with hands and knees – but Charles attributed it all to Warrior. It was wonderful how that horse responded, he said. There was real understanding between him and Warrior. He wouldn't mind taking him home with us.

  When Charles uses that expression my heart sinks. I like animals too, but I have never felt impelled to consider building a pond on the front lawn so that I could keep a King Penguin (this after a visit to the Zoo at which Charles spent an entranced three-quarters of an hour watching one of them doing all the smaller penguins out of their fish). I have never had the bright idea that a camel would be an ideal companion for Annabel on the grounds that (discounting the fact that Annabel is a Scandinavian variety) camels and donkeys are companion creatures of the East and Charles once knew a very intelligent one in Egypt. But I have had the task of talking Charles out of these and various similar ideas, and a pretty narrow squeak it has been on some occasions.

  In the case of the horses it was, I must agree, somewhat different. If it came to that, I wouldn't have minded taking Pixie home for myself It was practically the end of the riding season; the horses
were
lent out for the winter in exchange for their keep if people wanted them; and for all Pixie's wilfulness and her habit of stumping stolidly along on the way home saying she was tired – until, on the advice of the instructor, I swung my riding crop thoughtfully on the end of my finger as I rode, whereupon Pixie immediately leapt into a trot saying Goodness Gracious Her, almost asleep she'd been and why hadn't I woken her up... for all that, her nodding little head and sturdy fat grey body were beginning to grow on me.

  The snag – which I could see, but Charles, in his sudden affection for Warrior, stubbornly refused to do – was that while it might be all right for people in the neighbourhood to take Warrior or Pixie or Morven and feed and ride them through the winter,
we
lived four hundred miles away.

  How were we going to get them home? I enquired. 'Ride them', said Charles, at which I had a vision of ourselves trotting determinedly down through the Potteries and Birmingham and arriving home somewhere around Christmas. 'Put them on the train', he said airily, when I said but if we rode them how would we get the car home. Despite my insistence that that would cost a fortune – and we'd have to send them back next May and that would cost a fortune too, let alone the fact that by that time we'd probably decide we couldn't part with them and have to buy them and where on earth would we keep them permanently – despite all that Charles still went on talking about taking Warrior home, and telling Warrior how he was going to enjoy himself down in the West Country on all those pony nuts Charles was going to buy him... when fate, as it usually does if one waits long enough, took a hand.

  We rode twenty miles on the Friday, and on the last lap of the run home it rained. Solid Highland rain that ran off the roads in rivers, and soaked our saddles, and steamed like sauna baths off the horses' backs. We got back to the stables. Watered and fed our charges. Charles, damp but determined, prepared to mount Warrior bareback for his nightly trek down to the river fields...

  Warrior was such a big horse that not even Charles, who is six feet tall, could mount him bareback from the ground. Instead he used a convenient bank of earth at the side of the stable yard as a mounting block, and – as Warrior, understanding or not, immediately moved as far away as his reins would permit – Charles had to jump at him sideways from there.

  This time – it was as simple as that – as Charles prepared to jump, his heels slid down the rain-soaked surface of the earth-heap and he landed on his back. He hadn't fallen off. He hadn't even got as far as actually jumping. He'd strained his back though, and it was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to ride for a while, so we came back from Scotland, after all, without Pixie or Charles's friend Warrior.

  Nothing, when we got back, could shake Father Adams's conviction that Charles had fallen off his horse. He kept reminiscing about how Lawrence had fallen off his camel when he was learning to ride. Miss Wellington kept asking Charles how his back was and telling me that she hoped I didn't mind her saying it but wasn't he perhaps a little old for such pursuits? Charles himself alternated between saying that he'd show them in a week or two whether he could ride or not and then coming in, bent like Father Time after a bout of log-cutting, announcing that he was crippled for life.

  He proved that he wasn't three days after we got back from Scotland, when he had to go up a tree in a hurry to rescue Solomon.

W
hat happened was that we'd come home late from town, put on all the outside lights, and let the cats out for a look round while we fed Annabel and put the car away.

  We kept a strict eye on them as we did our chores, knowing Solomon's propensity for looking one minute as if he was glued to the fish-pool wall for life and the next being half-way up the lane apparently
en route
for Siam. So when, ten minutes after we'd let them out, we went to get them in again and discovered that Solomon, who five seconds before had been peering suspiciously down a mouse-hole in the rockery, was now nowhere to be seen, we didn't take it seriously at first.

  We looked over the front gate, over the side gate, inside the coalhouse... we looked in the potting shed, where there was a heap of sand which Solomon sometimes fancied as a change from his earth-box. There was a rat-hole in the hard-packed sand. We'd once seen Solomon sit hopefully beside it for a while and then, becoming bored and deciding that nobody was coming out today, he'd dug a hole of his own in front of the first one and sat on it, his mind obviously by now on other things, his innocent little bottom exposed to attack in a way that turned us cold when we thought of it, but that was Solomon all over.

  He wasn't on the sand-heap now, though. Neither was he up the lane in the ruined cottage, or sitting thinking on the wall of Annabel's house, or – we were beginning to get desperate by this time – locked by accident in Father Adams's outside lavatory, which we checked by tiptoeing up his path and looking in.

  I called him – 'Tollywollywolly' in the yodel up and down the valley that I knew, even as I did it, would have the neighbours tapping their foreheads and saying how sorry they felt for Charles, but at least it always brought an answering wail from Solomon, to let me know where he was and would I please hurry up and fetch him.

  Not this time it didn't. There was only complete silence and the terrible conviction, after we'd ranged the valley for nearly two hours with torches, and shouted till our throats were sore, that a fox must have taken him. How, we couldn't imagine. The lights were on, the doors were open, we'd kept check on him every minute or so and the idea of Solomon, who always had so much to say about everything, being carried off from under our noses without so much as a peep from that world-shattering voice of his was unbelievable.

  But there it was. Twelve o'clock. Nearly two hours of searching for him, and now we had to admit that he'd gone. At which point, standing miserably on the lawn, worn completely to a standstill, I shone my torch up into the damson tree by the front gate, and there he was. A faint dark shadow a few feet from the top. His eyes glittering fixedly in the torchlight. So unmoving that – my next mental crisis of the evening – I was certain he must be dead.

  He'd fallen from a higher branch, I decided. He never could climb anyway. Another cat must have chased him, and he'd slipped and been transfixed on a sharp lower branch, which was why, in all those long hours when we'd passed and re-passed under the tree, only a few yards from the house, he hadn't answered us...

  At that point my knees gave way. It was Charles who rushed for the garage, moved the car and, despite his back, raced back down the garden with the fruit ladder. But the fruit ladder wasn't long enough, and when we called and reached with encouraging hands from only inches below, there was still no move from the motionless form above us. I died a thousand deaths while Charles raced up the garden, fetched the double roof ladders without even stopping to separate them, thrust them up into the tree and was up there, in seconds, with our seal man. I died a further one, too, with relief, when he said that Solomon was alive – apparently unharmed, except that he appeared to be in a coma – and handed him, limp as a little black waterlily, down into my waiting arms.

  What frightened him we never knew. My theory is that it was a badger. A fox I think he would have taken for a dog. But a badger – and there are badger setts just a little way down the valley, and we often hear them grunting their way through the woods at night, but so far as we knew Solomon himself had never seen one... a badger, six times the size of himself, coming down the lane with that great white stripe down its head like a witch-doctor and encountered, perhaps, right at our very gate as Solomon nipped over for an airing... that would have frightened him all right.

  Charles said it was either that or we'd brought the Loch Ness monster home in the car-boot. Whichever it was, Solomon bolted upstairs as soon as we got him indoors and remained there for three whole days. He ate up there. He lived up there. It would be wrong to say that he slept up there because for three days solid, so far as we could tell, Solomon didn't sleep at all.

  Every time we went into the hall a small black face scanned us anxiously from the landing like a defender at the Siege of York looking down from a portcullis. When we went upstairs he peered worriedly round our legs as we got to the top, to make sure the enemy hadn't crept up behind us. He wouldn't look out of a window at all. Presumably that would have given away the fact that he was in our bedroom. And when we peered cautiously out ourselves – the feeling of being besieged having spread itself to us by this time, the way he was carrying on – Solomon hid under the bed.

  He apparently was up there for good. Sheba, with true Siamese contrariness, was meanwhile going further afield than she ever did normally. Every time we looked for her she seemed to be either vanishing over the front gate or setting off up the path through the woods – so much the innocent little lamb going out as tiger bait that, even as we ran to fetch her back to safety, we wondered, knowing Sheba, whether she was doing it deliberately.

  It was a great relief when, at the end of three days, Solomon appeared once more in the living room and, after watching Sheba carefully for an hour or two, satisfied himself that she was indeed – no fooling – going right out into the garden and coming back in one piece. Following which, the next time she went out he went out behind her. It was even more of a relief when a week or so later a neighbour who lived beyond us up the lane reported something he'd seen on his way home one night in his car. Coming down the hill he was, he said, and there in his headlights, standing by her paddock gate, was Annabel – and beneath her, glowing oddly in the darkness, were three pairs of disembodied green eyes. Stopping to investigate, with his headlights full on the fence, he'd discovered that there were three cats sitting under her. One was his own cat, Rufus. Another was the black and white cat from up the lane. And the third was the ginger stray Solomon had fought before the holidays.

  They were sheltering from the rain, he said. They looked as if they were in conference. And Annabel was standing over them with an air of great importance.