Raining Cats and Donkeys (10 page)

  He'd been wanting one for ages. He was fond of music. If we had a piano, he commented at frequent intervals, I could accompany him while he played the violin, and he'd learn the piano himself so he could compose.

  Neither of us had played at all for a considerable number of years. It was, as I pointed out, going to cause something of a sensation in the Valley when we started
our
duets. Charles practising beginners' pieces on a piano would hardly go unnoticed, either. Couldn't he compose on a violin? I enquired hopefully.

  Apparently he couldn't. He needed a piano. Having settled that, the project stayed in the background for months and might never have materialised at all but for Charles seeing the tape-recorder turning seductively in the hedge.

  That – and the visions it no doubt aroused of composing, recording, and the tapes being sent to London to be played by an ecstatic Barbirolli – revived his interest, and within a fortnight we had our piano. A modern miniature. And the piano men had gone, and I was in the study trying it out.

  My one real doubt about having it had been how Solomon would react. He was a tremendously nervous cat. The staccato tap of a typewriter, for instance, affected him so that he leapt like a startled fawn at the slightest sound for hours after either of us had used it. We'd long ago had to buy a silent model before we started leaping too. So we'd decided to get him used to the piano gradually. Shut him downstairs to begin with, where he could only hear it at a distance, and then let him come up to the study in his own good time, exploring by himself.

  In the excitement I forgot that, of course. I'd locked Solomon and Sheba in our bedroom while the piano was delivered. Let them out afterwards, when they'd immediately rushed down to see what they'd missed. And I'd started, hesitantly, to play.

  After all those years of not touching a piano it probably was pretty awful – but not, I feel sure, as excruciating as I was given to understand when I glanced up a few minutes later to see the two of them sitting side by side in the doorway looking at me. There was no sign of nervousness on Solomon's face. Only complete incredulity. What on earth did I think I was doing? His expression demanded. Frightening off the bogy-men? Sheba enquired, while two pairs of ears tilted speculatively towards the piano.

  After that I had only to touch the keys and, even if they hadn't been seen for hours, they appeared as if I were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It wasn't so much the music. It was warm just then, and when I played I opened the window that looked out on to the hall roof for air. The attraction was to get up into the wide, tiled window-sill and march in and out over the roof with raised tails, as if they were playing at bands. I reckoned they were doing it to draw people's attention to the fact that we now possessed a piano. Charles said they were making sure nobody thought it was them making all that noise. Whichever it was, the fact remained that the sun shone straight through that window on to the music rack; that when I played it was with the shadows of a pair of Siamese tails passing continuously across the music like a frieze of travelling bulrushes; and that when from time to time the voice of Father Adams saying 'Cor!' floated up from the lane as I struck a particularly distracted chord, it was hardly to be wondered at.

  There are so many things one can do with a piano. When they came finally in from the roof, for instance, they jumped heavily, one by one, on to my back
en route
to the floor. That laid me practically flat on the keyboard for a start. Occasionally, inspired by a particularly noisy piece of music, they staged a wrestling match on the stairs. Galvanised on one occasion by the sound of louder screams than usual, I looked up to see Sheba crawling through the doorway on her stomach while Solomon held her by the scruff of the neck. This do for Rigoletto? they enquired hopefully.

  One night Solomon rushed excitedly upstairs in the middle of my practising and bit me on the leg. Only in fun, of course. Apparently he'd decided I was playing the piano as a joke, so he was playing one on me. He beamed all over his triangular black face when I yelled and leapt from the chair.

  Another night Sheba decided to sit on top of the door to watch me – a favourite place of hers – and, just as I got to the difficult bit, she fell off. Half a page of Chopin followed by a scream and the sound of somebody apparently being thrown from top to bottom of the stairs – that was the order of the day with my piano practice.

  Charles had even less success. He'd intended to learn from the Rector's wife, who'd had quite a few pupils in the village, but she and her husband had moved to another parish. There wasn't a teacher now within miles. While he waited for one to turn up – if not, said Charles, he'd buy a Tutor when he had time and teach himself; the important thing was to have the piano – he got out his violin. That was in a pretty parlous state, too; the strings long since disintegrated, the bow a wreck, the bridge lying forlornly on its side in the case. Charles went specially to town to renew everything and one night stood happily in the sitting-room, violin assembled, ready to begin.

  'Now!' he said with confidence, raising his bow.

  I should have anticipated it, of course. Charles, with practice, is an extremely good violinist. A violin is a tricky thing, however, and after a lapse of years anyone's notes are liable to be off.

  Charles's were so off that Solomon, who'd been sleeping peacefully on the hearthrug, was up and in siege position at the top of the stairs before the echo of the first one had died away. He wore his Loch Ness Monster expression and, as Charles drew his next, more tentative, bow across the strings, retired beneath the bed. Somebody was murdering somebody in his opinion, and he didn't want to be included.

  It was obviously a choice between his nerves and the violin, and when it got to the stage where he went and sat on the landing if I so much as moved the violin case to dust it, Solomon, as usual, won.

  The violin went back into the cupboard. Charles bought himself a piano tutor. He put it aside for the moment, being busy with other things – but the day would come, he informed Solomon darkly. Solomon regarded him innocently. He liked
pianos
, he assured him.

C
harles wasn't the only one affected by the Rector's departure. Father Adams had been cutting the Rectory lawn for years and when the new man, the Reverend Morgan, moved in bringing with him a motor mower and the announcement that he liked using it himself, for exercise, our neighbour was very put out indeed.

  He pretended not to recognise Mr Morgan when they met. Ours being a quiet village, there were times when the only figures visible in the entire place were the stocky, betrilbied outline of Father Adams crossing the Green to the Rose and Crown and the tall thin black one of the Rector emerging on some errand from the Rectory, but still Father Adams affected not to see him.

  He sentimentalised about his predecessor over his nightly pint until Mr Holcombe, whose most errant sheep Father Adams had ever been, would never have recognised himself. He passed the Rectory gate as though even to glance at it would turn him immediately to a pillar of salt. It was a situation ripe for Siamese exploitation and at an opportune moment Father Adams's own Siamese, Mimi, exploited it.

  We didn't see much of Mimi these days. She, and the picture painted of her incredible attributes by Father Adams, had been responsible for our going in for Siamese in the first place, but by the time Solomon and Sheba had grown up she'd given up coming down to us. Our two had told her on too many occasions what would happen if she did. She never normally went near the Rectory either, being content – being a lady, and on her own, which has a more sobering effect when cats grow older than keeping them in pairs – to sit on her own home gatepost and study the passers-by.

  There she was now, however, on the Rectory wall as large as life, bawling to Father Adams to see where she was, and he, sweating frantically with the embarrassment of it, trying to get her down. She wouldn't jump on his shoulder. She liked it up there, she said. She wasn't interested in a wiggled twig. Remember where she was, she intimated with dignity. She sat there playing the part of the Squire's lady, as the Squire's lady might play it if she held her At Homes on top of the Rectory wall. Father Adams got exasperated and eventually threw his hat at her to try to move her. Mimi stopped playing at visiting and was down, across the Green and sitting on her own home gatepost with the speed of a Derby winner. Which was why the hat, instead of bouncing off her, went over the wall; Father Adams wouldn't go in and ask for it; and for the first time in living memory... at least for fifty years, we gathered from the discussion that went on about it afterwards... he stumped self-consciously home through the village, hatless.

  He might as well have come through it trouserless. Faces appeared at the windows as he passed. Somebody asked him if 'twere cold up top. Miss Wellington rose slowly from the gnome she was painting, stared incredulously after him and, paintbrush in hand, disappeared immediately through the next-door gate to spread the news.

  Actually it was a blessing in disguise. The hat (nobody could have mistaken that battered coal-scuttle effect as anybody but Father Adams's even if it had been found on the railings of Buckingham Palace) appeared, tilted at a rakish angle, on the Adams's front gatepost an hour later. The Rector grinned so knowingly at Father Adams next time they met that Father Adams couldn't help grinning back. The next we heard, Mr Morgan had decided that he couldn't, after all, manage all that grass by himself and the familiar outline of Father Adams was once more seen progressing importantly over the Rectory lawn on Saturday afternoons – this time, to his intense satisfaction, behind a large and exceedingly noisy motor mower. Them cats certainly got things moving, he remarked, leaning reflectively on our gate one night.

  So, if it came to that, did donkeys. We'd recently been given permission to graze Annabel on the adjoining Forestry Commission land, the only stipulation being that we should tether her to prevent her eating the trees. Surrounded by all the lush green grass that was a welcome change from her own moth-eaten paddock, Annabel wasn't the slightest bit interested in the trees, but we tethered her all the same. It prevented her from chasing horse-riders as they rode up the Forestry tracks.

  It also, since one can't have everything in this world, presented us with an entirely new set of problems. Tether her to a tree and within minutes, having walked round it determinedly in circles, she'd be bound to it like Joan of Arc, bawling for help. Tether her on what appeared to be open land and in no time she'd be roped, head down and unable to move, round an ant-hill. Tether her, as we did once, on a piece flat as a billiard table with her rope tied to a last-war bayonet left behind by the previous owner of the cottage – she couldn't wind her rope round that, said Charles, and it made a jolly good portable anchor... the next thing we knew, a posse of round-eyed children were coming in to report that Annabel had a sword, and when we scurried out, sure enough there was Annabel running round in the lane with the bayonet clanking behind her.

  We dared not try that one again. We went back to tethering her to trees. It meant we had to keep going out to unwind her, but it was safer. Until, that was, we tethered her to a felled Scots pine, high on the Valley skyline, in the belief that she couldn't move that one in a hundred years. Five minutes later Annabel, complete with pine tree to which she was still attached, was down in the Valley bottom. Right by our back gate, where our immediate problem was to get the tree up again double quick, before the Forestry people thought we were stealing it.

  It was sooner said than done. At that point the hillside was practically perpendicular. The tree weighed at least a ton. Sweatingly we tugged and strained – with Annabel tied to the front end ostensibly helping us but a fat lot of help that donkey gave, if I knew anything about it. At last we got it up. It would have been better if we'd untied Annabel from it before we sat down to rest, of course, but one can't think of everything. In any case we were too worn out. So we sat there panting, with the sweat dripping off our brows, Annabel said that was fun, wasn't it, and started trotting down the hill again log and all. We got up and chased her...

  It wasn't my day that day. I had got past the log and was close behind her when Annabel swerved and the rope tripped me up. While I was sitting there swearing soundly the log, which I had forgotten, came bouncing down the hillside on the end of the rope and caught me a thud on the bottom. I wished that donkey to Hades.

  Perhaps she ought to be mated, Charles said later that evening. Transportation in ball and chain was more to my way of thinking at the moment, but there was something, when one considered it, in his suggestion. She was old enough now. It was springtime and the sap was rising. Not only might a foal be perhaps what she was wanting to steady her... but the idea of a foal, wobbly-legged among the buttercups... a foal, smaller even than Annabel, nestled in the straw in the stable... Wonderful, I said with dewy eyes. So we set about looking for a mate.