Raining Cats and Donkeys (5 page)

  This reassured us on two counts. That there couldn't be anything really dangerous in the valley, otherwise these other cats – far more wordly-wise than Solomon, for all his air of being Lord of the Valley and Anybody Want To Dispute It – wouldn't have been there. And that Annabel – our hearts warmed with pleasure when we thought of it – liked cats.

  We'd never been quite sure about this. True we'd once seen her nudging Sheba playfully along with her nose – Sheba turning to natter at her over her shoulder as she went and the pair of them acting like a friendship scene out of Walt Disney. We'd also, however, on several occasions, caught her chasing Solomon in the nearest thing we'd seen to real-life cowboys and Indians – and whether Solomon's big bat ears were streamlined for the fun of it, or because he thought avoidance of wind-resistance was his only hope in his present extremity, we never knew. He'd be back sitting in her paddock within half an hour, but that was Solomon all over. Annabel would most likely be grazing peacefully a yard away as though she'd now decided Siamese cats were some sort of butterfly and the worst that the big-eared seal one could do was sit on her cow-parsley – but that was Annabel all over too. We just didn't know.

  Three cats, though – sitting under her where one stamp of her hoof could do so much damage and all Annabel did was stand there like a benevolent mother sheep keeping the rain off... that showed what she was like, we said. And when a night or two later we found she was actually allowing the ginger stray to share her house with her, we were even more impressed.

  Annabel was very jealous of her house. Solomon and Sheba weren't allowed to enter it at all. We ourselves were allowed to go in with food and bedding, but once the food was down Annabel stood possessively over it and offered to kick us soundly if we touched one bit of hay. She marked it for all the world to know as hers by standing straddle-legged in front of it, whenever she returned from a walk, and spending a penny. And if we wanted more proof than that of the importance to Annabel of Annabel's house, we had it in her behaviour the day we took her to the County Show. Sixty miles she went by horsebox, to collect for charity, and a full day it was indeed.

  She rode regally in the big double horsebox that had been lent to us as though she'd been used to it all her life, though in fact it was the first time she'd ever been in one. She emerged from it, when we got to the showground, as if she were the Horse of the Year arriving at the White City. She did her rounds with her collecting box with the mixture of modesty and self-assurance that we knew of old was Annabel being a Lady, and was photographed and petted, and watched the horses, when we led her to the railings of the show-ring, with an intentness that signified she knew just as well as we did what they were doing there –
and
had her own ideas as to which horses were doing it properly.

  Twelve hours solid she'd been away by the time she stepped down from the horse box again and into her paddock. And what did she do, this donkey of ours who for once had behaved as a status symbol should and there were probably misguided people all over the county that very minute saying wasn't she a poppet, and what about one themselves, as a playmate for the children? Straight into her house she went. Spending a penny on the way, of course, by way of relief and to let the rabbits know that Annabel was back. When we went in a few minutes later with her supper and her water-bucket, though this was summer and it was still light and warm outside, Annabel was lying down. Resting, we gathered. After the strain of her public appearance. In the privacy of her Home.

  For Annabel, a couple of months later, to invite the ginger stray to share her home was really something indeed. Charles discovered it one night when he went out to feed her. Her house had been constructed for quickness, when we first had her, out of a small, roofless stone shed, lined with hurdles to give it height, with a sloping roof of corrugated iron lashed to metal poles, and with a further hurdle as a door. This arrangement was so successful that we'd left it like that – the only deterioration being that the hurdles had warped slightly, and in places were not now flat with the walls.

  It was behind one of these that the cat was lying, in the gap between the hurdle and the wall. Curled into a ball.

  Strategically placed so that, while Annabel couldn't step on him, when she lay down to sleep (Annabel was a creature of habit and always lay in exactly the same position) he was right where she'd breathe on him, acting as a sort of fan heater through the night.

  He lay there unmoving, obviously wondering whether Charles would turn him out and ready to fly if he did. Charles pretended not to see him. Annabel ate her supper innocently – also pretending not to see him but Charles said she had that complacent pout to her mouth which we knew so well, and which in this case indicated that she knew something we didn't, and that Annabel was feeling Benevolent.

  She was so benevolent that two nights later the cat ventured out from behind the hurdle and began to sleep in an even warmer place. Right against her head. We knew this because there was a deep indentation in the straw where she slept, and when we went out in the mornings now the cat was lying, still curled into a ball, against the place where her head had been.

  The next thing Charles reported was that he'd seen Annabel and her new friend eating side by side from her bowl of breakfast bread. Had I, enquired Charles, any old food Solomon and Sheba didn't want? A cat had to be pretty hungry to eat bread, and though Annabel might think she was being generous, he couldn't be getting much nourishment out of that.

  So the ginger stray, now known as Robertson on account of his marmalade colouring, was put on the strength. He got two meals a day – taken up to him in Annabel's house because Solomon and Sheba wouldn't have stood for our feeding him in the cottage. Milk – at which he purred his delight like an orphan being taken into a rich man's house and given the delicacies he'd so long seen only with his nose pressed to the window. He was unwise, actually, to make such a song about the milk. Annabel, thinking it must be something special to warrant all that noise, promptly forgot her good intentions, pushed him to one side, and drank it herself. Annabel as a foal had indignantly refused to drink the cow's milk we offered her, declaring that we were poisoning her and it wasn't like Mum's. The sight of her now, delicately pursing her lips into a saucer of it like a dowager duchess taking tea, in order to show Robertson that everything round there was hers, was absolutely typical.

  Robertson was a match for her, though. A few intrusions like that and Robertson, when she stuck her big white nose into his saucer, sat up and slapped her on it. A spectacular left and right which, oddly enough, Annabel didn't appear to mind in the least. If our two had done it to her they'd have gone through the doorway like a couple of shooting stars. When Robertson did it, all she did was snort to show she didn't want his old milk anyway, and go back to eating her hay.

  They slept together. They fed together. When anybody called to see Annabel at her paddock gate Robertson's little ginger figure was there as well, and as they fondled her head Robertson rubbed against her legs and rose, purring, on his own hind legs to share in the petting. The amazing thing was that Annabel – so jealous when the jennet was with us that she pushed between him and visitors and kicked him if anybody so much as spoke to him – didn't mind at all. Maybe, knowing Annabel, because she thought she'd put one over on us. Adopted him herself. Been really clever and slipped him in when we weren't looking.

  The only ones who did object were Solomon and Sheba. Robertson, realising that for all we fed him in Annabel's stable the food actually came up the path from the cottage, started coming to meet us when we took it up. Sometimes he waited on the wall by the garage. Sometimes he appeared through the door of the conservatory, where he'd apparently been looking for mice to fill in time. One day, to Solomon's intense indignation, he appeared on the path outside our window while we were still at breakfast and sat there looking expectantly in at us while Solomon howled at him from inside to go away. All the Food round here was his. And all the Scraps were SHEBA'S, roared Solomon, his voice rising in indignant crescendo at the sight of Robertson, taking no notice of him at all, but still sitting there looking expectant.

  Even after we'd escorted Robertson back to the paddock with the dish of food for which he'd come, Solomon still wouldn't be content. He sniffed the wall by the garage and sprayed it to mark the boundary. He sniffed the path where Robertson had sat, and sprayed the nearby jasmine by way of warning. He sniffed round the flower pots in the conservatory and sprayed those, according to Charles who'd witnessed it, like a Whirling Dervish with a hose pipe.

  Solomon, of course, had been spraying outdoor landmarks to mark his ownership ever since his delighted discovery that, neuter or not, he
could
spray. What really brought home to us the seriousness with which our two regarded Robertson's arrival was the behaviour of Sheba, whom I also found sniffing intently one day in the conservatory. Not to worry, I said, stroking her delicate little ears as she looked up at me. Robertson wasn't going to live with us. It was only Solomon being Silly, I said – and laughed to feel her stand, as she had a habit of doing when she wanted to show special closeness to us, on my feet.

  It was a good thing I was wearing gum-boots. When I looked down she was determinedly spraying a chrysanthemum plant – and the lot, this being her first attempt ever at direction and I hadn't, until that moment, known that female cats were capable of spraying at all – was going straight over my legs.

  She wasn't Worrying, said Sheba when she'd finished her personal contribution to the defence preparations. She and Solomon were keeping him off.

T
here are various indications of the approach of winter in the village. The emergence of Miss Wellington in a fur hat, for example, and the appearance at Father Adams's windows of a set of maroon plush curtains which, having belonged to his grandmother and looking it, have a psychologically depressing effect on everybody save Father Adams himself for the next six months.

  That particular year, however, it was the behaviour of the rooks that aroused the greatest comment around the place. Based a good half-mile away in the elms around the Rectory, with a birds' eye view of Farmer Pursey's cornfield and consequently rarely seen in our part of the world, they had suddenly taken to flying down the valley in formation in the mornings. And the thing that made everybody notice them was that one of them talked so much as he flew. Not cawing, but chattering away to his companions like an incorrigible gossip on a village bus.

  We wondered whether it was the rook that, years before, had been raised as a fledgling by Father Adams's grandson, Timothy, and used to chatter to people as they passed the gate. Whether it was or not, his nattering as he accompanied the flight down the valley caused people to look up, and so, by force of country habit, did his nattering on the flight back. It was on the return flight, however, that the onlookers stood open-mouthed and stared. When they came back the entire armada of rooks – including the natterer, still talking indefatigably away but rather more muffled this time because his mouth was full – were carrying pieces of bread Charles and I recognised the source of the phenomenon the moment we saw it, of course. Annabel. The cook in Charles's favourite lunching place, who insisted on presenting him with a bag of bread crusts for her every day, had, as winter approached, increased the supply on the ground that the dear little soul could do with a bit of feeding now the colder weather was coming. The dear little soul, filled to bursting point with hay and pony nuts, couldn't encompass another crumb. Most of it was lying uneaten in her bowl now that Robertson was getting proper cat food. There weren't even any rats about to eat it, thanks to Robertson himself, who kept leaving large fat dead ones in the path just to show us what a handy cat we'd taken on. And so – no doubt with the same Big-Eared Lady Bountiful expression on her face that she used when patronising Robertson. Annabel was letting the rooks have it.

  Charles didn't like to say anything to the cook for fear of offending her. She, enthusiastically doing her good turn for the winter, went on stepping up supplies to the point where he was coming home every night with two large carrier bags overflowing with bread-crusts. Even the rooks couldn't cope with that lot, of course and, as inexorably as things always happen with us, eventually we reached a state where we were running round after dark tipping bagfuls of it over hedges, near foxholes and badger setts – anywhere where we felt something might be glad to eat it, yet far enough away not to encourage rats or foxes near the cottage.