Raining Cats and Donkeys (9 page)

  The matter had been referred urgently to the Parish Council. Unfortunately they met only every two months. Meanwhile there was a weekly traffic block at Carey's cottage, a nightly indignation meeting at the Rose and Crown, and considerable speculation as to whether the heather, planted so doggedly by Mr Carey, would grow.

  General opinion was that it wouldn't. It grew in the peat on top of the moors, but hereabouts the soil was limestone. Actually it did. In bringing the heather down from the moors Mr Carey had thoughtfully brought the soil to go with it. And there, for the moment, the matter rested.

  Things were much more peaceful with us. For one thing Solomon appeared to have made friends with Robertson. I nearly dropped the first time I saw them, Robertson ensconced inscrutably on a hay-bale in the garage and Solomon, on his first post-thaw inspection trip, sitting on the ground in front of him. There was a silence that I expected to be broken at any moment by Solomon hurtling flat-eared into the attack. Then I realised it was a silence not so much of an eve of battle as of a chess-match. Robertson regarded the driveway. Solomon studied the sand-heap. There they sat, if a trifle embarrassedly, like a couple of members of Boodles.

  It was some time before Sheba joined them, but eventually she did and now the three of them sat in silence in the garage apparently practising mental telepathy. They weren't practising that, though, the evening we saw them by the woodshed. We'd been off for a week by the sea – Annabel going up to the farm, Solomon and Sheba to the Siamese hotel at Halstock, and the Hazells, in our absence, feeding Robertson. Halfway through the week he'd vanished, they reported when we came back, and they couldn't find him anywhere. We thought he'd probably traced Annabel to the farm and sure enough, the day after we fetched Annabel home, Robertson himself reappeared, stalking grandly along the path towards her stable.

  Later that night I noticed, looking through the kitchen doorway, that Solomon and Sheba were in the yard, sitting in front of the woodshed and studying the base of it with expressions of rapt concentration. 'They've got Robertson down a mouse-hole', I jokingly said to Charles, 'and they're not going to let him come out'. I was nearer the truth than I knew. A while later I looked out of the hall window on the principle, well-known to Siamese owners, that if they're quiet they're up to something – and there, beyond them, where I hadn't been able to see him from the kitchen, was Robertson. Sniffing at one of the support posts while our two gazed superiorly on.

  A little later Robertson had gone, but our own two were still sitting importantly by the woodshed. I went out at that to see what Robertson had been sniffing at – and there, down the woodwork, was a long damp streak. Solomon, it seemed, had sprayed. A good big spray that he'd been saving up for a week. He'd then sat down with Sheba with an air of Beat That One If You Can while Robertson inspected it – and, to their intense satisfaction, he'd had to admit that he couldn't.

H
ad things continued like that, with Robertson content to sit outcast-fashion in the yard, to acknowledge Solomon as local spraying champion and to look suitably humble whenever our two met up with him, they might in time have become used to him and allowed him into the cottage.

  Might is a nebulous word, of course. They might equally have done what they did years before when we tried to introduce the kitten Samson. Fight him, ourselves and each other till the place resembled the United Nations.

  As it was, Robertson jumped the gun one day and appeared in person in our kitchen. Without being asked, commented Sheba, who was the first to spot him and drew our attention to it by craning her neck incredulously through the doorway from the sitting-room. Just going to eat Our Food! roared Solomon – which Robertson probably was, but only because it happened to be there, like the fruits of the Indies,
en route
on his voyage of discovery...

  Robertson went through the door like a niblick shot with Solomon behind him. Any time Solomon saw Robertson after that he chased him indignantly from the garden. That, hard though it was on Robertson, was logical. It was Solomon's garden; Robertson
was
supposed to live with Annabel; and though I felt a pang at times when I saw his stocky ginger figure valiantly accompanying Charles around the orchard or sitting with him while he dug in the vegetable garden, which was the nearest Robertson could come now to his desire to belong to somebody, at least he got regular meals and we petted him surreptitiously in the garage.

  He was sitting by the bean row one day, busily belonging to Charles, when some people came past with a dog. The dog, a big brown cross-bred, stopped in the gateway and growled at Robertson. Only in passing, because Robertson was a cat, but Robertson didn't see it like that. He saw it that Solomon stopped him from being with Charles in the cottage; now this dog was threatening to stop him from being with Charles among the beans... At that point something snapped. He stood up, bushed his tail, and growled back. The dog fled. Robertson, like a boy who has just discovered he can fight a bully, flew after him. The snag being that the next time he saw Solomon, he flew at
him
.

  'Take that... and that... and THAT', he spat, and Solomon, caught unawares, was badly beaten. Thereafter it was Solomon versus Butch all over again. Solomon kept going out to look for Robertson. Robertson kept coming down to look for Solomon. He was worse than Butch, however, in that his idea was obviously to drive Solomon away from the cottage so that he could live with us himself. The blue one, too, he apparently decided, with the result that he leapt from the undergrowth one day when Sheba and I were in the garden – Sheba, who had never said boo to him in her life... and attacked her before my very eyes until, recovering from my surprise, I shouted and drove him off.

  Thereafter I was officially his enemy. Behind the scenes I still prepared his food – there was nobody else to feed him and we couldn't let him starve. But Charles took it up to him. Charles talked to him and allowed Robertson to accompany him round the orchard. Any time I saw him, I chased him back to the paddock. I hated doing it, but it was the only way. He had Charles as his friend, lived with Annabel, had good meals, but knew that if he set one paw in the garden I'd be after him. It was no worse, in principle, than a cat living in one house but being afraid to venture next door because of the dog – and that way, we thought, we could look after him yet keep our own two safe from attack.

  It worked for a while. Robertson loved Charles, looked daggers at me when he saw me, but kept well to his side of the fence. When he went for a ramble he skirted our garden now, instead of coming through it. Our two, for their part, took to the tiles for safety – Sheba sitting on the coalhouse under the lilac, which was in any case a favourite perch of hers, and Solomon spending most of his time on the woodshed. It was higher, the woodshed roof, and Solomon, though officially up there looking for Robertson, obviously felt safer at an altitude.

  He wasn't, though. Stumping with the resentfulness of the underprivileged past the cottage one day, Robertson spotted Solomon in his eyrie, presumably worked out that he could get at him up there without setting foot in the forbidden territory of our garden (the only reason I can think of for the fact that his approach from then on was always from an outside wall at roof level, and never by any chance through the yard) and climbed metaphorically in with his cosh.

  Thereafter I dreaded ten o'clock in the morning. Around that time Robertson came by on the war-path. If Solomon was on the woodshed he got up and attacked him. If Sheba was on the coalhouse, he got up and attacked her. Keep vigilance as I might, the moment my back was turned he was up there fighting one of them.

  Sheba, rolling comet-fashion as in her battle with Butch, was off the roof and indoors within seconds. Solomon, however, apart from his determination to fight like a man, couldn't roll off the woodshed. It was too high to get off in a hurry. He had to stay there till I went to his aid. Becoming, for some reason we couldn't understand, less and less able to drive Robertson off until the day came – or so we imagined must have happened – when Robertson pushed Solomon off the roof.

  We rushed out to find him limping slowly through the yard while Robertson made off up the lane. He limped, he wouldn't eat... he was Tired, he said. All he wanted was to lie down and rest. We got the Vet at once; this time not without cause. He hadn't fallen off the roof, said Mr Harler – or if he had, it hadn't done him any harm. What Solomon had was a virus infection. A high temperature, a resultant lethargy which was why he hadn't felt like fighting. When I asked but why was he limping if he hadn't fallen off the roof, Mr Harler said 'You'd limp too, if your legs were aching', and called him his poor little man.

  He gave him aureomycin. Afterwards, sick at heart to think of him being attacked while he was ill, by a cat whom we'd encouraged, perhaps from whom he'd actually caught the infection while they were fighting, we watched him limp listlessly up behind the cottage into the long grass.

  'Let him rest for a while', the Vet. had said after the injection. And so, working in the garden to guard him, watching perpetually for Robertson, we did. Never giving a thought to the heat of the sun except that the warmth would do him good, until, going up to see how he was an hour later, I found him suffering from heat-stroke.

  It was obvious enough. His legs were aching, the injection had made him sleepy, the strength of the sun had intensified the effect until he was too numb to move even if he'd wanted to. So obvious that we hadn't even thought of it.

  Anguishedly I picked him up – limp, his head drooping over my arm, dribbling helplessly at the mouth – and rushed indoors with him to Charles. We laid him on our bed, which was the coolest place we could think of, and pulled the curtains. So many pictures went through my mind while we watched and waited. Solomon as a kitten, running races up and down this very bed. Solomon going walks with us, galloping exuberantly on his long black legs to catch us when we ran. Solomon, so nervous for all his airs of bravado, coming to me when he was frightened, looking into my eyes for reassurance when he was in the hands of the Vet, trusting me with every inch of his small seal-point soul – and I had let him down.

  He wasn't our little black clown for nothing, however. Even as I gulped back my tears – Solomon was scared of crying; he always hid under the table when I wept – Sheba came into the room. On to the bed she got. Sniffed Solomon expertly. Informed us in her cracked soprano voice that there wasn't much wrong with
him
, and went to sit, unconcernedly washing herself, in the window behind the curtains.

  She was right. Half an hour later he was sitting up drinking rabbit broth. That night he was eating rabbit itself. Within two days, so quickly did the aureomycin work, he was back to normal. Eating like a horse. Going, every time he thought of it, right up to the paddock to challenge Robertson (only I went right up after him and brought him back before he got the chance). Robertson, sensing his disgrace, stayed strictly up with Annabel. In order to divert Solomon's mind from Robertson we took him and Sheba for walks. Which was how we came to buy a piano.

  We took them up across the hills one night – Charles carrying Sheba, who was otherwise apt to say her feet hurt and turn back halfway, while Solomon ambled behind. Rounding a corner, we suddenly came upon a young man sitting in a hedge with a tape-recorder. Recording birdsong, we presumed; we couldn't think what he was doing there otherwise. Not wanting to disturb him, we put Sheba down with Solomon and turned quietly back along the track.

  Normally this was the signal for the pair of them to follow back behind us, bounding exuberantly through the grass and stopping at intervals to play their favourite game of boys and girls, which consisted of Solomon sitting on Sheba and biting her neck and which, for some reason best known to themselves, they only did on the return half of walks.

  This time, however, there was silence. No sign of anybody. Until we went back along the track once more and there round the corner sat the pair of them, side by side in front of the bird-watcher. There was no need for speech. The angle of Sheba's ears enquired what he was doing. The angle of Solomon's expressed intense interest in the recorder itself. Silently we picked them up and slung them over our shoulders. Silently, if somewhat bewilderedly, the birdwatcher acknowledged our mimed apology...

  It was useless, of course. Hanging over our shoulders as we tiptoed down the track, they started to shout back at him. Sheba first, as she always did to departing strangers, Solomon joining in from sheer enthusiasm. There went
that
recording, I said resignedly. While Charles, his mind on the recorder itself, said 'When are we going to get our piano?'