by Doreen Tovey
We always got the latest news when he came back. 'Plantin' their cabbages,' he would announce as he stumped past our gate. 'Seedin' their lawn.' 'Got their drains stopped up.' Always conveying an up-to-the-minute summary of what was going on, an implied disappointment that that was all that was happening and that the bridge hadn't fallen in yet, and the unfortunate impression, if we happened to have visitors, that he'd gone up there prospecting on our behalf.
'Thee's ought to see!' he greeted us stentoriously on this occasion from a good hundred yards away. We were wrong in gathering that the bridge had at last come up to expectations, however. What had happened was that autumn had come, the Segals had started their lounge fire on a free-standing, Swedish-style hearth that was plainly visible from the lane through their picture window, and had discovered that it smoked. Raising the hearth experimentally up and down on blocks they'd found that the correct height at which it didn't smoke was about three feet from the ground. Contemporarily correct inside their lounge, highly spectacular viewed from the lane when one saw a fire apparently burning on a shelf halfway up a wall – 'Thee's all be nuts!' was Father Adams' verdict when we explained that nowadays that was a perfectly normal idea.
A few days later I felt like agreeing with him as far as we were concerned. I called at the stables to thank Miss Linley, who'd been out with her riding school the morning we collected Annabel and Henry, and I hadn't seen her since. I told her about Henry's second escape and our returning him to his owner. Funny that Annabel didn't miss him, I said, since they got on so well together.
It was one of the biggest shocks in my career as a donkey-keeper when she said they certainly did – the morning after they'd run away they'd got married in her paddock. I felt myself turn pale. 'He's barren though, isn't he – like a mule?' she said in a hearty, used-to-animals voice which brought me partly back to consciousness. Of course he was, I agreed with her. Ha ha, of course he was. I was forgetting that.
It was Charles's turn to turn pale when I got home and told him. They were supposed to be barren, he groaned. One of the things the donkey-man had told him the day he brought Henry, though, which he'd forgotten to tell me but the man had said that in any case it was so remote it was bound to be all right, was that occasionally... there had been a couple of cases... where they weren't.
THIRTEEN
Working up for Winter
We kept quiet about the possibility of Annabel being enceinte. The Rector's wife would have worried. Miss Wellington would probably have bought pink wool and started knitting bootees. Father Adams – we could just see him going past the gate. Slapping at his knees. Guffawing 'When they'm keen enough they'm old enough' which was his usual ribald comment in a situation like this and spreading our discomfiture like wildfire round the Rose and Crown.
It quite possibly hadn't happened, of course – but a lot of little incidents seemed to fall into place after Miss Linley's revelation. The nose-nuzzling in the paddock. The elopement itself with Henry disappearing masterfully with his bride into the night. The scene next morning – innocents that we were – when we saw them lying flat out in Miss Linley's field and thought they were tired from walking. Even when you came to think of it, said Charles darkly, the way we'd seen old Henry looking over the fence at the mare and foal and giving himself ideas.
So did Annabel's following after him the way she did the morning of their honeymoon and now not caring a button. And – or was it just the winter coming on – her increased fussiness about food.
She'd been easy enough to feed through the summer. Grass, water, bread, and a strong dislike for carrots. Apart from the cost – and a suspicion that we must have gone wrong somewhere because the whole point of donkeys, according to the article we'd read, was that even in winter all they needed was grazing, water, and a rough old hedge under which to shelter she'd been easy enough to feed in the autumn, too.
Hay, which disappeared into her stomach at the rate of nearly a bale a week now grass was short, and with which she contrived – by dint of emerging enquiringly from her house with a wisp of it in her mouth whenever we called her – to give an impression of being so hard at work we felt apologetic for having disturbed her. Oats, which as far as we could see she would have eaten by the sackful so we had to ration her to a saucepanful per meal, and Charles walking backwards through the paddock at feeding time, carrying a saucepan and warding off a donkey rearing joyfully after him on her hind legs like a Liberty horse, was matched on my part by the day she stopped in the lane, refused to come home until she had eaten all the ivy off a wall, and I fetched a saucepan of oats as bait. I started by waving it enticingly under her nose; I continued by jogging at an encouraging trot ahead of her down the lane; I ended things having got slightly out of hand – going flat out like a competitor in a pancake race, Annabel coming behind me like a greyhound, and I only just made it to the paddock.
Annabel liked oats so much that if we showed her an empty saucepan she would stick her head in it like a fencing mask and, while we held it in place over her nose, march hilariously round the field by way of demonstration. Annabel liked oats so much that when we decided we were still giving her too many and replaced her morning quota with bread she burrowed through it like a terrier, snorted with disgust when she found there were no oats underneath, and upset the bowl with her hoof. Annabel liked oats so much that when, a few weeks after Henry's departure, she suddenly went off them and took of all things to carrots, our eyebrows went up in alarm.
Full of Vitamins, she announced, chewing steadfastly away at the roots she'd previously hated. Made her feel Sick, she said, turning her head away when we offered her oats in our hands. Made her feel even Sicker, she insisted when we made her a hot bran mash, offered it to her knowing horses usually went mad about it, and after one wan sniff she turned languidly aside.
She could, she added as an afterthought – turning immediately back again to sniff the bag I had under my arm in case the mash was the wrong consistency – manage a little dry bran. So she took to bran and hot water consumed from separate bowls – as she often drank water through whatever she was eating the result was presumably mash anyway but Annabel preferred it like that – ate peppermints as avidly as ever, went capriciously off oven-dried bread for a week or two in favour of the same bread Soft with Honey On, and encouraged – as the next thing to worry us – rats.
We already, as we knew, had one rat. He lived in the cottage roof, disturbed us by coming in in the early hours and gnawing on the beam over our bedroom ceiling, and could be seen from time to time – which was the reason he'd taken up residence with us – slipping round the corner to eat the bread we put out for the birds in the yard. He was quite an establishment around the place and even Solomon and Sheba – he was, after all, a pretty big rat – didn't bother with him overmuch. Sometimes he had a session on the beam during the day whereupon the cats, snoozing comfortably on our bed, raised their heads, stared reproachfully at the ceiling, and went back to sleep. Sometimes Solomon did a routine look up a drainpipe like 'What The Butler Saw' and stuck his paw up it. Sometimes, if she had nothing else to do, Sheba sat in the guttering over the kitchen door. Overflowing it like a small blue broody hen, informing callers when they least expected it that she was Waiting up Here for the Rat – and he wished, said the postman, dropping our letters nervelessly into the mud one morning when she spoke to him in the very act of his handing them over, that we'd train our animals to be normal.
Once, after a particularly sleepless night ourselves, we caught the rat in a cage trap, carried it a mile into the hills with the coal tongs, set it free with a warning about disturbing people and started up another mystery. At five o'clock next morning somebody galloped belatedly across our bedroom ceiling, started gnawing post-haste at the beam, stopped when I hammered beneath it, and – after a minute or so's complete silence during which I got back into bed – dropped a stone like a bomb on the plaster-board. Whether our neighbour in the roof had found his way back and was mad w
ith us, or whether it was a newly-imported girl-friend of his we'd captured and after a fruitless search for her he was mad at us about that we never knew. Only that it seemed to be the same rat we saw eating the bread in the yard next morning. Definitely that whoever it was was chewing away on the selfsame beam. And that we were practically walking somnambulists through lack of sleep and expecting the roof to cave in at any moment when suddenly, blessedly, he vanished.
He didn't vanish far. The next place we saw him – unmistakable from his size and light brown colouring –was up in Annabel's house, scuttling across the floor with a piece of bread in his mouth and making for a hole in the wall to which presumably he'd moved on the grounds that Annabel had a bigger stock of bread than the birds and nobody thumped on the ceiling at him in the night. And the next thing we knew he'd got friends up there.
Bread was disappearing from Annabel's bowl at breakfast time practically on a conveyor belt system. Annabel, a little belatedly, for it was her finickiness in leaving bread around that had started this business in the first place, was standing, while she ate, at Invasion Stations – behind her bowl and suspiciously facing the door, which was quite the wrong way round because the rats nipped out from behind her. Half the cats in the neighbourhood started sitting on the wall watching for the rats. Solomon kept going up and fighting the cats. Father Adams, listening to the howls that came constantly from behind Annabel's house where, from the sound of it, murder was being committed, said we couldn't even have rats could us, peaceably like other people.
We certainly couldn't. The howling was Solomon, with the other cats cornered in crevices or up trees, telling them what he'd do to them. Bite their ears off! he roared, undulating like an air-raid warning and probably deafening them for days. Pull their tails out! Punch their noses if they touched a twig on Siamese property! Which was all very well, but Solomon didn't catch the rats himself. All he did was come in with his eyes watering and frighten us into thinking he'd picked up a germ, until we realised it happened every time and the explanation was that the passion with which he'd been howling had made his eyes run. One day he also came in reeking of ammonia where a besieged adversary had sprayed at him in self-defence and we had, while he howled some more, to Dettol him. We were jolly glad when Annabel got keen on her food again, the rats and cats apparently disappeared, and life returned to normal.
As normal as it ever is, that is. We – it was now three weeks to Christmas – were having our sitting-room fireplace altered. The modern one, which had been the bugbear of our lives for years, taken out; an oak beam set in the wall as it must have been originally; and a simple, wide brick fireplace with an air-control principle behind it set back into the alcove.
Sidney, when we first asked him about doing the job, asked incredulously what did we want to move the old one out for. Nice shiny tiles, boiler and all behind, what did we want better than that? Sidney, reconciled eventually to our having a brick one, wilted again when we suggested setting it back in the alcove. Whip the first 'un out, he said persuasively; bung the brick 'un flat in its place – did we realise what it would mean in altering pipes alone if we went back into that wall? Sidney, bringing along his mate Norm to confirm the position when we still insisted on excavating the alcove, had a moment or two of intense hilarity when Norm said 'twould mean altering all the plumbing. I said we could do without hot water for a day or two. Norm and Sidney fell helpless on one another's shoulders at my innocence and said 'twould be more like a week but go ahead and order the thing if we wanted to. We did. The parts, ordered in September, arrived three months later. Sidney, when we told him, said Lumme he thought we'd forgotten that lot, he was in the middle of decorating his bathroom. Pressed for co-operation on account of the nearness of Christmas he said Norm and his other mate Ern might possibly help him. And so the job was done.
At weekends and evenings. Taking just over a fortnight and seeming like all eternity. With the windows open to the winter blasts to get the rubble out – half a lorry load at least said Sidney and Co., gleefully tipping it with Charles' co-operation into the storm ditch outside the gate and I knew, come January, we'd have to dig it out again. Discovering three flues built one behind the other in the chimney wall, the bar on which the first cottager's wife must have hung her cauldrons, but – to the team's great disappointment – no hidden gold.
The great oak beam was sawn to size on the sitting-room floor and hoisted into place, Sidney commenting relievedly that he was glad that was in. He wouldn't, he said (which was the first we'd heard of it) have slept in the place the last couple of nights himself, he wouldn't, with a hole like that in the wall and nothing to hold it up. The plumbing was disconnected and, through somebody not turning a screw tightly enough, water flooded the floor amid the sawdust and cement. A hole was made for the new air control pipe through from the sitting-room to the conservatory – a hole which went down like a mine and under and up, and as soon as the team went home the cats started going down like a mine and under and up too, yelling their surprise at finding themselves among the chrysanthemums and nipping round to the back door to be let in and try some more.
When the hole was filled in again Solomon took to being the Third Man in the Vienna sewers – creeping mysteriously around under dust covers and narrowly escaping being sat on. Sheba sat dramatically on the carpet, which was piled on the table with the underfelt and the table pushed against a window. The curtains were down on account of the dust and Sheba, perched perpetually on her mound of carpet, not only attracted far more attention from passers-by than our activities would otherwise have had, but at night, when the lights (without shades) were on, she added a waif-like touch to the scene that made it look as if we were either in for a Christmas like the Cratchits or else, as Charles remarked, as if she was expecting the floods at any minute and was already on Mount Ararat.
I was sweating pretty hard about Christmas myself, but we made it all right. The fireplace went in. The mess was cleared up. Ern, working dementedly in a clockwise direction, painted the entire room with two coats of white with the biggest brush he could find while Sidney and Norm put the finishing touches to the mantelpiece.
Not, even then, that the job was without its involvements. Sidney arrived one night towards the end of the period, tired out as were we all with the effort it had entailed, and informed us that his cousin Bert had called the night before about his staircase. Sidney, it seemed, had some time previously promised Bert that one of these days he'd alter it for him – to one of these modem styles, said Sidney, with open treads and bamboo poles to grow ivy up.
Fraught, apparently, with the same desire to have ivy and bamboo poles on their stairs for Christmas as we had to sit by an old-style fireplace, Bert and his wife had spent the previous Sunday stripping the staircase; come joyfully round to tell Sidney they were ready for him to start work; Sidney, exhausted with our little lot, said not before Christmas he wasn't; and when Bert's wife said but what were they going to do, they'd taken all the paper off, Sidney (a remark which we gathered he now regretted) had suggested they stick it back on again.
This has more to do with the story of Annabel than it may seem. While Sidney and Co. worked in their spare time on our fireplace, you see, they discussed these other jobs with us. At the beginning of the period they were working during the day on a farmhouse in the neighbourhood whose owners were restoring it to its original Elizabethan state, and Sidney's condition of near apoplexy at having to take up a fine polished parquet floor in the hall and replace it with flagstones (guess what he'd been doing all day, he said resignedly on one occasion; going round the outhouses, tapping the floor for flagstones, digging 'em up as if they was gold and washing 'em) was equalled only by his indignation the following night when he said what did we think he was doing now? Taking up the kitchen floor on account of its consisting of cracked old flagstones which they hadn't been able to find enough of in the outhouses. Transporting it by wheelbarrow through to the hall – the place, said Sidney, was not
hing but duckboards and the cook was going mad. Replacing it in the kitchen, he informed us in a voice full of tragedy, not even by the parquet but by blooming old red cement.
By the time the fireplace was finished Sidney and Co. were engaged on another curious task. Digging up the village maypole, which was normally a permanent fixture in the school playground, and erecting it in the local guest house which had borrowed it for the Christmas festivities. Not to ask him why they were doing maypole dances at Christmas, said Sidney exasperatedly. For the same reason people took up flagstones in their kitchen and bunged 'em down in their hall he expected. What got him was that they had to keep putting it up and down. Up in the morning for the kids to practise, down at night for the guest house visitors to play table tennis. He and his mates was marching up and down the road like a picket patrol, he said, and if it came down when they was gigglegacking round it at Christmas and hit 'em on their silly gert heads 'twould serve 'em right.
Sidney told us about the maypole. Sidney, on his visits to raise or lower the maypole at the guest house, told Mrs. Reynolds about us and Annabel...
It was the fault of the season, of course. People singing Little Donkey on the radio. Miss Wellington coming by while we were giving Annabel supper in her house saying what a picture she made by lantern-light. The Rector recalling the year the choirboys, in scarlet cassocks and ruffs, toured the village singing carols with lanterns slung on poles. Coming over the hill in procession like a mediaeval picture, he said. Singing so sweetly it brought the tears to one's eyes. The only year they'd done it, alas, for most of them caught colds...