Donkey Work

ELEVEN

Two's Company

It was in October that our moment of truth caught up with us. All the summer Miss Wellington had been campaigning for a companion for Annabel. All the summer we'd been assuring her, first that Annabel didn't need a companion, and then, as summer drew to its close, that maybe we'd think about one for the winter.

A borrowed one, we said as the idea grew upon us. One from the local seaside, just to stay with Annabel through the desolate months when there weren't so many of her friends about. A donkey mare, we firmly informed Miss Wellington who, with stars in her eyes, was already envisaging Annabel roaming a wintry paddock cheek to cheek with a he-donkey and in due course – in the Spring, said Miss Wellington romantically, disregarding the fact that donkeys take a lot longer than that – having a little donkey foal. Maybe we could have Annabel's Mum, said Charles one day with inspiration – and what, when one thought of it, could be nicer? A touching reunion; the pair of them nuzzling secrets together in their stable on winter nights; Mum, a trained and conscientious beach donkey, teaching Annabel to be obedient, which was more than we looked like achieving ourselves in a month of Sundays...

Without more ado it was arranged. We drove over to see her owner. Sure he remembered us, he said. Sure we could have Mum for the winter. We liked donkeys, did we? he enquired, entering us efficiently on the back of an envelope and promising she'd be over in October. We went off on holiday with the idea of Mum still a comforting figure in the future. Came back and looked for the tortoises. Annabel, with memories of the oats they'd given her at the farm, got through her fence twice in a week and was found each time, with her trunk metaphorically packed, waiting hopefully outside the Purseys' gate.

Mum wouldn't have that, we scolded her as we brought her captively home. Mum wouldn't have that, we assured her as we avoided a donkey making camel-mouths at us while we mended her fence. Mum certainly wouldn't have that, we said, when a day or so later she deliberately rolled on a bucket of ashes and squashed it. Her ashes, weren't they? snuffled Annabel, rolling determinedly backwards and forwards like a rolling pin. And so they were, and perhaps we should have been quicker at emptying them on her rolling patch, and maybe it was our fault that when we got the bucket out from under her it was flatter, said Charles regarding it with awe, than a water-lily leaf. But the next day, quite without excuse, she rolled the watering-can flatter than a water-lily leaf too. Too many oats, we said. Not enough discipline, we said. Where, said Miss Wellington like the voice of Nemesis, was Annabel's mother?

She was right. October, with its bonfires and garden tidying and Charles working diligently away at the goldfish pond, had gone with the wind without our realising it. Annabel's Mum had gone with the wind too, as we discovered when we rang the donkey-man. She was up in Wiltshire, he informed us apologetically. He'd lost the envelope, we hadn't rung, a farmer had taken her for winter board with the rest of the donkeys... He'd got a jennet or two left behind though, he suggested helpfully. He could let us have one of those if we liked. And, so help me, we said yes.

When the jennet arrived a week later I was in bed. Suffering from a cold, with a gale blowing outside, the cats sitting side by side on top of me and Charles, as husbands usually do when their helpmeets are unable to reply, holding conversation with me up the stairs. 'You there?' he called solicitously, following with an enquiry as to whether I'd like some coffee. 'You there?' he called a little later. This time to the effect that the papers had come and where were the sweets for Timothy. 'You there?' came the familiar cry a moment or two after that. And, while I gathered my strength to enquire where he thought I was with a cold like this, up a perishing pine tree – 'The jennet's come!' he said.

I wasn't there very much longer. Five minutes later, with the jennet in the paddock and the van grinding irrevocably away up the hill, Charles came up the stairs. He hoped he'd done the right thing in taking it in, he said. It wasn't one of the little chestnut ones we'd anticipated; it was black. It wasn't very small; he reckoned I could ride it. It wasn't a she either, he revealed, the story developing by leaps and bounds with the intensity of a Victorian melodrama. It was a he by the name of Henry. The man said it was definitely a jennet, though, he'd be all right with Annabel, and he'd be coming to fetch him back in March.

A few more salient points like that, such as that Annabel only came up to Henry's middle, Henry appeared to be hungry and Annabel was kicking him – Annabel had long since eaten all the leaves off her trees up to Annabel height; Henry, according to Charles, was now going methodically round the paddock eating them off up to Henry height, and that was why Annabel was kicking him – and I was up all right. Staggering up to the paddock in pyjamas, duffle coat and gumboots to see for myself. Greeting a neighbour, whom I met inevitably because I was in the lane on Sunday afternoon in pyjamas and with my hair on end, with what I hoped was a nonchalant smile. Falling for Henry the moment I saw him.

Henry was big and black and sleek with a tail that fell like a waterfall. Henry's mane had been clipped like a horse's but, presumably to take some sort of trapping, a stiff black tuft had been left on top like the scalp lock of a Mohawk Indian. Henry was a jennet all right – you could see it, though only faintly, in the sturdiness of his legs and the slightly long black ears. But Henry was very handsome. That Annabel realised it too was obvious from the way she was standing by his side. Coyly; femininely; emphasising with unmistakable deliberation the fact that she indeed only came up to his middle. Helen and Paris, said Charles, forgetting his apprehension in his admiration of the scene. Annabel and Henry, I said with equal pride. I put out my hand to pat him, and Annabel immediately kicked Henry.

Annabel kicked Henry a lot. Determinedly but coquettishly, obviously fully aware of her feminine prerogative. She kicked him when we tried to stroke him. She was our donkey – he wasn't Allowed, she said, pushing imperiously between us and Henry and giving a few sharp back-kicks to emphasise the fact. She kicked him when we gave him titbits. She was our donkey and everything was Hers, she said, interposing her bottom in so many directions at once to fend him off that at times she appeared to be doing the Charleston. We evolved a system of holding sugar or a piece of bread close to the fence for her and then, while she was eating it, surreptitiously handing another piece over her back to Henry. Henry, reaching equally surreptitiously over her to get it, soon cottoned on. So, unfortunately, did Annabel. Following a trick or two like that she only had to see the shadow of a hand pass over her head and Annabel kicked capriciously behind and clocked Henry on principle. She knew he was there and that'd teach him not to Sneak, she snorted into her bread and honey.

It wasn't that she didn't like Henry. She just intended to be boss. The first night he was there, for instance, Henry moved into the shelter at dusk as if it was his right. It was too small for him, being only Annabel size, so he stood up all night as if he was in a sentry box with his rump inside and his head and forefeet out. Annabel, presumably under the impression he was standing there on guard and had his eye on her, didn't attempt to throw him out that evening. She stood up too, under a nearby tree, looking warily across at him, pretending she was grazing, and working out a plan. There must have been a plan because the next night it was Annabel who got there first and stood Horatio-like in the doorway while Henry loitered under the tree. And the next night and the next night, till Henry got the idea it was Annabel's shelter and stopped trying to go in there himself, Annabel Frrmphed triumphantly and said she should think so, too – and the next thing we saw, going out one night with a torch to check on the position to date, was Henry standing under his tree and no sign of Annabel at all. Annabel, ascendancy established, had given up keeping guard. Annabel, when we looked inside her house, was back where she belonged. Asleep flat out in the straw with her hooves crossed, her cowlick over her eyes and a pout of triumph on her small white mouth. The only concession to watchfulness being that she had her head towards the door.

Banned from the shelter, kicked when he spoke to us – kicked, according to the neighbours, even when he spoke to them and the people up the lane said the way Annabel ate ginger-cake now was a revelation – Henry might have been excused for developing a temper. He did in fact kick me a couple of times. On account of their jealousy we fed them separately – oats and hay for Annabel outside her shelter, oats and hay for Henry under his tree – and still they squabbled. Annabel marched over to Henry's heap and said it was better than hers, Henry moved over to Annabel's heap and said very well he'd eat that, Annabel charged back in a towering temperament snorting That was hers as well, she'd have the Law on him... Feeding time in the paddock was less a matter of eating than of Annabel and Henry playing musical chairs and, when they stopped, Annabel standing truculently over whichever pile she fancied at the moment, snorting and threatening to kick Henry off.

At first Henry, being a gentleman, gave in to the lady and went. Eventually Henry, goaded beyond endurance, began to kick back in retaliation. Never, even then, to land. Simply thrashing out in a powerful arc to show her he could, if he wanted to, kick her over the cottage; missing her deliberately on account of she was a girl by a good six inches; and having no effect on Annabel the Wilful at all. Only on me, whom he kicked by accident in the stomach.

I thoughtlessly went too close behind him; he, lashing out in what was meant to be a warning to Annabel, caught me amid-ships and laid me flat; and Charles (it was one of my more off-moments in donkey-keeping) picked me winded from the grass and cheerily said No Harm Done. Fortunately not, as Henry didn't wear shoes. I only had a bruise the size of a plate on my stomach, and an assurance from Charles that he'd had that many a time playing cricket. Which I took leave to doubt because I used to play cricket myself at school and we never caught balls on our stomachs. Though, as Sidney said when he heard about it, you never knew with the Gaffer.

After that I stood carefully on one side when I was with Henry. Even then I got caught one night when I patted him on the rump at dusk; he thought it was Annabel up to her tricks and kicked out, and the bag of bread I was holding soared straight into the middle of the field. A magnificent, arching goal-kick, with the top of the bag still left in my hand. I ought to be more careful, said Charles reprovingly. Silly playing at donkeys when I didn't know how to kick, said Annabel, standing watching me from outside her house with a wisp of hay in her mouth. Wooooh! said Solomon apprehensively from his post by the fence. Which was how I felt myself.

Henry seemed liable to put me into orbit any day but there was no question of his hurting Annabel. That, illustrated by the way he carefully kicked to miss her and turned a paternal eye on the cats, was why we kept him. Not only did we have a feeling that, jealousies apart, Henry liked Annabel. We had no doubt about the fact that Annabel liked Henry.

We watched sometimes in the paddock when there was neither food nor us on their minds. Wherever Henry grazed, Annabel grazed as well. Not kicking now because the grass was free, but standing like a prim small toy at his side. Wherever Annabel wandered Henry followed, trailing amiably after her like a clumsy guardian giant. Occasionally we even saw them in a corner rubbing noses.

She kicked him, she grazed with him. She kicked him, she rubbed noses with him. The paddock grass vanished like snow in summer before Henry's formidable hooves and Henry's enormous mouth. The hay and oats vanished like snow in summer, too, what with Henry eating three times as much as Annabel and the pair of them eating twice as much as they normally would on account of rivalry. One moment we wondered whether we should ever have taken Henry. The next, smoothing his big black nose when Annabel wasn't looking, we assured him we wouldn't be without him. The one thing we could congratulate ourselves on was – as we were only agreeing with Miss Wellington one weekend when we'd had Henry with us for a fortnight – that Annabel was no longer lonely, and that she'd not since run away. I can see us saying it now, leaning on the paddock gate with Henry and Annabel plodding companionably towards us. Like Dignity and Impudence, said Miss Wellington ecstatically.

I can see us a little later. Taking Annabel for her first walk since we'd had Henry. Leaving him regretfully behind because we weren't quite certain how he'd handle on a walk with Annabel as yet, but assuring him that we'd take him, too, before long. Touched to the heart by the way he ran up and down the fence at being parted from Annabel, calling to her from the gate and watching her anxiously till she was out of sight. Quite unlike Annabel, who capered skittishly up the lane, never looked back at him once, and greeted him on her return with a vastly superior snuffle.

I can see myself at three the next morning, too, rolling down the stairs to answer the telephone. Wondering what catastrophe had hit the family now. Shivering unbelievingly in the cold November night while the riding mistress informed me that Annabel and Henry had eloped. They were over there with her, two miles away. She'd captured Annabel and tied her to the kitchen door. Henry was running about in the road and wouldn't be rounded up. She was in her pyjamas. And would we please come over at once.