Donkey Work

SIX

The Donkey Owners

They supposed, people sometimes commented in suitably saddened tones, that the cats were settling down now and that was why we'd bought a donkey.

Those were the people who didn't own a Siamese themselves; who took at its face-value the sight of Solomon sitting soberly on the field wall watching Annabel and of Sheba, who'd at last got round to acknowledging that there were such things as donkeys and we had one of them in the paddock, sitting equally soberly beside him. Bless their dear little hearts, they would sigh. Pity they got older, wasn't it?

Those two weren't getting any older. The fact that Solomon's normally orchid-spotted whiskers were temporarily snow-white and contrasted oddly against his seal-black face, and that Sheba had gone white too, all round her mouth and nose so that it looked as if she'd been dipped in face-powder, had nothing to do with age. Way back before we'd had Annabel they'd been ill, and the whiteness was part of the aftermath. They were six now and fighting fit again, and as fiendishly bad as ever. Even their illness had resulted from one of their escapades. One of Solomon's in point of fact, though Sheba encouraged him in it.

Solomon had decided he was a tom. He'd decided it some time previously, when a real stray ginger tom appeared on the scene and, to show there was a man around at last, started to spray about the valley. Solomon, not to be outdone, immediately started to spray back. An action not unknown in a jealous neuter, particularly in a Siamese, but which we had so far not experienced. He not only sprayed wherever the ginger tom had been… On our Rockery Wall, he would announce, examining it with dark suspicion as he passed and immediately backing up to it to effect his own contribution… On our Garage Door, he would add a second or two later while Sheba watched with admiration and said fancy his being able to do that... On our Loganberries, he informed us on one occasion and without more ado bang went the loganberry crop for the season before our very eyes... but he sniffed.

Round the garden, under the gate, up the lane – he followed the trail, being Solomon, with the sniff of a Hound of the Baskervilles and a spray with the force of a Flit gun. We tried to stop him, knowing the risk. We sprayed the lane ourselves with disinfectant till people stopped and sympathetically asked us whether our drains had gone wrong. It was no use. It was a hot dry summer, we couldn't disinfect the entire countryside though goodness knows we tried, Solomon followed the trail with gusto and the next thing we knew he had a germ and was lying, a sad small shadow in a blanket, with a temperature and a swollen tongue. He couldn't eat, he couldn't drink, he dribbled and he was very ill.

Our only consolation in the anxious days of nursing him was that Sheba was unlikely to get it. From the moment she walked wide-eyed into the room on the first day of his illness, sniffed cautiously at him over the top of his blanket and backed speedily away saying he was Catching, we weren't nearly so much worried about Sheba picking it up as unnerved by the precautions she took to see that she didn't.

Passing the invalid's couch in an exaggerated circle, for instance, presumably in case he leaned out and breathed on her. Leaping defensively on to the table when from time to time, not knowing quite what to do with himself, Solomon got feebly down and tottered across the room. Let them sleep together, said the Vet, because if it was infectious she was incubating it anyway and meanwhile she might comfort him. But when we put them in the spare room at night, laying Solomon tenderly on his favourite corner of the settee and inviting her to cuddle up to him, Sheba took up quarantine stations in the other corner, with a good big ridge of blanket between herself and the germy one, and refused to comfort anybody.

Five weeks after Solomon's outbreak, with Solomon himself convalescing nicely, the Vet declaring five weeks' incubation was unheard of and she couldn't possibly have it and Sheba looking sorrowfully at him saying she was afraid she did, she began to dribble too.

At that stage we had the further complication of Solomon, now he was on his feet again and it wasn't him the Vet was coming to give injections to, taking such an interest in medical affairs we were scared stiff he'd reinfect himself. Where Sheba had kept away from him, for instance, the moment he came into the room he strolled up and took deep diagnostic sniffs at her stomach. When we put cream round her mouth in an effort to get her to eat and she listlessly left it there he bounded forward, saying it was a pity to waste good stuff like that, and ate it off himself. When I gave her water with a teaspoon, trickling it gently into her mouth as she lay frailly in Charles's arms, he nipped up behind us and had a good long drink from the bowl in case it contained something special. And when we shut him out through one of the sitting-room doors to keep him away from the germs it was only a question of seconds before Solomon, having streaked like a black-faced hare through the kitchen, round the cottage and through the porch, was coming through the other door, agog with excitement to see what we were doing to her now.

He didn't reinfect himself, in due course we reached the happy day when two fit Siamese cats – one big, black and important-looking; one small, blue and extremely self-possessed – sat side by side in the cottage porch. We hoped, we informed Solomon as he sat looking interestedly round the garden, that this would be a lesson to him and we'd have no more of this business of being a tom. It was, of course, like water off a Siamese's back. The next stage in Solomon's campaign of being a tom was that he had to have a girl-friend.

Solomon didn't like girls. There was a blue one down the lane, a black and white one up the hill, Father Adams' Siamese Mimi if he felt like company of his own superior kind... Solomon never had liked girls. Silly, prissy things, he said. When he saw them he chased them as he did the toms, with the exception of Mimi who was apt to chase him back. For the demonstration of the next step in being a tom he chose, of all people, Sheba.

Both of them were neutered and it couldn't do any harm but it was embarrassing, to say the least, to be walking down the lane and several times en route have Solomon suddenly spring on Sheba, grab her by the neck, and start howling through a mouthful of fur to Look what He was Doing. Particularly since Sheba, after the first couple of times when she kicked him in the stomach and fled, decided to co-operate. There they posed, Sheba flat on her stomach uttering coy feminine cries with her nose in the dust, Solomon holding her manfully by the scruff and daring the ginger tom to get his Woman. Been seeing too much television, commented Sidney. Dear little friendies playing together, beamed Miss Wellington when they did it outside her gate. Absolutely disgraceful, said somebody one day who fortunately we didn't know.

Disgraceful or not, they went on doing it. Never in the house or garden, only when we were coming back from walks, and only when we were far enough ahead for them to pose before we could stop them.

It meant – for the information of psychiatrists who may see in this some evidence of sad frustration – absolutely nothing. In their minds it was part of the fun of the walk, like shinning up the fire-warning notice when we came to the forestry gate and drinking from muddy puddles, and it was forgotten the moment they got home. It was also typical of Siamese, a fitting answer to the suggestion that now they were six they were settling down, and it carried them inevitably on to the time when Solomon caught up with the ginger tom again and got another germ.

This time they fought in the garden shed and the tom gashed Solomon on the cheek. That, judging from the tufts of ginger fur we found scattered in the shed next day, with Solomon going gloatingly in to look at them every time he passed, was nothing to what Solomon had done to the tom. But it was enough. A fortnight later Solomon started sitting by the fire looking sorry for himself. The next day his tell-tale third eyelids came up, with Solomon peering woefully over the tops of them looking like Chu Chin Chow. Once more Solomon was sick.

It was fortunate, the Vet assured us, that, spectacular as it looked, the illness wasn't dangerous and lots of other cats around had had it, because Solomon said he was dying. Freezing, he said, huddling up to the fire for warmth. Couldn't See, he wailed, raising his sad veiled eyes to us for sympathy. When he ate it was even sadder. His appetite was unimpaired, but when he bent his head the effort set the tears running down his cheeks and into his food, and poor old Fatso ate them willy-nilly with his rabbit. On and off he had stomach-ache as well which was why, of course, his eyelids were up; as a sign of intestinal disturbance. Poisoned! he would yell, leaping violently to his feet whenever a pang struck him and frightening us into a sweat.

A fortnight later Sheba appeared one evening with her third eyelids up, announcing that she was poisoned as well, and we started all over again. Six weeks the infection took from start to finish. Eight in all for the pair of them, allowing for the fact that Sheba developed it a fortnight later. At the end of that time, save for the fact that they were considerably thinner and their whiskers had whitened under the strain they were as fit as ever while we, after what we'd been through, were a good deal nearer Colney Hatch. A few weeks later we had Annabel. The fact that the cats could be seen so often after that sitting soberly on her paddock wall had, as may now be appreciated, nothing to do with age but was a sign that they were waiting for us to arrive. So that they could pursue their latest interest, of being Donkey Owners.

Being donkey owners meant patrolling our side of the fence, while we fed her, with superior looks on their faces. Our side of the fence because it showed they belonged to the boss class, could rub possessively round our legs, stroll out to the lane when they liked, and walk importantly back to the cottage with us when we'd finished. Annabel's side of the fence was reserved for Solomon's racing sorties – when he tore madly into the lion's den to show how brave he was, sat in her bed and had to be hauled out again. Annabel's side of the fence, as far as Sheba was concerned, was reserved for strolling nonchalantly through when we were on hand, sitting down with her back to Annabel, and looking around.

Nice in here, she would announce, her back a study in sublime, pale blue indifference. Better before we had a donkey of course. She remembered it then. She remembered it Always. In here now, she would comment, ambling innocently through the grass towards Annabel's sleeping house while Annabel raised her head to look after her, we used to have... At which Annabel would stop eating and chase her and Sheba would dash through Annabel's bed, leap smartly on to the wall and shout for Charles to rescue her. Not that she needed rescuing. It was just a tradition of having to be saved by Charles at every opportunity that Sheba had kept up since kittenhood. Left to herself, as we discovered on the odd occasions when Charles was in sandals and had to fetch his gumboots from the cottage before wading through the nettles to get her out, Sheba would pass the time of waiting rolling blissfully in the slack of Annabel's tarpaulin roof, a scant two inches above Annabel's vengeful ears, as nonchalantly as you liked.