Raining Cats And Donkeys

TEN

Annie Mated

It was more than five weeks before we saw Annabel again. Five weeks during which we rang up every other day, the breeder reported nothing doing, and we almost gave up hope.

According to those who know, donkeys and horses come into season at three-weekly intervals. She must have been in season when she arrived, said the breeder, otherwise Peter wouldn't have been interested. She might have been going off then, of course – but how she'd managed to stay off for five weeks afterwards, with Peter around to excite her, was a mystery to him.

It wasn't to us. Sheba had once managed to catch, with exactly a five-week interval, an infection from Solomon which the Vet had said she couldn't possibly get after twenty-one days. She'd stopped us from going on holiday on that occasion. Our animals were experts at confounding Science.

All was well now, however. Annabel had at last succumbed to Peter's charms. Twice, two days following, the breeder reported proudly over the telephone. There was no doubt about it now. And so we fetched her home.

She was out at grass with Peter and Gilly when we went over to collect her. A strong companionship had sprung up between the trio, based no doubt on their common diminutiveness, and the two small Shetlands accompanied her loyally across two large fields to the gate when we led her away. Oddly enough it was Gilly who walked closest to her, side by side, apparently her dearest friend. Peter plodded behind, with them but obviously out of things, in the manner of men the world over accompanying a couple of females on a shopping trip.

They watched through the gate as we loaded her into the horse box. They were still watching, two small black figures no bigger than Annabel herself, as we drove out through the yard. It was surprising how other animals took to her, we said. We wondered what Annabel thought?

What Annabel thought was apparent when we got her home. There was a pout on her mouth for days. All she'd gone through, she reminded us, assuming a wilted lily expression every time we spoke to her. She couldn't in her condition, she protested when we tried to hurry her through her gate. Wasn't surprising, she snorted indignantly when we commented how much thinner she was.

It was nice to have her back, all the same. Robertson, who'd vanished while she was away, reappeared like a ginger genie, sitting proprietarily in her stable door though definitely not speaking to me. The rooks were in force again. We'd fed them during her absence but there seemed even more of them about when Annabel was at home.

'The pregnant Valley', said Janet, dreamily tickling Annabel's ears a few days before her own baby was due. 'How wonderfully peaceful it is.'

She didn't say that the next time she came to see us. It was an evening a fortnight later and Janet, leaving Jim keeping an eye on the baby, had dropped in for a first-time-out chat.

'Sherry?' I asked, and Janet said yes, she would. Wonderful she felt, she said, lying back in our biggest armchair. The son and heir at home in his cot; her sitting here without feeling like a hippopotamus; her first glass of sherry in nine whole months...

At that moment there was a blood-curdling scream from the yard. Solomon! I thought, the usual range of possibilities flashing like a film through my mind. Solomon – caught on the roof by Robertson, bitten by an adder he'd mistaken for a slow-worm, attacked (I turned cold at the prospect) by a stoat that he'd met up with and tried to fight...

'I can't go', I said, my knees turning to jelly as usual. It was obvious that Janet couldn't go, either. She sat there as if turned to stone, her glass half-raised in her hand, while Charles rushed to the kitchen, shouted back that Solomon had caught a hare and I, my knees miraculously recovering themselves, dashed after Charles to see.

I forgot Janet in the excitement of the next few minutes. Solomon had indeed brought home a hare. Knowing him we knew he couldn't have caught it in the ordinary way, of course. We decided later that he must have fallen over it while it was asleep. The hare – a young, inexperienced half-grown one – had most likely been asleep on the hillside; Solomon had probably stumbled over it as he ambled along; and, grabbing it while both he and the hare were in a state of semi-consciousness, he'd brought it home for us to see.

The hare, screaming with fright, was now running round and round the kitchen and Solomon was bounding exuberantly after it as if chivvying a captured mouse. All his quarries were as big as this, we were given to understand, and he could round it up any time he chose...

Even as we debated how to rescue it, however, the hare found the open doorway and was gone. Out across the yard towards the gate and straight, in its panic, into the goldfish pond. Fortunately we keep a net over the pond to ward off herons and in the next split-second sequence the hare rebounded off the net with a mighty splash and was away through the gate to safety.

We could have bet on it, of course. A second later there was another almighty splash. Solomon, in his excitement, had also gone straight into the pond and bounced off the net. By the time he got to the gate, the hare was out of sight.

The yard was soaked, Solomon was soaked, we were soaked... It was all right, we assured Janet as we went back into the sitting-room. It was only a hare, and he'd managed to get away. She regarded us from the armchair. It was at that moment that I realised she hadn't moved an inch since we'd left. She was still sitting there like a statue, her glass half-raised in her hand. One thing she knew, she said when we finally convinced her that nobody had been murdered or run amok and that of the three of us, wet though we were, only Solomon had actually fallen in... One thing she knew was that it was no good coming to us expecting peace and relaxation.

It certainly wasn't. Only a few weeks later there we were, quietly minding our own business, and before we knew what was happening we were tangled up with the hunt. Normally, when we hear the horn, we get the cats in, make sure Annabel is where she can't frighten the horses, and leave it at that. This time, however, it was the first hunt of the season, they were using some new young hounds, and by the time the hunt was over and the fox had vanished deftly into the woods, they'd lost some of them. Five and a half couples according to the huntsman, who by this time had exchanged his horse for a van in order to search for them. If we came across them, would we hold them?

Translated, five and a half couples is eleven. The question of how we'd hold eleven excited young foxhounds if they did come into our orbit quite escaped us. Feeling sorry for the lost ones, we said we would – though in the event the one we did catch was more than enough.

Actually it wasn't so much that we caught her as that she gave herself up. We were returning from shutting in Annabel for the night when a lemon-and-white figure padded up to us in the dusk, performed a couple of ingratiating squirms, and announced that she was lost. We brought her into the garden, gave her a couple of biscuits, and wondered what to do next. Her own suggestion, when she found we didn't have the rest of the pack in the garden, was that she should jump the wall and go on looking for them. So we put her, as we didn't have a dog-leash, on Annabel's halter.

Janet said later she wondered if she was seeing things when she looked out of her window that afternoon and saw, through the fast-falling darkness, what appeared to be me streaking past with the Hound of the Baskervilles. It was me all right. No sooner had we got the hound on the makeshift leash than we heard the horn further up the valley and Charles said if I ran (he couldn't run on account of his back, he said) I would catch the huntsman and it would save us a lot of trouble.

When I got there, of course, the huntsman had gone. The next thing I heard was the blasted horn sounding, like the horn of Roland, from the heights way above the Valley, where he'd driven in five minutes in his van but it would take me an hour to reach on foot.

Back at the cottage, having been towed down the Valley by the excited hound faster than I remembered running in years, I found Charles in a similar condition of status quo. Having telephoned the hunt kennels and got no reply, Charles had next phoned the local policeman, who was having his tea, and who'd advised him to phone the hunt kennels. 'That's all I could do myself, you see Zur', said Constable Coggins, helpfully giving Charles the hunt kennels number and hanging up fast before his kipper got cold. So Charles had once more phoned the hunt kennels, once more got no reply, and was sitting there frustratedly demanding what things were coming to.

As if in answer, the hound, whom I'd left tied to the lilac tree while I went in to talk to Charles, at that moment started baying. A forlorn, full-throated call that was like the wind in Fingal's Cave. 'Lo-oooost', she moaned mournfully down the Valley. 'Tied up in a place where there's no-oooo meat, only bissss-cuits. Come to the rescue at o-oooonce!'

Refusing to be quiet unless someone stayed with her – and of course we couldn't have her indoors on account of the cats – what happened was that I spent the next three-quarters of an hour sitting on the porch-mat comforting her. She, deciding that she liked being comforted, climbing affectionately on to my lap, Charles put the porch-light on so that the huntsman could see us if he came past and Solomon and Sheba immediately got up into the window that looked on to the porch and, craning their necks so that they could look down at us, started bellowing indignantly themselves at my traitorous behaviour.

The neighbours must have thought they were seeing things that night, the way their homecoming cars slowed, took in the floodlit tableau on our doorstep, and proceeded thoughtfully on up the lane. Never was I more glad than when the hunt van stopped outside our gate, the voice of the huntsman called through the darkness 'Thank goodness you've got our Emily', and Emily, without so much as a parting lick, leapt thankfully over the wall to join him.

Father Adams's comment, when we told him about it, was that it showed how careful we had to be. Whether he meant careful about taking on strange hounds or careful about people seeing me act peculiarly on the porch I wasn't quite sure, but it didn't make much difference anyway. However careful we were things always happened to us. Take, for instance, the episode of Charles's tooth.

When one of his side teeth collapsed while he was eating a nut, the dentist suggested he had a plate. A normal occurrence, many people have them, and Charles's tooth, on the thinnest cobalt plate imaginable, was most realistic. After his initial attempt at eating with it, when he announced that meals now meant nothing to him, never again would he be able to taste anything, he settled down with it very well. The one exception being that when he'd had it in for long periods – particularly when he'd had a hard day at the office or been to visit his Aunt Ethel – it gave him indigestion. He said it did, anyway. He got a strong metallic taste in his stomach.

We were coming back from town one night, even more harassed than usual on account of we'd not only been visiting Aunt Ethel but were extremely worried because we'd lost some keys that morning and couldn't think where they were, when Charles said he'd have to take his tooth out. He couldn't stand it a moment longer, he said. His stomach was sending up signals of solid aluminium.

If he put it in his pocket, I warned him, sure as eggs were eggs he'd lose it. Don't be silly, of course he wouldn't, said Charles, slipping the fragile metal strapping into a fold of his breast pocket handkerchief. After which we forgot about his tooth and returned to worrying about the keys.

We had reason for worrying, too. We could get into the cottage all right; I had a spare key in my handbag. But the garage key was missing, without which we could neither put the car away nor get the hay for Annabel's supper. The coalhouse key was missing, without which we couldn't light the fire. The toolhouse key was missing, which meant if anything went wrong and needed fixing – as, in the circumstances, it undoubtedly would within the hour – Charles couldn't get the tools to do it with.

What with that and our normal homecoming routine of letting out the cats, getting Annabel in, switching on the radio to hear the news, changing used earth-boxes and seeing that Solomon didn't get up the path and encounter Robertson, we were in our usual state of pandemonium.

I searched the bedroom for the keys, and the pockets of Charles's duffle coat. I looked in the dustbin, where they'd been found on several previous occasions, but they weren't there this time. Charles was wandering about the paddock with a torch. Some hope, I thought, he had of finding anything in that mud.

I knew from his tread as he came down the path a while later that the news wasn't good. Honestly, I said. Where things went around this place I didn't know. We couldn't feed Annabel, couldn't light the fire, where Solomon had got to I hadn't the vaguest clue...

Solomon was by the rain-barrel, said Charles. He'd passed him coming in. He'd found the keys, he informed me as he kicked off his boots – adding, when I started to say but that was good, 'But now I've lost my tooth'.

He had, too. We searched for it for ages. Upstairs. Downstairs. In the mud of the paddock. Even – since that was where he'd discovered the keys by seeing them glint in the torchlight – in the straw in Annabel's stable. We found it at last where it must have fallen when Charles bent to switch on the radio. On the rug in front of the fireplace. We'd have trodden on it long before if Solomon, presumably under the impression that it was some sort of spider, hadn't been sitting there cautiously keeping an eye on it. Meanwhile, being used to Solomon and his trophy hunting, we'd been stepping over and around him automatically, and had never noticed a thing. It was only when he reached out and cautiously poked it that I realised what our fat man was watching. There was no dignity around this place, said Charles, leaping to the rescue of his beloved tooth just as Solomon's paw came stealthily up for the kill. Just no dignity at all.