Raining Cats and Donkeys

FOUR

Solomon and the Loch Ness Monster

What happened was that we'd come home late from town, put on all the outside lights, and let the cats out for a look round while we fed Annabel and put the car away.

We kept a strict eye on them as we did our chores, knowing Solomon's propensity for looking one minute as if he was glued to the fish-pool wall for life and the next being half-way up the lane apparently en route for Siam. So when, ten minutes after we'd let them out, we went to get them in again and discovered that Solomon, who five seconds before had been peering suspiciously down a mouse-hole in the rockery, was now nowhere to be seen, we didn't take it seriously at first.

We looked over the front gate, over the side gate, inside the coalhouse... we looked in the potting shed, where there was a heap of sand which Solomon sometimes fancied as a change from his earth-box. There was a rat-hole in the hard-packed sand. We'd once seen Solomon sit hopefully beside it for a while and then, becoming bored and deciding that nobody was coming out today, he'd dug a hole of his own in front of the first one and sat on it, his mind obviously by now on other things, his innocent little bottom exposed to attack in a way that turned us cold when we thought of it, but that was Solomon all over.

He wasn't on the sand-heap now, though. Neither was he up the lane in the ruined cottage, or sitting thinking on the wall of Annabel's house, or – we were beginning to get desperate by this time – locked by accident in Father Adams's outside lavatory, which we checked by tiptoeing up his path and looking in.

I called him – 'Tollywollywolly' in the yodel up and down the valley that I knew, even as I did it, would have the neighbours tapping their foreheads and saying how sorry they felt for Charles, but at least it always brought an answering wail from Solomon, to let me know where he was and would I please hurry up and fetch him.

Not this time it didn't. There was only complete silence and the terrible conviction, after we'd ranged the valley for nearly two hours with torches, and shouted till our throats were sore, that a fox must have taken him. How, we couldn't imagine. The lights were on, the doors were open, we'd kept check on him every minute or so and the idea of Solomon, who always had so much to say about everything, being carried off from under our noses without so much as a peep from that world-shattering voice of his was unbelievable.

But there it was. Twelve o'clock. Nearly two hours of searching for him, and now we had to admit that he'd gone. At which point, standing miserably on the lawn, worn completely to a standstill, I shone my torch up into the damson tree by the front gate, and there he was. A faint dark shadow a few feet from the top. His eyes glittering fixedly in the torchlight. So unmoving that – my next mental crisis of the evening – I was certain he must be dead.

He'd fallen from a higher branch, I decided. He never could climb anyway. Another cat must have chased him, and he'd slipped and been transfixed on a sharp lower branch, which was why, in all those long hours when we'd passed and re-passed under the tree, only a few yards from the house, he hadn't answered us...

At that point my knees gave way. It was Charles who rushed for the garage, moved the car and, despite his back, raced back down the garden with the fruit ladder. But the fruit ladder wasn't long enough, and when we called and reached with encouraging hands from only inches below, there was still no move from the motionless form above us. I died a thousand deaths while Charles raced up the garden, fetched the double roof ladders without even stopping to separate them, thrust them up into the tree and was up there, in seconds, with our seal man. I died a further one, too, with relief, when he said that Solomon was alive – apparently unharmed, except that he appeared to be in a coma – and handed him, limp as a little black waterlily, down into my waiting arms.

What frightened him we never knew. My theory is that it was a badger. A fox I think he would have taken for a dog. But a badger – and there are badger setts just a little way down the valley, and we often hear them grunting their way through the woods at night, but so far as we knew Solomon himself had never seen one... a badger, six times the size of himself, coming down the lane with that great white stripe down its head like a witch-doctor and encountered, perhaps, right at our very gate as Solomon nipped over for an airing... that would have frightened him all right.

Charles said it was either that or we'd brought the Loch Ness monster home in the car-boot. Whichever it was, Solomon bolted upstairs as soon as we got him indoors and remained there for three whole days. He ate up there. He lived up there. It would be wrong to say that he slept up there because for three days solid, so far as we could tell, Solomon didn't sleep at all.

Every time we went into the hall a small black face scanned us anxiously from the landing like a defender at the Siege of York looking down from a portcullis. When we went upstairs he peered worriedly round our legs as we got to the top, to make sure the enemy hadn't crept up behind us. He wouldn't look out of a window at all. Presumably that would have given away the fact that he was in our bedroom. And when we peered cautiously out ourselves – the feeling of being besieged having spread itself to us by this time, the way he was carrying on – Solomon hid under the bed.

He apparently was up there for good. Sheba, with true Siamese contrariness, was meanwhile going further afield than she ever did normally. Every time we looked for her she seemed to be either vanishing over the front gate or setting off up the path through the woods – so much the innocent little lamb going out as tiger bait that, even as we ran to fetch her back to safety, we wondered, knowing Sheba, whether she was doing it deliberately.

It was a great relief when, at the end of three days, Solomon appeared once more in the living room and, after watching Sheba carefully for an hour or two, satisfied himself that she was indeed – no fooling – going right out into the garden and coming back in one piece. Following which, the next time she went out he went out behind her. It was even more of a relief when a week or so later a neighbour who lived beyond us up the lane reported something he'd seen on his way home one night in his car. Coming down the hill he was, he said, and there in his headlights, standing by her paddock gate, was Annabel – and beneath her, glowing oddly in the darkness, were three pairs of disembodied green eyes. Stopping to investigate, with his headlights full on the fence, he'd discovered that there were three cats sitting under her. One was his own cat, Rufus. Another was the black and white cat from up the lane. And the third was the ginger stray Solomon had fought before the holidays.

They were sheltering from the rain, he said. They looked as if they were in conference. And Annabel was standing over them with an air of great importance.

This reassured us on two counts. That there couldn't be anything really dangerous in the valley, otherwise these other cats – far more wordly-wise than Solomon, for all his air of being Lord of the Valley and Anybody Want To Dispute It – wouldn't have been there. And that Annabel – our hearts warmed with pleasure when we thought of it – liked cats.

We'd never been quite sure about this. True we'd once seen her nudging Sheba playfully along with her nose – Sheba turning to natter at her over her shoulder as she went and the pair of them acting like a friendship scene out of Walt Disney. We'd also, however, on several occasions, caught her chasing Solomon in the nearest thing we'd seen to real-life cowboys and Indians – and whether Solomon's big bat ears were streamlined for the fun of it, or because he thought avoidance of wind-resistance was his only hope in his present extremity, we never knew. He'd be back sitting in her paddock within half an hour, but that was Solomon all over. Annabel would most likely be grazing peacefully a yard away as though she'd now decided Siamese cats were some sort of butterfly and the worst that the big-eared seal one could do was sit on her cow-parsley – but that was Annabel all over too. We just didn't know.

Three cats, though – sitting under her where one stamp of her hoof could do so much damage and all Annabel did was stand there like a benevolent mother sheep keeping the rain off... that showed what she was like, we said. And when a night or two later we found she was actually allowing the ginger stray to share her house with her, we were even more impressed.

Annabel was very jealous of her house. Solomon and Sheba weren't allowed to enter it at all. We ourselves were allowed to go in with food and bedding, but once the food was down Annabel stood possessively over it and offered to kick us soundly if we touched one bit of hay. She marked it for all the world to know as hers by standing straddle-legged in front of it, whenever she returned from a walk, and spending a penny. And if we wanted more proof than that of the importance to Annabel of Annabel's house, we had it in her behaviour the day we took her to the County Show. Sixty miles she went by horsebox, to collect for charity, and a full day it was indeed.

She rode regally in the big double horsebox that had been lent to us as though she'd been used to it all her life, though in fact it was the first time she'd ever been in one. She emerged from it, when we got to the showground, as if she were the Horse of the Year arriving at the White City. She did her rounds with her collecting box with the mixture of modesty and self-assurance that we knew of old was Annabel being a Lady, and was photographed and petted, and watched the horses, when we led her to the railings of the show-ring, with an intentness that signified she knew just as well as we did what they were doing there – and had her own ideas as to which horses were doing it properly.

Twelve hours solid she'd been away by the time she stepped down from the horse box again and into her paddock. And what did she do, this donkey of ours who for once had behaved as a status symbol should and there were probably misguided people all over the county that very minute saying wasn't she a poppet, and what about one themselves, as a playmate for the children? Straight into her house she went. Spending a penny on the way, of course, by way of relief and to let the rabbits know that Annabel was back. When we went in a few minutes later with her supper and her water-bucket, though this was summer and it was still light and warm outside, Annabel was lying down. Resting, we gathered. After the strain of her public appearance. In the privacy of her Home.

For Annabel, a couple of months later, to invite the ginger stray to share her home was really something indeed. Charles discovered it one night when he went out to feed her. Her house had been constructed for quickness, when we first had her, out of a small, roofless stone shed, lined with hurdles to give it height, with a sloping roof of corrugated iron lashed to metal poles, and with a further hurdle as a door. This arrangement was so successful that we'd left it like that – the only deterioration being that the hurdles had warped slightly, and in places were not now flat with the walls.

It was behind one of these that the cat was lying, in the gap between the hurdle and the wall. Curled into a ball.

Strategically placed so that, while Annabel couldn't step on him, when she lay down to sleep (Annabel was a creature of habit and always lay in exactly the same position) he was right where she'd breathe on him, acting as a sort of fan heater through the night.

He lay there unmoving, obviously wondering whether Charles would turn him out and ready to fly if he did. Charles pretended not to see him. Annabel ate her supper innocently – also pretending not to see him but Charles said she had that complacent pout to her mouth which we knew so well, and which in this case indicated that she knew something we didn't, and that Annabel was feeling Benevolent.

She was so benevolent that two nights later the cat ventured out from behind the hurdle and began to sleep in an even warmer place. Right against her head. We knew this because there was a deep indentation in the straw where she slept, and when we went out in the mornings now the cat was lying, still curled into a ball, against the place where her head had been.

The next thing Charles reported was that he'd seen Annabel and her new friend eating side by side from her bowl of breakfast bread. Had I, enquired Charles, any old food Solomon and Sheba didn't want? A cat had to be pretty hungry to eat bread, and though Annabel might think she was being generous, he couldn't be getting much nourishment out of that.

So the ginger stray, now known as Robertson on account of his marmalade colouring, was put on the strength. He got two meals a day – taken up to him in Annabel's house because Solomon and Sheba wouldn't have stood for our feeding him in the cottage. Milk – at which he purred his delight like an orphan being taken into a rich man's house and given the delicacies he'd so long seen only with his nose pressed to the window. He was unwise, actually, to make such a song about the milk. Annabel, thinking it must be something special to warrant all that noise, promptly forgot her good intentions, pushed him to one side, and drank it herself. Annabel as a foal had indignantly refused to drink the cow's milk we offered her, declaring that we were poisoning her and it wasn't like Mum's. The sight of her now, delicately pursing her lips into a saucer of it like a dowager duchess taking tea, in order to show Robertson that everything round there was hers, was absolutely typical.

Robertson was a match for her, though. A few intrusions like that and Robertson, when she stuck her big white nose into his saucer, sat up and slapped her on it. A spectacular left and right which, oddly enough, Annabel didn't appear to mind in the least. If our two had done it to her they'd have gone through the doorway like a couple of shooting stars. When Robertson did it, all she did was snort to show she didn't want his old milk anyway, and go back to eating her hay.

They slept together. They fed together. When anybody called to see Annabel at her paddock gate Robertson's little ginger figure was there as well, and as they fondled her head Robertson rubbed against her legs and rose, purring, on his own hind legs to share in the petting. The amazing thing was that Annabel – so jealous when the jennet was with us that she pushed between him and visitors and kicked him if anybody so much as spoke to him – didn't mind at all. Maybe, knowing Annabel, because she thought she'd put one over on us. Adopted him herself. Been really clever and slipped him in when we weren't looking.

The only ones who did object were Solomon and Sheba. Robertson, realising that for all we fed him in Annabel's stable the food actually came up the path from the cottage, started coming to meet us when we took it up. Sometimes he waited on the wall by the garage. Sometimes he appeared through the door of the conservatory, where he'd apparently been looking for mice to fill in time. One day, to Solomon's intense indignation, he appeared on the path outside our window while we were still at breakfast and sat there looking expectantly in at us while Solomon howled at him from inside to go away. All the Food round here was his. And all the Scraps were SHEBA'S, roared Solomon, his voice rising in indignant crescendo at the sight of Robertson, taking no notice of him at all, but still sitting there looking expectant.

Even after we'd escorted Robertson back to the paddock with the dish of food for which he'd come, Solomon still wouldn't be content. He sniffed the wall by the garage and sprayed it to mark the boundary. He sniffed the path where Robertson had sat, and sprayed the nearby jasmine by way of warning. He sniffed round the flower pots in the conservatory and sprayed those, according to Charles who'd witnessed it, like a Whirling Dervish with a hose pipe.

Solomon, of course, had been spraying outdoor landmarks to mark his ownership ever since his delighted discovery that, neuter or not, he could spray. What really brought home to us the seriousness with which our two regarded Robertson's arrival was the behaviour of Sheba, whom I also found sniffing intently one day in the conservatory. Not to worry, I said, stroking her delicate little ears as she looked up at me. Robertson wasn't going to live with us. It was only Solomon being Silly, I said – and laughed to feel her stand, as she had a habit of doing when she wanted to show special closeness to us, on my feet.

It was a good thing I was wearing gum-boots. When I looked down she was determinedly spraying a chrysanthemum plant – and the lot, this being her first attempt ever at direction and I hadn't, until that moment, known that female cats were capable of spraying at all – was going straight over my legs.

She wasn't Worrying, said Sheba when she'd finished her personal contribution to the defence preparations. She and Solomon were keeping him off.