Raining Cats and Donkeys

EIGHT

Music Hath Charms

Had things continued like that, with Robertson content to sit outcast-fashion in the yard, to acknowledge Solomon as local spraying champion and to look suitably humble whenever our two met up with him, they might in time have become used to him and allowed him into the cottage.

Might is a nebulous word, of course. They might equally have done what they did years before when we tried to introduce the kitten Samson. Fight him, ourselves and each other till the place resembled the United Nations.

As it was, Robertson jumped the gun one day and appeared in person in our kitchen. Without being asked, commented Sheba, who was the first to spot him and drew our attention to it by craning her neck incredulously through the doorway from the sitting-room. Just going to eat Our Food! roared Solomon – which Robertson probably was, but only because it happened to be there, like the fruits of the Indies, en route on his voyage of discovery...

Robertson went through the door like a niblick shot with Solomon behind him. Any time Solomon saw Robertson after that he chased him indignantly from the garden. That, hard though it was on Robertson, was logical. It was Solomon's garden; Robertson was supposed to live with Annabel; and though I felt a pang at times when I saw his stocky ginger figure valiantly accompanying Charles around the orchard or sitting with him while he dug in the vegetable garden, which was the nearest Robertson could come now to his desire to belong to somebody, at least he got regular meals and we petted him surreptitiously in the garage.

He was sitting by the bean row one day, busily belonging to Charles, when some people came past with a dog. The dog, a big brown cross-bred, stopped in the gateway and growled at Robertson. Only in passing, because Robertson was a cat, but Robertson didn't see it like that. He saw it that Solomon stopped him from being with Charles in the cottage; now this dog was threatening to stop him from being with Charles among the beans... At that point something snapped. He stood up, bushed his tail, and growled back. The dog fled. Robertson, like a boy who has just discovered he can fight a bully, flew after him. The snag being that the next time he saw Solomon, he flew at him.

'Take that... and that... and THAT', he spat, and Solomon, caught unawares, was badly beaten. Thereafter it was Solomon versus Butch all over again. Solomon kept going out to look for Robertson. Robertson kept coming down to look for Solomon. He was worse than Butch, however, in that his idea was obviously to drive Solomon away from the cottage so that he could live with us himself. The blue one, too, he apparently decided, with the result that he leapt from the undergrowth one day when Sheba and I were in the garden – Sheba, who had never said boo to him in her life... and attacked her before my very eyes until, recovering from my surprise, I shouted and drove him off.

Thereafter I was officially his enemy. Behind the scenes I still prepared his food – there was nobody else to feed him and we couldn't let him starve. But Charles took it up to him. Charles talked to him and allowed Robertson to accompany him round the orchard. Any time I saw him, I chased him back to the paddock. I hated doing it, but it was the only way. He had Charles as his friend, lived with Annabel, had good meals, but knew that if he set one paw in the garden I'd be after him. It was no worse, in principle, than a cat living in one house but being afraid to venture next door because of the dog – and that way, we thought, we could look after him yet keep our own two safe from attack.

It worked for a while. Robertson loved Charles, looked daggers at me when he saw me, but kept well to his side of the fence. When he went for a ramble he skirted our garden now, instead of coming through it. Our two, for their part, took to the tiles for safety – Sheba sitting on the coalhouse under the lilac, which was in any case a favourite perch of hers, and Solomon spending most of his time on the woodshed. It was higher, the woodshed roof, and Solomon, though officially up there looking for Robertson, obviously felt safer at an altitude.

He wasn't, though. Stumping with the resentfulness of the underprivileged past the cottage one day, Robertson spotted Solomon in his eyrie, presumably worked out that he could get at him up there without setting foot in the forbidden territory of our garden (the only reason I can think of for the fact that his approach from then on was always from an outside wall at roof level, and never by any chance through the yard) and climbed metaphorically in with his cosh.

Thereafter I dreaded ten o'clock in the morning. Around that time Robertson came by on the war-path. If Solomon was on the woodshed he got up and attacked him. If Sheba was on the coalhouse, he got up and attacked her. Keep vigilance as I might, the moment my back was turned he was up there fighting one of them.

Sheba, rolling comet-fashion as in her battle with Butch, was off the roof and indoors within seconds. Solomon, however, apart from his determination to fight like a man, couldn't roll off the woodshed. It was too high to get off in a hurry. He had to stay there till I went to his aid. Becoming, for some reason we couldn't understand, less and less able to drive Robertson off until the day came – or so we imagined must have happened – when Robertson pushed Solomon off the roof.

We rushed out to find him limping slowly through the yard while Robertson made off up the lane. He limped, he wouldn't eat... he was Tired, he said. All he wanted was to lie down and rest. We got the Vet at once; this time not without cause. He hadn't fallen off the roof, said Mr Harler – or if he had, it hadn't done him any harm. What Solomon had was a virus infection. A high temperature, a resultant lethargy which was why he hadn't felt like fighting. When I asked but why was he limping if he hadn't fallen off the roof, Mr Harler said 'You'd limp too, if your legs were aching', and called him his poor little man.

He gave him aureomycin. Afterwards, sick at heart to think of him being attacked while he was ill, by a cat whom we'd encouraged, perhaps from whom he'd actually caught the infection while they were fighting, we watched him limp listlessly up behind the cottage into the long grass.

'Let him rest for a while', the Vet. had said after the injection. And so, working in the garden to guard him, watching perpetually for Robertson, we did. Never giving a thought to the heat of the sun except that the warmth would do him good, until, going up to see how he was an hour later, I found him suffering from heat-stroke.

It was obvious enough. His legs were aching, the injection had made him sleepy, the strength of the sun had intensified the effect until he was too numb to move even if he'd wanted to. So obvious that we hadn't even thought of it.

Anguishedly I picked him up – limp, his head drooping over my arm, dribbling helplessly at the mouth – and rushed indoors with him to Charles. We laid him on our bed, which was the coolest place we could think of, and pulled the curtains. So many pictures went through my mind while we watched and waited. Solomon as a kitten, running races up and down this very bed. Solomon going walks with us, galloping exuberantly on his long black legs to catch us when we ran. Solomon, so nervous for all his airs of bravado, coming to me when he was frightened, looking into my eyes for reassurance when he was in the hands of the Vet, trusting me with every inch of his small seal-point soul – and I had let him down.

He wasn't our little black clown for nothing, however. Even as I gulped back my tears – Solomon was scared of crying; he always hid under the table when I wept – Sheba came into the room. On to the bed she got. Sniffed Solomon expertly. Informed us in her cracked soprano voice that there wasn't much wrong with him, and went to sit, unconcernedly washing herself, in the window behind the curtains.

She was right. Half an hour later he was sitting up drinking rabbit broth. That night he was eating rabbit itself. Within two days, so quickly did the aureomycin work, he was back to normal. Eating like a horse. Going, every time he thought of it, right up to the paddock to challenge Robertson (only I went right up after him and brought him back before he got the chance). Robertson, sensing his disgrace, stayed strictly up with Annabel. In order to divert Solomon's mind from Robertson we took him and Sheba for walks. Which was how we came to buy a piano.

We took them up across the hills one night – Charles carrying Sheba, who was otherwise apt to say her feet hurt and turn back halfway, while Solomon ambled behind. Rounding a corner, we suddenly came upon a young man sitting in a hedge with a tape-recorder. Recording birdsong, we presumed; we couldn't think what he was doing there otherwise. Not wanting to disturb him, we put Sheba down with Solomon and turned quietly back along the track.

Normally this was the signal for the pair of them to follow back behind us, bounding exuberantly through the grass and stopping at intervals to play their favourite game of boys and girls, which consisted of Solomon sitting on Sheba and biting her neck and which, for some reason best known to themselves, they only did on the return half of walks.

This time, however, there was silence. No sign of anybody. Until we went back along the track once more and there round the corner sat the pair of them, side by side in front of the bird-watcher. There was no need for speech. The angle of Sheba's ears enquired what he was doing. The angle of Solomon's expressed intense interest in the recorder itself. Silently we picked them up and slung them over our shoulders. Silently, if somewhat bewilderedly, the birdwatcher acknowledged our mimed apology...

It was useless, of course. Hanging over our shoulders as we tiptoed down the track, they started to shout back at him. Sheba first, as she always did to departing strangers, Solomon joining in from sheer enthusiasm. There went that recording, I said resignedly. While Charles, his mind on the recorder itself, said 'When are we going to get our piano?'

He'd been wanting one for ages. He was fond of music. If we had a piano, he commented at frequent intervals, I could accompany him while he played the violin, and he'd learn the piano himself so he could compose.

Neither of us had played at all for a considerable number of years. It was, as I pointed out, going to cause something of a sensation in the Valley when we started our duets. Charles practising beginners' pieces on a piano would hardly go unnoticed, either. Couldn't he compose on a violin? I enquired hopefully.

Apparently he couldn't. He needed a piano. Having settled that, the project stayed in the background for months and might never have materialised at all but for Charles seeing the tape-recorder turning seductively in the hedge.

That – and the visions it no doubt aroused of composing, recording, and the tapes being sent to London to be played by an ecstatic Barbirolli – revived his interest, and within a fortnight we had our piano. A modern miniature. And the piano men had gone, and I was in the study trying it out.

My one real doubt about having it had been how Solomon would react. He was a tremendously nervous cat. The staccato tap of a typewriter, for instance, affected him so that he leapt like a startled fawn at the slightest sound for hours after either of us had used it. We'd long ago had to buy a silent model before we started leaping too. So we'd decided to get him used to the piano gradually. Shut him downstairs to begin with, where he could only hear it at a distance, and then let him come up to the study in his own good time, exploring by himself.

In the excitement I forgot that, of course. I'd locked Solomon and Sheba in our bedroom while the piano was delivered. Let them out afterwards, when they'd immediately rushed down to see what they'd missed. And I'd started, hesitantly, to play.

After all those years of not touching a piano it probably was pretty awful – but not, I feel sure, as excruciating as I was given to understand when I glanced up a few minutes later to see the two of them sitting side by side in the doorway looking at me. There was no sign of nervousness on Solomon's face. Only complete incredulity. What on earth did I think I was doing? His expression demanded. Frightening off the bogy-men? Sheba enquired, while two pairs of ears tilted speculatively towards the piano.

After that I had only to touch the keys and, even if they hadn't been seen for hours, they appeared as if I were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It wasn't so much the music. It was warm just then, and when I played I opened the window that looked out on to the hall roof for air. The attraction was to get up into the wide, tiled window-sill and march in and out over the roof with raised tails, as if they were playing at bands. I reckoned they were doing it to draw people's attention to the fact that we now possessed a piano. Charles said they were making sure nobody thought it was them making all that noise. Whichever it was, the fact remained that the sun shone straight through that window on to the music rack; that when I played it was with the shadows of a pair of Siamese tails passing continuously across the music like a frieze of travelling bulrushes; and that when from time to time the voice of Father Adams saying 'Cor!' floated up from the lane as I struck a particularly distracted chord, it was hardly to be wondered at.

There are so many things one can do with a piano. When they came finally in from the roof, for instance, they jumped heavily, one by one, on to my back en route to the floor. That laid me practically flat on the keyboard for a start. Occasionally, inspired by a particularly noisy piece of music, they staged a wrestling match on the stairs. Galvanised on one occasion by the sound of louder screams than usual, I looked up to see Sheba crawling through the doorway on her stomach while Solomon held her by the scruff of the neck. This do for Rigoletto? they enquired hopefully.

One night Solomon rushed excitedly upstairs in the middle of my practising and bit me on the leg. Only in fun, of course. Apparently he'd decided I was playing the piano as a joke, so he was playing one on me. He beamed all over his triangular black face when I yelled and leapt from the chair.

Another night Sheba decided to sit on top of the door to watch me – a favourite place of hers – and, just as I got to the difficult bit, she fell off. Half a page of Chopin followed by a scream and the sound of somebody apparently being thrown from top to bottom of the stairs – that was the order of the day with my piano practice.

Charles had even less success. He'd intended to learn from the Rector's wife, who'd had quite a few pupils in the village, but she and her husband had moved to another parish. There wasn't a teacher now within miles. While he waited for one to turn up – if not, said Charles, he'd buy a Tutor when he had time and teach himself; the important thing was to have the piano – he got out his violin. That was in a pretty parlous state, too; the strings long since disintegrated, the bow a wreck, the bridge lying forlornly on its side in the case. Charles went specially to town to renew everything and one night stood happily in the sitting-room, violin assembled, ready to begin.

'Now!' he said with confidence, raising his bow.

I should have anticipated it, of course. Charles, with practice, is an extremely good violinist. A violin is a tricky thing, however, and after a lapse of years anyone's notes are liable to be off.

Charles's were so off that Solomon, who'd been sleeping peacefully on the hearthrug, was up and in siege position at the top of the stairs before the echo of the first one had died away. He wore his Loch Ness Monster expression and, as Charles drew his next, more tentative, bow across the strings, retired beneath the bed. Somebody was murdering somebody in his opinion, and he didn't want to be included.

It was obviously a choice between his nerves and the violin, and when it got to the stage where he went and sat on the landing if I so much as moved the violin case to dust it, Solomon, as usual, won.

The violin went back into the cupboard. Charles bought himself a piano tutor. He put it aside for the moment, being busy with other things – but the day would come, he informed Solomon darkly. Solomon regarded him innocently. He liked pianos, he assured him.