There was no mistake about it. Once she lifted her head to reach down and bite her leg where a fly was tickling her. Again she lifted it when Charles – wondering from the silence, he said, whether I'd fallen in her feeding bowl and she'd eaten me – came and looked over the fence and nearly dropped at what he saw. Each time she drooped her lashes, snorted softly, and laid her head back on my shoulder to be stroked.
I told people about Annabel's responsiveness that day till they must have been tired of hearing it. I gave her peppermints. I went up to talk to her practically every half-hour. I saw myself achieving things unheard-of in the rapport between donkey – properly treated – and man.
It didn't take her long to blot that small beginning of a copybook. The next day, wandering up the lane with her in an atmosphere of mutual affection, on our own because Charles was spraying the grape-vine, minus my duffle coat because it was hot – and what need had I of protection now, when there was such a wonderful understanding between us? – Annabel bit me in the pants. A good hard nip like being caught by a pair of nutcrackers. Guess who did that? she enquired when I touched ground again, wobbling her underlip amiably at me à la Maurice Chevalier.
EIGHT
The Trouble with Tortoises
Our donkey apparently liked us. Solomon was mine to the extent that he alone was allowed to snuggle down with his head on my pillow when he and Sheba came into our bedroom in the mornings and if Sheba tried it on he bit her. Sheba would jump into a bath at any time to be with Charles, and when he worked at home she sat companionably on his desk like a paperweight, enquiring didn't he think she was pretty and making footmarks on his documents. The ingrate of the family – the one we never mentioned – was Tarzan the tortoise.
Tarzan, two years previously, had run away. Run was the operative word. Scarcely had we got to know him – scarcely, even, had the cats discovered which end to prod to make him work – than Tarzan bolted up the path one day while we were having lunch and vanished again till the following Spring. Tarzan, after that, had had a blue and white circle painted on his shell to make him more identifiable. Tarzan, we decided, thinking that might be what made him wander, should forthwith have a mate. We even decided on her name. Tosca we intended to call her. But there was a shipping strike on at the time. Tarzan wouldn't wait. By the time the boat came in and the Tortoises for Sale notice went up outside the local pet-shop, Tarzan, camouflaging himself presumably under a dandelion leaf, had gone again.
It was May when he disappeared and it was August – too late, we thought, to provide him with his Tosca at that time of year – when we discovered him again. Up on the hillside behind the cottage, where we'd gone quite by chance to call for Solomon, who as usual was missing when we wanted to go out. And there, as we shouted 'Tolly-wolly-wolly' and searched the neighbourhood with field glasses, for by this time he'd been missing for an hour and a half and we'd searched every thinkable place till we were exhausted, we discovered him. Not Solomon – whom we found eventually sitting conspicuously on the coalhouse roof saying he'd been there all the time though we knew jolly well he hadn't – but Tarzan. Standing on a rocky outcrop looking at us with his head out and a defiant expression on his face, and with the weather-worn remnants of the blue and white paint on his back to prove that he was ours.
How he'd got there in the first place was amazing, for behind the cottage garden was a ten-foot wall backing on the hill, and behind the cottage itself was an almost vertical stone-lined bank that one would have thought would have stopped an elephant let alone a tortoise. He spat at us when we took him back. Didn't want to live in the valley, he said, and we could tell from his expression he was mad. And so, seeing that a painted shell is useless when a tortoise takes to midsummer undergrowth or goes climbing above one's head, we fitted him with a ping-pong ball on the end of a long length of string tied round his waist on the principle of a marker buoy, offered him some bread and milk at which he withdrew his head and said he supposed we were trying to poison him now, and let him go. Outside the kitchen door where he immediately started out across the yard, which Charles was still in the process of paving, and got his ping-pong ball caught between a couple of stones.
We unhitched him from there, struggling away like a beleaguered Channel swimmer and spitting at us with disgust, and put him in the garden. There, for a few days while he learned the ropes, he stayed. Once, seeing the string pulled taut and Tarzan on the end doing his Channel-swimming act, I found he'd got the ping-pong ball anchored in the chrysanthemums. Shortly afterwards, seeing Tarzan struggling valiantly behind the dahlias, I looked to see what was holding him this time and found Solomon sitting on his string. Watching Tarzan's struggles on the end of it with the interest of an entomologist, but pretending, when he spotted me, that he hadn't a clue he was holding him up.
The third time it was the ping-pong ball I noticed, wrapped by its string round a rose tree. Three times round as if Tarzan had gone berserk and started walking in circles. But there was nothing berserk about that tortoise. Three times round for leverage that had been. When I trailed the string to where it ended in the Michaelmas Daisies, there was an empty red string waist-band and Tarzan once more had gone.
We never saw him again. He didn't appear the following Spring and we had, in fact, given him up as perished when, in the ensuing summer, we were invited out to supper by some people who lived up the hill a quarter of a mile away. They supposed, they said during the course of the evening, that we hadn't lost a tortoise? When we said we had as a matter of fact, nearly a year ago, they said they'd found one three weeks previously climbing up the hill. Two days following they'd seen him and the second day, fearing he might get run over, they'd taken him in and put him in their herbaceous border. Where, they said, he seemed to be pottering happily, came out to see them on occasion, and they'd grown quite fond of him.
It was Tarzan all right. The fact that he'd been found mountaineering was proof of that. But if he was going to keep leaving home and making for the heights; if he was happier when he got there – and the fact that he'd been pottering voluntarily in their flower-bed for weeks when he wouldn't stay five minutes in ours seemed proof enough of that – then they had, we said beneficently, better keep him.
They did. I, never having had Tarzan around long enough to strike up a bosom friendship with him, was content to let them. And Charles, after thinking it over for a fortnight, announced that he missed Tarzan and was going to ask for him back. When I said he couldn't, we'd given him to the people, he said he was going to lure him back. People had no right to other people's tortoises, he said, and if he went up there with a lettuce and Tarzan looked through the hedge at it he had as much right to pick him up as anybody. Tortoises, he said, were jolly interesting. Which was why the following week, to prevent Charles carrying out his threat of tortoise-napping and no doubt ruining our reputations for ever, I brought home two small baby tortoises.
Victoria and Albert we called them because at the time there was a move, quite rightly, to ban the importation of tortoises on account of bad conditions of transport, the petshop man said this might be the last consignment he'd have and Charles – quite brilliantly I thought, when I told him – said in that case they'd be museum pieces. We didn't know whether they were really a pair. According to our reference book the undershell of a male tortoise is concave and that of a female convex, but when I turned these two upside down in the petshop they were both, with my usual luck, flat. They were the only small ones they had, however, so I bought them in hope. And Charles and Solomon thought they were wonderful.