NINE
The Sad Tale of Micawber
That wasn't the only setback we had that year. Back in the summer, with the tortoises newly with us, the mousing season in full swing and Annabel emerging by instalments from her baby coat, Charles had developed a passion for peanuts. Peanuts by the pound, since he never did anything by halves. The dustbin was filled with peanut tins, Charles was slapping his chest saying peanuts certainly had something. When I said they couldn't be good for him in such quantities and – by way of another approach – what on earth would the dustmen think when they tipped out all those tins, Charles, practically devastated by his own wit, said they'd think we were nuts.
He didn't laugh when his rash came up and the doctor said it was either the oil or all the salt in his system. For the next two months, he only had to get agitated or over-heated and it came up again within seconds, turning him a bright brick-red with bumps. It was during that period that we adopted a magpie, and in no time at all Charles' bumps were up like measles.
The magpie came to us from friends in town who'd found him sitting on their dustbin lid one morning. Tamed, they imagined, by someone who'd taken him from a nest in spring. Turned out to fend for himself when his owner got tired of him. Homeless but hopeful, with a strong predilection for humans despite the treatment he had received, Micawber didn't fancy fending for himself, and for a week, amply justifying the name they'd given him, he sat stolidly on their dustbin lid waiting for something to turn up.
Nothing did. Our friends fed him but wouldn't, as he obviously hoped they'd do, let him into their house. So he tried his luck with a neighbour, ate two rows of the neighbour's peas by way of introduction, flew frantically back to our friends when the neighbour chased him... He was now, they informed us in a phone call late that night, locked precautionally in their coal-shed. The owner of the peas was threatening to shoot him the moment he set eyes on him. Would we, for his own good, have him to live with us in the country?
Touched by his plight, we agreed. The cats were used to birds by now, we reasoned. Pheasants skimming the clearing in the wood with Solomon leaping salmon-like beneath them were a staple view from the cottage, but he never caught one. Sheba, going through the kitchen door, dropped to her stomach like a sharpshooter when she saw the blackbird in the yard, but it was only habit. The blackbird flipped his tail at her and went on eating. Sheba got automatically up as if from a curtsey and went on round the corner. Even the robin they besieged under the settee for an hour one day wasn't particularly worried. They sat there the whole of lunch-time – Sheba guarding one end like a Buckingham Palace sentry, Solomon peering intimidatingly under the other in the intervals of sharing the tomato soup, us thinking they'd mislaid a mouse until eventually they gave it up, wandered off, and, to our astonishment, a robin walked calmly from under the settee and started to look for crumbs. Nobody caught anybody any more. Micawber, we said when we heard of his troubles, would be quite all right with us.
Micawber was. It was Solomon who, within an hour of Micawber's arrival, was being rushed by car to the Vet's. Sheba, seeing us shut ourselves in the garage with a mysterious-looking basket and refuse to let her in, had climbed precipitously up to spy on us through a high outside window. Solomon, seeing her perched aloft like a mountain goat and inspired with his usual desire to imitate her, had tried to climb up to the sill himself and missed. Unknown to us there was a cloche beneath the window. And, as inevitably as everything happened to him, poor old Solomon fell through it.
His long black leg was ripped from top to bottom. Twelve stitches he had in it while, sick with remorse, we held him on the surgery table. Ten days he spent with his leg sewn up in a pathetic seam, turning our hearts every time we looked at him but not inconveniencing Solomon an inch. A fortnight we had Micawber and it seemed, in our extremity, like years.
Micawber said he was going to live in the garage. That was all right by us. We took down every cloche in sight. Charles put a ladder against the inside wall to give him a high, safe perch. We had to be careful, when we drove in, not to hit the ladder, otherwise the ladder immediately fell down and hit the car, but we soon got used to that. We put Micawber on the ladder by way of demonstration... Snag number one. Raised, presumably, in a low-hung cage, Micawber didn't like heights. He, he said, planing to earth so frantically you could practically see him mop his brow with relief when he got there, was a Ground Magpie. He took up residence on a box two feet off the ground, with a derelict door leaning against it one way which formed a sort of cave and a plank leaning against it the other way which formed a sloping gangplank and down this, to the detriment of Charles' rash, every time we or the cats approached he strolled grandly to meet us on foot.
Micawber liked having baths. Our friends discovered that when they saw him splashing earnestly in a garden puddle and we, to keep up the good work, provided him with a soup tureen. Snag number two. Micawber insisted on having that on the ground as well. Out in the drive in the sun, where he ducked and splashed like a grampus, sat blissfully on the edge of the tureen to dry, and we kept nerve-racked watch because if there was anything more vulnerable than a magpie who wouldn't fly it was a waterlogged magpie who couldn't.
That was how it appeared at first sight. Actually Micawber wasn't nearly as vulnerable as he looked. The moment a cat got within striking distance – sometimes, to make it even more hair-raising, the moment the cat actually struck – and Micawber, throwing the business of being a Ground Magpie to the winds, was away. Not, unfortunately, very far. Flapping heavily to the sharp thin top of a beanstick with, a second later, Sheba threatening to leap up there as well and turn herself into a kebab. Fluttering precariously to the top of the garage door with Solomon, sewn-up leg or not, crouched beneath ready for a suicidal spring. Sitting, most dangerous of all, on the apex of the greenhouse, with the car nearby where we normally left it, Solomon and Sheba on the car roof preparing to dive in unison straight through the greenhouse glass, and Charles and I diving even faster to prevent them.
We nearly went mad over the car. We moved it a dozen times a day to a different part of the drive, but it was no use. If we left it nearer the lane it was nearer the bean rows too. Within seconds, the cats were on the roof crouched ready for the take-off and Micawber was sitting like a coconut on the nearest stick. If we left it nearer the garage it was correspondingly nearer the garage door with, this time, Micawber sitting seductively on the top of that. If we put it in the garage and shut the door Micawber immediately flew down, drooped his wings in the dust, huddled dejectedly against the door of what he said was his Only Home and, we gathered from his attitude, wept.
We practically wept, too. We netted the greenhouse and conservatory roofs to afford some protection to the cats. Resulting, needless to say, in the neighbours asking what the mackerel catch was like this morning. We took the netting off again when the cats weren't about in case Micawber got his legs entangled in the mesh and hurt himself. We enticed Micawber down to the cottage proper – away, we thought, from the perils of car and glass. Only to find that he then either sat interminably on the windowsills with the cats charging like Bengal Lancers at the panes from the inside or else kept walking affably at ground level through a kitchen door which had, if we didn't keep eternal watch on them, two equally affable Siamese behind it.