We felt absolutely besieged. We were besieged. That was obvious when we opened the door one day in a thunderstorm, peered apprehensively out to check whether Micawber was sitting on the doorstep, breathed a sigh of relief to see that he wasn't and prayed it might rain for a week – and there, in a flash, he was. Padding wetly to the edge of the coalhouse roof from his vigil under a lilac branch; flapping his wings to attract our attention; assuring us in his loud, harsh voice, while the rain ran off his tail in streams, that he was there and ready and watching.
He was there and ready and watching whatever we did, wherever we went, whatever the hour. At dawn on our bedroom windowsill. Waiting like a customer for the sales to open because, to prevent him coming in during the night, we now slept with the windows shut. At night, having abandoned the garage as too far removed from the centre of things, he watched from a nearby tree. Twice when we'd been away all day until late evening we crept down the path at dusk, admonishing one another not to make a noise, fond as ever of Micawber but hoping, in view of the problems he set us, that he might have given us up for lost this time and gone to live elsewhere. It was no use. Even at nightfall, with every other magpie in England asleep and snoring long before, Micawber was watching us. Down through the dusk he came, circling our shoulders like a bat, sitting on the greenhouse while we put the car away, huddling – the last we saw of him as we closed the kitchen door – a watching outline on the coalshed roof.
That one day was the last we ever saw of Micawber as we knew him. Our first feeling, when next morning he was missing from our bedroom windowsill, was one of relief. No Micawber waddling demoralisingly through the kitchen door the moment we opened it. No Micawber, when we looked round the corner, sitting picket-fashion in the porch. No Micawber, when we went up to feed Annabel, running flat-footedly after us with raucous squawks to play with our shoe-laces, pull at our sandal buckles or jump with a splash into her water-bowl.
It was Charles, growing worried, who found him, lying stunned in a nearby lane. It was nobody's fault that we could see. A rough, bumpy lane where nothing could possibly have speeded. A car lumbering up in bottom gear. Micawber wandering about the verge under the overhanging grass and flying up at the last moment, as was his wont with people and animals, only this time into a car... Sadly we took him in and fought to save him. Micawber fought too, but he died.
It sobered us all for a while. He'd been a nuisance, a danger to the cats and a chaser of other birds. Even the blackbird and the robin had deserted us, chased off so fast by Micawber when they came down to land that, scuttling about the yard on his big flat feet, he looked like a character in a silent film. It was, perhaps, for the best, but we wished it had been some other way. We wished Micawber had taken to the woods where, with no danger to anybody, he might be flashing still between the trees.
The cats missed him. Sheba sniffed puzzledly round the windowsills and thoroughly searched the garage; Solomon sat for hours behind the kitchen door for a Micawber who didn't come; the pair of them scanned the sky when they went out for the familiar flapping of wings. We missed him too. Poking his meat fussily into corners of the yard for storage; raising his head in enjoyment as he drank from a saucer at our feet; sitting – the memory that stayed with us longest of all – at nightfall on the coalshed roof.
It took another setback to return us to normal. Annabel, eating her way steadily through the summer, had chewed her hedge quite threadbare. From that, with Annabel's eye for effect, it had been a short step to putting her head through the gaps when people passed and reaching, seemingly ignorant of their presence, across the ditch for an odd, stray bramble leaf or an overlooked blade of grass. A touching sight, particularly now that she'd lost her baby coat completely and looked more defenceless than ever with her rounded limbs, minute feet, tiny little tail and the winsomest golden cowlick outside a toyshop. Quite unnecessary, of course, seeing that the paddock was big enough for a dozen donkeys, she had two meals a day and the neighbours fed her till she was fit to pop. But it got her buns and sympathy, and people – watched approvingly by Annabel over the side-fence once their backs were turned – coming to tell us she was hungry.
It also got her out. Annabel, leaning through the wires one day after an elusive dandelion, discovered that she could stretch the top strand up with her head, the middle strand out by leaning on it like a dray horse with her chest – and thereafter, having reduced them in a couple of performances to sagging loops, all she had to do was up with her head, through (stepping carefully) with her feet, and she was free. Running up the hill with Charles and me after her, Timothy racing to cut her off up a side-track, and the lot of us going round like Paul Revere.
Three times she did it in a day, each time at a different point, till the wires hung like Christmas bunting, Annabel was wild with excitement and we were practically flat on our backs. The next day we had to tether her. We didn't like it but there was no alternative until we could get home from town with additional poles and wire and reinforce her fence. She'd be all right, we told ourselves. We'd tethered her for days when we first had her, till we got her fence up. Apart from regularly winding herself up like a maypole till she was on ten feet of rope instead of thirty – plodding self-pityingly round being a Treadmill Donkey, we supposed, though we'd never seen her do it – she hadn't come to harm. Never, as we imagined her doing now, breaking a leg, or strangling herself, or tying herself to a tree. She just couldn't do it, we assured ourselves.
So we left her. Watching us downtroddenly from the middle of the field on the end of her rope. Practising, for the benefit of the day's passers-by, her Burgher of Calais look. And when we got back she'd done it. Hogtied herself so thoroughly in a corner of the paddock that at first we thought she was dead.
She lay there unmoving under the elder tree. Eyes closed, legs bound to her muzzle, coat damp with fear and sweat. Only later had we time to work out how she'd done it – rolling like a puppy in a dust patch with the rope tightening round her with every kick. Meanwhile, panic-stricken, we cut her loose, helped her to her feet, trembled to see that she limped and that, when she opened her mouth to trumpet, only a squeak came out.
She recovered all right. Water, a couple of peppermints, Charles massaging her legs while she leaned convalescently against his head and Annabel was as right as rain. Only Charles was back where he started from, with a flaming peanut rash.
TEN
Time to Take the Pledge
Ours, though sometimes we queried the fact, weren't the worst Siamese in the world. They didn't get drunk, for instance. Like the cat belonging to one of our friends who, enjoying a sherry one night before dinner, put it down by her chair while she read the paper and, when she picked up the glass a moment or two later, found it empty. It gave her the shock of her life, she said, particularly as she was alone in the house. It gave her an even bigger one when she looked apprehensively round and there behind her chair, regarding her from behind the paw he'd used to dip the sherry from the glass and was now licking to extract the last lingering flavour, was her seal-point Siamese Pinocchio. He absolutely leered at her, she said. When she tried to make him stand upright he couldn't. She laid him on her bed. He leered at her again she said, awestruck at the memory, and then he passed out for two solid hours.