There we were, eventually, at the fête. Annabel, at the Rector's suggestion, wearing her sou'wester. The sun incongruously shining. The children milling round for the lucky dips which she carried in a sack on either side. The Rector beaming happily upon the festive scene.
He didn't beam for long. Five minutes or so of standing still while people fussed around her and Annabel moved off on a tour of inspection. Determinedly, carrying the dip bags, and accompanied by a trail of children. Nothing Charles or I could do could stop her. She met up with Miss Wellington, who was running a competition with a bucket of water with a half-crown in it. (You dropped in a penny. If you covered the half-crown you won it. If you didn't the penny went to the organ fund and Miss Wellington, with the doctor muttering darkly about her rheumatism every time he passed, skittishly fished it out.) Annabel drank the water.
She wandered to the handwork stall and, while we struggled to turn her away, looked inexorably over the contents. Nothing of interest there, said Annabel. But there was when we moved on. Water from her whiskers on a set of embroidered doileys. She found the home-made cake stall, regarded it steadfastly till someone gave her one and then the stall had to be cleared in a hurry because Annabel wanted the lot.
Nothing serious in any of it, mind you, unless you counted her making a camel-mouth at the lady who removed the walnut cake she particularly fancied, and Annabel wouldn't really have bitten her. Just, said the Rector, that she was a little young for a fete perhaps, and excited by the crowds. Just, said Charles, as we trudged deflatedly home with her long before the end of the fete, that she did it purposely, like the cats… Annabel's trouble really, of course, was that, like the Elephant's Child, she was filled with curiosity. En route for home, near Sidney's cottage, we met a cat sitting on a garden wall. Blue Persian as it happened, as against the Siamese to which Annabel was accustomed.
She stopped and gravely studied it. Why was it blue, why didn't it have points, why was it round instead of gawky like the ones we had at home... you could see Annabel's ears whipping about like semaphore flags while she thought it out. Cars came past and stopped. People looked out and clucked at her. Sidney came out to see what the fuss was about. 'Lumme,' he said, seeing us posed like pillars of salt for the third time that afternoon. 'Thee'st been struck by lightnin' or somethin'?'
ELEVEN
Two's Company
It was in October that our moment of truth caught up with us. All the summer Miss Wellington had been campaigning for a companion for Annabel. All the summer we'd been assuring her, first that Annabel didn't need a companion, and then, as summer drew to its close, that maybe we'd think about one for the winter.
A borrowed one, we said as the idea grew upon us. One from the local seaside, just to stay with Annabel through the desolate months when there weren't so many of her friends about. A donkey mare, we firmly informed Miss Wellington who, with stars in her eyes, was already envisaging Annabel roaming a wintry paddock cheek to cheek with a he-donkey and in due course – in the Spring, said Miss Wellington romantically, disregarding the fact that donkeys take a lot longer than that – having a little donkey foal. Maybe we could have Annabel's Mum, said Charles one day with inspiration – and what, when one thought of it, could be nicer? A touching reunion; the pair of them nuzzling secrets together in their stable on winter nights; Mum, a trained and conscientious beach donkey, teaching Annabel to be obedient, which was more than we looked like achieving ourselves in a month of Sundays...
Without more ado it was arranged. We drove over to see her owner. Sure he remembered us, he said. Sure we could have Mum for the winter. We liked donkeys, did we? he enquired, entering us efficiently on the back of an envelope and promising she'd be over in October. We went off on holiday with the idea of Mum still a comforting figure in the future. Came back and looked for the tortoises. Annabel, with memories of the oats they'd given her at the farm, got through her fence twice in a week and was found each time, with her trunk metaphorically packed, waiting hopefully outside the Purseys' gate.
Mum wouldn't have that, we scolded her as we brought her captively home. Mum wouldn't have that, we assured her as we avoided a donkey making camel-mouths at us while we mended her fence. Mum certainly wouldn't have that, we said, when a day or so later she deliberately rolled on a bucket of ashes and squashed it. Her ashes, weren't they? snuffled Annabel, rolling determinedly backwards and forwards like a rolling pin. And so they were, and perhaps we should have been quicker at emptying them on her rolling patch, and maybe it was our fault that when we got the bucket out from under her it was flatter, said Charles regarding it with awe, than a water-lily leaf. But the next day, quite without excuse, she rolled the watering-can flatter than a water-lily leaf too. Too many oats, we said. Not enough discipline, we said. Where, said Miss Wellington like the voice of Nemesis, was Annabel's mother?
She was right. October, with its bonfires and garden tidying and Charles working diligently away at the goldfish pond, had gone with the wind without our realising it. Annabel's Mum had gone with the wind too, as we discovered when we rang the donkey-man. She was up in Wiltshire, he informed us apologetically. He'd lost the envelope, we hadn't rung, a farmer had taken her for winter board with the rest of the donkeys... He'd got a jennet or two left behind though, he suggested helpfully. He could let us have one of those if we liked. And, so help me, we said yes.
When the jennet arrived a week later I was in bed. Suffering from a cold, with a gale blowing outside, the cats sitting side by side on top of me and Charles, as husbands usually do when their helpmeets are unable to reply, holding conversation with me up the stairs. 'You there?' he called solicitously, following with an enquiry as to whether I'd like some coffee. 'You there?' he called a little later. This time to the effect that the papers had come and where were the sweets for Timothy. 'You there?' came the familiar cry a moment or two after that. And, while I gathered my strength to enquire where he thought I was with a cold like this, up a perishing pine tree – 'The jennet's come!' he said.
I wasn't there very much longer. Five minutes later, with the jennet in the paddock and the van grinding irrevocably away up the hill, Charles came up the stairs. He hoped he'd done the right thing in taking it in, he said. It wasn't one of the little chestnut ones we'd anticipated; it was black. It wasn't very small; he reckoned I could ride it. It wasn't a she either, he revealed, the story developing by leaps and bounds with the intensity of a Victorian melodrama. It was a he by the name of Henry. The man said it was definitely a jennet, though, he'd be all right with Annabel, and he'd be coming to fetch him back in March.
A few more salient points like that, such as that Annabel only came up to Henry's middle, Henry appeared to be hungry and Annabel was kicking him – Annabel had long since eaten all the leaves off her trees up to Annabel height; Henry, according to Charles, was now going methodically round the paddock eating them off up to Henry height, and that was why Annabel was kicking him – and I was up all right. Staggering up to the paddock in pyjamas, duffle coat and gumboots to see for myself. Greeting a neighbour, whom I met inevitably because I was in the lane on Sunday afternoon in pyjamas and with my hair on end, with what I hoped was a nonchalant smile. Falling for Henry the moment I saw him.