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  Annabel, to our surprise, showed no concern at all. She snorted contentedly when we fed her, lingering gloatingly over her bowl with the intimation that it was all hers wasn't it and nobody to have to share it with. She pranced so joyously out at Charles when he unbarred her door in the mornings that there was no mistaking the inference that there was Much more room for fun now, with old Big Feet out of the way. Despite the morning when she'd trailed Henry up the valley, acting as though the skies would fall if she lost sight of him for an instant, there was such an air of Things being like they Used to be, Annabel having Triumphed, and it was Hoped we realised now who was the best donkey around here, that we wondered if we'd been mistaken in taking him on in the first place.

  The cats, who'd kept strictly to the outside of the fence for the past few weeks, appeared in the paddock again like Spring crocuses. Sheba rolling celebratorily on Annabel's new roof, Solomon getting so excited that when I was playing tag with him with Annabel's empty halter he seized the end of it in his mouth and ran away with it, as he sometimes did with string. I yelled in case the loop end of it caught on something and pulled out Solomon's teeth. Father Adams, blissfully en route from a mid-day session at the Rose and Crown, nearly dropped. God Almighty, he said, mopping his brow. He thought he was used to us by now. But when I shouted like that and a cat tore down the lane like a thunderbolt carrying a halter-now he'd seen everything, he said.

  Not quite everything he hadn't. A few nights later I was sitting in the shed across the lane with Solomon. Guarding him against foxes, as a matter of fact. We never let them out unsupervised on winter evenings and when somebody roared for air or a desire to see the great outdoors one or other of us always went with them. This evening it was raining. Instead of walking up the lane Solomon and I were sitting in the open-fronted shed. I, to pass the ten minutes or so allocated to Fatso's airing, was shining my torch on the falling rain saying 'Look at the rain, Solomon'. At which moment Father Adams walked past, shone his torch on me and a Siamese sitting talking in the dark on a sand-heap, and demanded apprehensively 'Bist thee feelin' all right?'

  Things having a habit of happening in threes, he strolled up the lane the following day and nearly stopped breathing altogether. The people in the modernised cottage had moved in some time before. One of their innovations had been a long, low lounge in stone with picture windows, built on at the side. Another had been a bridge over the stream to get their car across which Father Adams forecast would collapse at any moment – not for any structural reason but just because there hadn't been one there before – and kept going up to see if it had.

  We always got the latest news when he came back. 'Plantin' their cabbages,' he would announce as he stumped past our gate. 'Seedin' their lawn.' 'Got their drains stopped up.' Always conveying an up-to-the-minute summary of what was going on, an implied disappointment that that was all that was happening and that the bridge hadn't fallen in yet, and the unfortunate impression, if we happened to have visitors, that he'd gone up there prospecting on our behalf.

  'Thee's ought to see!' he greeted us stentoriously on this occasion from a good hundred yards away. We were wrong in gathering that the bridge had at last come up to expectations, however. What had happened was that autumn had come, the Segals had started their lounge fire on a free-standing, Swedish-style hearth that was plainly visible from the lane through their picture window, and had discovered that it smoked. Raising the hearth experimentally up and down on blocks they'd found that the correct height at which it didn't smoke was about three feet from the ground. Contemporarily correct inside their lounge, highly spectacular viewed from the lane when one saw a fire apparently burning on a shelf halfway up a wall – 'Thee's all be nuts!' was Father Adams' verdict when we explained that nowadays that was a perfectly normal idea.

  A few days later I felt like agreeing with him as far as we were concerned. I called at the stables to thank Miss Linley, who'd been out with her riding school the morning we collected Annabel and Henry, and I hadn't seen her since. I told her about Henry's second escape and our returning him to his owner. Funny that Annabel didn't miss him, I said, since they got on so well together.

  It was one of the biggest shocks in my career as a donkey-keeper when she said they certainly did – the morning after they'd run away they'd got married in her paddock. I felt myself turn pale. 'He's barren though, isn't he – like a mule?' she said in a hearty, used-to-animals voice which brought me partly back to consciousness. Of course he was, I agreed with her. Ha ha, of course he was. I was forgetting that.

  It was Charles's turn to turn pale when I got home and told him. They were supposed to be barren, he groaned. One of the things the donkey-man had told him the day he brought Henry, though, which he'd forgotten to tell me but the man had said that in any case it was so remote it was bound to be all right, was that occasionally... there had been a couple of cases... where they weren't.

THIRTEEN

Working up for Winter

We kept quiet about the possibility of Annabel being enceinte. The Rector's wife would have worried. Miss Wellington would probably have bought pink wool and started knitting bootees. Father Adams – we could just see him going past the gate. Slapping at his knees. Guffawing 'When they'm keen enough they'm old enough' which was his usual ribald comment in a situation like this and spreading our discomfiture like wildfire round the Rose and Crown.

  It quite possibly hadn't happened, of course – but a lot of little incidents seemed to fall into place after Miss Linley's revelation. The nose-nuzzling in the paddock. The elopement itself with Henry disappearing masterfully with his bride into the night. The scene next morning – innocents that we were – when we saw them lying flat out in Miss Linley's field and thought they were tired from walking. Even when you came to think of it, said Charles darkly, the way we'd seen old Henry looking over the fence at the mare and foal and giving himself ideas.

  So did Annabel's following after him the way she did the morning of their honeymoon and now not caring a button. And – or was it just the winter coming on – her increased fussiness about food.

  She'd been easy enough to feed through the summer. Grass, water, bread, and a strong dislike for carrots. Apart from the cost – and a suspicion that we must have gone wrong somewhere because the whole point of donkeys, according to the article we'd read, was that even in winter all they needed was grazing, water, and a rough old hedge under which to shelter she'd been easy enough to feed in the autumn, too.

  Hay, which disappeared into her stomach at the rate of nearly a bale a week now grass was short, and with which she contrived – by dint of emerging enquiringly from her house with a wisp of it in her mouth whenever we called her – to give an impression of being so hard at work we felt apologetic for having disturbed her. Oats, which as far as we could see she would have eaten by the sackful so we had to ration her to a saucepanful per meal, and Charles walking backwards through the paddock at feeding time, carrying a saucepan and warding off a donkey rearing joyfully after him on her hind legs like a Liberty horse, was matched on my part by the day she stopped in the lane, refused to come home until she had eaten all the ivy off a wall, and I fetched a saucepan of oats as bait. I started by waving it enticingly under her nose; I continued by jogging at an encouraging trot ahead of her down the lane; I ended things having got slightly out of hand – going flat out like a competitor in a pancake race, Annabel coming behind me like a greyhound, and I only just made it to the paddock.