I, quite frankly, was scared practically rigid. Charles was for going up to see what it was – armed, he assured me, with a tyre lever – but I wasn't having any. Supposing it was a desperado, I said. Somebody having committed a bank robbery, for instance. Trying to get away into the hills, for nobody would go rattling up an isolated track at four in the morning for any normal reason. The man wasn't injured otherwise he wouldn't be trying to get the car out. On the other hand, why was he trying so frantically to get it out himself instead of coming to ask for help? I, I said determinedly, was going to call the police.
It is surprising how clearly one's mind works in an emergency. Like a member of MI5 I felt, creeping down the stairs in the darkness (better not to show a light); sitting with the telephone on the hall floor (sometimes they shoot at one through windows); dialling 999. That was a bit difficult because I couldn't, what with the darkness and my trembling like an aspen, remember which end of the dial the 9 was, but I got it in the end. Whispered my message into the mouthpiece and received instructions not to go out of doors on any account; they'd be with us as soon as possible...
The driver was still reversing hysterically when I went back to the window. It was a nerve-racking business, keeping watch through the swirling mist. I jumped like a grasshopper when there was a scuffling sound from the spare room but it was only the cats, disturbed by the noise, getting up to look out of their window. My heart nearly stopped entirely when a second or two later Annabel, whom I'd quite forgotten, let out a mighty blast complaining that she, too, had been disturbed. It frightened me, used to her as I was. What it did to the driver goodness knew, except after that there was no more revving.
When the police car arrived, sweeping silently down the hill with its roof-light flashing, there was no man either. Only a car tilted into the ditch; our assurance that the driver hadn't come back past the cottage; and a report from a second patrol car which arrived a short while later that there was no sign of him around the village.
We gathered, from snatches of conversation, that they knew who they were looking for. We gathered so even more when we got up next morning and there outside the cottage were three police cars, an Inspector and two Sergeants conferring over a map, a couple of men with walkie-talkie outfits and a handler with a tracker dog.
Excitement followed excitement. Footprints were found under a tree up the lane and, while the police slapped chagrinedly at their helmets, turned out to be ours, where we'd taken the cats for a walk the previous evening. The cats, unable to go out on account of the dog, sat rubbernecking at him from the hall window with ears stuck up like radar aerials. Annabel paraded importantly back and forth along her fence – ten paces, right wheel; ten paces, left wheel – till a constable said she looked like a top-cop on patrol duty. Half the village gathered outside our gate, including Miss Wellington who pushed worriedly through the crowd to ask the Inspector who was missing, was it Annabel?
We weren't a bit surprised when we heard on the one o'clock news that some men were missing from a local prison. It was a bit of an anti-climax, however, when it transpired that our man wasn't one of them. That someone in the village had given a party. The first car we'd heard, at four in the morning, was bringing home a girl who'd helped at the party. The second car, a short while later, had contained a guest from town who, mistaking his way in the fog, had landed in our lane instead of on the main road. He'd tried – probably being a little merrier than he should have been – to get the car out of the ditch himself and had failed. He'd been frightened clean out of his wits when Annabel brayed at him, had gone haring back by a track through the woods to his friend's house and then, feeling a little braver by that time and not liking on second thoughts to disturb him, had found a nearby barn and slept it off till lunchtime.
Might have been a criminal though, said Father Adams sagely. Nice to know we knew our onions and the police were so quick off the mark. It was indeed. Except that Charles, after that, got the idea of keeping a tyre-lever permanently under the bedroom carpet in case we ever needed to know our onions again.
There, he assured me, it was invisible but handy. There it clonked hollowly under my feet every time I made the bed. And there, going up to repair a floorboard and me not remembering to remove it first, Sidney incredulously discovered it one morning and a fresh bit of news went round the village. That we kept tyre levers for burglar protection under our carpets.
FIFTEEN
To Be or Not to Be
One might have expected life to be a little humdrum after that, but we had our diversions. A tile blowing off the roof in a gale, for instance, and Charles going up in the dark to replace it and coming resignedly down with the cause. A marsh tit's nest. Built under the roof in the previous spring. Swollen with winter rain, which was why it had pushed up the tiles. Made, Charles pointed out, of donkey hair, and he bet we were the only people in England who adopted a donkey and got their tiles blown off as a result.
Then the stream – which normally disappears down a swallet-hole up the lane – rose as it always does in the January rains, ran down to us, couldn't get through our ditch on account of the rubble from the fireplace, and no doubt we were the only people in England doing that. Digging the darned stuff out again. With the stream gushing down the middle of the road. The cats sitting happily on the coalhouse roof advising everybody who passed that we were digging it out fast before the policeman saw us. Annabel informing the world from up the lane that she didn't do it and could she please be moved to a place of safety. And Timothy, engaged to help us in return for cash towards a racing bike, leaving us goggle-eyed with his account of every day getting his jean-legs shrunk in the stream, every night hanging them up to dry over his mother's Aga with the legs tied at the ends with string and filled with stones – and every morning, our helper assured us with aplomb, the jeans as good as new again and the legs stretched back to normal.
We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a heron on our garden path. Following the stream, no doubt; coming down to land when he spotted the outline of our fish pool; flapping off as cross as a crow when he found that Charles hadn't finished it yet and there were still no goldfish in it. We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a squirrel on the lawn. Digging under an apple tree, coming up triumphantly with a brace of our biggest cob-nuts and we'd wondered where they'd got to in the previous autumn. We had also, recurring like an echo through the tempo of our activities, the question of whether Annabel was to be a mother.
If faddiness was anything to go by she was probably having triplets. She still ate bran in preference to oats. She rejected two entire bales of hay on the grounds that she didn't like that kind and we had to get some more. She announced that she wanted her drinking water hot. A decision understandable in January, when we'd heated the water to prevent it freezing, but slightly suspicious come April, when the sun shone, the cats sunbathed on her shelter roof and Annabel, confronted by a pail of fresh cold water, pouted her lips at it and said she still required it Hot.