She hoped we didn't mind, said the owner of the animals, who when we got there was leaning patiently against a tree – but Major, her horse, was mad about our donkey and wouldn't pass the paddock till he'd seen it, and Misha, her Alsatian, insisted on having a game. While we watched with trembling knees they had a game. Misha put his head under one strand of wire and drank from Annabel's water bowl while Annabel leaned over another and apparently bit his tail. Misha rushed into the paddock, leapt playfully at Annabel's ears, and Annabel butted him with her head. Side by side, apparently doing their best to knock one another flat, they cantered round the field a couple of times at least before, with a last nip at her ear and a bark which presumably meant he'd see her again tomorrow, Misha bounded up to join his owner. What, said Charles as the riding party moved off up the lane while Annabel watched them from the gate with the air of a small girl seeing guests off from her birthday party – would Miss Wellington have thought of that as company for Annabel?
What would she have thought, if it came to that, of the morning three of the riding school children turned up on foot and asked if they could take Annabel for a walk. It was a fine opportunity for exercise for her, and with reservations we agreed. They were only, we stipulated, to take her up the valley where she couldn't run away. If she did get loose, said Charles, at which they raised professional eyebrows at one another and sighed politely inaudible sighs, they must come back and tell us immediately. They shouldn't, I advised them, walk too close to her head in case she butted. Or too close to her heels, put in Charles, in case she frisked and kicked them by accident.
With that, and final instructions that she wouldn't cross the stream except when we were with her and to watch out if she rolled because although she was small she was heavy, they set out. One each side, one behind and Annabel plodding demurely away in the middle, like a string of miniature Canterbury pilgrims.
It was two hours before we saw them again. Two hours during which we kept looking anxiously up the lane assuring ourselves that of course they were all right and we mustn't fuss. Two hours in which we kept imagining the children butted over banks or rolled on by a rioting donkey, Annabel with a broken leg or running lost among the hills, and the lot – when time went on and neither she nor they showed up even independently – down one of the local pot-holes.
When suddenly they were at the back gate, having done a complete circuit of the valley and come down the hill behind us. She hadn't, they informed us as they hitched her expertly to the gatepost, tried to roll or gallop or butt them once, and she'd walked absolutely for miles. She'd gone over the stream without a pause, they said – they couldn't think why we thought she wouldn't. Could they take her out again?
Annabel was doing very well for friends indeed, and it was a pity Miss Wellington couldn't know. Miss Wellington was on holiday, however. Staying with a friend near Clovelly. Sending us cards with donkeys on them, invariably in groups of two or more, with a message that had the postman positively mesmerised. SOME DAY, enquired the cards in large capital letters – THIS?
SIX
The Donkey Owners
They supposed, people sometimes commented in suitably saddened tones, that the cats were settling down now and that was why we'd bought a donkey.
Those were the people who didn't own a Siamese themselves; who took at its face-value the sight of Solomon sitting soberly on the field wall watching Annabel and of Sheba, who'd at last got round to acknowledging that there were such things as donkeys and we had one of them in the paddock, sitting equally soberly beside him. Bless their dear little hearts, they would sigh. Pity they got older, wasn't it?
Those two weren't getting any older. The fact that Solomon's normally orchid-spotted whiskers were temporarily snow-white and contrasted oddly against his seal-black face, and that Sheba had gone white too, all round her mouth and nose so that it looked as if she'd been dipped in face-powder, had nothing to do with age. Way back before we'd had Annabel they'd been ill, and the whiteness was part of the aftermath. They were six now and fighting fit again, and as fiendishly bad as ever. Even their illness had resulted from one of their escapades. One of Solomon's in point of fact, though Sheba encouraged him in it.
Solomon had decided he was a tom. He'd decided it some time previously, when a real stray ginger tom appeared on the scene and, to show there was a man around at last, started to spray about the valley. Solomon, not to be outdone, immediately started to spray back. An action not unknown in a jealous neuter, particularly in a Siamese, but which we had so far not experienced. He not only sprayed wherever the ginger tom had been… On our Rockery Wall, he would announce, examining it with dark suspicion as he passed and immediately backing up to it to effect his own contribution… On our Garage Door, he would add a second or two later while Sheba watched with admiration and said fancy his being able to do that... On our Loganberries, he informed us on one occasion and without more ado bang went the loganberry crop for the season before our very eyes... but he sniffed.
Round the garden, under the gate, up the lane – he followed the trail, being Solomon, with the sniff of a Hound of the Baskervilles and a spray with the force of a Flit gun. We tried to stop him, knowing the risk. We sprayed the lane ourselves with disinfectant till people stopped and sympathetically asked us whether our drains had gone wrong. It was no use. It was a hot dry summer, we couldn't disinfect the entire countryside though goodness knows we tried, Solomon followed the trail with gusto and the next thing we knew he had a germ and was lying, a sad small shadow in a blanket, with a temperature and a swollen tongue. He couldn't eat, he couldn't drink, he dribbled and he was very ill.
Our only consolation in the anxious days of nursing him was that Sheba was unlikely to get it. From the moment she walked wide-eyed into the room on the first day of his illness, sniffed cautiously at him over the top of his blanket and backed speedily away saying he was Catching, we weren't nearly so much worried about Sheba picking it up as unnerved by the precautions she took to see that she didn't.
Passing the invalid's couch in an exaggerated circle, for instance, presumably in case he leaned out and breathed on her. Leaping defensively on to the table when from time to time, not knowing quite what to do with himself, Solomon got feebly down and tottered across the room. Let them sleep together, said the Vet, because if it was infectious she was incubating it anyway and meanwhile she might comfort him. But when we put them in the spare room at night, laying Solomon tenderly on his favourite corner of the settee and inviting her to cuddle up to him, Sheba took up quarantine stations in the other corner, with a good big ridge of blanket between herself and the germy one, and refused to comfort anybody.