It was at that point that Jeanine realised that her microphone, attached to her belt, was still switched on. The entire incident had been recorded. Tani's screaming opened and closed one episode of 'A Small Country Living', while the recording of our rescuing the cats formed part of it. People listening to it probably thought she was warning off the adder. What she was really doing was warning off Jeanine.
That wasn't the end of it, either. After Jeanine had gone I cut down the long grass behind the cat-run and laced a foot-deep length of heavy polythene right round the wire netting to stop the adder coming back again, though after Tani's performance it was probably in a hole somewhere having a nervous breakdown. Later events were to show how wrong I was.
For days I kept constant watch over the cats, going up regularly to check that they were all right in their run and listening, when I wasn't near them, to be sure nobody was screeching a warning. Thus, a week or so later, I came to be on the other side of the cottage from the cat-run, chopping down brambles in the lilac hedge that bordered the lane and stopping every now and then, as I couldn't see the run from that point, to listen to make sure all was well.
Suddenly I heard the sound of hooves approaching and a voice I recognised booming out her latest achievements in horse-breeding. Not wishing to be caught – it was, I knew, a local female, accompanied by her much-henpecked husband, who would keep me talking for ages about her latest foal if she saw me – I got down on my hands and knees and took refuge under the hedge, only to hear the woman bawl, as she neared the gate, 'What on earth's that noise?'
'Don't know,' replied her weary spouse.
'Somebody's calling,' persisted the woman. Then, answering her own question, she announced, 'It's one of the Siamese on heat.'
'Thank goodness horses don't make that noise when they're on heat,' said her husband with feeling.
I couldn't hear any howling with the cottage between myself and the cat-run, but Tani had been spayed… it must be another adder. I erupted from under the hedge, much to the couple's astonishment, and tore up the path – to find the two cats side by side, tails bushed like flue brushes, swearing horrible oaths at the ginger cat from up the lane, who'd come down to sit outside their run and tantalise them about being Shut In like Cissies.
SEVEN
That story soon went the rounds as further evidence of my eccentricity. 'Mrs Haskins be tellin' people thee'st come up out of thic lilac like a Jack-in-the-box and frightened her hoss near out of his wits,' Fred Ferry informed me happily later. 'What wust thee doin' on thee hands and knees anyway?' he enquired hopefully.
I wasn't telling him, but neither was I surprised to learn that I was being talked about. I always had been, ever since I'd been seen in the garden shortly after we moved to the cottage with our tame squirrel sitting on my head to get a better view of his surroundings, and Father Adams assured me that he'd told the person who'd seen me that I wasn't as daft as I looked.
From then on there'd been a succession of incidents for people to mull over. When Cats in May was published, for instance, a television crew had come out to the cottage with the idea that Solomon and Sheba were going to climb out of transom windows, carry things round in their mouths and walk welcomingly out of the front door, on either side of me, as I'd described in the book. What actually happened when they had an audience, as any Siamese owner could have forecast, was that Sheba disappeared completely for the duration of the visit and Solomon, after one look at the camera, dived into a clump of delphiniums in the flower border and refused to come out. In the hope of encouraging some action I tied a kipper to a piece of string and, long after Charles and the camera crew had given up and retired to the cottage for refreshment, there I was, jogging round the lawn trailing it behind me, with no sign of a Siamese cat anywhere – just me, an empty lawn, a kipper on a string and, as I suddenly realised, the local riding-school teacher and her retinue of pint-sized riders watching me open-mouthed over the wall. Once I'd given up, of course, and retired indoors covered in embarrasment, Solomon emerged from the delphiniums and started prancing about with the kipper like Nureyev – but the riding party had long gone by that time, the camera crew packed up, and all that remained of that episode was the legend, oft recounted in the Rose and Crown, of me and the kipper on a string.
It was the same when we acquired Annabel, our donkey. Me being towed down the lane on my bottom when Annabel was supposed to be hauling wood. Me trying to give rides with her at the village fete, and Annabel going determinedly in the wrong direction. And, remembered in the village to this day, the time Charles and I were going to a music recital and Annabel went missing.
We didn't dress up very often. Neither our lifestyle nor our inclination subscribed to it. But the recital, a charity affair, was being given in a stately home, and proper gear was de rigueur. So the cats were indoors, the car was waiting in the drive and Charles and I were dressed. All that was necessary was to put Annabel in her stable for the night with her bowl of apples, carrots and bread – a task made easy by the fact that she normally followed Charles, who always gave her her supper, at the trot, with her head in the air like the Bisto Kid. We'd left her up on the hillside till the last moment because it was a summer's evening, the sun was still shining, and it seemed a shame to put her in before we had to. Then out went Charles, shaking the bowl to attract her attention and keeping a weather eye open to make sure nobody saw him in a dinner jacket – only to discover that the gate to Annabel's hillside grazing ground behind the cottage was open and she was nowhere to be seen.
Goodness knew who'd opened it but we couldn't go off and leave her roaming at large. It would be after midnight before we got back and Annabel, not in her stable after what she considered to be her bedtime, was apt to bawl the valley down telling the neighbours about it. Equally certain was the fact that Charles wasn't going to be seen hunting the highways and byways for her in his get-up. So who charged up the hill in gumboots and floating chiffon skirt hauled up to the knees, a bridle in one hand, Annabel's supper bowl balanced precariously in the hand holding up the skirt, enquiring of every passer-by whether they had seen her?
I did, of course, and nobody had. She wasn't at the local farm, where she stayed when we went on holiday, or up in the pub yard where she could be sure of plenty of attention any time she played truant. I got the attention instead.
I trundled back down to the cottage, where Charles was reversing the car into the lane so we could search for her further afield, and suddenly spotted her up on the hillside, coming through a gap in a thicket in the far top corner, where there was a path that ran behind two cottages further up the lane. She hadn't run away. She'd been along there all the time, spying on the neighbours which was another of her favourite occupations; hadn't deigned to come back because she was Busy, and now was ambling back for supper in her own sweet time, supremely indifferent to the fact that we were going to have to drive hell for leather to get to the recital and that I, chasing around in wellies and evening dress clutching a bowl of bread and carrots, was going to be the object of head-tapping in the village for weeks.