Unfortunately it wasn't only Annabel who could open the door. Solomon could do it too, tugging from the inside with his incredibly powerful claws. Try as I might to make sure it was firmly shut, the moment I left it Solomon would rake and claw and howl and roar until a sudden ominous silence would inform us that he'd done it again. Forced the door and was away on trouble bent.
It was as a result of this that eventually he had his last great fight with Robertson. Finding the door open I'd gone out to check on him as usual. I'd looked. Listened. There was no sign of anybody. No howl for help. No sound of battle. He must, I decided, have gone up behind the cottage where Robertson never went. He was safe up there and the air would do him good. Even Solomon had been indoors a lot during the recent awful weather...
He'd gone up behind the cottage all right – and so, for once, had his enemy. When Solomon came back a while later he had the most dreadful fight wounds I have ever seen on a cat. His ears were bleeding, his stomach gouged by ripping claws, his paws so savagely bitten that the bites went right through his pads. But for the mud and the smell, where Robertson had apparently rolled him on the ground and sprayed him in defeat, and the tell-tale fur-tufts, ginger and Siamese mixed, that lay like drifts of dandelion clocks where they'd met and fought under the rowan tree, I'd have thought he'd met up with a fox.
The fight had been so fiendish that that was obviously why it had been so silent. Nobody had had the breath to howl. The smell was fiendish, too. Solomon reeked like a Venetian canal. I sponged him as best I could without disturbing him, but when Sheba joined him on the hot-water bottle that night, just when our wounded warrior was at his lowest ebb and Sheba cuddling up to him would have given him comfort, she positively reeled. He Stank, she said, spitting at him and fleeing from the chair in horror.
No Florence Nightingale was Sheba. For days, while Solomon lay in his chair unable to walk, feeding wanly from our hands, struggling weakly to his haunches when he wanted to use his box, which was a signal for us to lift him down, and looking mutely at us when he'd finished, which was the signal to lift him back, Sheba slept relentlessly on the settee. Want her to catch something? she bawled, leaping indignantly from the chair if we tried to put her with him. Want her to smell like that? she demanded, when Charles said why wasn't she kind to him.
Three weeks later, however, when the sequel to the fight occurred, Solomon no longer smelled, Sheba was back to sleeping with him – and that was how our next traumatic drama took place.
We'd had to take Solomon to the Vet. He'd recovered by now from his wounds. He had countless bare patches where they'd been, of course, and eventually, as well we knew, he'd grow white hairs there for a while as a result of the shock. He had done since he was a kitten, this time he was going to look spotted as a rocking horse and Sheba would no doubt start nattering about catching those too, in due course – but it wasn't that that was worrying us.
Solomon was off his food. Badly off his food. As a result of shock, we'd thought at first, or maybe because of his distress at being defeated. Now, three weeks later, he wasn't eating at all; he was thin and light as a feather; and, most ominous of all, we hadn't heard him speak for days.
Vitamin deficiency said Mr Harler when, for the umpteenth time, Solomon once more stood woefully on his surgery table being gone over with thermometer and stethoscope. But wasn't it the same as last year? I suggested anxiously. When Solomon fought Robertson, if he remembered, and caught a virus, and he'd given him aureomycin? It was the aureomycin I wanted to remind him of. By now I was expecting Solomon to collapse at any minute, aureomycin had pulled him round before, and I didn't want any mistake about it.
Mr Harler eyed me sternly. Last time, he said, this cat had had a temperature. This time he didn't. Aureomycin wouldn't have any effect. He didn't have a virus. Maybe this was the result of shock – such deficiency sometimes was – but it was Vitamin B he needed, and it was Vitamin B he was going to get. Saying which he got out a syringe, fixed an ampoule to the end of it, tested it, applied it practisedly to Solomon's rear – and the contents shot straight through the back of the syringe and over Charles.
'Stuck' said Mr Harler resignedly, obviously wondering how we did it. He fetched another syringe and ampoule, fixed things up again, and this time Solomon got the dose intended for him. Within minutes Mr Harler was seeing us relievedly off from the surgery steps, telling us to let him know tomorrow if he wasn't any better but he thought that would do the trick.
It did so far as Solomon was concerned. He ate some meat from my hand as soon as he got home. He was wolfing food the next morning as if we'd been starving him for a month. It was the rest of us who suffered.
I'm afraid I wasn't very sympathetic when Charles, driving home from the Vet's, came over queer when we reached the cottage. He'd been nattering so much about the stuff spraying into his mouth and the putrid taste of it and wondering whether it was poisonous or not, that I put it down to his imagination. When, as he went to get out, he suddenly sat heavily on the running-board and said that he felt giddy, I said 'Don't be silly, it didn't make Solomon giddy' and never gave it another thought.
Not till the following day, that was, when we were in the sitting-room just before tea – Solomon, with a solid meal of rabbit inside him, curled recuperatively in the armchair, Sheba spread like a little blue buffalo robe on top of him, and a log-fire blazing comfortingly in the grate. Outside, which made things seem even cosier, it was snowing heavily. A late snowfall we hadn't anticipated, which by now was a good ten inches deep.
'Thank goodness we took Solomon to Harler yesterday', I said with relief. 'We'd never have got through in this.' Charles agreed; we looked with a common thought towards the chair in which, just at that moment, Sheba was reaching out to give Solomon a loving lick on his flanks – and in that very instant it happened. Sheba leapt from the chair before our eyes, gnashed her teeth in frenzy and, foaming alarmingly at the mouth, started tearing round and round the room.
'She's having a fit!' I whispered, almost too scared to speak. 'How can we get her to Harler?' cried Charles, his thoughts on the impassable roads. And there we were once more like a scene from Tchekov. The snow slanting down outside, Sheba going round and round in circles, Charles and I wringing our hands and Solomon – visible only as a pair of big round eyes – hiding under the table.
It came to us eventually, of course. That some of the spilt injection must have gone over Solomon's coat, that Sheba had just licked it off and that – allowing for the fact that Charles hadn't actually foamed at the mouth or run in circles himself (a lot of notice I'd have taken if he had, he said, when I wouldn't even believe he'd been feeling giddy) her reaction had been much the same as his. We caught her, wiped the taste from her mouth with a towel, and in seconds she'd recovered. Except – trust Sheba – that when she tried to tell Charles about it, thanks to all the frothing she'd done and all the lick she'd lost, nothing came out but a squeak.