Sidney could afford to be cheerful. The last time it had happened he'd been working for us at weekends and had the job of digging down to the pipes himself. Since then, however, Sidney had prospered. Become his ageing builder-employer's right-hand man, drove the lorry, acted as fore-man. Sidney was beyond the spare-time clearing of people's drains now, and who could blame him? The snag was, so now he was in charge of it – was Sidney's firm.
'Have to wait a long time afore we'd get down to he', he informed us, checking off a list of waiting customers as long as the lane. 'You could do 'n yourself, though', he added, as though the thought had suddenly struck him. 'Dig down here' – indicating an area under the rockery. 'Rod 'n through there' – indicating the line of the pipes under the lawn. 'Do 'n in half a day, as easy as pie'.
On the previous occasion it had taken Sidney a fortnight of spare-time work to get to the pipes, several hours of poking and prodding to clear out the silt, and ourselves (since at that stage Sidney had had enough and we didn't see sign of him for ages) a couple of months of personal endeavour to fill in the hole. Half a day – even though, as Sidney light-heartedly pointed out, we didn't need to dig the pipes right up this time; just find th' end and rod 'em along – seemed optimistic even at that stage. A fortnight later, with a positive slag-heap of earth on the lawn, Charles about eight feet deep down a hole like a churchyard vault and still no sign of the pipes, Charles turned purple when he thought of Sidney.
It wasn't just digging the hole, he said with feeling. It was being down it when people came past. Miss Wellington peering over and asking what he was doing, for instance – to which Charles replied 'Digging a hole'. Father Adams enquiring whether he were practising to be Sexton, then to which Charles's reply was unrepeatable. The Rector coming in to introduce a friend – neither of them apparently the least perturbed about Charles being down below ground level, but what, demanded Charles, must it have looked like?
What it looked like when he wasn't working, with the hole covered with sheets of corrugated iron on which sat two Siamese cats importantly mouse-hunting and, if she could possibly get at it, Annabel climbing the earth-mound for practice on her way back to her stable, was also a matter for speculation.
His most embarrassing moment was my fault, however. It was a Saturday afternoon when Charles, after a particularly frustrating morning, said he wasn't going out again; he'd finished. We'd get another contractor, he said. One out from town if necessary. Him all the time in dirty clothes, he said. People coming by and staring at him. That cat, he said, with a glare at Solomon, getting down the hole and under his feet as fast as he dug it – to which Solomon aggrievedly replied that he didn't want the mice down there biting him, did he?
It was I who said oh come now, just an inch or two more and he was bound to find the pipe, and if anybody came by he could duck. It was I, therefore, who was responsible for the fact that when a short while later the riding school came past – the only people who, from the backs of their horses, could look over the gate and down the hole and see him – Charles was there once more in the bottom of the trench.
It was a good thing he was, because at that moment he noticed something he hadn't seen before. Two feet up from the floor of the hole, there in the hard-packed earth wall, solid with silt itself which was why we hadn't spotted it, was the round clay rim of the outlet pipe. He'd been digging on beyond it for at least a week.
I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that I heard voices and looked out to see the riding teacher conversing as imperturbably with Charles, in the bowels of the earth, as if he'd been sitting on a horse at her side, while surrounding her in a parade-style semi-circle, gazing down upon him with the greatest of interest, were ten round-eyed children and their ponies.
I wasn't surprised that his face was red when they'd gone and he clambered out. I forgot that, though, in the excitement of the discovery of the outlet. We fetched the drain-rods; pushed them up the pipes; Charles took off the cover of the septic tank to check the level, at which the cats appeared across the lawn as if by magic... Sheba to be immediately retrieved, wailing that she only wanted to look, from hanging head-first down the septic tank; Solomon to be hauled, howling about the mice he knew were there, from the by now highly vulnerable bottom of the hole. Just in time, too, for a moment later the silt gave way and four feet of drainage water shot into the hole with a roar. The operation, at last, was a success.
It was some days later that I was in the garden when the riding school went by again and the teacher heartily enquired as to whether I was pregnant. 'Huh?' I enquired open-mouthed, sure I must have misheard. 'I said are you PREGNANT?' she shouted stentorially. 'ANNABEL I mean', she yelled as she cantered past.
I said we hoped she was. Honestly, I said to Charles when I went indoors. Was my face red! Supposing Miss Wellington had heard, or Father Adams, or Janet and Jim? Now I knew why he'd turned red, said Charles resignedly. That was what she'd said to him.
Interest in Annabel was growing rapidly now. People kept stopping to ask when she was due to foal; were we going to keep it; what were we going to call it. Our own chief interest was whether it was there at all. We couldn't feel anything or was it significant that when we tried, Annabel walked pettishly away saying she didn't like being touched just there? Her waist measurement didn't reveal anything. Fifty-eight inches by now – which, though that, it was interesting to note, was exactly the same circumference as the top of our rain-barrel, was only four inches in seven months beyond normal, and could have been accounted for by the amount of food she'd eaten.
Miss Wellington, purveyor of Yorkshire puddings to Annabel, was sure beyond possible doubt. There was a look on her dear little face, she said. Indigestion, said Charles, sotto voce, and her face was the last thing to go by.
That was the opinion at the farm. Annabel stayed there for a week that spring, while we went for a short sailing holiday. We came back, went up to fetch her, I was discussing the weather with Mrs Pursey... I was holding Annabel on her halter while we talked and I was most surprised when I looked round to see Charles and Farmer Pursey bending down to peer under her stomach.
What they were looking for I hadn't a clue, but Annabel obviously knew. In the middle of the yard. In front of other people. No thought for a donkey's feelings. I knew what that expression meant, as I'd known at the racehorse stable.
'Her teats', said Charles, when, as we went down the hill, I asked what they had been looking for. 'Farmer Pursey said when they begin to swell it's the surest sign with cows.'
Annabel snorted indignantly when he added that they couldn't find hers at all. Of course they couldn't, she said. She wasn't a cow. She was a Lady.