FOURTEEN
Putting a Foot in It
As far as her undercarriage was concerned, Annabel went on being a lady. Her teats were there all right, hidden in the thick cream fur that covered her stomach, but they didn't swell. Perhaps with a little donkey they wouldn't said someone else – or maybe not until she actually foaled.
As the months went by there were other signs, however. One morning we noticed Annabel, as we thought, looking persistently in at us through the kitchen window – the one that faced on to the yard. She was there when we had our coffee. She was there when I went out to get the lunch, nuzzling round the frame and wasn't she clever, I said, to realise she could watch us through that?
What she was actually doing was eating the putty. Charles had recently renewed it and presumably it still tasted of linseed, but it was an odd thing to do, nevertheless. Other than Charles's anguished outcry when he saw the tooth-marks – that dam blasted donkey ate everything, he said; it was a wonder she didn't eat us – undoubtedly it was significant of something.
So it appeared when, for the first time ever, she jibbed at climbing the steep track up into the Forestry estate. It was safe to let her run free there and normally, full of excitement at going for a walk, she galloped it like a Derby winner – up and back at least six times while we climbed it ourselves, kicking skittishly sideways at us when we laughed. Lately, though, she'd taken to walking it and this time, at the steepest part, she stopped. She sighed, eyed the track and visibly rested. We would have taken her back but for the fact that when we tried to turn her, being Annabel she immediately insisted in going on up. If she stumbled by the wayside we weren't to worry, she assured us. She knew donkeys were only beasts of burden. If Julius fell right out she'd carry on.
Having reached the top without this calamity happening she announced that it was all right this time but now Julius would like some grass, and started grazing. She always did up here, where the grass was green and lush. She'd stay there for hours if we let her, and normally we chivied her on. This time, however, we left her, slipped quietly round the corner, and continued our walk alone. We'd go just to the gate at the bottom to give Julius time to settle, we decided, and then come back, put her on her halter and take her home. No more up the hill for her, we said. One shock like that was enough.
We got our second shock ten minutes later, when, while we were at the gate, leaning on it and gazing, still sweating slightly, at the scenery, we heard the sound of determinedly galloping hooves. 'Annabel!' I gasped in horror, recognising the beat. 'It can't be!' groaned Charles. But it was.
Round the corner she came, like a four-footed avenging angel. Downhill now, so there was nothing to hold her up. Wheezing like a bellows with the exertion and shaking Julius roundly at every thud. Leaving her behind and trying to lose her, she snorted when she caught up with us – and, when we tried to placate her, she kicked petulantly out at us and promptly lost her footing in the mud.
We expected Julius to appear at any moment on the way back, but he didn't. Even so we didn't take her up the hill again. She stayed in the Valley now. Receiving her many callers; bulging, so it seemed to me, daily; and beset, as soon as the summer came, by flies.
It so happened that Aunt Louisa had given me some old lace curtains of my grandmother's to put over the raspberries, and when Charles came in one day and said the flies were pestering her badly, couldn't we find something to cover her head and eyes, I said I had the very thing. I got a piece of lace curtain long enough to hang over her nose, cut two holes in it for her ears, put it on and tied it firmly behind her head.
It worked wonders. Admittedly she looked like a Spanish duenna wearing her mantilla back to front – but who, I said, was going to see that, if we kept her grazing quietly on the lawn? The answer was the riding school, who appeared within minutes as if summoned by a bugle. Annabel sauntered over to greet them, putting her head, curtain and all, over the wall; there was a chorus of 'Oooohs' from the children... 'Look Miss Linley, Annabel's getting married' called one excited voice. There was no answer from Miss Linley this time. She was quite at a loss for words.
Before long the flies involved us in a far more serious situation, however. By this time we'd discovered a fly repellent made specially for horses, which we sprayed on her back and legs and – since she objected to the hissing at too close quarters – rubbed by hand round her nose and ears. One warm morning I sprayed her thoroughly as usual, put her to graze on the slope behind the cottage – not far enough to involve her in any real climbing but enough to give her a change of grass – and was coming back down with the fly spray when I suddenly realised that I had the wrong tin. Not the fly repellent for horses but a tin of household fly killer containing Pybuthrin.
I knew what the instructions said without looking at them.
'Remove birdcages and fishbowls... cover children's cots... not to be used on cats and dogs...' We never used it at home ourselves. The only reason we had it was that we'd taken it on a trip to the Camargue in the mosquito season – and the only reason it happened to be on hand, which was how I'd picked it up, was that I'd got it out the previous day to give the name of it to Louisa, who was going on her first-ever trip abroad and had visions of deadly insects everywhere from Calais onwards.
When I told Charles what I'd done, his opinion, based on the observation that I'd used it enough on the old etangs and he was still around himself, was that it probably wouldn't hurt her at all. She was big, he said. She didn't lick herself as a cat or dog would. Better just watch her for a while, he advised. There was nothing else we could do.
There was, though. After ten minutes of waiting for her to collapse – sure at one moment that she had because I couldn't see her, but it was all right, she was only hidden temporarily behind a tree – I rang up Boots in the nearest town and asked to speak to one of their chemists.
'A what?' was the astonished comment when I told him what I'd done. 'A donkey', I worriedly confirmed. It was like confiding one's troubles to a policeman. When he said hold on a moment while he consulted his colleagues and incredulous voices saying 'She's sprayed a what?' came from the room behind him, the equanimity with which he in turn replied 'A donkey' was really magnificent. There was a muttered conference, after which he returned to the phone to report that the general opinion was that if she were their donkey they'd wash her. 'With what?' I enquired puzzledly. 'Oh, the usual thing – soapflakes or detergent and plenty of hot water', he said, speaking by now as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
It wasn't, of course. I thanked him, told Charles, and the pair of us started slogging up behind the cottage with buckets of detergent. Better to do the job up there, we decided, where the water could sink into the ground, instead of in the yard where the next thing would be Solomon paddling in it and we'd be ringing up Boots about him.
Which was how – elevated on the hillside as on a stage we were next to be seen industriously bathing a donkey. Rubbing in the detergent till she foamed; running up with buckets of water to rinse her; running up again with the proper fly spray when we'd finished because, having got off all the original repellent, the horse-flies were pitching on her in hundreds as she was now so attractively wet.
'What be doin' up there then?' came Father Adams's voice inevitably, in due course, from the bottom, and when we told him he said we fair beat cock-fighting. When, a few weeks later, he looked over the wall one day and saw me fitting a striped canvas bag with a rubber sole over one of Annabel's feet it was too much even for him, however. 'Don't tell I thee bist making her boots!' he declared. And when I confessed that as a matter of fact I was – 'God Almighty!' he breathed incredulously.