Time proved that wrong, as the weeks went by, no foal appeared, and Annabel remained as bulgingly plump as ever. We just couldn't win, though – and neither, so far as that period was concerned, could the Duggans. On one side of them the boat was almost finished, the hammering had long since stopped, everybody was admiring the trim little craft that sat buoyantly in the driveway – and Alan was now worrying in case someone wanted to buy it and the Foots started boat-building all over again. On the other, though the bulldozer was silent at last, the Duggans were now suffering heavily from bonfires as the builder and his helpers cleared the undergrowth.
Not only from the smoke, either. Alan swore that one afternoon he and Carrie were sitting on the lawn – used by now, he said, to being kippered – when an adder four feet long came travelling across it at speed. Definitely an adder, he said, when we queried whether it might not perhaps have been a grass snake. Coming straight for them with its head raised, and by Harry it was touch and go, when he got up and shooed it off, as to whether it jumped at him or not. His theory was that it had been annoyed by the bonfire. It had hissed at him angrily, he said, and then turned tail and slid into the rockery. How many more of the perishing things, he wanted to know, might be there, lying in wait, ready to attack?
None so far as we heard. With the Duggans' star in such temporary eclipse, however, we should have known better than to ask them to look after our garden while we were away. Since everything happened to us, and what didn't happen to us appeared to be happening at the moment to them, it was obviously asking for trouble.
It was, too. We came back to find that Carrie had of all things fallen on our path and dislocated her elbow, and scarcely had we digested that catastrophe – it wasn't our fault, she kept heroically telling us; she hadn't tripped or anything; just one moment she was putting down her basket at the conservatory door and the next she was flat on her face – when I happened to mention Alan and we heard the news about him. He'd nearly poleaxed himself on our plum tree.
It was the very first morning we'd gone, she said. Alan had gone down to open the tomato house, and near the garage he too had fallen down. Why she couldn't imagine, unless it was all that smoke affecting him. Anyway, getting up, irate as anybody would be in the circumstances and with a badly grazed knee, he'd forgotten for the moment where he was and, coming up directly under the plum tree, had caught himself a thumping crack on an overhanging branch and gone down again practically for the count.
Carrie was annoyed with him when he got back. All he'd been asked to do was open the greenhouse door, she said, and he came back limping, mud on his trousers, a cut on his bald head and moss off the plum tree all over him like woad. Just like a man, she'd informed him; she'd much better go herself.
That night she did go herself. Fortunately Alan had taken her down in the car and was sitting in it glowering balefully at the plum tree when she, too, fell down. Nowhere near where he had tripped, she said, and she was standing still and the path was dry and she couldn't for the life of her understand it. He was there, anyway. On hand to run her to the doctor, and then to the nearest hospital, where they'd put her elbow straight under anaesthetic.
She'd never forget it, she said. She'd come round at eleven o'clock at night. There she was with her elbow bandaged and Alan sitting gloomily beside her holding his head... They'd put him to watch her to see that she came round all right and his first heartfelt words, when he saw her open her eyes, were 'And those two so-and-so's are on holiday!'
We didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Carrie's accident was awful, and we felt dreadfully sorry about that. But Alan's was so like something out of the Keystone Cops... We tried hard to keep our faces straight, and then Carrie started to giggle. If we could have seen him, she choked, sitting there in the cubicle with a face as long as a fiddle. 'Bouncing off the plum tree', I chortled. 'Covered all over with mildew', roared Charles. 'Lot of unfeeling heathens', growled Alan.
Meanwhile, having brought Annabel home again, we had to consider her future. To mate or not to mate was the operative question. Normally, if a mating fails, one is entitled to a free re-mating with the original stallion. But Peter had by this time been sold – and even if he hadn't I doubt whether we would have considered it. One thing we'd learned, discussing it in many quarters over recent weeks, was that that particular cross is very difficult. A donkey stallion with a mare, yes. You get mules as easy as winking. A horse with a donkey mare – no. It is something to do with the lack of matching chromosomes. Jennets are rare as roses in April.
There was still no jack donkey around. Even if there had been, said Farmer Pursey, he wouldn't advise us on that. May was the time for mating. We'd be wasting our time in October. So we concentrated on getting Annabel's weight down. Sixty inches she'd measured at the final stretch – round with the tape measure – mostly consisting of Yorkshire Pudding, as we could see it now. Getting so fat had been why she'd baulked at the hill. Keeping her down in the Valley so as not to tire her had made her even fatter. And as for Julius moving... he'd always had his doubts about that, said Charles; he reckoned it was the flies making her stomach twitch.
It had been Julius too, Annabel insisted indignantly. Hurting her foot had put him off. She wouldn't have him at all, mind, she threatened, when we took her for her first reducing walk. As she wasn't having him anyway we took no notice of her objection, got out the bridle we'd bought some months before but had never used because we hadn't wanted, in what we'd thought was her delicate state, to upset her and We put it on.
Farmer Pursey had advised it. A donkey bridle with a little snaffle bit, he'd said. Nothing to hurt her, but we'd control her a lot better on that than with a halter. Let her wear it for a few days for an hour or so on the lawn to get used to it, lead her gently so it didn't pull her mouth – in no time at all we wouldn't know ourselves when we took her out.
After the first couple of times, when we wondered why people were laughing and discovered, when we looked back, that our status symbol was marching along behind us with her mouth wide open, it really worked very well. The bridle had a head-band with red and white triangles on it, and, being Annabel, it was always lopsided so that the effect was that of a slightly tipsy Red Indian squaw, but it suited her. Annabel knew it too, jingling her bit rings with the best of them and regarding the bigger horses, when we met, with the air of being just as good as they were and with a harness like they had, too.
On outward journeys, once she got into the routine again, she still ran loose, gambolling and capering and pretending to kick us as ever. On homeward journeys, however, where in the old days she dallied and dawdled and at times I swear my arm stretched to three times its length trying to get her home, she now walked demurely on her bridle as to the manner born. When I took her to the village she was on her bridle all the time, of course, and it was thus – with Annabel on the lawn one morning harnessed ready for the Post Office and Sheba bawling from the garden wall about brushing her too, she was prettier than silly old donkeys – that I had an idea and put Sheba on her back.
For a moment Sheba looked wildly for the safest way to jump. Then, feeling the warmth coming through to her paws, she settled happily down on Annabel and curled her tail. Why hadn't we thought of this before? she demanded. We knew how her feet got cold.