When Charles uses that expression my heart sinks. I like animals too, but I have never felt impelled to consider building a pond on the front lawn so that I could keep a King Penguin (this after a visit to the Zoo at which Charles spent an entranced three-quarters of an hour watching one of them doing all the smaller penguins out of their fish). I have never had the bright idea that a camel would be an ideal companion for Annabel on the grounds that (discounting the fact that Annabel is a Scandinavian variety) camels and donkeys are companion creatures of the East and Charles once knew a very intelligent one in Egypt. But I have had the task of talking Charles out of these and various similar ideas, and a pretty narrow squeak it has been on some occasions.
In the case of the horses it was, I must agree, somewhat different. If it came to that, I wouldn't have minded taking Pixie home for myself It was practically the end of the riding season; the horses were lent out for the winter in exchange for their keep if people wanted them; and for all Pixie's wilfulness and her habit of stumping stolidly along on the way home saying she was tired – until, on the advice of the instructor, I swung my riding crop thoughtfully on the end of my finger as I rode, whereupon Pixie immediately leapt into a trot saying Goodness Gracious Her, almost asleep she'd been and why hadn't I woken her up... for all that, her nodding little head and sturdy fat grey body were beginning to grow on me.
The snag – which I could see, but Charles, in his sudden affection for Warrior, stubbornly refused to do – was that while it might be all right for people in the neighbourhood to take Warrior or Pixie or Morven and feed and ride them through the winter, we lived four hundred miles away.
How were we going to get them home? I enquired. 'Ride them', said Charles, at which I had a vision of ourselves trotting determinedly down through the Potteries and Birmingham and arriving home somewhere around Christmas. 'Put them on the train', he said airily, when I said but if we rode them how would we get the car home. Despite my insistence that that would cost a fortune – and we'd have to send them back next May and that would cost a fortune too, let alone the fact that by that time we'd probably decide we couldn't part with them and have to buy them and where on earth would we keep them permanently – despite all that Charles still went on talking about taking Warrior home, and telling Warrior how he was going to enjoy himself down in the West Country on all those pony nuts Charles was going to buy him... when fate, as it usually does if one waits long enough, took a hand.
We rode twenty miles on the Friday, and on the last lap of the run home it rained. Solid Highland rain that ran off the roads in rivers, and soaked our saddles, and steamed like sauna baths off the horses' backs. We got back to the stables. Watered and fed our charges. Charles, damp but determined, prepared to mount Warrior bareback for his nightly trek down to the river fields...
Warrior was such a big horse that not even Charles, who is six feet tall, could mount him bareback from the ground. Instead he used a convenient bank of earth at the side of the stable yard as a mounting block, and – as Warrior, understanding or not, immediately moved as far away as his reins would permit – Charles had to jump at him sideways from there.
This time – it was as simple as that – as Charles prepared to jump, his heels slid down the rain-soaked surface of the earth-heap and he landed on his back. He hadn't fallen off. He hadn't even got as far as actually jumping. He'd strained his back though, and it was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to ride for a while, so we came back from Scotland, after all, without Pixie or Charles's friend Warrior.
Nothing, when we got back, could shake Father Adams's conviction that Charles had fallen off his horse. He kept reminiscing about how Lawrence had fallen off his camel when he was learning to ride. Miss Wellington kept asking Charles how his back was and telling me that she hoped I didn't mind her saying it but wasn't he perhaps a little old for such pursuits? Charles himself alternated between saying that he'd show them in a week or two whether he could ride or not and then coming in, bent like Father Time after a bout of log-cutting, announcing that he was crippled for life.
He proved that he wasn't three days after we got back from Scotland, when he had to go up a tree in a hurry to rescue Solomon.
FOUR
Solomon and the Loch Ness Monster
What happened was that we'd come home late from town, put on all the outside lights, and let the cats out for a look round while we fed Annabel and put the car away.
We kept a strict eye on them as we did our chores, knowing Solomon's propensity for looking one minute as if he was glued to the fish-pool wall for life and the next being half-way up the lane apparently en route for Siam. So when, ten minutes after we'd let them out, we went to get them in again and discovered that Solomon, who five seconds before had been peering suspiciously down a mouse-hole in the rockery, was now nowhere to be seen, we didn't take it seriously at first.
We looked over the front gate, over the side gate, inside the coalhouse... we looked in the potting shed, where there was a heap of sand which Solomon sometimes fancied as a change from his earth-box. There was a rat-hole in the hard-packed sand. We'd once seen Solomon sit hopefully beside it for a while and then, becoming bored and deciding that nobody was coming out today, he'd dug a hole of his own in front of the first one and sat on it, his mind obviously by now on other things, his innocent little bottom exposed to attack in a way that turned us cold when we thought of it, but that was Solomon all over.
He wasn't on the sand-heap now, though. Neither was he up the lane in the ruined cottage, or sitting thinking on the wall of Annabel's house, or – we were beginning to get desperate by this time – locked by accident in Father Adams's outside lavatory, which we checked by tiptoeing up his path and looking in.
I called him – 'Tollywollywolly' in the yodel up and down the valley that I knew, even as I did it, would have the neighbours tapping their foreheads and saying how sorry they felt for Charles, but at least it always brought an answering wail from Solomon, to let me know where he was and would I please hurry up and fetch him.
Not this time it didn't. There was only complete silence and the terrible conviction, after we'd ranged the valley for nearly two hours with torches, and shouted till our throats were sore, that a fox must have taken him. How, we couldn't imagine. The lights were on, the doors were open, we'd kept check on him every minute or so and the idea of Solomon, who always had so much to say about everything, being carried off from under our noses without so much as a peep from that world-shattering voice of his was unbelievable.