But there it was. Twelve o'clock. Nearly two hours of searching for him, and now we had to admit that he'd gone. At which point, standing miserably on the lawn, worn completely to a standstill, I shone my torch up into the damson tree by the front gate, and there he was. A faint dark shadow a few feet from the top. His eyes glittering fixedly in the torchlight. So unmoving that – my next mental crisis of the evening – I was certain he must be dead.
He'd fallen from a higher branch, I decided. He never could climb anyway. Another cat must have chased him, and he'd slipped and been transfixed on a sharp lower branch, which was why, in all those long hours when we'd passed and re-passed under the tree, only a few yards from the house, he hadn't answered us...
At that point my knees gave way. It was Charles who rushed for the garage, moved the car and, despite his back, raced back down the garden with the fruit ladder. But the fruit ladder wasn't long enough, and when we called and reached with encouraging hands from only inches below, there was still no move from the motionless form above us. I died a thousand deaths while Charles raced up the garden, fetched the double roof ladders without even stopping to separate them, thrust them up into the tree and was up there, in seconds, with our seal man. I died a further one, too, with relief, when he said that Solomon was alive – apparently unharmed, except that he appeared to be in a coma – and handed him, limp as a little black waterlily, down into my waiting arms.
What frightened him we never knew. My theory is that it was a badger. A fox I think he would have taken for a dog. But a badger – and there are badger setts just a little way down the valley, and we often hear them grunting their way through the woods at night, but so far as we knew Solomon himself had never seen one... a badger, six times the size of himself, coming down the lane with that great white stripe down its head like a witch-doctor and encountered, perhaps, right at our very gate as Solomon nipped over for an airing... that would have frightened him all right.
Charles said it was either that or we'd brought the Loch Ness monster home in the car-boot. Whichever it was, Solomon bolted upstairs as soon as we got him indoors and remained there for three whole days. He ate up there. He lived up there. It would be wrong to say that he slept up there because for three days solid, so far as we could tell, Solomon didn't sleep at all.
Every time we went into the hall a small black face scanned us anxiously from the landing like a defender at the Siege of York looking down from a portcullis. When we went upstairs he peered worriedly round our legs as we got to the top, to make sure the enemy hadn't crept up behind us. He wouldn't look out of a window at all. Presumably that would have given away the fact that he was in our bedroom. And when we peered cautiously out ourselves – the feeling of being besieged having spread itself to us by this time, the way he was carrying on – Solomon hid under the bed.
He apparently was up there for good. Sheba, with true Siamese contrariness, was meanwhile going further afield than she ever did normally. Every time we looked for her she seemed to be either vanishing over the front gate or setting off up the path through the woods – so much the innocent little lamb going out as tiger bait that, even as we ran to fetch her back to safety, we wondered, knowing Sheba, whether she was doing it deliberately.
It was a great relief when, at the end of three days, Solomon appeared once more in the living room and, after watching Sheba carefully for an hour or two, satisfied himself that she was indeed – no fooling – going right out into the garden and coming back in one piece. Following which, the next time she went out he went out behind her. It was even more of a relief when a week or so later a neighbour who lived beyond us up the lane reported something he'd seen on his way home one night in his car. Coming down the hill he was, he said, and there in his headlights, standing by her paddock gate, was Annabel – and beneath her, glowing oddly in the darkness, were three pairs of disembodied green eyes. Stopping to investigate, with his headlights full on the fence, he'd discovered that there were three cats sitting under her. One was his own cat, Rufus. Another was the black and white cat from up the lane. And the third was the ginger stray Solomon had fought before the holidays.
They were sheltering from the rain, he said. They looked as if they were in conference. And Annabel was standing over them with an air of great importance.
This reassured us on two counts. That there couldn't be anything really dangerous in the valley, otherwise these other cats – far more wordly-wise than Solomon, for all his air of being Lord of the Valley and Anybody Want To Dispute It – wouldn't have been there. And that Annabel – our hearts warmed with pleasure when we thought of it – liked cats.
We'd never been quite sure about this. True we'd once seen her nudging Sheba playfully along with her nose – Sheba turning to natter at her over her shoulder as she went and the pair of them acting like a friendship scene out of Walt Disney. We'd also, however, on several occasions, caught her chasing Solomon in the nearest thing we'd seen to real-life cowboys and Indians – and whether Solomon's big bat ears were streamlined for the fun of it, or because he thought avoidance of wind-resistance was his only hope in his present extremity, we never knew. He'd be back sitting in her paddock within half an hour, but that was Solomon all over. Annabel would most likely be grazing peacefully a yard away as though she'd now decided Siamese cats were some sort of butterfly and the worst that the big-eared seal one could do was sit on her cow-parsley – but that was Annabel all over too. We just didn't know.
Three cats, though – sitting under her where one stamp of her hoof could do so much damage and all Annabel did was stand there like a benevolent mother sheep keeping the rain off... that showed what she was like, we said. And when a night or two later we found she was actually allowing the ginger stray to share her house with her, we were even more impressed.
Annabel was very jealous of her house. Solomon and Sheba weren't allowed to enter it at all. We ourselves were allowed to go in with food and bedding, but once the food was down Annabel stood possessively over it and offered to kick us soundly if we touched one bit of hay. She marked it for all the world to know as hers by standing straddle-legged in front of it, whenever she returned from a walk, and spending a penny. And if we wanted more proof than that of the importance to Annabel of Annabel's house, we had it in her behaviour the day we took her to the County Show. Sixty miles she went by horsebox, to collect for charity, and a full day it was indeed.
She rode regally in the big double horsebox that had been lent to us as though she'd been used to it all her life, though in fact it was the first time she'd ever been in one. She emerged from it, when we got to the showground, as if she were the Horse of the Year arriving at the White City. She did her rounds with her collecting box with the mixture of modesty and self-assurance that we knew of old was Annabel being a Lady, and was photographed and petted, and watched the horses, when we led her to the railings of the show-ring, with an intentness that signified she knew just as well as we did what they were doing there – and had her own ideas as to which horses were doing it properly.
Twelve hours solid she'd been away by the time she stepped down from the horse box again and into her paddock. And what did she do, this donkey of ours who for once had behaved as a status symbol should and there were probably misguided people all over the county that very minute saying wasn't she a poppet, and what about one themselves, as a playmate for the children? Straight into her house she went. Spending a penny on the way, of course, by way of relief and to let the rabbits know that Annabel was back. When we went in a few minutes later with her supper and her water-bucket, though this was summer and it was still light and warm outside, Annabel was lying down. Resting, we gathered. After the strain of her public appearance. In the privacy of her Home.