by Doreen Tovey
When it got to the stage where when we poured water down the kitchen sink it immediately came up again in the bath Charles said we must do something about it. Normally, of course, Charles is not nearly so precipitate as this. When he took all the door handles off for painting, for instance—even though, as the inner side of the fastenings were latches, people were continually getting locked out and having to let themselves in again with skewers—it was months before he put them back on again. Rome, he said, while people battered furiously on doors all over the cottage and swore never to come again, wasn’t built in a day, and renovating it—particularly painting six ring handles with black enamel—took time.
It was different with the drains. When they went wrong a visit from Charles’s Aunt Ethel was only a week away and Aunt Ethel being what she was—a ripe old tartar, as our neighbour Father Adams described her the day he heard her carrying on because Solomon had autographed her nightdress case with large muddy footprints, and he wouldn’t be married to she for ten quid—something did have to be done about it.
Unfortunately when we rang up the builder he said he couldn’t come for a fortnight and the outcome, which I try not to remember, particularly at night when I lie in bed thinking of Charles and the cats and trying desperately to count my blessings, was that Charles and Sidney did it themselves.
Charles has been responsible for a good many catastrophes in his time. There was the time he fixed new wall-lights in the hall, for instance, and in a series of experimental connections produced first the interesting result that when the switch was pressed, though nothing happened in the hall, all the sitting-room lights went on; secondly, after a little adjustment, the equally interesting phenomenon that when the switch was pressed every bulb in the house exploded; and lastly—if this didn’t fix it, said Charles, emerging triumphantly from the cupboard with a large screwdriver in his hand, then nothing would—the grand finale where, when he pulled the main switch, with one almighty bang all the lights in the valley went out.
There was also the time when he built a drystone wall which looked solid as a rock while he was doing it—at least four old men, with their eyes on a pint at the Rose and Crown, said it was the best bit of walling they’d seen since they was lads and ’twas wonderful seeing the old craft revived—and the moment the last of them tottered rheumatically round the bend of the hill the wall immediately fell down and blocked the road for hours. As for Sidney—when I reveal that some years back, the Post Office men came out and spent nearly a week putting the local telephone wires underground and no sooner had their little green van disappeared in the direction of the big city than Sidney, who was working then for a neighbouring farmer, rode happily out with the plough and cut clean through the cable, you can imagine what the pair of them did with the drains.
First, having taken the cover off the inspection trap, they dug a long deep trench across the lawn to find the soakaway. Then, on the advice of Father Adams, who happened along just then and, though he favours an earth-closet himself, knows quite a lot about such things, they dug a long deep trench in the opposite direction and found it. Next they blocked in the pipe. After that, with a lot of sweating and straining and telling me what hard work it was, they enlarged the soakaway and filled it with stones. It was a pity that by that time Father Adams had gone home to his lunch, because he might also have told them it was silly to unblock the pipe before they got out of the trench. As it was, just as I went out to call them in to feed there was a yell from Charles, who in imagination was obviously engaged in some mighty damming operation on the Frazer River, to Let Her Flow, a biff on the pipe from Sidney’s pickaxe—before you could say Jack Robinson the pair of them were ankle-deep in filthy black water, and all Charles could say when I asked him what on earth he was doing was that one of his gumboots leaked.
Everything went wrong after that. While we were having lunch Solomon went out, started to poke nosily under the planks they’d put over the trench for safety and immediately fell in. No sooner had we got him out than Charles, busily cleaning out the pipes with rods—not that there was any need for it, but he said he liked to see a job well done—lost the plunger. And no sooner had we fished that out than there was a strangled scream from Sidney who, having been skipping merrily round the open inspection trap for hours, had just measured it with a rod and found it to be seven feet deep.
He went home shortly after that. Never in his life, he said, had he come across one deeper than four foot six before. Only have to fall down there, he kept saying starkly from the other side of the lawn, and they’d never get thee out again. It was fruitless to point out that while that was true in principle, the trap was only about two feet square and the only way he could fall down it would be stiffly at attention, with both arms at his sides. Sidney had had enough. Home he went, looking back at us fearfully as he pedalled up the lane as if we were a couple of Sweeney Todds bent on his end, and leaving us to finish the drains the best way we could.
Spurred on by the thought of what Aunt Ethel would say if the dishwater came up in the bath while she was in it, we did. There was an interesting sequel in that while the drains worked perfectly while the trench was open, the moment it was filled in the water immediately started going up and down the wrong pipes again like mad, but it righted itself within the week. Meanwhile—just to make sure he never had any rest, said Charles savagely; just to make sure, what with the drains and Siamese cats and blockheads like Sidney, that he was hounded till he died—the night before Aunt Ethel’s arrival, Sheba disappeared.
If it had been Solomon we wouldn’t have been surprised. Solomon was always turning up in odd places. Staring inquisitively through people’s windows, slinking sinisterly round people’s chicken runs—though in point of fact if a day-old chicken had so much as looked him in the eye he would have run for miles. One day a couple of hikers, coming past the cottage and seeing Sheba sitting on the car roof smirking lovingly at Charles, asked us if we owned a black-faced one as well, and when we said we did they said if we wanted to know where he was, he was two miles up the valley lurking in the long grass. Frightened the life out of them, they said he had. There they were having a quiet little picnic by the stream and Lil had only turned to throw the banana skins into the hedge and there was his great black face peering at her out of the cow parsley and she was so scared she’d spilt the thermos all over her shorts.
‘Oughtn’t to be allowed,’ said Lil’s husband tenderly, mopping a stray trickle of tea off Lil’s tub-shaped thigh. ‘Ought to be kept in a cage,’ he yelled after me as I started up the lane at the double. Pretty well everybody who knew Solomon had said that at some time or other, but that wasn’t why I was running. There were foxes in the valley and while I would have bet any money on Sheba being more than a match for any fox she met, I could equally well imagine Solomon being dragged down the nearest foxhole still asking whether they’d seen him on television. As it happened, I met him that time the moment I rounded the corner, doing his stateliest Rex Harrison down the middle of the lane and complaining loudly because the visitors hadn’t waited for him. He was safe enough. It was Sheba who, only a few days later, we were to mourn as taken by a fox.
It was an evening such as we had spent hundreds of times before—pottering in the garden, with the gnats biting sultrily and occasional oaths and the sound of breaking glass coming from the corner where, instruction sheet in hand, Charles was putting up his own greenhouse. Solomon had had his bottom smacked for rolling in the paeonies; Sheba for stalking Father Adams’s bantams. Solomon had stunned a wasp and been prevented from eating it in the nick of time. Sheba, always out for effect, had stretched herself in a Diana-like attitude in a seedbox on the garden wall, causing quite a sensation among passers-by and an even greater one with Charles when he discovered she was lying on his lettuce plants. An ordinary, normal evening. Until the moment when I went to call them in for supper and found, instead of the usual bedtime tableau of two little cats sitting soulfully on the wall wondering
whether we wanted them any more, only Solomon. Solomon, happily boxing midges in the dusk. His only comment, when we asked him where Sheba was, was an assurance that he didn’t know but if we were worried about it he could easily eat her supper as well.
We searched for her for three hours without success. Leisurely at first, expecting to see her small pale figure come tearing down the lane or out of the woods at any moment. Then more concentratedly, with torches, looking in outhouses and old barns, tracking and calling endlessly through the woods while Solomon—locked in before he could decide to do a Stanley act and vanish as well—wailed reproachfully at us from the kitchen window.
At one o’clock we went to bed. Not to sleep, but to wait for daylight so that we could go on searching. It was one of the most miserable nights I have ever spent in my life. Not only on account of Sheba, who by this time I imagined a mangled little heap in some fox’s den. On account of Charles, who lay there holding forth alternately on the fox which he was going to kill with his bare hands when he caught it and a mysterious perambulator he now remembered being pushed up the hill at dusk, and the more he thought of it the more certain he was, he kept telling me, that Sheba had been in it being kidnapped. On account also of the perishing gale which blew round the bed like Cape Horn and was the result of having every door and window in the house wide open so that we could hear if she called. And not least on account of Solomon, who at two o’clock started howling his head off in the spare room.
‘Poor little chap,’ said Charles when, after a particularly piercing scream we decided we’d better have him in with us before he woke the entire valley. ‘He’s missing her too,’ he said as Solomon, with a reproachful sniffle, marched in and peered suspiciously under the bed. He wasn’t, of course. All Solomon was worried about was whether we’d had Sheba in with us and not him. When he discovered she was nowhere to be seen he snuggled happily down with his head on my shoulder and within a few minutes was snoring like a pig. A little later the snores gave way to the steady grinding of teeth. Dreaming happily of being able to eat all Sheba’s suppers in future as well as his own—and drowning, incidentally, any chance we had of hearing her footsteps if she did come back—Solomon slept.
The cause of the trouble returned at nine o’clock next morning. We had been out since daybreak, combing the woods again, calling her till we were hoarse, looking apprehensively in streams and cattle troughs in case, like a small blue Ophelia, she floated there among the duckweed. Father Adams had arrived, spade in hand, with the intention of digging out the fox’s earth in the wood so we might know if that had been her end. Charles, flatly refusing to believe we had lost her for ever and enlarging on his theory that—presumably bound and gagged, since we’d heard no sound—she’d been carried off in the perambulator, was on the point of ringing Scotland Yard. Solomon, with his smuggest I’m-here-aren’t-I-not-silly-like-Sheba expression, was sitting conspicuously on the cooker determined not to miss anything. I, gazing dumbly at the kitchen table, was trying to realise that never again would I see her sitting there explaining earnestly just why she wanted more fish—usually because Solomon had pinched hers while she wasn’t looking. When there was a cracked soprano wail and in she stalked.
We never discovered where she’d been. From the mud on her paws and her worn-down claws I personally believed she must have been accidentally locked in somebody’s outhouse and spent the night trying to dig her way out. Sheba herself supported Charles. Kidnapped, she assured us, crossing her eyes and beaming enigmatically every time we looked at her. Locked in a cellar with iron bars and a great big man on guard. Got through a window and walked ten miles home with the kidnappers hunting her every inch of the way. Make a good story for Television, wouldn’t it? she demanded, sauntering airily over to her plate to see what was for breakfast. Whereupon Solomon did what I felt very much like doing myself. Knocked her down and bit her on the bottom.
Three
The Reason Why
The immediate reasons for the things that happened to us were indeed obvious. You didn’t need to look far for the reason why people thought we were nuts, for instance, when practically every day saw us marching through the village at least once carrying those wretched cats in public procession—Charles pink with embarrassment because the only way Sheba would be carried was flat on her back in his arms, gazing adoringly up into his face; I with Solomon dangling goofily down my back like a sack of coals while I held on to him by his back legs. Unless of course it was the fly season, when, though I still held him by his back legs, with his front ones he would be flailing the air behind me like a demented windmill.
Even people who knew us—who knew that we were only fetching them back from the Rector’s or the Williamses’ or whoever it was that had rung up to complain about them this time—looked at us a bit oddly on such occasions. People who didn’t know us usually thought we ought to be locked up.
Father Adams, who owned a Siamese himself and knew what it was like—though his, he said, was pretty good these days except when our two devils led her into mischief—was quite indignant one night when somebody said as much in the Rose and Crown. ‘Said he seen thee sliding out of the woods on thee backside with a dappy gert cat round thee neck,’ he informed me over the gate, his voice—as was usual when he was conducting a conversation at a distance of more than three feet—a full-blooded bellow that could be heard all over the village. Probably he had at that. The wood was on a steep slope and, once having caught Solomon, the only way to get out of it without letting go of him was to sling him over my shoulder and slide down on my seat, with the result that in a community where practically every female under forty wore jeans, I could be identified a mile away by a large black mudpatch on mine.
What had annoyed Father Adams, however, was the stranger’s inference that I was odd, coupled with the observation that he supposed most country people were a bit touched anyway. ‘I told he!’ he roared, tipping the brim of his hat belligerently over his eyes like the characters he had seen on Telly when they, too, had put somebody properly in their place. ‘I told he, not half I didn’t!’ What, I enquired wearily, for I knew Father Adams’s home truths of old, exactly had he told him?
It was as I feared. Father Adams had first informed him that I weren’t as daft as I looked, followed by the announcement that if he thought I were he ought to have been here a few years back. When, he had advised the startled stranger triumphantly, he’d have seen I going round with a squirrel on my head.
I am digressing here, however. What I was really coming to was that Charles was right. There was a reason—a deep-seated, fundamental reason way back behind all those immediate reasons—why things happened to us. And I knew what it was.
Sometimes, being only human, I was inclined to blame it solely on to Charles. The time the brakes froze on the car one bitter night miles from anywhere, for instance, and, having left the tools at home for safety as usual, the only thing he could think to do was light a candle we happened to have in the car and lie hopefully underneath trying to thaw them out. That was bad enough. The wind kept blowing the candle out and by about the twentieth time Stirling Moss had held it silently out from under the car for me to re-light I was so mad I could have jumped on it. What was really so dispiriting, however, was that when eventually a man did come along with aspanner and manage to free the brakes, no sooner had we coasted a few yards down the road to prove they were free than Charles said we really must go back and thank him. Before I could stop him he had put the brakes on again—and there we were, frozen rigid as before.
At that stage I leaned my head on the roof of the car and wept. If I’d listened to my grandmother, I howled, while the snow melted forlornly in my snowboots and Charles, looking nervously over his shoulder, said Sshhhh, not here, the man was listening—if I’d listened to my grandmother I’d never have married him.
It was quite untrue, of course. My grandmother thought Charles was wonderful. If she’d been there at that moment she’d probably have bee
n under the car herself, button boots and all, holding the candle with him.
I remember the time, before we were married, when he called for me one night in the pouring rain with a hole in the roof of his sports car right over the passenger seat, and the hole itself stuffed with a Financial Times.
There he was, dressed to kill in plus fours, diamond-checked golf stockings, and a white racing helmet. There he was, tightening the string that held the exhaust pipe on and adjusting the windscreen wiper. Only for effect, of course. It hadn’t actually worked since Charles bought the car. The real operative system consisted of another piece of string tied to the wiper with an end dangling in through each window, and as we went along we pulled it alternately in a sort of rhythmic rowing motion.
There he was. Dangerous Living—plus fours and all—personified. If my father could have seen either the car or Charles in that helmet he would have had a fit. But Father was engineering far away. Grandma was my legal guardian. And all Grandma did was gaze nostalgically at the golf stockings and say she wished she were forty years younger.
Halfway up the street, with the pair of us pulling away at the wiper strings like a couple of Cambridge strokes, the car back-fired and the Financial Times descended on to my lap, followed by a gallon or so of water which had collected on the sagging roof. Even then Grandma was undismayed. As we backed spasmodically to the front door she came running out with an umbrella. That I didn’t grab it and hit Charles on the helmet there and then; that I meekly put it up inside the car, stuck the top through the hole in the roof and, with the umbrella itself tilted smartly out of the port window—otherwise, said Grandma, the rain would run down it inside the car and Charles would get wet—zoomed off up the road again as if I always went about in cars with my umbrella up; that I said nothing at all about the fact that I was now soaked to the stomach because, as Charles kept reminding me, he’d promised to meet old Ian at seven-thirty and we were already late … these things are of no importance at all except as evidence that even in my salad days I should have had my head read.
