by Doreen Tovey
Nothing unusual, in fact, had happened for ages—until the night we went to see Charles’s friend Allister, and Allister got Charles interested in Yoga. Allister is always getting Charles interested in something. Once, when Solomon and Sheba were small, it was archery and they nearly winged the kittens. Once it was the proposition for removing rock from behind the cottage with dynamite. Fortunately for the cottage the proposition fell through. Now—unfortunately for me—it was Yoga.
Allister hadn’t done any himself. So far he’d only read a book about it. A jolly interesting book, as he said, and when I heard his description I was quite keen to read it myself. I wasn’t at all surprised when Charles said he was going to get it from the library. What did alarm me—knowing from experience what Charles’s enthusiasm could mean—was when, after several sessions of intense study, he announced that he was taking it up.
I spoke to Grandma, who had a lot of influence with Charles, about that. But all she did, after listening to him intently, with her spectacles on the end of her nose, was encourage him. Most interesting she said it was, and there was a great deal in some of these things. Charles might learn much from it. If she were younger she would take up Yoga too.
Well, there we were. Charles meditating all over the place with Grandma’s blessing and practising deep breathing. The cats sitting importantly by him meditating as well and announcing that they used to do this in Siam. Any minute now I expected to see the three of them wearing turbans. Until, once again, I had an idea.
This, like the snuff one, was also born of desperation. We were visiting some friends who lived on the moors at the time—staying with them, as the weather was bad, for the night. It was winter still, of course, and all the evening Charles had been talking happily of Yoga—how it mentally lifted one … raised one above bodily things … He didn’t, he announced (wonderful indeed, seeing there were several degrees of frost) even feel the cold.
I did. When we went to bed—without bottles because we’d been talking so late and Charles said we really didn’t need them, not feeling the cold—I was absolutely perished. Round about two o’clock in the morning I got out and put the floor rugs on the bed, but it made no difference. I was still perished.
Charles, who had rolled over while I was getting the rugs and was now comfortably cocooned in at least three-quarters of the bedclothes, informed me once more that he didn’t feel the cold. Mind over matter, he assured me, snuggling cosily into his pillow. I ought to take up yoga. I ought to meditate too.
I did. After a little meditation I put my hand on one of the bedposts—one of those old-fashioned brass ones it was—until it was icily cold. Lovingly I burrowed through the cocoon with it in search of Charles. Tenderly I placed it in the middle of his back. There was a loud, excruciating yell … And Charles gave up being interested in Yoga.
Thirteen
With Solder and Crowbar
That was the winter Grandma’s parrot, Laura, died. As a result, according to Grandma, of the coalman looking at her through the window.
Everybody else said it was old age. To the family’s knowledge Grandma had had Laura for thirty years, and she hadn’t been first-hand even then. Grandma had bought her from a pub in the belief that parrots from licensed premises (or, she said, from a sailor if you could get one) talked—and had kept her, when she turned out to be completely dumb except for screaming like a maniac at mealtimes, on the grounds that it was wicked to keep birds in such places and she couldn’t send her back.
So, after a little financial adjustment (Grandma, as she told the landlord herself, was no fool) Laura had lived with her happily for thirty years. Until, in recent months, she had begun to droop, and lose her feathers, and develop a wheezy little cough. When we reminded Grandma of that, and how for weeks now Aunt Louisa had been putting whisky in her drinking water and tying a hot-water bottle to her cage every night and still Laura had gone on failing, Grandma said it was rubbish. Laura always got bronchitis in the winter, she said; Louisa always put whisky in her drinking water (a statement which we had to clarify when there were strangers present for the sake of Aunt Louisa’s reputation) and it was no use our arguing. With her own eyes she had seen the coalman looking through the window with his great black face, it had frightened poor Laura, and now she was dead.
She was indeed, and there wasn’t much we could do about it except change the coalman the following week and offer to get her another parrot. After which—the management of Grandma being rather wearing at times—Charles and I went down with flu.
It wasn’t so bad to begin with, when only Charles had it. True it was unfortunate that the first day he took to his bed I had to go to town. When I got back the cats, whom I had left sitting happily on his chest enjoying his temperature—the first time, Sheba announced, that she had been really warm this winter—were waiting anxiously for me in the hall window. Charles hadn’t fed them, complained Solomon, regarding me indignantly through the glass. Charles was groaning, said Sheba, and they’d had to come downstairs because they couldn’t stand it. Charles hadn’t let them Out, roared Solomon, whose idea of anybody staying home, even with double pneumonia, was to let him in and out of doors all day long. Charles was hardly a little ray of sunshine either. When I went up to see him all he said—presumably in case it helped at the inquest—was that he’d taken his temperature at three o’clock and it was a hundred and two.
For three days he lay there wilting heroically. With his knees up most of the time because Sheba had decided that in the bed, in a little cave under Charles’s knees if he would kindly raise them for her, was the warmest place to be. Calling feebly for more food—not because he was hungry but because by the time he’d braced himself to tackle his soup or his poached plaice Solomon, who didn’t believe in this weaker brethren business, had appreciatively eaten the lot. Assuring me, when I asked how he was, that he felt very frail indeed … very frail.
It was on Monday, however, when Charles was on the convalescent list and I had taken to my bed, that the fun really started. Not that it was exactly fun for me. I had a temperature too, and to my poor flubefuddled mind it seemed more like one of those symbolic plays where people keep walking in and out.
First it was the cats, coming in with round, astonished eyes to ask what on earth I was doing there and when was I going to get up. Lying there instead of Charles, said Sheba reproachfully, and I knew she liked it under his knees. Then it was Charles, asking if he should make a cup of tea. Then, a few minutes later, it was the cats again—Charles having apparently decided there wasn’t much chance of my making it, anyway-appearing to report that he wasn’t half mucking about in the kitchen and he hadn’t given them their breakfast yet. Then it was Solomon, howling wrathfully downstairs, charging—grumbling loudly to himself—up to his earth box in the spare room, and then appearing dramatically in the doorway once more to inform me (even in bed I was still in charge in Solomon’s little world) that Charles hadn’t changed it, Charles wouldn’t let him out, and if I didn’t do something quick there’d be an accident.
At that point I summoned strength to yell for Charles, whereupon the cats were let out, I got my cup of tea, Charles—flushed with achievement—announced that he would now get the breakfast, and, save for a monotonous creak … BANG from down below where the sitting-room door latched itself firmly every time he went through (and what on earth he was doing going through it about fifty times a minute I couldn’t imagine), there was peace.
It lasted about five minutes, at the end of which Charles called up to say the post van hadn’t arrived yet and ought he to get Solomon in—after which my next diversion was Charles in the garden calling Solomon. Shortly after that there was the sound of a tray being deposited on the hall table. Breakfast now, I told myself, and felt quite hungry at the thought. But no. Charles, having got it that far, was once more in the garden calling Solomon …
It took twenty minutes to round up Solomon and get that tray up to my bed. By that time the toast was stone c
old—which Charles said was odd, because it was hot enough when he made it. The tea was cold too. Colder even than the toast. Understandably so when I questioned Charles and found that he hadn’t made a fresh pot. Having, he said, only poured one cup each out of it, and there was still bags left, he’d used the lot he’d made an hour ago.
I will skim the details of the rest of the morning, taken up by the Rector arriving to enquire whether he could get us anything in town (yes, I replied gratefully via Charles; a rabbit for the cats); Charles coming up again to ask what size rabbit; Charles shouting at me from the garden could I see, because the Rector was waving to me from the road; Charles coming up ten minutes later to ask whether I was awake and should he make some coffee; and, ever and anon, the cats marching in like a Greek chorus to enquire was I still in bed, they didn’t like what Charles had given them for breakfast, and—once again—Charles wouldn’t let them out.
By then it was lunch time. There was no need for Charles to ask me what he should do about that. Before he wore his legs out completely I got up and fixed it myself.
What followed was, of course, inevitable. After all that work Charles had a relapse. By afternoon he was back in bed and I was tottering up with cups of tea for him. By evening, too—and there was no denying it; Sidney said he could hear him from the other end of the garden—Charles had a cough. There was no need as Sheba said, snug once more in her little tent under Charles’s knees while Solomon lay determinedly on his chest, heaving like a storm-tossed sailor with every wheeze—to ask who was most sick in this house. It was undoubtedly Charles.
He recovered eventually, of course. By the end of the week, with people going down like flies all over the village and the cats sitting on the wall happily informing people as they passed that we’d had it first, Charles except for his cough—was quite flourishing. Which was how, looking round for something to occupy us during convalescence, we came to restring the grandfather clock.
You remember, perhaps, the grandfather clock. The one in the hall, where Sheba used to sit on top and Solomon was eternally opening the door to watch it tick? We’d found a key for it eventually, and for a while there’d been peace. Sheba had even given up sitting on the top. No fun in that, she said, if old Podgebelly wasn’t mucking about underneath.
And then one day the key broke off in the lock, and we were back where we started. Sheba sitting on the top, Solomon hanging through the door, entrancedly watching the pendulum. He was taller now than he had been—or else a bit more athletic. And when we went home one night and, when I opened the hall door, only Solomon ambled through, I had the fright of my life. No sign of Sheba, the door of the clock wide open, and—the silence struck me immediately—no sound of ticking from the clock …
I hardly dared look, so sure I was of what I’d find. Sheba lying in the bottom of the clock flat as a pancake, with a weight on top of her—pushed in experimentally by Solomon or, as she was apt to do when nobody was about, having an inquisitive look on her own account and overbalancing.
Sheba, as it happened, was asleep on our bed. Frozen to the eiderdown, she said when I found her there a few minutes later and hugged her with relief. Which was why she hadn’t come down, and I’d be a lot more useful if I got her a hot-water bottle. Solomon it was who’d stopped the clock. Want to see how? he enquired excitedly as I set it going again. Standing on his thin hind legs he opened the door, reached in a long black paw, and prodded the pendulum. Clever, wasn’t he? he said.
After that little scare we went back to tying the door with string while we were away, and it was just as well we did. One night we went home to find that the clock had stopped again—and this time, when we opened the door to find out why, one of the weights was off. The catgut had snapped and it was lying in the bottom.
So, during our convalescence, it seemed an apt time to rehang it. Quietly, contemplatively—with, as Charles said, plenty of time to appreciate the way craftsmen of old did their work.
What the craftsmen of old did with grandfather clocks, as we discovered when we started in on ours, was to hang the weights on catgut, tie the ends in knots inside a couple of hollow cogwheels—and then bung the clock face on fast, right in front of the cogwheels and fixed so firmly that we couldn’t get it off.
We used everything but a crowbar on it before we’d finished, and still we couldn’t get it off. We never did get it off. We were in fact fast reaching the stage of jumping on it when Father Adams looked in to see how we were and informed us that you didn’t put new gut in like that. Not by taking off the hands and strewing pendulum, weights, and pieces of clock case all over the floor. You eased it—with a piece of wire if necessary, but definitely without touching the clock face—in through they little holes …
We managed it in the end. What Charles said before we’d finished about the craftsmen of old and those little holes must have scorched their ears even at a distance of a hundred and twenty years—but we did it. We even got the clock back together again, mounted on its pinnacle, and working. We have never, to this day, been able to replace the second hand. It got a bit bent when we were taking it off, and though we straightened it again with a hammer, every time we put it back it gets hooked up in the other hands and the clock immediately stops. For days, too, we nearly went mad because no matter what we did to it the clock kept striking on the half-hour—five at half-past four, for instance, and midnight at half-past eleven. Which, even in a household like ours, was a little muddling.
We discovered what it was eventually. We had the minute hand on upside-down. A discovery that so delighted us we forgot the vicissitudes we’d gone through to get one simple weight running on one simple piece of catgut and went round boasting of our prowess in mending clocks. Which was why, when Grandma broke the hand on her alarm clock a week or two later, she asked us, as experts, to put it right.
What we did to our own clock was, as Charles remarked only the other day, nothing to what we did to Grandma’s. Quite by accident, of course. The clock had no glass in it to begin with—that had got broken one morning when the clock went off too early for Grandma’s liking and she had swept it on to the floor. The hand had snapped off another morning when she put the clock under the bedclothes to muffle it and it caught in the blankets. All it needed, as Charles assured her, was a touch of solder and it would be as good as new.
The trouble there was that we weren’t very expert with solder. At least four times we got the hand on—success at last! said Charles each time we did it—only to find we’d soldered it to the other one and they both went round together. And when at last we did get it on by itself we discovered that during our endeavours the clock face—the little circle round the hands—had been badly scorched by the soldering iron.
We painted that—or rather Charles did, being the artist of the family—with aluminium paint. Which made the rest of the clock face look shabby, so he painted that green. Only to discover that, in his enthusiasm, he’d painted over the numbers—so when the green paint was dry he put those in again in red. At which stage, putting in the figure twelve, he unfortunately touched the minute hand with his brush and, being very lightly soldered, it fell off again. And by the time we’d soldered it on once more the aluminiumpainted circle behind it was not only scorched. The heat had cracked the paint …
Charles was for starting all over again, but I was feeling slightly cracked myself by that time. We gave it back to Grandma as it was. The hand, as I pointed out before she had a chance to say anything, was at any rate on.
Actually Grandma was too stunned to pass much comment. Yes, she said, gazing disbelievingly at her chameleon-like alarm clock, it was.
Fourteen
Right up the Pole
Spring arrived in the valley at the end of March. It needed experts to detect it, mind you. Charles still had a cough. Sidney still clung firmly to his muffler. Father Adams still clumped past the cottage every morning in a balaclava that made him deafer than ever—to protect, as we heard him informing the Rect
or at the top of the hill one day, his lug’oles from the frost.
But the cats knew it had come. Only a week before we had had snow, and it had been the easiest thing in the world to find them in the mornings. A small, neat line of tracks leading straight from the back door to the nearest cloche—that was Sheba. Ears down, coat stuck up like a parka, a quick dig in the early peas and in again.
A trail that wound deeply through the wastes like a traveller lost in the Antarctic—pausing to inspect a bush, digressing to look in the greenhouse, ambling haphazardly up the drive and ending at a frozen puddle—that, on the other hand, was Solomon. Sitting interestedly on the ice and listening to it crack.
We had, when we got them in again, had the usual protest meeting over the bird table—with, outside, little wrens and blue tits gratefully fluttering in the snow, and, inside, Solomon and Sheba shouting battle songs in the window. We had also witnessed an incident which Charles said sometimes came to nature lovers like us as a reward for diligence and patience.
One morning the cats, in the middle of raucous advice to the birds as to what they’d do if they laid hands on them—and it wouldn’t, bawled Solomon, with his eye on his old enemy the blackbird, include giving him bacon rind either—had suddenly gone quiet. Going in to see what was wrong, on the principle that silence in a Siamese household always means trouble—there, sure enough, was Sheba hiding behind the curtain, Solomon visible only as two ears stuck periscope-fashion above the windowsill, and magpies staging a raid outside.
Back and forwards they were going, the great black-and-white wings flashing so fast between the bird table and the woods that, as Solomon said in a small, un-Solomon-like voice from beneath the sill, there must be hundreds of them out there, and it was a jolly good thing we were in. As a matter of fact, which was the interesting thing about it, there were only two. Working, according to Charles, who understands these things, to a plan of Time and Motion. One chasing off the other birds and piling the cake over by the gate and the other—the girl she bet, said Sheba from behind her curtain; it was always the girls who did the work and the other one looked a lazypants to her, like Solomon—busily transporting it from the gate into the woods.
