Raining Cats and Donkeys (3 page)

  Actually Solomon wasn't any more anxious to see him than he was to see Solomon. Some while previously we'd found Fatso sitting on the settee surreptitiously examining one of his paws, which was swollen like a fat brown boxing glove. A sting of some sort, obviously – but before we could get a look at it Solomon had seen us watching him and tucked it out of sight beneath him. Nothing wrong with him, he assured us airily – knowing from experience that if there was he was set for an immediate visit to the Vet's. Everything all right. All paws correct. He was just sitting there having a rest. The moment he thought we were out of sight, however, out came the paw again, with Solomon, who always worried about himself, looking at it anxiously, obviously wondering whether it was going to stay like that forever.

  Oddly enough – or maybe not so oddly seeing that we were forever snatching him away from some grounded bee or wasp that he'd cornered in the garden and was either poking experimentally with his paw or about to eat when we belted up – not long after he was chased through the cloches he got stung again. On his chin this time. I was in the living-room when he dashed through the door, batted a stray piece of paper round the carpet, leapt to the top shelf of the bookcase and then, with a roar, to the back of my chair, where he poised like a ballet dancer with his tail raised demanding that I chase him... throw things for him... anything, yelled Solomon, to liven the place up and let a fit cat get a bit of exercise.

  I wondered at his sudden exuberance. Even more so when I noticed the peculiarity of his profile. Fatso was getting a double chin. He must, I decided, be putting on weight...

  Only later, by which time Solomon had enough chins for a dowager duchess but was still bounding determinedly about the place like a kitten, did I realise what had happened. Solomon had been stung, and this sudden display of athletics was to put us off. To conceal the fact that his chin was swelling, or, if we did happen to notice it, to convince us that it was nothing. Just a trick of our imagination. No need, on any account, for anybody to call the Vet.

  Nobody did. His chin went down again. His leg, after the episode with the mastiff, healed perfectly. Just to prove it he had a fight with a large ginger tom he found sitting in the yard one day, who forthwith went up the garden like a rocket and was last seen three feet in the air outside the garage, with Solomon up there with him, kicking him in the stomach as they went – and then it was September, and we went on holiday.

  Usually we went to the Mediterranean, to lie in the sun and relax after a year of arduous endeavour. That year, thanks to our dear little donkey, we went horse-riding. In the rain, in the wilds of Scotland.

  The thing was, people were always coming past the cottage with horses. Sometimes the horses liked Annabel and refused to go on till they'd put their heads over her fence and had a word with her. Sometimes they were afraid of her and we had to go out and help their owners get them past. Either way, sooner or later we got talking to their riders and they assumed that if we were donkey-minded we must be horse-minded – which we were to a degree, but not to the extent of actually getting upon one and
riding
it.

  Before we knew where we were, however, one or two of them had mentioned that any time we wanted to ride we might like to help exercise their horses – perhaps little Annabel could come too, they said, with a pat on her buff Beatle fringe – and there we were. Carried away by a vision of ourselves on a couple of show-jumpers, far across the hills, with Annabel, her minute golden mane flying in the breeze, galloping at our sides... Oh yes, we said. We'd
love
to.

  Fortunately I had enough sense to say we were rather busy at the moment and could we leave it till after the holidays. Privately I said to Charles that, not having been on a horse for nearly twenty years, if I
was
going to fall off it was going to be miles from the village – not somewhere where Father Adams would immediately appear round a corner to enquire whether my backside was sore, or Miss Wellington go shrieking up the lane that I was dead and it wasn't her fault.

  So that was how we came to go to Scotland. To a place where, for a solid week, we could ride, look after the horses ourselves (if we exercised them for people, said Charles, we should also know how to feed and groom them – not just ride them and hand them over to someone else as we'd done in our youth at riding school), and at the end of it, we hoped, we'd be fighting fit. Ready to ride anything. Galloping along the lanes with a touch of our riding hats to Father Adams and a nonchalant wave to Miss Wellington...

  Which was how, by Tuesday afternoon, we came to be sheltering in a wet Scottish wood. Aching in every muscle. Soaked to the skin. And dealing, by way of holiday relaxation, with another case of colic.

  It was my pony Pixie who was the patient. Charles was leading her up and down while I held his mount, a horse the size of a battle charger who was appropriately called Warrior. Pixie – a grey Highland pony not much larger than Annabel and with, from what I had seen of her, much the same temperament – was groaning, rolling her eyes and leaning heavily on Charles with an air of not having long to live.

  With our usual optimism it occurred to us that perhaps she hadn't. It was only our diagnosis that it was colic. She wasn't our pony. We were miles from a Vet. We had never been wetter in our lives...

  Had it, panted Charles, struggling determinedly to hold up Pixie while Pixie strove equally determinedly to sink to the ground and get her gut twisted... Had it occurred to me that this was the result of owning that donkey?

A
s a matter of fact it had been occurring to me ever since we arrived at the riding centre the previous weekend. After dinner on Saturday night for a start, when, instead of the drink in some small Continental cafe with which we usually celebrated the first night of our holiday, we sat in a circle in the harness room with a dozen other eager beavers, industriously tying knots.

  Tethering knots. We might not have heard of them on those dear little jaunts of our youth, said the instructor, but if we didn't learn how to do them now, sooner or later we'd find ourselves legging it back from a twenty-mile ride on which we'd lost our horses while we stopped for sandwiches.

  Charles, being all keen and eager at this stage, got so enthusiastic that long after I was in bed that night he was still tying tethering knots with his shoelace round the back of a bedroom chair. Hardly able to wait to be galloping over the hills, tethering his horse to a tree when he felt like it while he stopped for a snack from his saddle bag, he was, to the astonishment of the maid who brought up the tea, up and practising them again before seven the next morning.

  It was the last time our turret bedroom in that old Scottish castle saw Charles prancing happily around it at that hour of day. Holding his back and groaning, yes... Complaining because it was his turn to take the water buckets round the stables before breakfast and, according to Charles, if he made it down the turret staircase without dislocating his spine his legs would never stand the strain of the buckets anyway... but never again so light-heartedly. Two hours after untying his final practice knot with a flourish and assuring me that there was nothing to it, it was all coming back to him, Charles was up on Warrior discovering that, after an interval of twenty years, there was a great deal to it indeed. Mostly the bumping.

  One never loses the rhythm of the trot, of course. Five minutes on that first morning's road run and the entire cavalcade was, out of the dim recesses of its memory, rising and sitting automatically to the instructor's ringing call of 'Hup Down, Hup Down, Hup Down, Hup Down'. Five minutes more, alas, and we were all back to bumping like sacks of turnips. What we
had
lost was the ability of our leg muscles to get us up and down in the peculiarly English style of riding which, for those who had never experienced it, can best be compared to crouching on a hassock, legs apart, rising and sitting inexorably to a metronome set at sixty ticks to the minute, with the prospect of getting slapped on a tight-trousered bottom with the force of a carpet beater if you come down at the wrong moment.

  Charles, considering it red-faced and jolting from the back of Warrior, said we must have been mad. He'd never live to tie a tether-knot, he announced between gasps. Any moment now he was going to fall off and break his neck.

  That Charles was able to talk at all was due to the fact that he
was
on Warrior. A big horse trots at an easier pace than a pony. I, jiggering along at his side on Pixie, who took at least two trots to keep up with Warrior's one, was going up and down like a cocktail shaker. Any time I tried to say anything, my teeth rattled.

  That was a soul-searching morning, if ever there was one.

  Rising to the trot till we could rise no longer. Bouncing for the next few minutes with the feeling of being slapped on the bottom by a frying pan. Roused at nightmarish intervals by the instructor's cry of 'Car coming, everybody! Don't let 'em see you lagging now. Come on – HUP Down! HUP Down! HUP Down! HUP Down!' At which we all obediently hupped like a troop of Household Cavalry and practically died in our saddles as soon as the car had passed.

  It was a soul-searching afternoon, too. After lunch we dragged ourselves back on to those horses and, under the relentless eye of the instructor, practised cantering. Three people fell off and the only reason I didn't was that I was cheating. I happen to have long arms. Sitting deceptively upright, keeping ahead of everybody else so they couldn't see what I was up to, quietly I was clinging to the saddle like a leech.

  I ached. I longed to die. At the beginning of every canter the saddle rose, as I grabbed at it, with a lurch that practically lifted Pixie from the ground. But I didn't fall off. As a reward for which, after we'd watered the horses that evening, and fed them and groomed them and massaged their backs to loosen their muscles (nobody, I noticed with sudden self-sympathy, was worrying about loosening mine), the instructor announced that I was one of the selected few who would be permitted to ride the eight horses who spent their nights out at grass across the river – as against the six who slept in to give us the experience of cleaning out their stables – down to their grazing ground
bareback
.

  There was just no end to that perishing day. There being no way out short of confessing, the next thing I knew I was on Pixie's naked back jolting agonisingly down the road. Smiling brightly, of course. Studying the scenery with nonchalant interest as I went – the stables, the group of elms by the paddock gate, the colourful lichen-covered wall that bordered the track down to the river. And privately wondering whether I'd be carried back past it on a stretcher.

  Charles had been selected for bareback riding, too. But Charles, apart from his stiffness,
was
a rider. It was coming back to him indeed. He rode his horse like a show-jumper now, down the track to the ford, across it, touched his heels to Warrior's sides, and was up the almost perpendicular bank on the other side as if he was flying. I, following behind him, was inspired by the sight of this to touch my heels to Pixie's sides too, and the next thing I knew, I was in the river. Straight over her tail I slid, but nobody was worrying about me. Just everybody, including Charles, shouting that I shouldn't have let go of her reins and racing after her in case they tripped her up.

  Things even themselves out, of course. That evening – stiff but convinced that his aches were only temporary; forgetting the setbacks of the day and remembering only the ecstasy of that surge up the river bank – Charles volunteered for seven o'clock duty next morning at the stables.

  'This was the life', he said enthusiastically as we went to bed. The smell of the good old straw. The feel of a good old horse between one's knees. A night's rest to get rid of his stiffness and he'd probably be up at six and go down to ride Warrior
up
from the river fields bareback as well.

  Alas for the visions which, in one form or another, dawn perpetually on Charles's horizons. By the time he'd had a night's rest his muscles had seized up completely. He did get down to the stables – groaning and muttering at every turn of the turret steps that we were paying for this and why the hell didn't they have stable boys. And he returned at breakfast time to announce that one of the good old horses (only he didn't call them that this time) had stepped on his foot.

  One of the smaller ponies, fortunately, and, having had experience with Annabel, he'd
almost
got his foot out in time. She'd only got him on the toe. She had shoes on, nevertheless. We discussed Charles's toe during the whole of breakfast.