Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

So did the Irish groom detailed to take charge of Annabel. 'Me?' he exclaimed with horror when the breeder, saying we might as well try her now, told him to take her into the yard. 'Groom to a donkey!' he declared tragically to the onlookers as he led her through the gate. 'If they hear of this at Newmarket!' he lamented as Peter was brought out of his stall.

There was no inferiority complex about Annabel. We'd noticed before how she could assume dignity to suit the occasion, and she was certainly dignified now. She stood there like a queen. A distinctly affronted queen, we gathered from the rigidity of her attitude. In front of all these People! Signified the disapproving angle of her ears. What was going on behind was nothing to do with her , declared the determinedly detached expression on her face.

That being her outlook, there was in fact nothing going on at all. Peter was keen enough, but nobody can love an ice-maiden.

'Bit fat, of course', commented the breeder poking her speculatively in the stomach. Annabel didn't move an inch, but she'd noted it, I knew from her ears. I hoped, for his own sake, the breeder wouldn't turn his back to her while she was there.

'We'll try her again tomorrow', he finally decided. So we went home and left her there. We drove, with a noticeably silent horse box behind us, telling ourselves that she'd be back with us by the weekend. But that was where we were wrong.

TEN

Annie Mated

It was more than five weeks before we saw Annabel again. Five weeks during which we rang up every other day, the breeder reported nothing doing, and we almost gave up hope.

According to those who know, donkeys and horses come into season at three-weekly intervals. She must have been in season when she arrived, said the breeder, otherwise Peter wouldn't have been interested. She might have been going off then, of course – but how she'd managed to stay off for five weeks afterwards, with Peter around to excite her, was a mystery to him.

It wasn't to us. Sheba had once managed to catch, with exactly a five-week interval, an infection from Solomon which the Vet had said she couldn't possibly get after twenty-one days. She'd stopped us from going on holiday on that occasion. Our animals were experts at confounding Science.

All was well now, however. Annabel had at last succumbed to Peter's charms. Twice, two days following, the breeder reported proudly over the telephone. There was no doubt about it now. And so we fetched her home.

She was out at grass with Peter and Gilly when we went over to collect her. A strong companionship had sprung up between the trio, based no doubt on their common diminutiveness, and the two small Shetlands accompanied her loyally across two large fields to the gate when we led her away. Oddly enough it was Gilly who walked closest to her, side by side, apparently her dearest friend. Peter plodded behind, with them but obviously out of things, in the manner of men the world over accompanying a couple of females on a shopping trip.

They watched through the gate as we loaded her into the horse box. They were still watching, two small black figures no bigger than Annabel herself, as we drove out through the yard. It was surprising how other animals took to her, we said. We wondered what Annabel thought?

What Annabel thought was apparent when we got her home. There was a pout on her mouth for days. All she'd gone through, she reminded us, assuming a wilted lily expression every time we spoke to her. She couldn't in her condition, she protested when we tried to hurry her through her gate. Wasn't surprising, she snorted indignantly when we commented how much thinner she was.

It was nice to have her back, all the same. Robertson, who'd vanished while she was away, reappeared like a ginger genie, sitting proprietarily in her stable door though definitely not speaking to me. The rooks were in force again. We'd fed them during her absence but there seemed even more of them about when Annabel was at home.

'The pregnant Valley', said Janet, dreamily tickling Annabel's ears a few days before her own baby was due. 'How wonderfully peaceful it is.'

She didn't say that the next time she came to see us. It was an evening a fortnight later and Janet, leaving Jim keeping an eye on the baby, had dropped in for a first-time-out chat.

'Sherry?' I asked, and Janet said yes, she would. Wonderful she felt, she said, lying back in our biggest armchair. The son and heir at home in his cot; her sitting here without feeling like a hippopotamus; her first glass of sherry in nine whole months...

At that moment there was a blood-curdling scream from the yard. Solomon! I thought, the usual range of possibilities flashing like a film through my mind. Solomon – caught on the roof by Robertson, bitten by an adder he'd mistaken for a slow-worm, attacked (I turned cold at the prospect) by a stoat that he'd met up with and tried to fight...

'I can't go', I said, my knees turning to jelly as usual. It was obvious that Janet couldn't go, either. She sat there as if turned to stone, her glass half-raised in her hand, while Charles rushed to the kitchen, shouted back that Solomon had caught a hare and I, my knees miraculously recovering themselves, dashed after Charles to see.

I forgot Janet in the excitement of the next few minutes. Solomon had indeed brought home a hare. Knowing him we knew he couldn't have caught it in the ordinary way, of course. We decided later that he must have fallen over it while it was asleep. The hare – a young, inexperienced half-grown one – had most likely been asleep on the hillside; Solomon had probably stumbled over it as he ambled along; and, grabbing it while both he and the hare were in a state of semi-consciousness, he'd brought it home for us to see.

The hare, screaming with fright, was now running round and round the kitchen and Solomon was bounding exuberantly after it as if chivvying a captured mouse. All his quarries were as big as this, we were given to understand, and he could round it up any time he chose...

Even as we debated how to rescue it, however, the hare found the open doorway and was gone. Out across the yard towards the gate and straight, in its panic, into the goldfish pond. Fortunately we keep a net over the pond to ward off herons and in the next split-second sequence the hare rebounded off the net with a mighty splash and was away through the gate to safety.

We could have bet on it, of course. A second later there was another almighty splash. Solomon, in his excitement, had also gone straight into the pond and bounced off the net. By the time he got to the gate, the hare was out of sight.

The yard was soaked, Solomon was soaked, we were soaked... It was all right, we assured Janet as we went back into the sitting-room. It was only a hare, and he'd managed to get away. She regarded us from the armchair. It was at that moment that I realised she hadn't moved an inch since we'd left. She was still sitting there like a statue, her glass half-raised in her hand. One thing she knew, she said when we finally convinced her that nobody had been murdered or run amok and that of the three of us, wet though we were, only Solomon had actually fallen in... One thing she knew was that it was no good coming to us expecting peace and relaxation.

It certainly wasn't. Only a few weeks later there we were, quietly minding our own business, and before we knew what was happening we were tangled up with the hunt. Normally, when we hear the horn, we get the cats in, make sure Annabel is where she can't frighten the horses, and leave it at that. This time, however, it was the first hunt of the season, they were using some new young hounds, and by the time the hunt was over and the fox had vanished deftly into the woods, they'd lost some of them. Five and a half couples according to the huntsman, who by this time had exchanged his horse for a van in order to search for them. If we came across them, would we hold them?