Four Ducks on a Pond Read online

  This eBook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © the Estate of Annabel Carothers 2010

  Afterword copyright © Fionna Eden-Bushell 2010

  Artwork copyright © Lyn Dunachie

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-84158-876-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-523-9

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Puddy with Carla and Nicholas

  Fionna and Grandpop outside the old henhouse

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nobody could call me inquisitive, but because I am quiet and unobtrusive I observe much and ponder deeply. And so I have decided to write down what I have seen and known of my family, those humans and animals who live in, or around, this sturdy granite building we share as our home.

  There was a time when this house was a manse, but the minister was in charge of a church nearly two miles away and not of that one beside the loch, just across the road. This must have been an inconvenient arrangement, but people have a way of making difficulties for themselves. Near the church is the old smithy, now a ruin, and close to it is the school and the teacher’s house. These are our nearest neighbours. The village is a mile away, and there are cottages dotted here and there, but mostly these are ruins. The church belonging to the manse, when it was a manse, is now a byre. So you will know that we live in a desolate place, and where there were fields of corn, now there are fields of bracken, or there are stretches of heather, interspersed with white warning flags of bog-cotton, since here is a land which man has never hoped to cultivate. There are hills around the loch, and in patches stunted trees, all with a slant towards the east, for the westerly winds blow relentlessly, and the trees bear this mark of their surrender.

  On the loch are five tiny islands, the nesting place of many birds, and there are rushes on the loch and delicious white foam. Often the water is grey and angry, and the foam forms stripes across, which is a sign of worse to come. I hear Grandpop say, ‘The loch is stripy. It’s going to rain.’ And it does. But the loch can be blue, oh so blue that to paint it would seem like a coloured lie, or it is a mirror reflecting perfectly the hills and the scrubby trees and rushes and the tiny granite church. And so it was now, as I sat on the wall, and I gazed and dreamed, and I thanked God that I had a smart white shirt and black shoes and a multi-coloured coat. I thanked God for where I was, for this is a wonderful place, and the grasshoppers chirped and the rabbits frolicked (for they had not seen me, since the lichen-coloured stones of which the wall is built are remarkably like my coat). And all the time in the background was the soporific murmur of the sea.

  Presently the mail bus would pass along the winding road. Sometimes it stops at our gate, but we are not expecting a guest today, and all of the family are in the house, so it would go past, on to the village, and the village people would be gathered round the post office, less to collect letters than to see who was coming off the bus, and why. Unlike me, these people have a great curiosity. But I learn more than they do by just being quiet. I heard the bus now, away in the distance, for it was deadly still and sound carried far. As it came in sight I saw first its white top, then its crimson-painted body, and I knew by the labouring sound of the engine that it was the old bus, the small one, for it was too early in the year for the big bus to be out. The tourist season had not yet started. When it did there were sometimes four buses on the road, in convoy, and nearly everyone in them would be going to Iona, though why they cross the ferry to that place when they could stay here is one of my big puzzles.

  To my surprise, the bus stopped at our gate after all, and Neilachan, the driver, climbed from his seat and placed a cardboard box beside our gate. The curious thing was that the box was twittering and cheeping. Neilachan sounded his horn to draw attention, and grinding the gears (because it was an old bus) he drove on. Nobody came from the house.

  Kitten would be in the kitchen preparing supper, and Margie would be chatting to her. Grandpop was making a new hen house at the back, so I expected Fionna and Puddy and Buddy were there, helping. Carla would be where Puddy was. I worked this out in my mind and sauntered over to the box. Yes, it chirped and twittered, and I knew what it was. The day-old chicks had come, and they were white Leghorns, because our Rhode Island Reds were so broody. I stopped to titivate my white shirt, while I debated whether or not to tell the family that the bus had been. While I was still thinking, I heard Fionna’s bicycle bell, and she came hurtling down the drive, calling over her shoulder, ‘John, it’s the chicks!’ John is Buddy. Some call him one thing, some the other. It is the same with the rest of the family. They each answer to several different names, but they always call me Nicholas or Nicky, which is nonsense, as my real name is Nathanial. But they don’t know, so I let it pass.

  John appeared from the back of the house. He always wears a kilt when he’s here, and very good he looks in it too, being tough and broad-shouldered, though not very tall. His blue short-sleeved shirt matched his eyes, and his curls stood up on end, so I know he had been very busy. He smooths down his curls when he can, pretending they aren’t there.

  By the time he reached Fionna she had opened the lid of the box, and I could see a moving mass of yellow fluff.

  ‘Any dead?’ John asked.

  ‘None. And I think they’ve sent twenty.’ Fionna put back the lid and picked up the box.

  ‘Jolly O,’ said John. He often said this and it meant he was pleased. ‘Mummy’s lighted the brooder. It’s in the cottage. Take them to her.’

  Fionna went up the drive, and John sighed and picked up her bicycle, which she had left lying on the ground. Then he saw me.

  ‘Nicholas, the Liddle Cat!’ he said, in the silly voice he adopts for me. ‘Where have you been, you old spiv? Killing bunnies for the Black Market?’

  I busied myself cleaning my shirt. This stupid talk annoyed me. As I am a good and energetic hunter, can I be blamed for selling the surplus, each at a price others are foolish enough to pay? And of course humans don’t understand our currency any more than we understand theirs.

  John put his hand under my tummy and scooped me up, placing me gently in the bicycle basket. I liked the feeling of his hand against me, and my hurt pride was quickly soothed. I stood on tiptoe in the basket and rubbed my head against John’s hand as he wheeled me up the drive.

  ‘Fecky cat.’ John said, leaning the bicycle against the garage doors. I purred loudly, hoping he would stay with me a little while, but he dumped me on the ground and gave me a light playful prod with his foot. ‘Come and see the baby chickens.’ He said. ‘And remember they aren’t for you.’

  The cottage is near the back door of the house. It used to be occupied by the servants, but for years now there have been no servants, so it has become a dump for all the surplus stuff from the house and for the outworn toys and treasures of the family.

  I tripped carefully after John along the cinder track leading to the little gr
een door with the painted horseshoe nailed over it, upside down, so that the luck would not run out. Puddy and Fionna, and Carla, were peering at the new chicks huddled behind the wire netting Grandpop had fixed around the little cone-shaped brooder. Carla whimpered a little, her tail wagging and her whole body quivering. Her long black ears hung down her blue roan back, and her brown liquid eyes seemed to me to flicker with a desire which I hoped Puddy would notice, before it was too late. Puddy seemed to read my thoughts.

  ‘If you touch the chickens, I’ll beat you, Carla,’ she said. Carla is always being threatened with a beating but she’s never had one yet.

  ‘Can the chickens find their way home?’ Fionna asked, but nobody heard her, for John and Puddy were arguing about the temperature of the brooder.

  ‘The book says ninety degrees,’ John said.

  ‘But if it’s ninety without the chickens in it, it will suffocate them when they pack in and we shut the door,’ Puddy answered, which I consider was a sensible thought.

  ‘Chickens can stand any amount of heat. It’s chills that kill them,’ John said, crumbling some oatmeal between his finger and thumb and sprinkling it among the chicks. They already had a little trough of oatmeal, a dish of milk and a dish of water, so any extra tit-bits were quite unnecessary. Anyhow, they appeared to prefer the powdered peat with which their run was littered and were scraping away vigorously as if they’d lived for years instead of for a few hours. Presently a bluebottle caught my eye. It was buzzing wrathfully against the back window, the one that overlooks the hen run. I jumped onto a pile of books stacked in the windowsill. At some time or another I had read all of these books. Hobbies Annual (with love to Buddy, Christmas 1928), Sonnenschein’s Latin Grammar (with scribbles all over it and ‘Form this’ and ‘Form that’ in Roman lettering), Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and several ‘Verity’ editions of Shakespeare, all very inky.

  Beside me was the creaky revolving bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, year 1882. This, I confess, I have not read entirely.

  I could see a huge spider waiting for the bluebottle and decided to let him capture it. I preferred to watch the hens, ten of them, all Rhode Island Reds, cared for by a Light Sussex cock who was named Geraldo, after the famous band leader. He was very attentive to his hens and had immaculate manners.

  Presently I realised that the family had gone and, not noticing me, had shut me in the cottage. There are disadvantages in being so quiet. However, I had had a good meal not long ago, and after I watched the spider parcelling up the bluebottle, I settled down for a nap, tucking my paws under my chest in the way John says makes me look like a sphinx. But he’s wrong, for I’ve never seen a sphinx with tucked-in paws. And I’ve seen most things.

  As I suspected, the day-old chicks soon brought Puddy back. She is one of those people who worries a lot and imagines all sorts of dreadful things happening, so she makes sure she is around to see that they don’t. She made twittering noises, which the chickens ignored, and, opening the cone lid of the brooder, she adjusted the flame of the little paraffin lamp. I don’t know whether she turned it up or down. Up, probably, because of what John had said about the chills.

  I jumped lightly off the windowsill and rubbed myself against her leg.

  ‘Darling Nicky,’ she said absently, picking me up, ‘sly old cat, lurking round the brooder.’ But I knew she knew that I would not touch her chickens. I never even touch birds, because I know she loves them. John’s right. I’m an affectionate cat and I like to please.

  There was a soft click-click outside, and Puddy quickly shut the cottage door. Unfortunately for them, but luckily for the family, the goats have knees that click when they walk. Otherwise they could creep up and do all manner of damage without attracting notice. There are two goats, Flora and Arnish. They are British Sanaan, white, and hornless, and Arnish is bigger and older than Flora, so it is a pity that she belongs to a library which supplies her with subversive literature, for Flora is easily impressed.

  Goodness knows what Arnish tells her in the quiet of their home, the little wooden house at the end of the barn, opposite the cottage.

  We heard the clatter of little hooves as the goats pawed at the door, and presently their wise, inquisitive faces appeared at the window. Puddy, who had been stroking my ears as she contemplated the chickens, giggled and went to the window. Flora and Arnish were chewing, as usual, their white beards bobbing in the fading light.

  ‘Go to bed, I’m coming to milk you,’ Puddy told them, ‘and I’ll expect a lot of milk, after all the damage you’ve done today.’ There had been a commotion that morning, something about the potatoes John had left in the garage, ready for planting, and he’d left the garage door open. So of course the goats had taken advantage of the situation, since nobody was around to hear their knees, and they had eaten some of the cushions from the dog-cart for good measure.

  Satisfied that the chickens were all right, we left the cottage and found the goats having a butting match over a piece of rag. Arnish always won these matches, rising on her hind legs and diving down on Flora in a manner that was most graceful. Puddy didn’t try to stop them. She knew that they never did one another any harm.

  We went out by the small side gate, across the wild heathery bit called the Dalvan, and so to the big field over the road, always called ‘The Fence’, where Peter and Iain, the year-old bullocks, lived. Peter and Iain were new to the family, having been bought by Puddy at the local auction sale only a few days before, and we had to watch them in case they returned to their old home, a farm not far away. Peter was half Highland, half Galloway, dark brown with a white tummy. Iain was almost entirely Highland, rather shaggy, and the beautiful horns so typical of his breed had been removed by a vet, perhaps luckily for us, but aesthetically a pity. Both of the bullocks came up to the big white gate and allowed Puddy to stroke them. I wriggled out of her arms and walked slowly a little way away, not because I was afraid but because I thought it right that, while she was cultivating their friendship, Puddy should be able to give Peter and Iain her undivided attention. She must have appreciated this, for when she had done talking to them, she came over to me and picked me up and carried me back to the house, whispering nice things about me all the while.

  We entered the house by the back door. Kitten was stirring something on the Aga cooker, and Fionna was beside her, scraping a pot with a spoon and eating the scrapings. I guessed Kitten had been making fudge. I knew by the flickering in the hall that Margie was lighting the lamps, and from the little back sitting-room, crackling noises meant that Grandpop was stoking up the fire. The gurgling of water outside the back door combined with the heartening sound of a rich baritone voice singing ‘Over the Sea to Skye’ told me John was just out of his bath.

  The cosy family evening was about to begin, with Puddy stealing the soup, which I’m afraid is the only way to describe her repeated tasting of it, and Carla eyeing my empty dish on the table, just as if I had been fed and she had been forgotten. There was a pleasant sameness about our evenings which someone less discerning than myself might consider dull. But I had already discovered that it is the small things in life that matter. The big things have a way of becoming nothing but a mark in time from which the small things are measured.

  And so it these small things that I am remembering and writing down before I get too old to remember anything at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Last night was one of my unlucky nights. There was a gale warning for Sea Area Malin (which is us) announced during the variety programme the family was listening to on the radio. So when Grandpop came into the kitchen to stoke the Aga before going to bed, he saw me lying in the big kitchen chair and said, ‘Poor little Nicky, you must sleep indoors tonight.’

  Now, I know he meant it well, and I know that even on good nights the family worry about me being out on my own, but they are dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. And as I can’t tell them how much I enjoy outside, I just have to slip off when they let Carla
out for her last run, and usually I manage it unless, like tonight, I am caught napping.

  Corrie and Arnish

  Since I wasn’t going to get out for the night, at least I might wangle a little extra milk. I sat up in the chair, tilted back my head and opened my mouth wide in the silent ‘meow’ which I know always melts Grandpop’s heart.

  ‘Poor little Nicky,’ said Grandpop again, and he walked with his slow, heavy tread across the kitchen into the pantry, where Puddy kept the goats’ milk in huge bowls to collect the cream. Grandpop has not got a beard, or anything as ancient as that, but his back is very bent because he has arthritis. He was a very great doctor in his time. A pity he didn’t do something about his back. I would have.

  He poured my milk out of a jug so as not to disturb Puddy’s cream and placed my dish on the little table by the kitchen window. This is where they feed me, so that Carla cannot reach. Carla was still outside, and I guessed she had probably found something disgusting to eat. Let me say here and now that Carla is very grand, with a pedigree longer than my tail, and she comes from kennels just outside London where they breed the most famous cocker spaniels in the world. But she has shocking lapses in taste and eats the skin and entrails of rabbits that I have discarded, and all manner of muck besides. I’ve even seen her eating with the hens, a thing no self-respecting cat would do.

  I make no bones about who I am. I was bought for seven and sixpence from a pet shop in a suburb of London called Ealing, but I am, and always have been, very fastidious. You will think it is a far cry from Ealing to the Isle of Mull, and how on earth did I get here? So I’ll tell you. Margie brought me here in a basket when I was only a kitten, but I assure you I have not forgotten my friends and relations in the outskirts of the Metropolis (doesn’t that sound better than the suburbs?), and I correspond with them enough to avoid being insular. Besides, when one is in business, one needs contacts, though don’t think my motives are entirely mercenary.