Tales of the Unexpected Read online

  Back in the farmhouse, Rummins was saying, ‘Fancy that old bastard giving twenty pound for a load of junk like this.’

  ‘You did very nicely, Mr Rummins,’ Claud told him. ‘You think he’ll pay you?’

  ‘We don’t put it in the car till he do.’

  ‘And what if it won’t go in the car?’ Claud asked. ‘You know what I think, Mr Rummins? You want my honest opinion? I think the bloody thing’s too big to go in the car. And then what happens? Then he’s going to say to hell with it and just drive off without it and you’ll never see him again. Nor the money either. He didn’t seem all that keen on having it, you know.’

  Rummins paused to consider this new and rather alarming prospect.

  ‘How can a thing like that possibly go in a car?’ Claud went on relentlessly. ‘A parson never has a big car anyway. You ever seen a parson with a big car, Mr Rummins?’

  ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘Exactly! And now listen to me. I’ve got an idea. He told us, didn’t he, that it was only the legs he was wanting. Right? So all we’ve got to do is to cut ’em off quick right here on the spot before he comes back, then it’ll be sure to go in the car. All we’re doing is saving him the trouble of cutting them off himself when he gets home. How about it, Mr Rummins?’ Claud’s flat bovine face glimmered with a mawkish pride.

  ‘It’s not such a bad idea at that,’ Rummins said, looking at the commode. ‘In fact it’s a bloody good idea. Come on then, we’ll have to hurry. You and Bert carry it out into the yard. I’ll get the saw. Take the drawers out first.’

  Within a couple of minutes, Claud and Bert had carried the commode outside and had laid it upside down in the yard amidst the chicken droppings and cow dung and mud. In the distance, half-way across the field, they could see a small figure striding along the path towards the road. They paused to watch. There was something rather comical about the way in which the figure was conducting itself. Every now and again it would break into a trot, then it did a kind of hop, skip, and jump, and once it seemed as though the sound of a cheerful song came rippling faintly to them from across the meadow.

  ‘I reckon he’s balmy,’ Claud said, and Bert grinned darkly, rolling his misty eye slowly round in its socket.

  Rummins came waddling over from the shed, squat and frog-like, carrying a long saw. Claud took the saw away from him and went to work.

  ‘Cut ’em close,’ Rummins said. ‘Don’t forget he’s going to use ’em on another table.’

  The mahogany was hard and very dry, and as Claud worked, a fine red dust sprayed out from the edge of the saw and fell softly to the ground. One by one, the legs came off, and when they were all severed, Bert stooped down and arranged them carefully in a row.

  Claud stepped back to survey the results of his labour. There was a longish pause.

  ‘Just let me ask you one question, Mr Rummins,’ he said slowly. ‘Even now, could you put that enormous thing into the back of a car?’

  ‘Not unless it was a van.’

  ‘Correct!’ Claud cried. ‘And parsons don’t have vans, you know. All they’ve got usually is piddling little Morris Eights or Austin Sevens.’

  ‘The legs is all he wants,’ Rummins said. ‘If the rest of it won’t go in, then he can leave it. He can’t complain. He’s got the legs.’

  ‘Now you know better’n that, Mr Rummins,’ Claud said patiently. ‘You know damn well he’s going to start knocking the price if he don’t get every single bit of this into his car. A parson’s just as cunning as the rest of ’em when it comes to money, don’t you make any mistake about that. Especially this old boy. So why don’t we give him his firewood now and be done with it. Where d’you keep the axe?’

  ‘I reckon that’s fair enough,’ Rummins said. ‘Bert, go fetch the axe.’

  Bert went into the shed and fetched a tall woodcutter’s axe and gave it to Claud. Claud spat on the palms of his hands and rubbed them together. Then, with a long-armed, high-swinging action, he began fiercely attacking the legless carcass of the commode.

  It was hard work, and it took several minutes before he had the whole thing more or less smashed to pieces.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, straightening up, wiping his brow. ‘That was a bloody good carpenter put this job together and I don’t care what the parson says.’

  ‘We’re just in time!’ Rummins called out. ‘Here he comes!’

  Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat

  America is the land of opportunities for women. Already they own about eighty-five per cent of the wealth of the nation. Soon they will have it all. Divorce has become a lucrative process, simple to arrange and easy to forget; and ambitious females can repeat it as often as they please and parlay their winnings to astronomical figures. The husband’s death also brings satisfactory rewards and some ladies prefer to rely upon this method. They know that the waiting period will not be unduly protracted, for overwork and hypertension are bound to get the poor devil before long, and he will die at his desk with a bottle of benzedrines in one hand and a packet of tranquillizers in the other.

  Succeeding generations of youthful American males are not deterred in the slightest by this terrifying pattern of divorce and death. The higher the divorce rate climbs, the more eager they become. Young men marry like mice, almost before they have reached the age of puberty, and a large proportion of them have at least two ex-wives on the payroll by the time they are thirty-six years old. To support these ladies in the manner to which they are accustomed, the men must work like slaves, which is of course precisely what they are. But now at last, as they approach their premature middle age, a sense of disillusionment and fear begins to creep slowly into their hearts, and in the evenings they take to huddling together in little groups, in clubs and bars, drinking their whiskies and swallowing their pills, and trying to comfort one another with stories.

  The basic theme of these stories never varies. There are always three main characters – the husband, the wife, and the dirty dog. The husband is a decent, clean-living man, working hard at his job. The wife is cunning, deceitful, and lecherous, and she is invariably up to some sort of jiggery-pokery with the dirty dog. The husband is too good a man even to suspect her. Things look black for the husband. Will the poor man ever find out? Must he be a cuckold for the rest of his life? Yes, he must. But wait! Suddenly, by a brilliant manoeuvre, the husband completely turns the tables on his monstrous spouse. The woman is flabber-gasted, stupefied, humiliated, defeated. The audience of men around the bar smiles quietly to itself and takes a little comfort from the fantasy.

  There are many of these stories going around, these wonderful wishful-thinking dreamworld inventions of the unhappy male, but most of them are too fatuous to be worth repeating, and far too fruity to be put down on paper. There is one, however, that seems to be superior to the rest, particularly as it has the merit of being true. It is extremely popular with twice – or thrice-bitten males in search of solace, and if you are one of them, and if you haven’t heard it before, you may enjoy the way it comes out. The story is called ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’, and it goes something like this:

  Mr and Mrs Bixby lived in a smallish apartment somewhere in New York City. Mr Bixby was a dentist who made an average income. Mrs Bixby was a big vigorous woman with a wet mouth. Once a month, always on Friday afternoons, Mrs Bixby would board the train at Pennsylvania Station and travel to Baltimore to visit her old aunt. She would spend the night with the aunt and return to New York on the following day in time to cook supper for her husband. Mr Bixby accepted this arrangement good-naturedly. He knew that Aunt Maude lived in Baltimore, and that his wife was very fond of the old lady, and certainly it would be unreasonable to deny either of them the pleasure of a monthly meeting.

  ‘Just so long as you don’t ever expect me to accompany you,’ Mr Bixby had said in the beginning.

  ‘Of course not, darling,’ Mrs Bixby had answered. ‘After all, she is not your aunt. She’s mine