Completely Unexpected Tales Read online

  The man waited, and said nothing. But when she pulled out the mink and allowed the beautiful thick fur to fall over the counter, his eyebrows went up and he drew his hand away from the cat and came over to look at it. He picked it up and held it out in front of him.

  ‘If only I had a watch on me or a ring,’ Mrs Bixby said, ‘I’d give you that instead. But the fact is I don’t have a thing with me other than this coat.’ She spread out her fingers for him to see.

  ‘It looks new,’ the man said, fondling the soft fur.

  ‘Oh yes, it is. But, as I said, I only want to borrow enough to tide me over till Monday. How about fifty dollars?’

  ‘I’ll loan you fifty dollars.’

  ‘It’s worth a hundred times more than that, but I know you’ll take good care of it until I return.’

  The man went over to a drawer and fetched a ticket and placed it on the counter. The ticket looked like one of those labels you tie on to the handle of your suitcase, the same shape and size exactly, and the same stiff brownish paper. But it was perforated across the middle so that you could tear it in two, and both halves were identical.

  ‘Name?’ he asked.

  ‘Leave that out. And the address.’

  She saw the man pause, and she saw the nib of the pen hovering over the dotted line, waiting.

  ‘You don’t have to put the name and address, do you?’

  The man shrugged and shook his head and the pen-nib moved on down to the next line.

  ‘It’s just that I’d rather not,’ Mrs Bixby said. ‘It’s purely personal.’

  ‘You’d better not lose this ticket, then.’

  ‘I won’t lose it.’

  ‘You realize that anyone who gets hold of it can come in and claim the article?’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘Simply on the number.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘What do you want me to put for a description.’

  ‘No description either, thank you. It’s not necessary. Just put the amount I’m borrowing.’

  The pen-nib hesitated again, hovering over the dotted line beside the word ARTICLE.

  ‘I think you ought to put a description. A description is always a help if you want to sell the ticket. You never know, you might want to sell it sometime.’

  ‘I don’t want to sell it.’

  ‘You might have to. Lots of people do.’

  ‘Look,’ Mrs Bixby said. ‘I’m not broke, if that’s what you mean. I simply lost my purse. Don’t you understand?’

  ‘You have it your own way then,’ the man said. ‘It’s your coat.’

  At this point an unpleasant thought struck Mrs Bixby. ‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘If I don’t have a description on my ticket, how can I be sure you’ll give me back the coat and not something else when I return?’

  ‘It goes in the books.’

  ‘But all I’ve got is a number. So actually you could hand me any old thing you wanted, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Do you want a description or don’t you?’ the man asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I trust you.’

  The man wrote ‘fifty dollars’ opposite the word VALUE on both sections of the ticket, then he tore it in half along the perforations and slid the lower portion across the counter. He took a wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted five ten-dollar bills. ‘The interest is three per cent a month,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, all right. And thank you. You’ll take good care of it, won’t you?’

  The man nodded but said nothing.

  ‘Shall I put it back in the box for you?’

  ‘No,’ the man said.

  Mrs Bixby turned and went out of the shop on to the street where the taxi was waiting. Ten minutes later, she was home.

  ‘Darling,’ she said as she bent over and kissed her husband. ‘Did you miss me?’

  Cyril Bixby laid down the evening paper and glanced at the watch on his wrist. ‘It’s twelve and a half minutes past six,’ he said. ‘You’re a bit late, aren’t you?’

  ‘I know. It’s those dreadful trains. Aunt Maude sent you her love as usual. I’m dying for a drink, aren’t you?’

  The husband folded his newspaper into a neat rectangle and placed it on the arm of his chair. Then he stood up and crossed over to the sideboard. His wife remained in the centre of the room pulling off her gloves, watching him carefully, wondering how long she ought to wait. He had his back to her now, bending forward to measure the gin, putting his face right up close to the measurer and peering into it as though it were a patient’s mouth.

  It was funny how small he always looked after the Colonel. The Colonel was huge and bristly, and when you were near to him he smelled faintly of horseradish. This one was small and neat and bony and he didn’t really smell of anything at all, except peppermint drops, which he sucked to keep his breath nice for the patients.

  ‘See what I’ve bought for measuring the vermouth,’ he said, holding up a calibrated glass beaker. ‘I can get it to the nearest milligram with this.’

  ‘Darling, how clever.’

  I really must try to make him change the way he dresses, she told herself. His suits are just too ridiculous for words. There had been a time when she thought they were wonderful, those Edwardian jackets with high lapels and six buttons down the front, but now they merely seemed absurd. So did the narrow stovepipe trousers. You had to have a special sort of face to wear things like that, and Cyril just didn’t have it. His was a long bony countenance with a narrow nose and a slightly prognathous jaw, and when you saw it coming up out of the top of one of those tightly fitting old-fashioned suits it looked like a caricature of Sam Weller. He probably thought it looked like Beau Brum-mel. It was a fact that in the office he invariably greeted female patients with his white coat unbuttoned so that they would catch a glimpse of the trappings underneath; and in some obscure way this was obviously meant to convey the impression that he was a bit of a dog. But Mrs Bixby knew better. The plumage was a bluff. It meant nothing. It reminded her of an ageing peacock strutting on the lawn with only half its feathers left. Or one of those fatuous self-fertilizing flowers – like the dandelion. A dandelion never has to get fertilized for the setting of its seed, and all those brilliant yellow petals are just a waste of time, a boast, a masquerade. What’s the word the biologists use? Subsexual. A dandelion is subsexual. So, for that matter, are the summer broods of water fleas. It sounds a bit like Lewis Carroll, she thought – water fleas and dandelions and dentists.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said, taking the martini and seating herself on the sofa with her handbag on her lap. ‘And what did you do last night?’

  ‘I stayed on in the office and cast a few inlays. I also got my accounts up to date.’

  ‘Now really, Cyril, I think it’s high time you let other people do your donkey work for you. You’re much too important for that sort of thing. Why don’t you give the inlays to the mechanic?’

  ‘I prefer to do them myself. I’m extremely proud of my inlays.’

  ‘I know you are, darling, and I think they’re absolutely wonderful. They’re the best inlays in the whole world. But I don’t want you to burn yourself out. And why doesn’t that Pulteney woman do the accounts? That’s part of her job, isn’t it?’

  ‘She does do them. But I have to price everything up first. She doesn’t know who’s rich and who isn’t.’

  ‘This Martini is perfect,’ Mrs Bixby said, setting down her glass on the side table. ‘Quite perfect.’ She opened her bag and took out a handkerchief as if to blow her nose. ‘Oh look!’ she cried, seeing the ticket. ‘I forgot to show you this! I found it just now on the seat of my taxi. It’s got a number on it, and I thought it might be a lottery ticket or something, so I kept it.’

  She handed the small piece of stiff brown paper to her husband, who took it in his fingers and began examining it minutely from all angles, as though it were a suspect tooth.

  ‘You know what this is?�€