Tales of the Unexpected Read online

  ‘The very first time I ever read that sentence, Mabel, I jumped straight out of my chair and I said to myself if it’ll work with a lousy rat, I said, then there’s no reason on earth why it shouldn’t work with Albert Taylor.’

  He paused again, craning his head forward and turning one ear slightly in his wife’s direction, waiting for her to say something. But she didn’t.

  ‘And here’s another thing,’ he went on. ‘It made me feel so absolutely marvellous, Mabel, and so sort of completely different to what I was before that I went right on taking it even after you’d announced the joyful tidings. Buckets of it I must have swallowed during the last twelve months.’

  The big heavy haunted-looking eyes of the woman were moving intently over the man’s face and neck. There was no skin showing at all on the neck, not even at the sides below the ears. The whole of it, to a point where it disappeared into the collar of the shirt, was covered all the way around with those shortish silky hairs, yellowy black.

  ‘Mind you,’ he said, turning away from her, gazing lovingly now at the baby, ‘it’s going to work far better on a tiny infant than on a fully developed man like me. You’ve only got to look at her to see that, don’t you agree?’

  The woman’s eyes travelled slowly downward and settled on the baby. The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and white and comatose, like some gigantic grub that was approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge into the world complete with mandibles and wings.

  ‘Why don’t you cover her up, Mabel?’ he said. ‘We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.’

  Edward the Conqueror

  Louisa, holding a dishcloth in her hand, stepped out of the kitchen door at the back of the house into the cool October sunshine.

  ‘Edward!’ she called. ‘Ed-ward! Lunch is ready!’

  She paused a moment, listening; then she strolled out on to the lawn and continued across it – a little shadow attending her – skirting the rose bed and touching the sundial lightly with one finger as she went by. She moved rather gracefully for a woman who was small and plump, with a lilt in her walk and a gentle swinging of the shoulders and the arms. She passed under the mulberry tree on to the brick path, then went all the way along the path until she came to the place where she could look down into the dip at the end of this large garden.

  ‘Edward! Lunch!’

  She could see him now, about eighty yards away, down in the dip on the edge of the wood – the tallish narrow figure in khaki slacks and dark-green sweater, working beside a big bonfire with a fork in his hands, pitching brambles on to the top of the fire. It was blazing fiercely, with orange flames and clouds of milky smoke, and the smoke was drifting back over the garden with a wonderful scent of autumn and burning leaves.

  Louisa went down the slope towards her husband. Had she wanted, she could easily have called again and made herself heard, but there was something about a first-class bonfire that impelled her towards it, right up close so she could feel the heat and listen to it burn.

  ‘Lunch,’ she said, approaching.

  ‘Oh, hello. All right – yes. I’m coming.’

  ‘What a good fire.’

  ‘I’ve decided to clear this place right out,’ her husband said. ‘I’m sick and tired of all these brambles.’ His long face was wet with perspiration. There were small beads of it clinging all over his moustache like dew, and two little rivers were running down his throat on to the turtleneck of the sweater.

  ‘You better be careful you don’t overdo it, Edward.’

  ‘Louisa, I do wish you’d stop treating me as though I were eighty. A bit of exercise never did anyone any harm.’

  ‘Yes, dear, I know. Oh, Edward! Look! Look!’

  The man turned and looked at Louisa, who was pointing now to the far side of the bonfire.

  ‘Look, Edward! The cat!’

  Sitting on the ground, so close to the fire that the flames sometimes seemed actually to be touching it, was a large cat of a most unusual colour. It stayed quite still, with its head on one side and its nose in the air, watching the man and woman with a cool yellow eye.

  ‘It’ll get burnt!’ Louisa cried, and she dropped the dishcloth and darted swiftly in and grabbed it with both hands, whisking it away and putting it on the grass well clear of the flames.

  ‘You crazy cat,’ she said, dusting off her hands. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Cats know what they’re doing,’ the husband said. ‘You’ll never find a cat doing something it doesn’t want. Not cats.’

  ‘Whose is it? You ever seen it before?’

  ‘No, I never have. Damn peculiar colour.’

  The cat had seated itself on the grass and was regarding them with a sidewise look. There was a veiled inward expression about the eyes, something curiously ominiscent and pensive, and around the nose a most delicate air of contempt, as though the sight of these two middle-aged persons – the one small, plump, and rosy, the other lean and extremely sweaty – were a matter of some surprise but very little importance. For a cat, it certainly had an unusual colour – a pure silvery grey with no blue in it at all – and the hair was very long and silky.

  Louisa bent down and stroked its head. ‘You must go home,’ she said. ‘Be a good cat now and go on home to where you belong.’

  The man and wife started to stroll back up the hill towards the house. The cat got up and followed, at a distance first, but edging closer and closer as they went along. Soon it was alongside them, then it was ahead, leading the way across the lawn to the house, walking as though it owned the whole place, holding its tail straight up in the air, like a mast.

  ‘Go home,’ the man said. ‘Go on home. We don’t want you.’

  But when they reached the house, it came in with them, and Louisa gave it some milk in the kitchen. During lunch, it hopped up on to the spare chair between them and sat through the meal with its head just above the level of the table, watching the proceedings with those dark-yellow eyes which kept moving slowly from the woman to the man and back again.

  ‘I don’t like this cat,’ Edward said.

  ‘Oh, I think it’s a beautiful cat. I do hope it stays a little while.’

  ‘Now, listen to me, Louisa. The creature can’t possibly stay here. It belongs to someone else. It’s lost. And if it’s still trying to hang around this afternoon, you’d better take it to the police. They’ll see it gets home.’

  After lunch, Edward returned to his gardening. Louisa, as usual, went to the piano. She was a competent pianist and a genuine music-lover, and almost every afternoon she spent an hour or so playing for herself. The cat was now lying on the sofa, and she paused to stroke it as she went by. It opened its eyes, looked at her a moment, then closed them again and went back to sleep.

  ‘You’re an awfully nice cat,’ she said. ‘And such a beautiful colour. I wish I could keep you.’ Then her fingers, moving over the fur on the cat’s head, came into contact with a small lump, a little growth just above the right eye.

  ‘Poor cat,’ she said. ‘You’ve got bumps on your beautiful face. You must be getting old.’

  She went over and sat down on the long piano stool but she didn’t immediately start to play. One of her special little pleasures was to make every day a kind of concert day, with a carefully arranged programme which she worked out in detail before she began. She never liked to break her enjoyment by having to stop while she wondered what to play next. All she wanted was a brief pause after each piece while the audience clapped enthusiastically and called for more. It was so much nicer to imagine an audience, and now and again while she was playing – on the lucky days, that is – the room would begin to swim and fade and darken, and she would see nothing but row upon row of seats and a sea of white faces upturned towards her, listening with a rapt and adoring concentration.

  Sometimes she played from memory, sometimes from music. Today she would play from memory; that was the way she felt. And what should the programme be