The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl Volume 2 Read online

  In due course, Mr Cleaver came to regard himself as an expert on wine, and inevitably he turned into a colossal bore. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' he would announce at dinner, holding up his glass, 'this is a Margaux '29! The greatest year of the century! Fantastic bouquet! Smells of cowslips! And notice especially the after taste and how the tiny trace of tannin gives it that glorious astringent quality! Terrific, ain't it?'

  The guests would nod and sip and mumble a few praises, but that was all.

  "What's the matter with the silly twerps?" Mr Cleaver said to Tibbs after this had gone on for some time. "Don't none of them appreciate a great wine?"

  The butler laid his head to one side and gazed upward. "I think they would appreciate it, sir," he said, "if they were able to taste it. But they can't."

  "What the heck d'you mean, they can't taste it?"

  "I believe, sir, that you have instructed Monsieur Estragon to put liberal quantities of vinegar in the salad-dressing."

  "What's wrong with that? I like vinegar."

  "Vinegar," the butler said, "is the enemy of wine. It destroys the palate. The dressing should be made of pure olive oil and a little lemon juice. Nothing else."

  "Hogwash!" said Mr Cleaver.

  "As you wish, sir."

  "I'll say it again, Tibbs. You're talking hogwash. The vinegar don't spoil my palate one bit."

  "You are very fortunate, sir," the butler murmured, backing out of the room.

  That night at dinner, the host began to mock his butler in front of the guests. "Mister Tibbs," he said, "has been trying to tell me I can't taste my wine if I put vinegar in the salad-dressing. Right, Tibbs?"

  "Yes, sir," Tibbs replied gravely.

  "And I told him hogwash. Didn't I, Tibbs?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "This wine," Mr Cleaver went on, raising his glass, "tastes to me exactly like a Ch‰teau Lafite '45, and what's more it is a Ch‰teau Lafite '45."

  Tibbs, the butler, stood very still and erect near the sideboard, his face pale. "If you'll forgive me, sir," he said, "that is not a Lafite '45."

  Mr Cleaver swung round in his chair and stared at the butler. "What the heck d'you mean," he said. "There's the empty bottles beside you to prove it!"

  These great clarets, being old and full of sediment, were always decanted by Tibbs before dinner. They were served in cut-glass decanters, while the empty bottles, as is the custom, were placed on the sideboard. Right now, two empty bottles of Lafite '45 were standing on the sideboard for all to see.

  "The wine you are drinking, sir," the butler said quietly, "happens to be that cheap and rather odious Spanish red."

  Mr Cleaver looked at the wine in his glass, then at the butler. The blood was coming to his face now, his skin was turning scarlet. "You're lying, Tibbs!" he said.

  "No sir, I'm not lying," the butler said. "As a matter of fact, I have never served you any other wine but Spanish red since I've been here. It seemed to suit you very well."

  "I don't believe him!" Mr Cleaver cried out to his guests. "The man's gone mad."

  "Great wines," the butler said, "should be treated with reverence. It is bad enough to destroy the palate with three or four cocktails before dinner, as you people do, but when you slosh vinegar over your food into the bargain, then you might just as well be drinking dishwater."

  Ten outraged faces around the table stared at the butler. He had caught them off balance. They were speechless.

  "This," the butler said, reaching out and touching one of the empty bottles lovingly with his fingers, "this is the last of the forty-fives. The twenty-nines have already been finished. But they were glorious wines. Monsieur Estragon and I enjoyed them immensely."

  The butler bowed and walked quite slowly from the room. He crossed the hail and went out of the front door of the house into the street where Monsieur Estragon was already loading their suitcases into the boot of the small car which they owned together.

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

  MY cow started bulling at dawn and the noise can drive you crazy if the cowshed is right under your window. So I got dressed early and phoned Claud at the filling-station to ask if he'd give me a hand to lead her down the steep hill and across the road over to Rummins's farm to have her serviced by Rummins's famous bull.

  Claud arrived five minutes later and we tied a rope around the cow's neck and set off down the lane on this cool September morning. There were high hedges on either side of the lane and the hazel bushes had clusters of big ripe nuts all over them.

  "You ever seen Rummins do a mating?" Claud asked me.

  I told him I had never seen anyone do an official mating between a bull and a cow.

  "Rummins does it special," Claud said. "There's nobody in the world does a mating the way Rummins does it."

  "What's so special about it?"

  "You got a treat coming to you," Claud said.

  "So has the cow," I said.

  "If the rest of the world knew about what Rummins does at a mating," Claud said, "he'd be world famous. It would change the whole science of dairy-farming all over the world."

  "Why doesn't he tell them then?" I asked.

  "I doubt he's ever even thought about it," Claud said. "Rummins isn't one to bother his head about things like that. He's got the best dairy-herd for miles around and that's all he cares about. He doesn't want the newspapers swarming all over his place asking questions, which is exactly what would happen if it ever got out."

  "Why don't you tell me about it," I said.

  We walked on in silence for a while, the cow pulling ahead.

  "I'm surprised Rummins said yes to lending you his bull," Claud said. "I've never known him do that before."

  At the bottom of the lane we crossed the Aylesbury road and climbed up the hill on the other side of the valley towards the farm. The cow knew there was a bull up there somewhere and she was pulling harder than ever on the rope. We had to trot to keep up with her.

  There were no gates at the farm entrance, just a wide gap and a cobbled yard beyond. Rummins, carrying a pail of milk across the yard, saw us coming. He set the pail down slowly and came over to meet us. "She's ready then, is she?" he said.

  "Been yelling her head off," I said.

  Rummins walked around my cow, examining her carefully. He was a short man, built squat and broad like a frog. He had a wide frog mouth and broken teeth and shifty eyes, but over the years I had grown to respect him for his wisdom and the sharpness of his mind. "All right then," he said. "What is it you want, a heifer calf or a bull?"

  "Can I choose?"

  "Of course you can choose."

  "Then I'll have a heifer," I said, keeping a straight face. "We want milk not beef."

  "Hey, Bert!" Rummins called out. "Come and give us a hand!"

  Bert emerged from the cowsheds. He was Rummins's youngest son, a tall boneless boy with a runny nose and something wrong with one eye. The eye was pale and misty-grey all over, like a boiled fish eye, and it moved quite independently from the other eye. "Get another rope," Rummins said.

  Bert fetched a rope and looped it around my cow's neck so that she now had two ropes holding her, my own and Bert's. "He wants a heifer," Rummins said. "Face her into the sun."

  "Into the sun?" I said. "There isn't any sun."

  "There's always sun," Rummins said. "Them bloody clouds don't make no difference. Come on now. Get a jerk on, Bert. Bring her round. Sun's over there."

  With Bert holding one rope and Claud and me holding the other, we manoeuvred the cow round until her head was facing directly towards the place in the sky where the sun was hidden behind the clouds.

  "I told you it was different," Claud whispered. "You're going to see something soon you've never seen in your life before."

  "Hold her steady now!" Rummins ordered. "Don't let her jump round!" Then he hurried over to a shed in the far corner of the yard and brought out the bull. He was an enormous beast, a black-and-white Friesian, with short legs and a body like a ten-t