The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl Volume 2 Read online

  Now and again, but not very often, a customer would enter the office from the shop and would hand his chosen volume to Miss Tottle, who checked the price written in pencil on the fly-leaf and accepted the money, giving change when necessary from somewhere in the left-hand drawer of her writing-table. Mr Buggage never bothered even to glance up at those who came in and went out, and if one of them asked a question, it would be Miss Tottle who answered it.

  Neither Mr Buggage nor Miss Tottle appeared to be in the least concerned about what went on in the main shop. In point of fact, Mr Buggage took the view that if someone was going to steal a book, then good luck to him. He knew very well that there was not a single valuable first edition out there on the shelves. There might be a moderately rare volume of Galsworthy or an early Waugh that had come in with a job lot bought at auction, and there were certainly some good sets of Boswell and Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest, often very nicely bound in half or even whole calf. But those were not really the sort of things you could slip into your overcoat pocket. Even if a villain did walk out with half a dozen volumes, Mr Buggage wasn't going to lose any sleep over it. Why should he when he knew that the shop itself earned less money in a whole year than the backroom business grossed in a couple of days. It was what went on in the back room that counted.

  One morning in February when the weather was foul and sleet was slanting white and wet on to the window-panes of the office, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were in their respective places as usual and each was engrossed, one might even say fascinated, by his and her own work. Mr Buggage, with a gold Parker pen poised above a note-pad, was reading The Times and jotting things down as he went along. Every now and again, he would refer to Who's Who and make more jottings.

  Miss Tottle, who had been opening the mail, was now examining some cheques and adding up totals.

  "Three today," she said.

  "What's it come to?" Mr Buggage asked, not looking up.

  "One thousand six hundred," Miss Tottle said. Mr Buggage said, "I don't suppose we've "eard anything yet from that bishop's 'ouse in Chester , 'ave we?"

  "A bishop lives in a palace, Billy, not a house," Miss Tottle said.

  "I don't give a sod where 'ee lives," Mr Buggage said. "But I get just a little bit uneasy when there's no quick answer from somebody like that."

  "As a matter of fact, the reply came this morning," Miss Tottle said.

  "Coughed up all right?"

  "The full amount."

  "That's a relief," Mr Buggage said. "We never done a bishop before and I'm not sure it was any too clever."

  "The cheque came from some solicitors."

  Mr Buggage looked up sharply. "Was there a letter?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Read it."

  Miss Tottle found the letter and began to read: 'Dear Sir, With reference to your communication of the 4th Instant, we enclose herewith a cheque for Ј537 in full settlement. Yours faithfully, Smithson, Briggs and Ellis.' Miss Tottle paused. "That seems all right, doesn't it?"

  "It's all right this time," Mr Buggage said. "But we don't want no more solicitors and let's not 'ave any more bishops either."

  "I agree about bishops," Miss Tottle said. "But you're not suddenly ruling out earls and lords and all that lot, I hope?"

  "Lords is fine," Mr Buggage said. "We never 'ad no trouble with lords. Nor earls either. And didn't we do a duke once?"

  "The Duke of Dorset," Miss Tottle said. "Did him last year. Over a thousand quid."

  "Very nice," Mr Buggage said. "I remember selectin'

  'im myself straight off the front page." He stopped talking while he prised a bit of food out from between two front teeth with the nail of his little finger. "What I says is this," he went on. "The bigger the title, the bigger the twit. In fact, anyone's got a title on 'is name is almost certain to be a twit."

  "Now that's not quite true, Billy," Miss Tottle said. "Some people are given titles because they've done absolutely brilliant things, like inventing penicillin or climbing Mount Everest."

  "I'm talking about in'erited titles," Mr Buggage said. "Anyone gets born with a title, it's odds-on 'ee's a twit."

  "You're right there," Miss Tottle said. "We've never had the slightest trouble with the aristocracy."

  Mr Buggage leaned back in his chair and gazed solemnly at Miss Tottle. "You know what?" he said. "One of these days we might even 'ave a crack at royalty."

  "Ooh, I'd love it," Miss Tottle said. "Sock them for a fortune."

  Mr Buggage continued to gaze at Miss Tottle's profile, and as he did so, a slightly lascivious glint crept into his eye. One is forced to admit that Miss Tottle's appearance, when judged by the highest standards, was disappointing. To tell the truth when judged by any standards, it was still disappointing. Her face was long and horsey and her teeth, which were also rather long, had a sulphurous tinge about them. So did her skin. The best you could say about her was that she had a generous bosom, but even that had its faults. It was the kind that makes a single long tightly bound bulge from one side of the chest to the other, and at first glance one got the impression that there were not two individual breasts growing out of her body but simply one big long loaf of bread.

  Then again, Mr Buggage himself was in no position to be overly finicky. When one saw him for the first time, the word that sprang instantly to mind was 'grubby'. He was squat, paunchy, bald and flaccid, and so far as his face was concerned, one could only make a guess at what it looked like because not much of it was visible to the eye. The major part was covered over by an immense thicket of black, bushy, slightly curly hair, a fashion, one fears, that is all too common these days, a foolish practice and incidentally a rather dirty habit. Why so many males wish to conceal their facial characteristics is beyond the comprehension of us ordinary mortals. One must presume that if it were possible for these people also to grow hair all over their noses and cheeks and eyes, then they would do so, ending up with no visible face at all but only an obscene and rather gamey ball of hair. The only possible conclusion one can arrive at when looking at one of these bearded males is that the vegetation is a kind of smoke-screen and is cultivated in order to conceal something unsightly or unsavoury.

  This was almost certainly true in Mr Buggage's case, and it was therefore fortunate for all of us, and especially for Miss Tottle, that the beard was there. Mr Buggage continued to gaze wistfully at his assistant. Then he said, "Now pet, why don't you 'urry up and get them cheques in the post because after you've done that I've got a little proposal to put to you."

  Miss Tottle looked back over her shoulder at the speaker and gave him a smirk that showed the cutting edges of her sulphur teeth. Whenever he called her 'pet', it was a sure sign that feelings of a carnal nature were beginning to stir within Mr Buggage's breast, and in other parts as well.

  "Tell it to me now, lover," she said.

  "You get them cheques done first," he said. He could be very commanding at times, and Miss Tottle thought it was wonderful.

  Miss Tottle now began what she called her Daily Audit. This involved examining all of Mr Buggage's bank accounts and all of her own and then deciding into which of them the latest cheques should be paid. Mr Buggage, you see, at this particular moment, had exactly sixty-six different accounts in his own name and Miss Tottle had twenty-two. These were scattered around among various branches of the big three banks, Barclays, Lloyds, and National Westminster, all over London and a few in the suburbs. There was nothing wrong with that. And it had not been difficult, as the business became more and more successful, for either of them to walk into any branch of these banks and open a Current Account, with an initial deposit of a few hundred pounds. They would then receive a cheque book, a paying-in book and the promise of a monthly statement.

  Mr Buggage had discovered early on that if a person has an account with several or even many different branches of a bank, this will cause no comment by the staff. Each branch deals strictly with its own customers and their