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  Yet in spite of all this, I must confess that I have never in my life – well, how shall I put it? – I have never really had anything much to do with women.

  To be perfectly honest, up until three weeks ago I had never so much as laid a finger on one of them except perhàps to help her over a stile or something like that when the occasion demanded. And even then I always tried to ensure that I touched only the shoulder or the waist or some other place where the skin was covered, because the one thing I never could stand was actual contact between my skin and theirs. Skin touching skin, my skin, that is, touching the skin of a female, whether it were leg, neck, face, hand, or merely finger, was so repugnant to me that I invariably greeted a lady with my hands clasped firmly behind my back to avoid the inevitable handshake.

  I could go further than that and say that any sort of physical contact with them, even when the skin wasn’t bare, would disturb me considerably. If a woman stood close to me in a queue so that our bodies touched, or if she squeezed in beside me on a bus seat, hip to hip and thigh to thigh, my cheeks would begin burning like mad and little prickles of sweat would start coming out all over the crown of my head.

  This condition is all very well in a schoolboy who has just reached the age of puberty. With him it is simply Dame Nature’s way of putting on the brakes and holding the lad back until he is old enough to behave like a gentleman. I approve of that.

  But there was no reason on God’s earth why I, at the ripe old age of thirty-one, should continue to suffer a similar embarrassment. I was well trained to resist temptation, and I was certainly not given to vulgar passions.

  Had I been even the slightest bit ashamed of my own personal appearance, then that might possibly have explained the whole thing. But I was not. On the contrary, and though I say it myself, the fates had been rather kind to me in that regard. I stood exactly five and a half feet tall in my stockinged feet, and my shoulders, though they sloped downward a little from the neck, were nicely in balance with my small neat frame. (Personally, I’ve always thought that a little slope on the shoulder lends a subtle and faintly aesthetic air to a man who is not overly tall, don’t you agree?) My features were regular, my teeth were in excellent condition (protruding only a smallish amount from the upper jaw), and my hair, which was an unusually brilliant ginger-red, grew thickly all over my scalp. Good heavens above, I had seen men who were perfect shrimps in comparison with me displaying an astonishing aplomb in their dealings with the fairer sex. And oh, how I envied them! How I longed to do likewise – to be able to share in a few of those pleasant little rituals of contact that I observed continually taking place between men and women – the touching of hands, the peck on the cheek, the linking of arms, the pressure of knee against knee or foot against foot under the dining-table, and most of all, the full-blown violent embrace that comes when two of them join together on the floor – for a dance.

  But such things were not for me. Alas, I had to spend my time avoiding them instead. And this, my friends, was easier said than done, even for a humble curate in a small country region far from the fleshpots of the metropolis.

  My flock, you understand, contained an inordinate number of ladies. There were scores of them in the parish, and the unfortunate thing about it was that at least sixty per cent of them were spinsters, completely untamed by the benevolent influence of holy matrimony.

  I tell you I was jumpy as a squirrel.

  One would have thought that with all the careful training my mother had given me as a child, I should have been capable of taking this sort of thing well in my stride, and no doubt I would have done if only she had lived long enough to complete my education. But alas, she was killed when I was still quite young.

  She was a wonderful woman, my mother. She used to wear huge bracelets on her wrists, five or six of them at a time, with all sorts of things hanging from them and tinkling against each other as she moved. It didn’t matter where she was, you could always find her by listening for the noise of those bracelets. It was better than a cowbell. And in the evenings she used to sit on the sofa in her black trousers with her feet tucked up underneath her, smoking endless cigarettes from a long black holder. And I’d be crouching on the floor, watching her.

  ‘You want to taste my martini, George?’ she used to ask.

  ‘Now stop it, Clare,’ my father would say. ‘If you’re not careful you’ll stunt the boy’s growth.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Don’t be frightened of it. Drink it.’

  I always did everything my mother told me.

  ‘That’s enough,’ my father said. ‘He only has to know what it tastes like.’

  ‘Please don’t interfere, Boris. This is very important.’

  My mother had a theory that nothing in the world should be kept secret from a child. Show him everything. Make him experience it.

  ‘I’m not going to have any boy of mine going around whispering dirty secrets with other children and having to guess about this thing and that simply because no one will tell him.’

  Tell him everything. Make him listen.

  ‘Come over here, George, and I’ll tell you what there is to know about God.’

  She never read stories to me at night before I went to bed, she just ‘told’ me things instead. And every evening it was something different.

  ‘Come over here, George, because now I’m going to tell you about Mohammed.’

  She would be sitting on the sofa in her black trousers with her legs crossed and her feet tucked up underneath her, and she’d beckon to me in a queer languorous manner with the hand that held the long black cigarette-holder, and the bangles would start jingling all the way up her arm.

  ‘If you must have a religion I suppose Mohammedanism is as good as any of them. It’s all based on keeping healthy. You have lots of wives, and you mustn’t ever smoke or drink.’

  ‘Why mustn’t you smoke or drink, Mummy?’

  ‘Because if you’ve got lots of wives you have to keep healthy and virile.’

  ‘What is virile?’

  ‘I’ll go into that tomorrow, my pet. Let’s deal with one subject at a time. Another thing about the Mohammedan is that he never never gets constipated.’

  ‘Now, Clare,’ my father would say, looking up from his book. ‘Stick to the facts.’

  ‘My dear Boris, you don’t know anything about it. Now if only you would try bending forward and touching the ground with your forehead morning, noon, and night every day, facing Mecca, you might have a bit less trouble in that direction yourself.’

  I used to love listening to her, even though I could only understand about half of what she was saying. She really was telling me secrets, and there wasn’t anything more exciting than that.

  ‘Come over here, George, and I’ll tell you precisely how your father makes his money.’

  ‘Now, Clare, that’s quite enough.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling. Why make a secret out of it with the child? He’ll only imagine something much much worse.’

  I was exactly ten years old when she started giving me detailed lectures on the subject of sex. This was the biggest secret of them all, and therefore the most enthralling.

  ‘Come over here, George, because now I’m going to tell you how you came into this world, right from the very beginning.’

  I saw my father glance up quietly, and open his mouth wide the way he did when he was going to say something vital, but my mother was already fixing him with those brilliant shining eyes of hers, and he went slowly back to his book without uttering a sound.

  ‘Your poor father is embarrassed,’ she said, and she gave me her private smile, the one that she gave nobody else, only to me – the one-sided smile where just one corner of her mouth lifted slowly upward until it made a lovely long wrinkle that stretched right up to the eye itself, and became a sort of wink-smile instead.

  ‘Embarrassment, my pet, is the one thing that I want you never to feel. And don’t think for a moment that your father is embarras