EIGHT FURTHER TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

 

The Umbrella Man

 

I'M going to tell you about a funny thing that happened to my mother and me yesterday evening. I am twelve years old and I'm a girl. My mother is thirty‑four but I am nearly as tall as her already.

Yesterday afternoon, my mother took me up to London to see the dentist. He found one hole. It was in a back tooth and he filled it without hurting me too much. After that, we went to a cafŽ. I had a banana split and my mother had a cup of coffee. By the time we got up to leave it was about six o'clock.

When we came out of the cafŽ it had started to rain. "We must get a taxi," my mother said. We were wearing ordinary hats and coats, and it was raining quite hard.

"Why don't we go back into the cafŽ and wait for it to stop?" I said. I wanted another of those banana splits. They were gorgeous.

"It isn't going to stop," my mother said. "We must get home."

We stood on the pavement in the rain, looking for a taxi. Lots of them came by but they all had passengers inside them. "I wish we had a car with a chauffeur," my mother said.

Just then a man came up to us. He was a small man and he was pretty old, probably seventy or more. He raised his hat politely and said to my mother, "Excuse me, I do hope you will excuse me… " He had a fine white moustache and bushy white eyebrows and a wrinkly pink face. He was sheltering under an umbrella which he held high over his head.

"Yes?" my mother said, very cool and distant.

"I wonder if I could ask a small favour of you," he said. "It is only a very small favour."

I saw my mother looking at him suspiciously. She is a suspicious person, my mother. She is especially suspicious of two things–strange men and boiled eggs. When she cuts the top off a boiled egg, she pokes around inside it with her spoon as though expecting to find a mouse or something. With strange men, she has a golden rule which says, 'The nicer the man seems to be, the more suspicious you must become.' This little old man was particularly nice. He was polite. He was welispoken. He was well‑dressed. He was a real gentleman. The reason I knew he was a gentleman was because of his shoes. 'You can always spot a gentleman by the shoes he wears,' was another of my mother's favourite sayings. This man had beautiful brown shoes.

"The truth of the matter is," the little man was saying, "I've got myself into a bit of a scrape. I need some help. Not much I assure you. It's almost nothing, in fact, but I do need it. You see, madam, old people like me often become terribly forgetful…

My mother's chin was up and she was staring down at him along the full length of her nose. It was a fearsome thing, this frosty‑nosed stare of my mother's. Most people go to pieces completely when she gives it to them. I once saw my own headmistress begin to stammer and simper like an idiot when my mother gave her a really foul frosty‑noser. But the little man on the pavement with the umbrella over his head didn't bat an eyelid. He gave a gentle smile and said, "I beg you to believe, madam, that I am not in the habit of stopping ladies in the street and telling them my troubles."

"I should hope not," my mother said.

I felt quite embarrassed by my mother's sharpness. I wanted to say to her, 'Oh, mummy, for heaven's sake, he's a very very old man, and he's sweet and polite, and he's in some sort of trouble, so don't be so beastly to him.' But I didn't say anything.

The little man shifted his umbrella from one hand to the other. "I've never forgotten it before," he said.

"You've never forgotten what?" my mother asked sternly.

"My wallet," he said. "I must have left it in my other jacket. Isn't that the silliest thing to do?"

"Are you asking me to give you money?" my mother said.

"Oh, good gracious me, no!" he cried. "Heaven forbid I should ever do that!"

"Then what are you asking?" my mother said. "Do hurry up. We're getting soaked to the skin here."

"I know you are," he said. "And that is why I'm offering you this umbrella of mine to protect you, and to keep forever, if… if only… "If only what?" my mother said.

"If only you would give me in return a pound for my taxi‑fare just to get me home."

My mother was still suspicious. "If you had no money in the first place," she said, "then how did you get here?"

"I walked," he answered. "Every day I go for a lovely long walk and then I summon a taxi to take me home. I do it every day of the year."

"Why don't you walk home now?" my mother asked.

"Oh, I wish I could," he said. "I do wish I could. But I don't think I could manage it on these silly old legs of mine. I've gone too far already."

My mother stood there chewing her lower lip. She was beginning to melt a bit, I could see that. And the idea of getting an umbrella to shelter under must have tempted her a good deal.

"It's a lovely umbrella," the little man said.

"So I've noticed," my mother said.

"It's silk," he said.

"I can see that."

"Then why don't you take it, madam," he said. "It cost me over twenty pounds, I promise you. But that's of no importance so long as I can get home and rest these old legs of mine."

I saw my mother's hand feeling for the clasp of her purse. She saw me watching her. I was giving her one of my own frosty‑nosed looks this time and she knew exactly what I was telling her. Now listen, mummy, I was telling her, you simply mustn't take advantage of a tired old man in this way. It's a rotten thing to do. My mother paused and looked back at me. Then she said to the little man, "I don't think it's quite right that I should take an umbrella from you worth twenty pounds. I think I'd better just give you the taxi‑fare and be done with it."

"No, no no!" he cried. "It's out of the question! I wouldn't dream of it! Not in a million years! I would never accept money from you like that! Take the umbrella, dear lady, and keep the rain off your shoulders!"

My mother gave me a triumphant sideways look. There you are, she was telling me. You're wrong. He wants me to have it.

She fished into her purse and took out a pound note. She held it out to the little man. He took it and handed her the umbrella. He pocketed the pound, raised his hat, gave a quick bow from the waist, and said, "Thank you, madam, thank you." Then he was gone.

"Come under here and keep dry, darling," my mother said. "Aren't we lucky. I've never had a silk umbrella before. I couldn't afford it."

"Why were you so horrid to him in the beginning?" I asked.

"I wanted to satisfy myself he wasn't a trickster," she said. "And I did. He was a gentleman. I'm very pleased I was able to help him."

"Yes, mummy," I said.

"A real gentleman," she went on. "Wealthy, too, otherwise he wouldn't have had a silk umbrella. I shouldn't be surprised if he isn't a titled person. Sir Harry Goldsworthy or something like that."

"Yes, mummy."

"This will be a good lesson to you," she went on. "Never rush things. Always take your time when you are summing someone up. Then you'll never make mistakes."

"There he goes," I said. "Look."

"Where?"

"Over there. He's crossing the street. Goodness, mummy, what a hurry he's in."

We watched the little man as he dodged nimbly in and out of the traffic. When he reached the other side of the street, he turned left, walking very fast.

"He doesn't look very tired to me, does he to you, mummy?"

My mother didn't answer.

"He doesn't look as though he's trying to get a taxi, either," I said.

My mother was standing very still and stiff, staring across the street at the little man. We could see him clearly. He was in a terrific hurry. He was bustling along the pavement, sidestepping the other pedestrians and swinging his arms like a soldier on the march.

"He's up to something," my mother said, stony‑faced.

"But what?"

"I don't know," my mother snapped. "But I'm going to find out. Come with me." She took my arm and we crossed the street together. Then we turned left.

"Can you see him?" my mother asked.

"Yes. There he is. He's turning right down the next street." We came to the corner and turned right. The little man was about twenty yards ahead of us. He was scuttling along like a rabbit and we had to walk very fast to keep up with him. The rain was pelting down harder than ever now and I could see it dripping from the brim of his hat on to his shoulders. But we were snug and dry under our lovely big silk umbrella.

"What is he up to?" my mother said.

"What if he turns round and sees us?" I asked.

"I don't care if he does," my mother said. "He lied to us. He said he was too tired to walk any further and he's practically running us off our feet! He's a barefaced liar! He's a crook!"

"You mean he's not a titled gentleman?" I asked.

"Be quiet," she said.

At the next crossing, the little man turned right again.

Then he turned left.

Then right.

"I'm not giving up now," my mother said.

"He's disappeared!" I cried. "Where's he gone?"

"He went in that door!" my mother said. "I saw him! Into that house! Great heavens, it's a pub!"

It was a pub. In big letters right across the front it said THE RED LION.

"You're not going in are you, mummy?"

"No," she said. "We'll watch from outside."

There was a big plate‑glass window along the front of the pub, and although it was a bit steamy on the inside, we could see through it very well if we went close.

We stood huddled together outside the pub window. I was clutching my mother's arm. The big raindrops were making a loud noise on our umbrella. "There he is," I said. "Over there."

The room we were looking into was full of people and cigarette smoke, and our little man was in the middle of it all. He was now without his hat and coat, and he was edging his way through the crowd towards the bar. When he reached it, he placed both hands on the bar itself and spoke to the barman. I saw his lips moving as he gave his order. The barman turned away from him for a few seconds and came back with a smallish tumbler filled to the brim with light brown liquid. The little man placed a pound note on the counter.

"That's my pound!" my mother hissed. "By golly, he's got a nerve!"

"What's in the glass?" I asked.

"Whisky," my mother said. "Neat whisky."

The barman didn't give him any change from the pound.

"That must be a treble whisky," my mummy said.

"What's a treble?" I asked.

"Three times the normal measure," she answered.

The little man picked up the glass and put it to his lips. He tilted it gently. Then he tilted it higher… and higher… and higher… and very soon all the whisky had disappeared down his throat in one long pour. "That's a jolly expensive drink," I said.

"It's ridiculous!" my mummy said. "Fancy paying a pound for something to swallow in one go!"

"It cost him more than a pound," I said. "It cost him a twenty‑pound silk umbrella."

"So it did," my mother said. "He must be mad."

The little man was standing by the bar with the empty glass in his hand. He was smiling now, and a sort of golden glow of pleasure was spreading over his round pink face. I saw his tongue come out to lick the white moustache, as though searching for one last drop of that precious whisky.

Slowly, he turned away from the bar and edged his way back through the crowd to where his hat and coat were hanging. He put on his hat. He put on his coat. Then, in a manner so superbly cool and casual that you hardly noticed anything at all, he lifted from the coat‑rack one of the many wet umbrellas hanging there, and off he went.

"Did you see that!" my mother shrieked. "Did you see what he did!"

"Ssshh!" I whispered. "He's coming out!"

We lowered our umbrella to hide our faces, and peered out from under it.

 

Out he came. But he never looked in our direction. He opened his new umbrella over his head and scurried off down the road the way he had come.

"So that's his little game!" my mother said.

"Neat," I said. "Super." We followed him back to the main street where we had first met him, and we watched him as he proceeded, with no trouble at all, to exchange his new umbrella for another pound note. This time it was with a tall thin fellow who didn't even have a coat or hat. And as soon as the transaction was completed, our little man trotted off down the street and was lost in the crowd. But this time he went in the opposite direction.

"You see how clever he is!" my mother said. "He never goes to the same pub twice!"

"He could go on doing this all night," I said.

"Yes," my mother said. "Of course. But I'll bet he prays like mad for rainy days."

 

Mr Botibol

 

 

MR BOTIBOL pushed his way through the revolving doors and emerged into the large foyer of the hotel. He took off his hat, and holding it in front of him with both hands, he advanced nervously a few paces, paused and stood looking around him, searching the faces of the lunchtime crowd. Several people turned and stared at him in mild astonishment, and he heard–or he thought he heard–at least one woman's voice saying, "My dear, do look what's just come in!"

At last he spotted Mr Clements sitting at a small table in the far corner, and he hurried over to him. Clements had seen him coming, and now, as he watched Mr Botibol threading his way cautiously between the tables and the people, walking on his toes in such a meek and self‑effacing manner and clutching his hat before him with both hands, he thought how wretched it must be for any man to look as conspicuous and as odd as this Botibol. He resembled, to an extraordinary degree, an asparagus. His long narrow stalk did not appear to have any shoulders at all; it merely tapered upwards, growing gradually narrower and narrower until it came to a kind of point at the top of the small bald head. He was tightly encased in a shiny blue double‑breasted suit, and this, for some curious reason, accentuated the illusion of a vegetable to a preposterous degree.

Clements stood up, they shook hands, and then at once, even before they had sat down again, Mr Botibol said, "I have decided, yes I have decided to accept the offer which you made to me before you left my office last night."

For some days Clements had been negotiating, on behalf of clients, for the purchase of the firm known as Botibol & Co., of which Mr Botibol was sole owner, and the night before, Clements had made his first offer. This was merely an exploratory, much‑too‑low bid, a kind of signal to the seller that the buyers were seriously interested. And by God, thought Clements, the poor fool has gone and accepted it. He nodded gravely many times in an effort to hide his astonishment, and he said, "Good, good. I'm so glad to hear that, Mr Botibol." Then he signalled a waiter and said, "Two large martinis."

"No, please!" Mr Botibol lifted both hands in horrified protest.

"Come on," Clements said. "This is an occasion."

"I drink very little, and never, no never during the middle of the day."

But Clements was in a gay mood now and he took no notice. He ordered the martinis and when they came along Mr Botibol was forced, by the banter and good‑humour of the other, to drink to the deal which had just been concluded. Clements then spoke briefly about the drawing up and signing of documents, and when all that had been arranged, he called for two more cocktails. Again Mr Botibol protested, but not quite so vigorously this time, and Clements ordered the drinks and then he turned and smiled at the other man in a friendly way. "Well, Mr Botibol," he said, "now that it's all over, I suggest we have a pleasant non‑business lunch together. What d'you say to that? And it's on me."

"As you wish, as you wish," Mr Botibol answered without any enthusiasm. He had a small melancholy voice and a way of pronouncing each word separately and slowly, as though he was explaining something to a child.

When they went into the dining‑room Clements ordered a bottle of Lafite 1912 and a couple of plump roast partridges to go with it. He had already calculated in his head the amount of his commission and he was feeling fine. He began to make bright conversation, switching smoothly from one subject to another in the hope of touching on something that might interest his guest. But it was no good. Mr Botibol appeared to be only half listening. Every now and then he inclined his small bald head a little to one side or the other and said, "Indeed." When the wine came along Clements tried to have a talk about that.

"I am sure it is excellent," Mr Botibol said, "but please give me only a drop."

Clements told a funny story. When it was over, Mr Botibol regarded him solemnly for a few moments, then he said, "How amusing." After that Clements kept his mouth shut and they ate in silence. Mr Botibol was drinking his wine and he didn't seem to object when his host reached over and refilled his glass. By the time they had finished eating, Clements estimated privately that his guest had consumed at least three‑quarters of the bottle.

"A cigar, Mr Botibol?"

"Oh no, thank you."

"A little brandy?"

"No really. I am not accustomed..

Clements noticed that the man's cheeks were slightly flushed and that his eyes had become bright and watery. Might as well get the old boy properly drunk while I'm about it, he thought, and to the waiter he said, "Two brandies."

When the brandies arrived, Mr Botibol looked at his large glass suspiciously for a while, then he picked it up, took one quick birdlike sip and put it down again. "Mr Clements," he said suddenly, "how I envy you."

"Me? But why?"

"I will tell you, Mr Clements, I will tell you, if I may make so bold." There was a nervous, mouselike quality in his voice which made it seem he was apologizing for everything he said.

"Please tell me," Clements said.

"It is because to me you appear to have made such a success of your life."

He's going to get melancholy drunk, Clements thought. He's one of the ones that gets melancholy and I can't stand it. "Success," he said, "I don't see anything especially successful about me."

"Oh yes, indeed. Your whole life, if I may say so, Mr Clements, appears to be such a pleasant and successful thing."

"I'm a very ordinary person," Clements said. He was trying to figure just how drunk the other really was.

"I believe," said Mr Botibol, speaking slowly, separating each word carefully from the other, "I believe that the wine has gone a little to my head, but… " He paused, searching for words. "… But I do want to ask you just one question." He had poured some salt on to the tablecloth and he was shaping it into a little mountain with the tip of one finger.

"Mr Clements," he said without looking up, "do you think that it is possible for a man to live to the age of fifty‑two without ever during his whole life having experienced one single small success in anything that he has done?"

"My dear Mr Botibol," Clements laughed, "everyone has his little successes from time to time, however small they may be."

"Oh no," Mr Botibol said gently. "You are wrong. I, for example, cannot remember having had a single success of any sort during my whole life."

 

"Now come!" Clements said, smiling. "That can't be true. Why only this morning you sold your business for a hundred thousand. I call that one hell of a success."

"The business was left me by my father. When he died nine years ago, it was worth four times as much. Under my direction it has lost three‑quarters of its value. You can hardly call that a success."

Clements knew this was true. "Yes, yes, all right," he said. "That may be so, but all the same you know as well as I do that every man alive has his quota of little successes. Not big ones maybe. But lots of little ones. I mean, after all, goddammit, even scoring a goal at school was a little success, a little triumph, at the time; or making some runs or learning to swim. One forgets about them, that's all. One just forgets."

"I never scored a goal," Mr Botibol said. "And I never learned to swim."

Clements threw up his hands and made exasperated noises. "Yes yes, I know, but don't you see, don't you see there are thousands, literally thousands of other things like… well like catching a good fish, or fixing the motor of the car, or pleasing someone with a present, or growing a decent row of French beans, or winning a little bet or… or… why hell, one can go on listing them for ever!"

"Perhaps you can, Mr Clements, but to the best of my knowledge, I have never done any of those things. That is what I am trying to tell you."

Clements put down his brandy glass and stared with new interest at the remarkable shoulderless person who sat facing him. He was annoyed and he didn't feel in the least sympathetic. The man didn't inspire sympathy. He was a fool. He must be a fool. A tremendous and absolute fool. Clements had a sudden desire to embarrass the man as much as he could. "What about women, Mr Botibol?" There was no apology for the question in the tone of his voice.

"Women?"

"Yes women! Every man under the sun, even the most wretched filthy down‑and‑out tramp has some time or other had some sort of silly little success with… "Never!" cried Mr Botibol with sudden vigour. "No sir, never!"

I'm going to hit him, Clements told himself. I can't stand this any longer and if I'm not careful I'm going to jump right up and hit him. "You mean you don't like them?" he said.

"Oh dear me yes, of course. I like them. As a matter of fact I admire them very much, very much indeed. But I'm afraid… oh dear me I do not know how to say it… I am afraid that I do not seem to get along with them very well. I never have. Never. You see, Mr Clements, I look queer. I know I do. They stare at me, and often I see them laughing at me. I have never been able to get within… well, within striking distance of them, as you might say." The trace of a smile, weak and infinitely sad, flickered around the corners of his mouth.

Clements had had enough. He mumbled something about how he was sure Mr Botibol was exaggerating the situation, then he glanced at his watch, called for the bill, and he said he was sorry but he would have to get back to the office.

They parted in the street outside the hotel and Mr Botibol took a cab back to his house. He opened the front door, went into the living‑room and switched on the radio; then he sat down in a large leather chair, leaned back and closed his eyes. He didn't feel exactly giddy, but there was a singing in his ears and his thoughts were coming and going more quickly than usual. That solicitor gave me too much wine, he told himself. I'll stay here for a while and listen to some music and I expect I'll go to sleep and after that I'll feel better.

They were playing a symphony on the radio. Mr Botibol had always been a casual listener to symphony concerts and he knew enough to identify this as one of Beethoven's. But now, as he lay back in his chair listening to the marvellous music, a new thought began to expand slowly within his tipsy mind. It wasn't a dream because he was not asleep. It was a clear conscious thought and it was this: I am the composer of this music. I am a great composer. This is my latest symphony and this is the first performance. The huge hall is packed with people–critics, musicians and music‑lovers from all over the country–and I am up there in front of the orchestra, conducting.

Mr Botibol could see the whole thing. He could see himself up on the rostrum dressed in a white tie and tails, and before him was the orchestra, the massed violins on his left, the violas in front, the cellos on his right, and back of them were all the woodwinds and bassoons and drums and cymbals, the players watching every moment of his baton with an intense, almost a fanatical reverence. Behind him, in the half‑darkness of the huge hail, was row upon row of white enraptured faces, looking up towards him, listening with growing excitement as yet another new symphony by the greatest composer the world has ever seen unfolded itself majestically before them. Some of the audience were clenching their fists and digging their nails into the palms of their hands because the music was so beautiful that they could hardly stand it. Mr Botibol became so carried away by this exciting vision that he began to swing his arms in time with the music in the manner of a conductor. He found it was such fun doing this that he decided to stand up, facing the radio, in order to give himself more freedom of movement.

He stood there in the middle of the room, tall, thin and shoulderless, dressed in his tight blue double‑breasted suit, his small bald head jerking from side to side as he waved his arms in the air. He knew the symphony well enough to be able occasionally to anticipate changes in tempo or volume, and when the music became loud and fast he beat the air so vigorously that he nearly knocked himself over, when it was soft and hushed, he leaned forward to quieten the players with gentle movements of his outstretched hands, and all the time he could feel the presence of the huge audience behind him, tense, immobile, listening. When at last the symphony swelled to its tremendous conclusion, Mr Botibol became more frenzied than ever and his face seemed to thrust itself round to one side in an agony of effort as he tried to force more and still more power from his orchestra during those final mighty chords.

Then it was over. The announcer was saying something, but Mr Botibol quickly switched off the radio and collapsed into his chair, blowing heavily.

"Phew!" he said aloud. "My goodness gracious me, what have I been doing!" Small globules of sweat were oozing out all over his face and forehead, trickling down his neck inside his collar. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped them away, and he lay there for a while, panting, exhausted, but exceedingly exhilarated.

"Well, I must say," he gasped, still speaking aloud, "that was fun. I don't know that I have ever had such fun before in all my life. My goodness, it was fun, it really was!" Almost at once he began to play with the idea of doing it again. But should he? Should he allow himself to do it again? There was no denying that now, in retrospect, he felt a little guilty about the whole business, and soon he began to wonder whether there wasn't something downright immoral about it all. Letting himself go like that! And imagining he was a genius! It was wrong. He was sure other people didn't do it. And what if Mason had come in the middle and seen him at it! That would have been terrible!

He reached for the paper and pretended to read it, but soon he was searching furtively among the radio programmes for the evening. He put his finger under a line which said '8.30 Symphony Concert. Brahms Symphony No .2'. He stared at it for a long time. The letters in the word 'Brahms' began to blur and recede, and gradually they disappeared altogether and were replaced by letters which spelt 'Botibol'. Botibol's Symphony No .2. It was printed quite clearly. He was reading it now, this moment. "Yes, yes," he whispered. "First performance. The world is waiting to hear it. Will it be as great, they are asking, will it perhaps be greater than his earlier work? And the composer himself had been persuaded to conduct. He is shy and retiring, hardly ever appears in public, but on this occasion he has been persuaded..

Mr Botibol leaned forward in his chair and pressed the bell beside the fireplace. Mason, the butler, the only other person in the house, ancient, small and grave, appeared at the door.

"Er… Mason, have we any wine in the house?"

"Wine, sir?"

"Yes, wine."

"Oh no, sir. We haven't had any wine this fifteen or sixteen years. Your father, sir..

"I know, Mason, I know, but will you get some please. I want a bottle with my dinner."

The butler was shaken. "Very well, sir, and what shall it be?"

"Claret, Mason. The best you can obtain. Get a case. Tell them to send it round at once."

When he was alone again, he was momentarily appalled by the simple manner in which he had made his decision. Wine for dinner! Just like that! Well, yes, why not? Why ever not now he came to think of it? He was his own master. And anyway it was essential that he have wine. It seemed to have a good effect, a very good effect indeed. He wanted it and he was going to have it and to hell with Mason.

He rested for the remainder of the afternoon, and at seven‑thirty Mason announced dinner. The bottle of wine was on the table and he began to drink it. He didn't give a damn about the way Mason watched him as he refilled his glass. Three times he refilled it; then he left the table saying that he was not to be disturbed and returned to the living‑room. There was quarter of an hour to wait. He could think of nothing now except the coming concert. He lay back in the chair and allowed his thoughts to wander deliciously towards eight‑thirty. He was the great composer waiting impatiently in his dressing‑room in the concert‑hall. He could hear in the distance the murmur of excitement from the crowd as they settled themselves in their seats. He knew what they were saying to each other. Same sort of thing the newspapers had been saying for months. Botibol is a genius, greater, far greater than Beethoven or Bach or Brahms or Mozart or any of them. Each new work of his is more magnificent than the last. What will the next one be like? We can hardly wait to hear it! Oh yes, he knew what they were saying. He stood up and began to pace the room. It was nearly time now. He seized a pencil from the table to use as a baton, then he switched on the radio. The announcer had just finished the preliminaries and suddenly there was a burst of applause which meant that the conductor was coming on to the platform. The previous concert in the afternoon had been from gramophone records, but this one was the real thing. Mr Botibol turned around, faced the fireplace and bowed graciously from the waist. Then he turned back to the radio and lifted his baton. The clapping stopped. There was a moment's silence. Someone in the audience coughed. Mr Botibol waited. The symphony began.

Once again, as he began to conduct, he could see clearly before him the whole orchestra and the faces of the players and even the expressions on their faces. Three of the violinists had grey hair. One of the cellists was very fat, another wore heavy brown‑rimmed glasses, and there was a man in the second row playing a horn who had a twitch on one side of his face. But they were all magnificent. And so was the music. During certain impressive passages Mr Botibol experienced a feeling of exultation so powerful that it made him cry out for joy, and once during the Third Movement, a little shiver of ecstasy radiated spontaneously from his solar plexus and moved downward over the skin of his stomach like needles. But the thunderous applause and the cheering which came at the end of the symphony was the most splendid thing of all. He turned slowly towards the fireplace and bowed. The clapping continued and he went on bowing until at last the noise died away and the announcer's voice jerked him suddenly back into the living‑room. He switched off the radio and collapsed into his chair, exhausted but very happy.

As he lay there, smiling with pleasure, wiping his wet face, panting for breath, he was already making plans for his next performance. But why not do it properly? Why not convert one of the rooms into a sort of concert‑hall and have a stage and row of chairs and do the thing properly? And have a gramophone so that one could perform at any time without having to rely on the radio programme. Yes by heavens, he would do it!

The next morning Mr Botibol arranged with a firm of decorators that the largest room in the house be converted into a miniature concert‑hall. There was to be a raised stage at one end and the rest of the floor‑space was to be filled with rows of red plush seats. "I'm going to have some little concerts here," he told the man from the firm, and the man nodded and said that would be very nice. At the same time he ordered a radio shop to instal an expensive self‑changing gramophone with two powerful amplifiers, one on the stage, the other at the back of the auditorium. When he had done this, he went off and bought all of Beethoven's nine symphonies on gramophone records, and from a place which specialized in recorded sound effects he ordered several records of clapping and applauding by enthusiastic audiences. Finally he bought himself a conductor's baton, a slim ivory stick which lay in a case lined with blue silk.

In eight days the room was ready. Everything was perfect; the red chairs, the aisle down the centre and even a little dais on the platform with a brass rail running round it for the conductor. Mr Botibol decided to give the first concert that evening after dinner.

At seven o'clock he went up to his bedroom and changed into white tie and tails. He felt marvellous. When he looked at himself in the mirror, the sight of his own grotesque shoulderless figure didn't worry him in the least. A great composer, he thought, smiling, can look as he damn well pleases. People expect him to look peculiar. All the same he wished he had some hair on his head. He would have liked to let it grow rather long. He went downstairs to dinner, ate his food rapidly, drank half a bottle of wine and felt better still. "Don't worry about me, Mason," he said. "I'm not mad. I'm just enjoying myself."

"Yes, sir."

"I shan't want you any more. Please see that I'm not disturbed." Mr Botibol went from the dining‑room into the miniature concert‑hall. He took out the records of Beethoven's First Symphony, but before putting them on the gramophone, he placed two other records with them. The one, which was to be played first of all, before the music began, was labelled 'prolonged enthusiastic applause'. The other, which would come at the end of the symphony, was labelled 'Sustained applause, clapping, cheering, shouts of encore'. By a simple mechanical device on the record changer, the gramophone people had arranged that the sound from the first and the last records–the applause–would come only from the loudspeaker in the auditorium. The sound from all the others–the music–would come from the speaker hidden among the chairs of the orchestra. When he had arranged the records in the concert order, he placed them on the machine but he didn't switch on at once. Instead he turned out all the lights in the room except one small one which lit up the conductor's dais and he sat down in the chair up on the stage, closed his eyes and allowed his thoughts to wander into the usual delicious regions; the great composer, nervous, impatient, waiting to present his latest masterpiece, the audience assembling, the murmur of their excited talk, and so on. Having dreamed himself right into the part, he stood up, picked up his baton and switched on the gramophone.

A tremendous wave of clapping filled the room. Mr Botibol walked across the stage, mounted the dais, faced the audience and bowed. In the darkness he could just make out the faint outline of the seats on either side of the centre aisle, but he couldn't see the faces of the people. They were making enough noise. What an ovation! Mr Botibol turned and faced the orchestra. The applause behind him died down. The next record dropped. The symphony began.

This time it was more thrilling than ever, and during the performance he registered any number of prickly sensations around his solar plexus. Once, when it suddenly occurred to him that the music was being broadcast all over the world, a sort of shiver ran right down the length of his spine. But by far the most exciting part was the applause which came at the end. They cheered and clapped and stamped and shouted encore! encore! encore! and he turned towards the darkened auditorium and bowed gravely to the left and right. Then he went off the stage, but they called him back. He bowed several more times and went off again, and again they, called him back. The audience had gone mad. They simply wouldn't let him go. It was terrific. It was truly a terrific ovation.

Later, when he was resting in his chair in the other room, he was still enjoying it. He closed his eyes because he didn't want anything to break the spell. He lay there and he felt like he was floating. It was really a most marvellous floating feeling, and when he went upstairs and undressed and got into bed, it was still with him.

The following evening he conducted Beethoven's–or rather Botibol's–Second Symphony, and they were just as mad about that one as the first. The next few nights he played one symphony a night, and at the end of nine evenings he had worked through all nine of Beethoven's symphonies. It got more exciting every time because before each concert the audience kept saying, 'He can't do it again, not another masterpiece. It's not humanly possible.' But he did. They were all of them equally magnificent. The last symphony, the Ninth, was especially exciting because here the composer surprised and delighted everyone by suddenly providing a choral masterpiece. He had to conduct a huge choir as well as the orchestra itself, and Benjamino Gigli had flown over from Italy to take the tenor part. Enrico Pinza sang bass. At the end of it the audience shouted themselves hoarse. The whole musical world was on its feet cheering, and on all sides they were saying how you never could tell what wonderful things to expect next from this amazing person.

The composing, presenting and conducting of nine great symphonies in as many days is a fair achievement for any man, and it was not astonishing that it went a little to Mr Botibol's head. He decided now that he would once again surprise his public. He would compose a mass of marvellous piano music and he himself would give the recitals. So early the next morning he set out for the show room of the people who sold Bechsteins and Steinways. He felt so brisk and fit that he walked all the way, and as he walked he hummed little snatches of new and lovely tunes for the piano. His head was full of them. All the time they kept coming to him and once, suddenly, he had the feeling the thousands of small notes, some white, some black, were cascading down a chute into his head through a hole in his head, and that his brain, his amazing musical brain, was receiving them as fast as they could come and unscrambling them and arranging them neatly in a certain order so that they made wondrous melodies. There were Nocturnes, there were Etudes and there were Waltzes, and soon, he told himself, soon he would give them all to a grateful and admiring world. When he arrived at the piano‑shop, he pushed the door open and walked in with an air almost of confidence.. He had changed much in the last few days. Some of his nervousness had left him and he was no longer wholly preoccupied with what others thought of his appearance. "I want," he said to the salesman, "a concert grand, but you must arrange it so that when the notes are struck, no sound is produced."

The salesman leaned forward and raised his eyebrows.

"Could that be arranged?" Mr Botibol asked.

"Yes, sir, I think so, if you desire it. But might I inquire what you intend to use the instrument for?"

"If you want to know, I'm going to pretend I'm Chopin. I'm going to sit and play while a gramophone makes the music. It gives me a kick." It came out, just like that, and Mr Botibol didn't know what had made him say it. But it was done now and he had said it and that was that. In a way he felt relieved, because he had proved he didn't mind telling people what he was doing. The man would probably answer what a jolly good idea. Or he might not. He might say well you ought to be locked up.

"So now you know," Mr Botibol said.

The salesman laughed out loud. "Ha ha! Ha ha ha! That's very good, sir. Very good indeed. Serves me right for asking silly questions." He stopped suddenly in the middle of the laugh and looked hard at Mr Botibol. "Of course, sir, you probably know that we sell a simple noiseless keyboard specially for silent practising."

"I want a concert grand," Mr Botibol said. The salesman looked at him again.

Mr Botibol chose his piano and got out of the shop as quickly as possible. He went on to the store that sold gramophone records and there he ordered a quantity of albums containing recordings of all Chopin's Nocturnes, Etudes and Waltzes, played by Arthur Rubinstein.

"My goodness, you are going to have a lovely time!"

Mr Botibol turned and saw standing beside him at the counter a squat, short‑legged girl with a face as plain as a pudding.

"Yes," he answered. "Oh yes, I am." Normally he was strict about not speaking to females in public places, but this one had taken him by surprise.

"I love Chopin," the girl said. She was holding a slim brown paper bag with string handles containing a single record she had just bought. "I like him better than any of the others."

It was comforting to hear the voice of this girl after the way the piano salesman had laughed. Mr Botibol wanted to talk to her but he didn't know what to say.

The girl said, "I like the Nocturnes best, they're so soothing. Which are your favourites?"

Mr Botibol said, "Well… " The girl looked up at him and she smiled pleasantly, trying to assist with his embarrassment. It was the smile that did it. He suddenly found himself saying, "Well now, perhaps, would you, I wonder… I mean I was wondering… " She smiled again; she couldn't help it this time. "What I mean is I would be glad if you would care to come along some time and listen to these records."

"Why how nice of you." She paused, wondering whether it was all right. "You really mean it?"

"Yes, I should be glad."

She had lived long enough in the city to discover that old men, if they are dirty old men, do not bother about trying to pick up a girl as unattractive as herself. Only twice in her life had she been accosted in public and each time the man had been drunk. But this one wasn't drunk. He was nervous and he was peculiar‑looking, but he wasn't drunk. Come to think of it, it was she who had started the conversation in the first place. "It would be lovely," she said. "It really would. When could I come?"

Oh dear, Mr Botibol thought. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

"I could come tomorrow," she went on. "It's my afternoon off."

"Well, yes, certainly," he answered slowly. "Yes, of course. I'll give you my card. Here it is."

"A. W. Botibol," she read aloud. "What a funny name. Mine's Darlington . Miss L. Darlington. How d'you do, Mr Botibol." She put out her hand for him to shake. "Oh I am looking forward to this! What time shall I come?"

"Any time," he said. "Please come any time."

"Three o'clock?"

"Yes. Three o'clock."

"Lovely! I'll be there."

He watched her walk out of the shop, a squat, stumpy, thick‑legged little person and my word, he thought, what have I done! He was amazed at himself. But he was not displeased. Then at once he started to worry about whether or not he should let her see his concert‑hall. He worried still more when he realized that it was the only place in the house where there was a gramophone.

That evening he had no concert. Instead he sat in his chair brooding about Miss Darlington and what he should do when she arrived. The next morning they brought the piano, a fine Bechstein in dark mahogany which was carried in minus its legs and later assembled on the platform in the concert hall. It was an imposing instrument and when Mr Botibol opened it and pressed a note with his finger, it made no sound at all. He had originally intended to astonish the world with a recital of his first piano compositions–a set of Etudes–as soon as the piano arrived, but it was no good now. He was too worried about Miss Darlington and three o'clock. At lunch‑time his trepidation had increased and he couldn't eat. "Mason," he said, "I'm, I'm expecting a young lady to call at three o'clock."

"A what, sir?" the butler said.

"A young lady, Mason."

"Very good, sir."

"Show her into the sitting‑room."

"Yes, sir."

Precisely at three he heard the bell ring. A few moments later Mason was showing her into the room. She came in, smiling, and Mr Botibol stood up and shook her hand. "My!" she exclaimed. "What a lovely house! I didn't know I was calling on a millionaire!"

She settled her small plump body into a large armchair and Mr Botibol sat opposite. He didn't know what to say. He felt terrible. But almost at once she began to talk and she chattered away gaily about this and that for a long time without stopping. Mostly it was about his house and the furniture and the carpets and about how nice it was of him to invite her because she didn't have such an awful lot of excitement in her life. She worked hard all day and she shared a room with two other girls in a boarding‑house and he could have no idea how thrilling it was for her to be here. Gradually Mr Botibol began to feel better. He sat there listening to the girl, rather liking her, nodding his bald head slowly up and down, and the more she talked, the more he liked her. She was gay and chatty, but underneath all that any fool could see that she was a lonely tired little thing. Even Mr Botibol could see that. He could see it very clearly indeed. It was at this point that he began to play with a daring and risky idea.

"Miss Darlington," he said. "I'd like to show you something." He led her out of the room straight to the little concert‑hall. "Look," he said.

She stopped just inside the door. "My goodness! Just look at that! A theatre! A real little theatre!" Then she saw the piano on the platform and the conductor's dais with the brass rail running round it. "It's for concerts!" she cried. "Do you really have concerts here! Oh, Mr Botibol, how exciting!"

"Do you like it?"

"Oh yes!"

"Come back into the other room and I'll tell you about it." Her enthusiasm had given him confidence and he wanted to get going. "Come back and listen while I tell you something funny." And when they were seated in the sitting‑room again, he began at once to tell her his story. He told the whole thing, right from the beginning, how one day, listening to a symphony, he had imagined himself to be the composer, how he had stood up and started to conduct, how he had got an immense pleasure out of it, how he had done it again with similar results and how finally he had built himself the concert‑hall where already he had conducted nine symphonies. But he cheated a little bit in the telling. He said that the only real reason he did it was in order to obtain the maximum appreciation from the music. There was only one way to listen to music, he told her, only one way to make yourself listen to every single note and chord. You had to do two things at once. You had to imagine that you had composed it, and at the same time you had to imagine that the public were hearing it for the first time. "Do you think," he said, "do you really think that any outsider has ever got half as great a thrill from a symphony as the composer himself when he first heard his work played by a full orchestra?"

"No," she answered timidly. "Of course not."

"Then become the composer! Steal his music! Take it away from him and give it to yourself!" He leaned back in his chair and for the first time she saw him smile. He had only just thought of this new complex explanation of his conduct, but to him it seemed a very good one and he smiled. "Well, what do you think, Miss Darlington?"

"I must say it's very very interesting." She was polite and puzzled but she was a long way away from him now.

"Would you like to try?"

"Oh no. Please."

"I wish you would."

"I'm afraid I don't think I should be able to feel the same way as you do about it, Mr Botibol. I don't think I have a strong enough imagination."

She could see from his eyes he was disappointed. "But I'd love to sit in the audience and listen while you do it," she added.

Then he leapt up from his chair. "I've got it!" he cried. "A piano concerto! You play the piano, I conduct. You the greatest pianist, the greatest in the world. First performance of my Piano Concerto No .1. You playing, me conducting. The greatest pianist and the greatest composer together for the first time. A tremendous occasion! The audience will go mad! There'll be queueing all night outside the hall to get in. It'll be broadcast around the world. It'll, it'll… " Mr Botibol stopped. He stood behind the chair with both hands resting on the back of the chair and suddenly he looked embarrassed and a trifle sheepish. "I'm sorry," he said, "I get worked up. You see how it is. Even the thought of another performance gets me worked up." And then plaintively, "Would you, Miss Darlington , would you play a piano concerto with me?"

"It's like children," she said, but she smiled.

"No one will know. No one but us will know anything about it."

"All right," she said at last. "I'll do it. I think I'm daft but just the same I'll do it. It'll be a bit of a lark."

"Good!" Mr Botibol cried. "When? Tonight?"

"Oh well, I don't..

"Yes," he said eagerly. "Please. Make it tonight. Come back and have dinner here with me and we'll give the concert afterwards." Mr Botibol was excited again now. "We must make a few plans. Which is your favourite piano concerto, Miss Darlington?"

"Oh well, I should say Beethoven's Emperor."

"The Emperor it shall be. You will play it tonight. Come to dinner at seven. Evening dress. You must have evening dress for the concert."

"I've got a dancing dress but I haven't worn it for years."

"You shall wear it tonight." He paused and looked at her in silence for a moment, then quite gently, he said, "You're not worried, Miss Darlington? Perhaps you would rather not do it. I'm afraid, I'm afraid I've let myself get rather carried away. I seem to have pushed you into this. And I know how stupid it must seem to you." That's better, she thought. That's much better. Now I know it's all right. "Oh no," she said. "I'm really looking forward to it. But you frightened me a bit, taking it all so seriously."

 

When she had gone, he waited for five minutes, then went out into the town to the gramophone shop and bought the records of the Emperor Concerto, conductor, Toscanini–soloist, Horowitz. He returned at once, told his astonished butler that there would be a guest for dinner, then went upstairs and changed into his tails.

She arrived at seven. She was wearing a long sleeveless dress made of some shiny green material and to Mr Botibol she did not look quite so plump or quite so plain as before. He took her straight in to dinner and in spite of the silent disapproving manner in which Mason prowled around the table, the meal went well. She protested gaily when Mr Botibol gave her a second glass of wine, but she didn't refuse it. She chattered away almost without a stop throughout the three courses and Mr Botibol listened and nodded and kept refilling her glass as soon as it was half empty.

Afterwards, when they were seated in the living‑room, Mr Botibol said, "Now Miss Darlington, now we begin to fall into our parts." The wine, as usual, had made him happy, and the girl, who was even less used to it than the man, was not feeling so bad either. "You, Miss Darlington, are the great pianist. What is your first name, Miss Darlington?"

"Lucille," she said. "The great pianist Lucille Darlington. I am the composer Botibol. We must talk and act and think as though we are pianist and composer."

"What is your first name, Mr Botibol? What does the A stand for?"

"Angel," he answered.

"Not Angel."

"Yes," he said irritably.

"Angel Botibol," she murmured and she began to giggle. But she checked herself and said, "I think it's a most unusual and distinguished name."

"Are you ready, Miss Darlington?"

"Yes."

Mr Botibol stood up and began pacing nervously up and down the room. He looked at his watch. "It's nearly time to go on," he said. "They tell me the place is packed. Not an empty seat anywhere. I always get nervous before a concert. Do you get nervous, Miss Darlington?"

"Oh yes, I do, always. Especially playing with you."

"I think they'll like it. I put everything I've got into this concerto, Miss Darlington. It nearly killed me composing it. I was ill for weeks afterwards."

"Poor you," she said.

"It's time now," he said. "The orchestra are all in their places. Come on." He led her out and down the passage, then he made her wait outside the door of the concert‑hall while he nipped in, arranged the lighting and switched on the gramophone. He came back and fetched her and as they walked on to the stage, the applause broke out. They both stood and bowed towards the darkened auditorium and the applause was vigorous and it went on for a long time. Then Mr Botibol mounted the dais and Miss Darlington took her seat at the piano. The applause died down. Mr Botibol held up his baton. The next record dropped and the Emperor Concerto began.

It was an astonishing affair. The thin stalk‑like Mr Botibol, who had no shoulders, standing on the dais in his evening clothes waving his arms about in approximate time to the music; and the plump Miss Darlington in her shiny green dress seated at the keyboard of the enormous piano thumping the silent keys with both hands for all she was worth. She recognized the passages where the piano was meant to be silent, and on these occasions she folded her hands primly on her lap and stared straight ahead with a dreamy and enraptured expression on her face. Watching her, Mr Botibol thought that she was particularly wonderful in the slow solo passages of the Second Movement. She allowed her hands to drift smoothly and gently up and down the keys and she inclined her head first to one side, then to the other, and once she closed her eyes for a long time while she played. During the exciting last movement, Mr Botibol himself lost his balance and would have fallen off the platform had he not saved himself by clutching the brass rail. But in spite of everything, the concerto moved on majestically to its mighty conclusion. Then the real clapping came. Mr Botibol walked over and took Miss Darlington by the hand and led her to the edge of the platform, and there they stood, the two of them, bowing, and bowing, and bowing again as the clapping and the shouting of 'encore' continued. Four times they left the stage and came back, and then, the fifth time, Mr Botibol whispered, "It's you they want. You take this one alone."

"No," she said. "It's you. Please." But he pushed her forward and she took her call, and came back and said, "Now you. They want you. Can't you hear them shouting for you?" So Mr Botibol walked alone on to the stage, bowed gravely to right, left and centre and came off just as the clapping stopped altogether.

He led her straight back to the living‑room. He was breathing fast and the sweat was pouring down all over his face. She too was a little breathless, and her cheeks were shining red.

"A tremendous performance, Miss Darlington. Allow me to congratulate you."

"But what a concerto, Mr Botibol! What a superb concerto!"

"You played it perfectly, Miss Darlington. You have a real feeling for my music." He was wiping the sweat from his face with a handkerchief. "And tomorrow we perform my Second Concerto."

"Tomorrow?"

"Of course. Had you forgotten, Miss Darlington? We are booked to appear together for a whole week."

"Oh… oh yes… I'm afraid I had forgotten that."

"But it's all right, isn't it?" he asked anxiously. "After hearing you tonight I could not bear to have anyone else play my music."

"I think it's all right," she said. "Yes, I think that'll be all right." She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. "My heavens, it's late! I must go! I'll never get up in the morning to get to work!"

"To work?" Mr Botibol said. "To work?" Then slowly, reluctantly, he forced himself back to reality. "Ah yes, to work. Of course, you have to get to work."

"I certainly do."

"Where do you work, Miss Darlington?"

"Me? Well," and now she hesitated a moment, looking at Mr Botibol. "As a matter of fact I work at the old Academy."

"I hope it is pleasant work," he said. "What Academy is that?"

"I teach the piano."

Mr Botibol jumped as though someone had stuck him from behind with a hatpin. His mouth opened very wide.

"It's quite all right," she said, smiling. "I've always wanted to be Horowitz. And could I, do you think, could I please be Schnabel tomorrow?"

 

Vengeance is Mine Inc.

 

 

IT was snowing when I woke up.

 

 

I could tell that it was snowing because there was a kind of brightness in the room and it was quiet outside with no footstep‑noises coming up from the street and no tyre‑noises but only the engines of the cars. I looked up and I saw George over by the window in his green dressing‑gown, bending over the paraffin‑stove, making the coffee.

"Snowing," I said.

"It's cold," George answered. "It's really cold."

I got out of bed and fetched the morning paper from outside the door. It was cold all right and I ran back quickly and jumped into bed and lay still for a while under the bedclothes, holding my hands tight between my legs for warmth.

"No letters?" George said.

"No. No letters."

"Doesn't look as if the old man's going to cough up."

"Maybe he thinks four hundred and fifty is enough for one month," I said.

"He's never been to New York . He doesn't know the cost of living here."

"You shouldn't have spent it all in one week."

George stood up and looked at me. "We shouldn't have spent it, you mean."

"That's right," I said. "We." I began reading the paper.

The coffee was ready now and George brought the pot over and put it on the table between our beds. "A person can't live without money," he said. "The old man ought to know that." He got back into his bed without taking off his green dressing‑gown. I went on reading. I finished the racing page and the football page and then I started on Lionel Pantaloon, the great political and society columnist. I always read Pantaloon–same as the other twenty or thirty million other people in the country. He's a habit with me; he's more than a habit; he's part of my morning, like three cups of coffee, or shaving.

 

"This fellow's got a nerve," I said.

"Who?"

"This Lionel Pantaloon."

"What's he saying now?"

"Same sort of thing he's always saying. Same sort of scandal. Always about the rich. Listen to this: '… seen at the Penguin Club… banker William S. Womberg with beauteous starlet Theresa Williams… three nights running… Mrs Womberg at home with a headache… which is something anyone's wife would have if hubby was out squiring Miss Williams of an evening… "That fixes Womberg," George said.

"I think it's a shame," I said. "That sort of thing could cause a divorce. How can this Pantaloon get away with stuff like that?"

"He always does, they're all scared of him. But if I was William S. Womberg," George said, "you know what I'd do? I'd go right out and punch this Lionel Pantaloon right on the nose. Why, that's the only way to handle those guys."

"Mr Womberg couldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because he's an old man," I said. "Mr Womberg is a dignified and respectable old man. He's a very prominent banker in the town. He couldn't possibly… "

And then it happened. Suddenly, from nowhere, the idea came. It came to me in the middle of what I was saying to George and I stopped short and I could feel the idea itself kind of flowing into my brain and I kept very quiet and let it come and it kept on coming and almost before I knew what had happened I had it all, the whole plan, the whole brilliant magnificent plan worked out clearly in my head; and right then I knew it was a beauty.

I turned and I saw George staring at me with a look of wonder on his face. "What's wrong?" he said. "What's the matter?"

I kept quite calm. I reached out and got myself some more coffee before I allowed myself to speak.

"George," I said, and I still kept calm. "I have an idea. Now listen very carefully because I have an idea which will make us both very rich. We are broke, are we not?"

"We are."

"And this William S. Womberg," I said, "would you consider that he is angry with Lionel Pantaloon this morning?"

"Angry!" George shouted. "Angry! Why, he'll be madder than hell!"

"Quite so. And do you think that he would like to see Lionel Pantaloon receive a good hard punch on the nose?"

"Damn right he would!"

"And now tell me, is it not possible that Mr Womberg would be prepared to pay a sum of money to someone who would undertake to perform this nose‑punching operation efficiently and discreetly on his behalf?"

George turned and looked at me, and gently, carefully, he put down his coffee‑cup on the table. A slowly widening smile began to spread across his face. "I get you," he said. "I get the idea."

"That's just a little part of the idea. If you read Pantaloon's column here you will see that there is another person who has been insulted today." I picked up the paper. "There is a Mrs Ella Gimple, a prominent socialite who has perhaps a million dollars in the bank..

"What does Pantaloon say about her?"

I looked at the paper again. "He hints," I answered, "at how she makes a stack of money out of her own friends by throwing roulette parties and acting as the bank."

"That fixes Gimple," George said. "And Womberg. Gimple and Womberg." He was sitting up straight in bed waiting for me to go on.

"Now," I said, "we have two different people both loathing Lionel Pantaloon's guts this morning, both wanting desperately to go out and punch him on the nose, and neither of them daring to do it. You understand that?"

"Absolutely."

"So much then," I said, "for Lionel Pantaloon. But don't forget that there are others like him. There are dozens of other columnists who spend their time insulting wealthy and important people. There's Harry Weyman, Claude Taylor, Jacob Swinski, Walter Kennedy, and the rest of them."

"That's right," George said. "That's absolutely right."

"I'm telling you, there's nothing that makes the rich so furious as being mocked and insulted in the newspapers."

"Go on," George said. "Go on."

"All right. Now this is the plan." I was getting rather excited myself. I was leaning over the side of the bed, resting one hand on the little table, waving the other about in the air as I spoke. "We will set up immediately an organization and we will call it… what shall we call it we will call it… let me see… we will call it 'Vengeance Is Mine Inc.'… How about that?"

"Peculiar name."

"It's biblical. It's good. I like it. 'Vengeance Is Mine Inc.' It sounds fine. And we will have little cards printed which we will send to all our clients reminding them that they have been insulted and mortified in public and offering to punish the offender in consideration of a sum of money. We will buy all the newspapers and read all the columnists and every day we will send out a dozen or more of our cards to prospective clients."

"It's marvellous!" George shouted. "It's terrific!"

"We shall be rich," I told him. "We shall be exceedingly wealthy in no time at all."

"We must start at once!"

I jumped out of bed, fetched a writing‑pad and a pencil and ran back to bed again. "Now," I said, pulling my knees under the blankets and propping the writing‑pad against them, "the first thing is to decide what we're going to say on the printed cards which we'll be sending to our clients," and I wrote, 'VENGEANCE IS MINE INC.' as a heading on the top of the sheet of paper. Then, with much care, I composed a finely phrased letter explaining the functions of the organization. It finished up with the following sentence: 'Therefore VENGEANCE IS MINE INC. will undertake, on your behalf and in absolute confidence, to administer suitable punishment to columnist and in this regard we respectfully submit to you a choice of methods (together with prices) for your consideration."

"What do you mean, 'a choice of methods'?" George said.

"We must give them a choice. We must think up a number of things… a number of different punishments. Number one will be… " and I wrote down, 'i. Punch him on the nose, once, hard.' "What shall we charge for that?"

"Five hundred dollars," George said instantly.

I wrote it down. "What's the next one?"

"Black his eye," George said.

I wrote it down, '2. Black his eye… $500.'

"No!" George said. "I disagree with the price. It definitely requires more skill and timing to black an eye nicely than to punch a nose. It is a skilled job. It should be six hundred."

"OK," I said. "Six hundred. And what's the next one?"

"Both together, of course. The old one two." We were in George's territory now. This was right up his street.

"Both together?"

"Absolutely. Punch his nose and black his eye. Eleven hundred dollars."

"There should be a reduction for taking the two," I said. "We'll make it a thousand."

"It's dirt cheap," George said. "They'll snap it up."

"What's next?"

We were both silent now, concentrating fiercely. Three deep parallel grooves of skin appeared upon George's rather low sloping forehead. He began to scratch his scalp, slowly but very strongly. I looked away and tried to think of all the terrible things which people had done to other people. Finally, I got one, and with George watching the point of my pencil moving over the paper, I wrote: '4. Put a rattlesnake (with venom extracted) on the floor of his car, by the pedals, when he parks it.'

"Jesus Christ!" George whispered. "You want to kill him with fright!"

"Sure," I said.

"And where'd you get a rattlesnake, anyway?"

"Buy it. You can always buy them. How much shall we charge for that one?"

"Fifteen hundred dollars," George said firmly. I wrote it down.

"Now we need one more."

"Here it is," George said. "Kidnap him in a car, take all his clothes away except his underpants and his shoes and socks, then dump him out on Fifth Avenue in the rush hour." He smiled, a broad triumphant smile.

"We can't do that."

"Write it down. And charge two thousand five hundred bucks. You'd do it all right if old Womberg were to offer you that much."

"Yes," I said. "I suppose I would." And I wrote it down. "That's enough now," I added. "That gives them a wide choice."

"And where will we get the cards printed?" George asked.

"George Karnoffsky," I said. "Another George. He's a friend of mine. Runs a small printing shop down on Third Avenue . Does wedding invitations and things like that for all the big stores. He'll do it. I know he will."

"Then what are we waiting for?"

We both leapt out of bed and began to dress. "It's twelve o'clock," I said. "If we hurry we'll catch him before he goes to lunch."

It was still snowing when we went out into the street and the snow was four or five inches thick on the sidewalk, but we covered the fourteen blocks to Karnoffsky's shop at a tremendous pace and we arrived there just as he was putting his coat on to go out. "Claude!" he shouted. "Hi boy! How you been keeping," and he pumped my hand. He had a fat friendly face and a terrible nose with great wide‑open nose‑wings which overlapped his cheeks by at least an inch on either side. I greeted him and told him that we had come to discuss some most urgent business. He took off his coat and led us back into the office, then I began to tell him our plans and what we wanted him to do.

When I'd got about quarter way through my story, he started to roar with laughter and it was impossible for me to continue; so I cut it short and handed him the piece of paper with the stuff on it that we wanted him to print. And now, as he read it, his whole body began to shake with laughter and he kept slapping the desk with his hand and coughing and choking and roaring like someone crazy. We sat watching him. We didn't see anything particular to laugh about.

Finally he quietened down and he took out a handkerchief and made a great business about wiping his eyes. "Never laughed so much," he said weakly. "That's a great joke, that is. It's worth a lunch. Come on out and I'll give you lunch."

"Look," I said severely, "this isn't any joke. There is nothing to laugh at. You are witnessing the birth of a new and powerful organization…

"Come on," he said and he began to laugh again. "Come on and have lunch."

"When can you get those cards printed?" I said. My voice was stern and businesslike. He paused and stared at us. "You mean… you really mean… you're serious about this thing?"

"Absolutely. You are witnessing the birth…

"All right," he said, "all right," he stood up. "I think you're crazy and you'll get in trouble. Those boys like messing other people about, but they don't much fancy being messed about themselves."

"When can you get them printed, and without any of your workers reading them?"

"For this," he answered gravely, "I will give up my lunch. I will set the type myself. It is the least I can do." He laughed again and the rims of his huge nostrils twitched with pleasure. "How many do you want?"

"A thousand–to start with, and envelopes."

"Come back at two o'clock," he said and I thanked him very much and as we went out we could hear his laughter rumbling down the passage into the back of the shop.

At exactly two o'clock we were back. George Karnoffsky was in his office and the first thing I saw as we went in was the high stack of printed cards on his desk in front of him. They were large cards, about twice the size of ordinary wedding or cocktail invitation‑cards. "There you are," he said. "All ready for you." The fool was still laughing.

He handed us each a card and I examined mine carefully. It was a beautiful thing. He had obviously taken much trouble over it. The card itself was thick and stiff with narrow gold edging all the way around, and the letters of the heading were exceedingly elegant. I cannot reproduce it here in all its splendour, but I can at least show you how it read: VENGEANCE IS MINE INC.

Dear…………………

You have probably seen columnist 's slanderous and unprovoked attack upon your character in today's paper. It is an outrageous insinuation, a deliberate distortion of the truth.

Are you yourself prepared to allow this miserable malice‑monger to insult you in this manner?

The whole world knows that it is foreign to the nature of the American people to permit themselves to be insulted either in public or in private without rising up in righteous indignation and demanding–nay, exacting–a just measure of retribution.

On the other hand, it is only natural that a citizen of your standing and reputation will not wish personally to become further involved in this sordid petty affair, or indeed to have any direct contact whatsoever with this vile person.

How then are you to obtain satisfaction?

 

The answer is simple, VENGEANCE IS MINE

 

INC. Will obtain it for you. We will undertake, on your behalf and in absolute confidence, to administer individual punishment to columnist, and in this regard we respectfully submit to you a choice of methods (together with prices) for your consideration: 1. Punch him on the nose, once, hard $500 2. Black his eye $600 3. Punch him on the nose and black his eye $1000 4. Introduce a rattlesnake (with venom extracted) into his car, on the floor by his pedals, when he parks it $1500 5. Kidnap him, take all his clothes away except his underpants, his shoes and socks, then dump him out on Fifth Ave. in the rush hour $2500 This work executed by a professional.

If you desire to avail yourself of any of these offers, kindly reply to VENGEANCE IS MINE INC. at the address indicated upon the enclosed slip of paper. If it is practicable, you will be notified in advance of the place where the action will occur and of the time, so that you may, if you wish, watch the proceedings in person from a safe and anonymous distance.

No payment need be made until after your order has been satisfactorily executed, when an account will be rendered in the usual manner.

George Karnoffsky had done a beautiful job of printing.

"Claude," he said, "you like?"

"It's marvellous."

"It's the best I could do for you. It's like in the war when I would see soldiers going off perhaps to get killed and all the time I would want to be giving them things and doing things for them." He was beginning to laugh again, so I said, "We'd better be going now. Have you got large envelopes for these cards?"

"Everything is here. And you can pay me when the money starts coming in." That seemed to set him off worse than ever and he collapsed into his chair, giggling like a fool. George and I hurried out of the shop into the street, into the cold snow‑falling afternoon.

We almost ran the distance back to our room and on the way up I borrowed a Manhattan telephone directory from the public telephone in the hall. We found 'Womberg, William S,' without any trouble and while I read out the address–somewhere up in the East Nineties–George wrote it on one of the envelopes.

'Gimple, Mrs Ella H,' was also in the book and we addressed an envelope to her as well. "We'll just send to Womberg and Gimple today," I said. "We haven't really got started yet. Tomorrow we'll send a dozen."

"We'd better catch the next post," George said.

"We'll deliver them by hand," I said. "Now, at once. The sooner they get them the better. Tomorrow might be too late. They won't be half so angry tomorrow as they are today. People are apt to cool off through the night. See here," I said, "you go ahead and deliver those two cards right away. While you're doing that I'm going to snoop around the town and try to find out something about the habits of Lionel Pantaloon. See you back here later in the evening… At about nine o'clock that evening I returned and found George lying on his bed smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

"I delivered them both; he said. "Just slipped them through the letter‑boxes and rang the bells and beat it up the street. Womberg had a huge house, a huge white house. How did you get on?"

"I went to see a man I know who works in the sports section of the Daily Mirror. He told me all."

"What did he tell you?"

"He said Pantaloon's movements are more or less routine. He operates at night, but wherever he goes earlier in the evening, he always–and this is the important point–he always finishes up at the Penguin Club. He gets there round about midnight and stays until two or twothirty. That's when his legmen bring him all the dope."

"That's all we want to know," George said happily.

"It's too easy."

"Money for old rope."

There was a full bottle of blended whisky in the cupboard and George fetched it out. For the next two hours we sat upon our beds drinking the whisky and making wonderful and complicated plans for the development of our organization. By eleven o'clock we were employing a staff of fifty, including twelve famous pugilists, and our offices were in Rockefeller Center . Towards midnight we had obtained control over all columnists and were dictating their daily columns to them by telephone from our headquarters, taking care to insult and infuriate at least twenty rich persons in one part of the country or another every day. We were immensely wealthy and George had a British Bentley, I had five Cadillacs. George kept practising telephone talks with Lionel Pantaloon. "That you, Pantaloon?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, listen here. I think your column stinks today. It's lousy."

"I'm very sorry, sir. I'll try to do better tomorrow."

"Damn right you'll do better, Pantaloon. Matter of fact we've been thinking about getting someone else to take over."

"But please, please sir, just give me another chance."

"OK, Pantaloon, but this is the last. And by the way, the boys are putting a rattlesnake in your car tonight, on behalf of Mr Hiram C. King, the soap manufacturer. Mr King will be watching from across the street so don't forget to act scared when you see it."

"Yes, sir, of course, sir. I won't forget, sir..

When we finally went to bed and the light was out, I could still hear George giving hell to Pantaloon on the telephone.

The next morning we were both woken up by the church clock on the corner striking nine. George got up and went to the door to get the papers and when he came back he was holding a letter in his hand.

"Open it!" I said.

He opened it and carefully unfolded a single sheet of thin notepaper.

"Read it!" I shouted.

He began to read it aloud, his voice low and serious at first but rising gradually to a high, almost hysterical shout of triumph as the full meaning of the letter was revealed to him. It said: 'Your methods appear curiously unorthodox. At the same time anything you do to that scoundrel has my approval. So go ahead. Start with Item 1, and if you are successful IT be only too glad to give you an order to work right on through the list. Send the bill to me. William S. Womberg.'

I recollect that in the excitement of the moment we did a kind of dance around the room in our pyjamas, praising Mr Womberg in loud voices and shouting that we were rich. George turned somersaults on his bed and it is possible that I did the same.

"When shall we do it?" he said. "Tonight?"

I paused before replying. I refused to be rushed. The pages of history are filled with the names of great men who have come to grief by permitting themselves to make hasty decisions in the excitement of a moment. I put on my dressing‑gown, lit a cigarette and began to pace up and down the room. "There is no hurry," I said. "Womberg's order can be dealt with in due course. But first of all we must send out today's cards."

I dressed quickly, we went out to the newsstand across the street, bought one copy of every daily paper there was and returned to our room. The next two hours was spent in reading the columnists' columns, and in the end we had a list of eleven people–eight men and three women–all of whom had been insulted in one way or another by one of the columnists that morning. Things were going well. We were working smoothly. It took us only another half hour to look up the addresses of the insulted ones–two we couldn't find–and to address the envelopes.

In the afternoon we delivered them, and at about six in the evening we got back to our room, tired but triumphant. We made coffee and we fried hamburgers and we had supper in bed. Then we re‑read Womberg's letter aloud to each other many many times.

"What's he doing he's giving us an order for six thousand one hundred dollars," George said. "Items 1 to 5 inclusive."

"It's not a bad beginning. Not bad for the first day. Six thousand a day works out at… let me see… it's nearly two million dollars a year, not counting Sundays. A million each. It's more than Betty Grable."

"We are very wealthy people," George said. He smiled, a slow and wondrous smile of pure contentment.

"In a day or two we will move to a suite of rooms at the St Regis."

"I think the Waldorf," George said.

"All right, the Waldorf. And later on we might as well take a house."

"One like Womberg's?"

"All right. One like Womberg's. But first," I said, "we have work to do. Tomorrow we shall deal with Pantaloon. We will catch him as he comes out of the Penguin Club. At two‑thirty a. m. we will be waiting for him, and when he comes out into the street you will step forward and punch him once, hard, right upon the point of the nose as per contract."

"It will be a pleasure," George said. "It will be a real pleasure. But how do we get away? Do we run?"

"We shall hire a car for an hour. We have just enough money left for that, and I shall be sitting at the wheel with the engine running, not ten yards away, and the door will be open and when you've punched him you'll just jump back into the car and we'll be gone."

"It is perfect. I shall punch him very hard." George paused. He clenched his right fist and examined his knuckles. Then he smiled again and he said slowly, "This nose of his, is it not possible that it will afterwards be so much blunted that it will no longer poke well into other people's business?"

"It is quite possible," I answered, and with that happy thought in our minds we switched out the lights and went early to sleep.

The next morning I was woken by a shout and I sat up and saw George standing at the foot of my bed in his pyjamas, waving his arms. "Look!" he shouted, "there are four! There are four!" I looked, and indeed there were four letters in his hand.

"Open them. Quickly, open them."

The first one he read aloud: "Dear Vengeance Is Mine Inc., That's the best proposition I've had in years. Go right ahead and give Mr Jacob Swinski the rattlesnake treatment (Item 4). But I'll be glad to pay double if you'll forget to extract the poison from its fangs. Yours Gertrude Porter Van dervelt. PS You'd better insure the snake. That guy's bite carries more poison than the rattler's."

George read the second one aloud: "My cheque for $500 is made out and lies before me on my desk. The moment I receive proof that you have punched Lionel Pantaloon hard on the nose, it will be posted to you, I should prefer a fracture, if possible. Yours etc. Wilbur H. Gollogly."

George read the third one aloud: "In my present frame of mind and against my better judgement, I am tempted to reply to your card and to request that you deposit that scoundrel Walter Kennedy upon Fifth Avenue dressed only in his underwear. I make the proviso that there shall be snow on the ground at the time and that the temperature shall be sub‑zero. H. Gresham."

The fourth one he also read aloud: "A good hard sock on the nose for Pantaloon is worth five hundred of mine or anybody else's money. I should like to watch. Yours sincerely, Claudia Calthorpe Hines."

George laid the letters down gently, carefully upon the bed. For a while there was silence. We stared at each other, too astonished, too happy to speak. I began to calculate the value of those four orders in terms of money.

"That's five thousand dollars worth," I said softly.

Upon George's face there was a huge bright grin. "Claude," he said, "should we not move now to the Waldorf?"

"Soon," I answered, "but at the moment we have no time for moving. We have not even time to send out fresh cards today. We must start to execute the orders we have in hand. We are overwhelmed with work."

"Should we not engage extra staff and enlarge our organization?"

"Later," I said. "Even for that there is no time today. Just think what we have to do. We have to put a rattlesnake in Jacob Swinski's car… we have to dump Walter Kennedy on Fifth Avenue in his underpants… we have to punch Pantaloon on the nose… let me see… yes, for three different people we have to punch Pantaloon. Ґ I stopped. I closed my eyes. I sat still. Again I became conscious of a small clear stream of inspiration flowing into the tissues of my brain. "I have it!" I shouted. "I have it! I have it! Three birds with one stone! Three customers with one punch!"

"How?"

"Don't you see? We only need to punch Pantaloon once and each of the three customers… Womberg, Gollogly and Claudia Hines… will think it's being done specially for him or her."

"Say it again." I said it again.

"It's brilliant."

"It's common‑sense. And the same principle will apply to the others. The rattlesnake treatment and the others can wait until we have more orders. Perhaps in a few days we will have ten orders for rattlesnakes in Swinski's car. Then we will do them all in one go."

"It's wonderful."

"This evening then," I said, "we will handle Pantaloon. But first we must hire a car. Also we must send telegrams, one to Womberg, one to Gollogly and one to Claudia Hines, telling them where and when the punching will take place."

We dressed rapidly and went out.

In a dirty silent little garage down on East 9th Street we managed to hire a car, a 1934 Chevrolet, eight dollars for the evening. We then sent three telegrams, each one identical and cunningly worded to conceal its true meaning from inquisitive people: 'Hope to see you outside Penguin Club two‑thirty a.m. Regards V. I. Mine."

"There is one thing more," I said. "It is essential that you should be disguised. Pantaloon, or the doorman, for example, must not be able to identify you afterwards. You must wear a false moustache."

"What about you?"

"Not necessary. I'll be sitting in the car. They won't see me."

 

We went to a children's toy‑shop and we bought for George a magnificent black moustache, a thing with long pointed ends, waxed and stiff and shining, and when he held it up against his face he looked exactly like the Kaiser of Germany. The man in the shop also sold us a tube of glue and he showed us how the moustache should be attached to the upper lip. "Going to have fun with the kids?" he asked, and George said, "Absolutely."

All was now ready, but there was a long time to wait. We had three dollars left between us and with this we bought a sandwich each and went to a movie. Then, at eleven o'clock that evening, we collected our car and in it we began to cruise slowly through the streets of New York waiting for the time to pass.

"You'd better put on your moustache so as you get used to it."

We pulled up under a street lamp and I squeezed some glue on to George's upper lip and fixed on the huge black hairy thing with its pointed ends. Then we drove on. It was cold in the car and outside it was beginning to snow again. I could see a few small snowflakes falling through the beams of the car‑lights. George kept saying, "How hard shall I hit him?" and I kept answering, "Hit him as hard as you can, and on the nose. It must be on the nose because that is a part of the contract. Everything must be done right. Our clients may be watching."

At two in the morning we drove slowly past the entrance to the Penguin Club in order to survey the situation. "I will park there," I said, "just past the entrance in that patch of dark. But I will leave the door open for you."

We drove on. Then George said, "What does he look like? How do I know it's him?"

"Don't worry," I answered. "I've thought of that," and I took from my pocket a piece of paper and handed it to' him. "You take this and fold it up small and give it to the doorman and tell him to see it gets to Pantaloon quickly. Act as though you are scared to death and in an awful hurry. It's a hundred to one that Pantaloon will come out. No columnist could resist that message."

On the paper I had written: 'I am a worker in Soviet Consulate. Come to the door very quickly please I have something to tell but come quickly as I am in danger, I cannot come in to you.'

"You see," I said, "your moustache will make you look like a Russian. All Russians have big moustaches."

George took the paper and folded it up very small and held it in his fingers. It was nearly half past two in the morning now and we began to drive towards the Penguin Club.

"You all set?" I said.

"Yes."

"We're going in now. Here we come. I'll park just past the entrance… here. Hit him hard," I said, and George opened the door and got out of the car. I closed the door behind him but I leant over and kept my hand on the handle so I could open it again quick, and I let down the window so I could watch. I kept the engine ticking over.

I saw George walk swiftly up to the doorman who stood under the red and white canopy which stretched out over the sidewalk. I saw the doorman turn and look down at George and I didn't like the way he did it. He was a tall proud man dressed in a magenta‑coloured uniform with gold buttons and gold shoulders and a broad white stripe down each magenta trouser‑leg. Also he wore white gloves and he stood there looking proudly down at George, frowning, pressing his lips together hard. He was looking at George's moustache and I thought Oh my God we have overdone it. We have over‑disguised him. He's going to know it's false and he's going to take one of the long pointed ends in his fingers and he'll give it a tweak and it'll come off. But he didn't. He was distracted by George's acting, for George was acting well. I could see him hopping about, clasping and unclasping his hands, swaying his body and shaking his head, and I could hear him saying, "Plees plees plees you must hurry. It is life and teth. Plees plees take it kvick to Mr Pantaloon." His Russian accent was not like any accent I had heard before, but all the same there was a quality of real despair in his voice.

Finally, gravely, proudly, the doorman said, "Give me the note." George gave it to him and said, "Tank you, tank you, but say it is urgent," and the doorman disappeared inside. In a few moments he returned and said, "It's being delivered now." George paced nervously up and down. I waited, watching the door. Three or four minutes elapsed. George wrung his hands and said, "Vere is he? Vere is he? Plees to go and see if he is not coming!"

"What's the matter with you?" the doorman said. Now he was looking at George's moustache again.

"It is life and teth! Mr Pantaloon can help! He must come!"

"Why don't you shut up," the doorman said, but he opened the door again and he poked his head inside and I heard him saying something to someone.

To George he said, "They say he's coming now.', A moment later the door opened and Pantaloon himself, small and dapper, stepped out. He paused by the door, looking quickly from side to side like an inquisitive ferret. The doorman touched his cap and pointed at George. I heard Pantaloon say, "Yes, what did you want?"

George said, "plees, dis vay a leetle so as novone can hear," and he led Pantaloon along the pavement, away from the doorman and towards the car.

"Come on, now," Pantaloon said. "What is it you want?"

Suddenly George shouted "Look!" and he pointed up the street. Pantaloon turned his head and as he did so George swung his right arm and he hit pantaloon plumb on the point of the nose. I saw George leaning forward on the punch, all his weight behind it, and the whole of Pantaloon appeared somehow to lift slightly off the ground and to float backwards for two or three feet until the faade of the Penguin Club stopped him. All this happened very quickly, and then George was in the car beside me and we were off and I could hear the doorman blowing a whistle behind us.

"We've done it!" George gasped. He was excited and out of breath. "I hit him good! Did you see how good I hit him!"

It was snowing hard now and I drove fast and made many sudden turnings and I knew no one would catch us in this snowstorm.

"Son of a bitch almost went through the wall I hit him so hard."

"Well done, George," I said. "Nice work, George."

"And did you see him lift? Did you see him lift right up off the ground?"

"Womberg will be pleased," I said.

"And Gollogly, and the Hines woman."

"They'll all be pleased," I said. "Watch the money coming in."

"There's a car behind us!" George shouted. "It's following us! It's right on our tail! Drive like mad!"

"Impossible," I said. "They couldn't have picked us up already. It's just another car going somewhere." I turned sharply to the right.

"He's still with us," George said. "Keep turning. We'll lose him soon."

"How the hell can we lose a police‑car in a nineteen thirty‑four Chev," I said. "I'm going to stop."

"Keep going!" George shouted. "You're doing fine."

"I'm going to stop," I said. "It'll only make them mad if we go on."

George protested fiercely but I knew it was no good and I pulled in to the side of the road. The other car swerved out and went past us and skidded to a standstill in front of us.

"Quick," George said. "Let's beat it." He had the door open and he was ready to run.

"Don't be a fool," I said. "Stay where you are. You can't get away now."

A voice from outside said, "All right boys, what's the hurry?"

"No hurry," I answered. "We're just going home."

"Yea?"

"Oh yes, we're just on our way home now."

The man poked his head in through the window on my side, and he looked at me, then at George, then at me again.

"It's a nasty night," George said. "We're just trying to reach home before the streets get all snowed up."

"Well," the man said, "you can take it easy. I just thought I'd like to give you this right away." He dropped a wad of banknotes on to my lap. "I'm Gollogly," he added, "Wilbur H. Gollogly," and he stood out there in the snow grinning at us, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands to keep them warm. "I got your wire and I watched the whole thing from across the street. You did a fine job. I'm paying you boys double. It was worth it. Funniest thing I ever seen. Goodbye boys. Watch your steps. They'll be after you now. Get out of town if I were you. Goodbye." And before we could say anything, he was gone.

When finally we got back to our room I started packing at once.

"You crazy?" George said. "We've only got to wait a few hours and we receive five hundred dollars each from Womberg and the Hines woman. Then we'll have two thousand altogether and we can go anywhere we want."

So we spent the next day waiting in our room and reading the papers, one of which had a whole column on the front page headed, 'Brutal assault on famous columnist'. But sure enough the late afternoon post brought us two letters and there was five hundred dollars in each.

And right now, at this moment, we are sitting in a Pullman car, drinking Scotch whisky and heading south for a place where there is always sunshine and where the horses are running every day. We are immensely wealthy and George keeps saying that if we put the whole of our two thousand dollars on a horse at ten to one we shall make another twenty thousand and we will be able to retire. 'We will have a house at Palm Beach ,' he says, 'and we will entertain upon a lavish scale. Beautiful socialites will loll around the edge of our swimming pool sipping cool drinks, and after a while we will perhaps put another large sum of money upon another horse and we shall become wealthier still. Possibly we will become tired of Palm Beach and then we will move around in a leisurely manner among the playgrounds of the rich. Monte Carlo and places like that. Like the Au Khan and the Duke of Windsor . We will become prominent members of the international set and film stars will smile at us and head‑waiters will bow to us and perhaps, in time to come, perhaps we might even get ourselves mentioned in Lionel Pantaloon's column.'

"That would be something," I said.

"Wouldn't it just," he answered happily. "Wouldn't that just be something."

 

The Butler

 

 

As soon as George Cleaver had made his first million, he and Mrs Cleaver moved out of their small suburban villa into an elegant London house. They acquired a French chef called Monsieur Estragon and an English butler called Tibbs, both wildly expensive. With the help of these two experts, the Cleavers set out to climb the social ladder and began to give dinner parties several times a week on a lavish scale.

But these dinners never seemed quite to come off. There was no animation, no spark to set the conversation alight, no style at all. Yet the food was superb and the service faultless.

"What the heck's wrong with our parties, Tibbs?" Mr Cleaver said to the butler. "Why don't nobody never loosen up and let themselves go?"

Tibbs inclined his head to one side and looked at the ceiling. "I hope, sir, you will not be offended if I offer a small suggestion."

"What is it?"

"It's the wine, sir."

"What about the wine?"

"Well, sir, Monsieur Estragon serves superb food. Superb food should be accompanied by superb wine. But you serve them a cheap and very odious Spanish red."

"Then why in heaven's name didn't you say so before, you twit?" cried Mr Cleaver. "I'm not short of money. I'll give them the best flipping wine in the world if that's what they want! What is the best wine in the world?"

"Claret, sir," the butler replied, "from the greatest ch‰teaux in Bordeaux –Lafite, Latour, Haut‑Brion, Margaux, Mouton‑Rothschild and Cheval Blanc. And from only the very greatest vintage years, which are, in my opinion, 1906, 1914, 1929 and 1945. Cheval Blanc was also magnificent in 1895 and 1921, and Haut‑Brion in 1906."

"Buy them all!" said Mr Cleaver. "Fill the flipping cellar from top to bottom!"

"I can try, sir," the butler said. "But wines like these are extremely rare and cost a fortune."

"I don't give a hoot what they cost!" said Mr Cleaver. "Just go out and get them!"

That was easier said than done. Nowhere in England or in France could Tibbs find any wine from 1895, 1906, 1914 or 1921. But he did manage to get hold of some twenty‑nines and forty‑fives. The bills for these wines were astronomical. They were in fact so huge that even Mr Cleaver began to sit up and take notice. And his interest quickly turned into outright enthusiasm when the butler suggested to him that a knowledge of wine was a very considerable social asset. Mr Cleaver bought books on the subject and read them from cover to cover. He also learned a great deal from Tibbs himself, who taught him, among other things, just how wine should be properly tasted. "First, sir, you sniff it long and deep, with your nose right inside the top of the glass, like this. Then you take a mouthful and you open your lips a tiny bit and suck in air, letting the air bubble through the wine. Watch me do it. Then you roll it vigorously around your mouth. And finally you swallow it."

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‑ton truck. Rummins was leading it by a chain attached to a steel ring through the bull's nose.

"Look at them bangers on him," Claud said. "I'll bet you've never seen a bull with bangers like that before."

"Tremendous," I said. They were like a couple of cantaloupe melons in a carrier bag and they were almost dragging on the ground as the bull waddled forward.

"You better stand back and leave the rope to me," Claud said. "You get right out of the way." I was happy to comply.

The bull approached my cow slowly, staring at her with dangerous white eyes. Then he started snorting and pawing the ground with one foreleg.

 

"Hang on tight!" Rummins shouted to Bert and Claud. They were leaning back against their respective ropes, holding them very taut and at right angles to the cow.

"Come on, boy," Rummins whispered softly to the bull. "Go to it, lad."

With surprising agility the bull heaved his front part up on to the cow's back and I caught a glimpse of a long scarlet penis, as thin as a rapier and just as stiff, and then it was inside the cow and the cow staggered and the bull heaved and snorted and in thirty seconds it was all over. The bull climbed down again slowly and stood there looking somewhat pleased with himself.

"Some bulls don't know where to put it," Rummins said. "But mine does. Mine could thread a needle with that dick of his."

"Wonderful," I said. "A bull's eye."

"That's exactly where the word come from," Rummins said. "A bull's eye. Come on, lad," he said to the bull. "You've had your lot for today." He led the bull back to the shed and shut him in and when he returned I thanked him, and then I asked him if he really believed that facing the cow into the sun during the mating would produce a female calf.

"Don't be so damn silly," he said. "Of course I believe it. Facts is facts."

"What do you mean facts is facts?"

"I mean what I say, mister. It's certainty. That's right, ain't it Bert?"

"And if you face her away from the sun does it get you a male?"

"Every single time," Rummins said. I smiled and he saw it. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"Not really," I said.

"Come with me," he said. "And when you see what I'm going to show you, you'll bloody well have to believe me. You two stay here and watch that cow; he said to Claud and Bert. Then he led me into the farmhouse. The room we went into was dark and small and dirty. From a drawer in the sideboard he produced a whole stack of thin exercise books. They were the kind children use at school. "These is calving books," he announced. "And in here is a record of every mating that's ever been done on this farm since I first started thirty‑two years ago."

He opened a book at random and allowed me to look. There were four columns on each page: COW'S NAME, DATE OF MATING, DATE OF BIRTH, SEX OF CALF.

I glanced down the sex column. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.

"We don't want no bull calves here," Rummins said. "Bull calves is a dead loss on a dairy farm."

I turned over a page. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.

"Hey," I said, "here's a bull calf."

"That's quite right," Rummins said. "Now take a look at what I wrote opposite that one at the time of the mating." I glanced at column two. Cow jumped round, it said.

"Some of them gets fractious and you can't hold 'em steady," Rummins said. "So they finish up facing the other way. That's the only time I ever get a bull."

"This is fantastic," I said, leafing through the book.

"Of course it's fantastic," Rummins said. "It's one of the most fantastic things in the whole world. Do you actually know what I average on this farm? I average ninety‑eight per cent heifers year in year out! Check it for yourself. Go on and check it. I'm not stopping you."

"I'd like very much to check it," I said. "May I sit down?"

"Help yourself," Rummins said. "I've got work to do." I found a pencil and paper and I proceeded to go through each one of the thirty‑two little books with great care. There was one book for each year, from 1915 to 1946. There were approximately eighty calves a year born on the farm, and my final results over the thirty‑two‑year period were as follows: Heifer calves 2,516 Bull calves 56 Total calves born, including stillborn 2,572 I went outside to look for Rummins. Claud had disappeared. He'd probably taken my cow home. I found Rummins in the dairy pouring milk into the separator. "Haven't you ever told anyone about this?" I asked him.

"Never have," he said.

"Why not?"

"I reckon it ain't nobody else's business."

"But my dear man, this could transform the entire milk industry the world over."

"It might," he said. "It might easily do that. It wouldn't do the beef business no harm either if they could get bulls every time."

"How did you hear about it in the first place?"

"My old dad told me," Rummins said. "When I were about eighteen, my old dad said to me, 'I'll tell you a secret,' he said, 'that'll make you rich.' And he told me this."

"Has it made you rich?"

"I ain't done too bad for myself, have I?" he said.

"But did your father offer any sort of explanation as to why it works?" I asked.

Rummins explored the inner rim of one nostril with the end of his thumb, holding the noseflap between thumb and forefinger as he did so. "A very clever man, my old dad was," he said. "Very clever indeed. Of course he told me how it works."

"How?"

"He explained to me that a cow don't have nothing to do with deciding the sex of the calf," Rummins said. All a cow's got is an egg. It's the bull decides what the sex is going to be. The sperm of the bull."

"Go on," I said.

"According to my old dad, a bull has two different kinds of sperm, female sperm and male sperm. You follow me so far?"

"Yes," I said. "Keep going."

"So when the old bull shoots off his sperm into the cow, a sort of swimming race takes place between the male and the female sperm to see which one can reach the egg first. If the female sperm wins, you get a heifer."

"But what's the sun got to do with it?" I asked.

"I'm coming to that," he said, "so listen carefully. When an animal is standing on all fours like a cow, and when you face her head into the sun, then the sperm has also got to travel directly into the sun to reach the egg. Switch the cow around and they'll be travelling away from the sun."

"So what you're saying," I said, "is that the sun exerts a pull of some sort on the female sperm and makes them swim faster than the male sperm."

"Exactly!" cried Rummins. "That's exactly it! It exerts a pull! It drags them forward! That's why they always win! And if you turn the cow round the other way, it's pulling them backwards and the male sperm wins instead."

"It's an interesting theory," I said. "But it hardly seems likely that the sun, which is millions of miles away, could exert a pull on a bunch of spermatozoa inside a cow."

"You're talking rubbish!" cried Rummins. "Absolute and utter rubbish! Don't the moon exert a pull on the bloody tides of the ocean to make 'em high and low? Of course it does! So why shouldn't the sun exert a pull on the female sperm?"

"I see your point."

Suddenly Rummins seemed to have had enough. "You'll have a heifer calf for sure," he said, turning away. "Don't you worry about that."

"Mr Rummins," I said.

"What?"

"Is there any reason why this shouldn't work with humans as well?"

"Of course it'll work with humans," he said. "Just so long as you remember everything's got to be pointed in the right direction. A cow ain't lying down you know. It's standing on all fours."

"I see what you mean."

"And it ain't no good doing it at night either," he said, "because the sun is shielded behind the earth and it can't influence anything."

"That's true," I said, "but have you any sort of proof it works with humans?"

Rummins laid his head to one side and gave me another of his long sly broken‑toothed grins. "I've got four boys of my own, ain't I?" he said.

"So you have."

"Ruddy girls ain't no use to me around here," he said. "Boys is what you want on a farm and I've got four of 'em, right?"

"Right," I said, "you're absolutely right."

 

The Bookseller

 

 

IF, in those days, you walked up from Trafalgar Square into Charing Cross Road, you would come in a few minutes to a shop on the right‑hand side that had above the window the words WILLIAM BUGGAGE–RARE BOOKS.

If you peered through the window itself you would see that the walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and if you then pushed open the door and went in, you would immediately be assailed by that subtle odour of old cardboard and tea leaves that pervades the interiors of every second‑hand bookshop in London . Nearly always, you would find two or three customers in there, silent shadowy figures in overcoats and trilby hats rummaging among the sets of Jane Austen and Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, hoping to find a first edition.

No shop‑keeper ever seemed to be hovering around to keep an eye on the customers, and if somebody actually wanted to pay for a book instead of pinching it and walking out, then he or she would have to push through a door at the back of the shop on which it said OFFICE–PAY HERE. If you went into the office you would find both Mr William Buggage and his assistant, Miss Muriel Tottle, seated at their respective desks and very much preoccupied. Mr Buggage would be sitting behind a valuable eighteenth‑century mahogany partners‑desk, and Miss Tottle, a few feet away, would be using a somewhat smaller but no less elegant piece of furniture, a Regency writing‑table with a top of faded green leather. On Mr Buggage's desk there would invariably be one copy of the day's London Times, as well as The Daily Telegraph, The Manchester Guardian, The Western Mail, and The Glasgow Herald. There would also be a current edition of Who's Who close at hand, fat and red and well thumbed. Miss Tottle's writing‑table would have on it an electric typewriter and a plain but very nice open box containing notepaper and envelopes, as well as a quantity of paper‑clips and staplers and other secretarial paraphernalia.

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 names are not circulated to other branches or to Head Office, not even in these computerized times.

On the other hand, banks are required by law to notify the Inland Revenue of the names of all clients who have Deposit Accounts containing one thousand pounds or more. They must also report the amounts of interest earned. But no such law applies to Current Accounts because they earn no interest. Nobody takes any notice of a person's Current Account unless it is overdrawn or unless, and this seldom happens, the balance becomes ridiculously large. A Current Account containing let us say Ј100,000 might easily raise an eyebrow or two among the staff, and the client would almost certainly get a nice letter from the manager suggesting that some of the money be placed on deposit to earn interest. But Mr Buggage didn't give a fig for interest and he wanted no raised eyebrows either. That is why he and Miss Tottle had eighty‑eight different bank accounts between them. It was Miss Tottle's job to see that the amounts in each of these accounts never exceeded Ј20,000. Anything more than that might, in Mr Buggage's opinion, cause an eyebrow to raise, especially if it were left lying untouched in a Current Account for months or years. The agreement between the two partners was seventy‑five per cent of the profits of the business to Mr Buggage and twenty‑five per cent to Miss Tottle.

Miss Tottle's Daily Audit involved examining a list she kept of all the balances in all those eighty‑eight separate accounts and then deciding into which of them the daily cheque or cheques should be deposited. She had in her filingcabinet eighty‑eight different files, one for each bank account, and eighty‑eight different cheque books and eighty‑eight different paying‑in books. Miss Tottle's task was not a complicated one but she had to keep her wits about her and not muddle things up. Only the previous week they had to open four new accounts at four new branches, three for Mr Buggage and one for Miss Tottle. "Soon we're goin' to 'ave over a 'undred accounts in our names," Mr Buggage had said to Miss Tottle at the time.

"Why not two hundred?" Miss Tottle had said.

"A day will come," Mr Buggage said, "when we'll 'ave used up all the banks in this part of the country and you and I is goin' to 'ave to travel all the way up to Sunderland or Newcastle to open new ones."

But now Miss Tottle was busy with her Daily Audit. "That's done," she said, putting the last cheque and the paying‑in slip into its envelope.

"Ow much we got in our accounts all together at this very moment?" Mr Buggage asked her.

Miss Tottle unlocked the middle drawer of her writing‑table and took out a plain school exercise book. On the cover she had written the words My old arithmetic book from school. She considered this a rather ingenious ploy designed to put people off the scent should the book ever fall into the wrong hands. "Just let me add on today's deposit," she said, finding the right page and beginning to write down figures. "There we are. Counting today, you have got in all the sixty‑six branches, one million, three hundred and twenty thousand, six hundred and forty‑three pounds, unless you've been cashing any cheques in the last few days."

"I 'aven't," Mr Buggage said. "And what've you got?"

"I have got… four hundred and thirty thousand, seven hundred and twenty‑five pounds."

"Very nice," Mr Buggage said. "And 'ow long's it taken us to gather in those tidy little sums?"

"Just eleven years," Miss Tottle said. "What was that teeny weeny proposal you were going to put to me, lover?"

"Ah," Mr Buggage said, laying down his gold pencil and leaning back to gaze at her once again with that pale licentious eye. "I was just thinkin'.. 'ere's exactly what I was thinkin' why on earth should a millionaire like me be sittin'

'ere in this filthy freezin' weather when I could be reclinin' in the lap of luxury beside a swimmin' pool with a nice girl like you to keep me company and flunkeys bringin' us goblets of iced champagne every few minutes?"

"Why indeed?" Miss Tottle cried, grinning widely.

"Then get out the book and let's see where we 'aven't been?"

Miss Tottle walked over to a bookshelf on the opposite wall and took down a thickish paperback called The 300 Best Hotels in the World chosen by Rene Lecler. She returned to her chair and said, "Where to this time, lover?"

"Somewhere in North Africa," Mr Buggage said. "This is February and you've got to go at least to North Africa to get it really warm. Italy's not 'ot enough yet, nor is Spain. And I don't want the flippin' West Indies. I've 'ad enough of them. Where 'aven't we been in North Africa?"

Miss Tottle was turning the pages of the book. "That's not so easy," she said. "We've done the Palais Jamai in Fez… and the Gazelle d'Or in Taroudant… and the Tunis Hilton in Tunis. We didn't like that one..

"Ow many we done so far altogether in that book?" Mr Buggage asked her.

"I think it was forty‑eight the last time I counted."

"And I 'as every intention of doin' all three 'undred of 'em before I'm finished," Mr Buggage said. "That's my big ambition and I'll bet nobody else 'as ever done it."

"I think Mr Rene Lecler must have done it," Miss Tottle said. "'Oo's 'ee?"

"The man who wrote the book."

"Ee don't count," Mr Buggage said. He leaned sideways in his chair and began to scratch the left cheek of his rump in a slow meditative manner. "And I'll bet 'ee 'asn't anyway. These travel guides use any Tom, Dick and 'Arry to go round for 'em."

"Here's one!" Miss Tottle cried. "Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakech."

"Where's that?"

"In Morocco. Just round the top corner of Africa on the left‑hand side."

"Go on then. What does it say about it?"

"It says," Miss Tottle read, "This was Winston Churchill's favourite haunt and from his balcony he painted the Atlas sunset time and again."

"I don't paint," Mr Buggage said. "What else does it say?"

Miss Tottle read on: "As the livened Moorish servant shows you into the tiled and latticed colonnaded court, you step decisively into an illustration of the 1001 Arabian nights..

"That's more like it," Mr Buggage said. "Go on."

"Your next contact with reality will come when you pay your bill on leaving."

"That don't worry us millionaires," Mr Buggage said. "Let's go. We'll leave tomorrow. Call that travel agent right away. First class. We'll shut the shop for ten days."

"Don't you want to do today's letters?"

"Bugger today's letters," Mr Buggage said. "We're on 'oliday from now on. Get on to that travel agent quick." He leaned the other way now and started scratching his right buttock with the fingers of his right hand. Miss Tottle watched him and Mr Buggage saw her watching him but he didn't care. "Call that travel agent," he said.

"And I'd better get us some Travellers Cheques," Miss Tottle said.

"Get five thousand quids' worth. I'll write the cheque. This one's on me. Give me a cheque book. Choose the nearest bank. And call that 'otel in wherever it was and ask for the biggest suite they're got. They're never booked up when you want the biggest suite."

Twenty‑four hours later, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were sunbathing beside the pool at La Mamounia in Marrakech and they were drinking champagne.

"This is the life," Miss Tottle said. "Why don't we retire altogether and buy a grand house in a climate like this?"

"What do we want to retire for?" Mr Buggage said. "We got the best business in London goin' for us and personally I find that very enjoyable."

On the other side of the pool a dozen Moroccan servants were laying out a splendid buffet lunch for the guests. There were enormous cold lobsters and large pink hams and very small roast chickens and several kinds of rice and about ten different salads. A chef was grilling steaks over a charcoal fire. Guests were beginning to get up from deck‑chairs and mattresses to mill around the buffet with plates in their hands. Some were in swimsuits, some in light summer clothes, and most had straw hats on their heads. Mr Buggage was watching them. Almost without exception, they were English. They were the very rich English, smooth, well mannered, overweight, loud‑voiced and infinitely dull. He had seen them before all around Jamaica and Barbados and places like that. It was evident that quite a few of them knew one another because at home, of course, they moved in the same circles. But whether they knew each other or not, they certainly accepted each other because all of them belonged to the same nameless and exclusive club. Any member of this club could always, by some subtle social alchemy, recognize a fellow member at a glance. Yes, they say to themselves, he's one of us. She's one of us. Mr Buggage was not one of them. He was not in the club and he never would be. He was a nouveau and that, regardless of how many millions he had, was unacceptable. He was also overtly vulgar and that was unacceptable, too. The very rich could be just as vulgar as Mr Buggage, or even more so, but they did it in a different way.

"There they are," Mr Buggage said, looking across the pool at the guests. "Them's our bread and butter. Every one of 'em's likely to be a future customer."

"How right you are," Miss Tottle said.

Mr Buggage, lying on a mattress that was striped in blue, red, and green, was propped up on one elbow, staring at the guests. His stomach was bulging out in folds over his swimming‑trunks and droplets of sweat were running out of the fatty crevices. Now he shifted his gaze to the recumbent figure of Miss Tottle lying beside him on her own mattress. Miss Tottle's loaf‑of‑bread bosom was encased in a strip of scarlet bikini. The bottom half of the bikini was daringly brief and possibly a shade too small and Mr Buggage could see traces of black hair high up on the inside of her thighs.

"We'll lave our lunch, pet, then we'll go to our room and take a little nap, right?"

Miss Tottle displayed her sulphurous teeth and nodded her head.

"And after that we'll do some letters."

"Letters?" she cried. "I don't want to do letters! I thought this was going to be a holiday!"

"It is a 'oliday, pet, but I don't like lettin' good business go to waste. The 'otel will lend you a typewriter. I already checked on that. And they're lendin' me their 'Oo's 'Oo. Every good 'otel in the world keeps an English 'Oo's 'Oo. The manager likes to know 'oo's important so lee can kiss their backsides."

"They won't find you in it," Miss Tottle said, a bit huffy now.

"No," Mr Buggage said. "I'll grant you that. But they won't find many in it that's got more money'n me neither. In this world, it's not 'oo you are, my girl. It's not even "oo you know. It's what you got that counts."

"We've never done letters on holiday before," Miss Tottle said.

"There's a first time for everything, pet."

"How can we do letters without newspapers?"

"You know very well English papers always go airmail to places like this. I bought a Times in the foyer when we arrived. It's actually the same as I was workin' on in the office yesterday so I done most of my 'omework already. I'm beginning to fancy a piece of that lobster over there. You ever seen bigger lobsters than that?"

"But you're surely not going to post the letters from here, are you?" Miss Tottle said.

"Certainly not. We'll leave 'em undated and date 'em and post 'em as soon as we return. That way we'll 'ave a nice backlog up our sleeves."

Miss Tottle stared at the lobsters on the table across the pool, then at the people milling around, then she reached out and placed a hand on Mr Buggage's thigh, high up under the bathing‑shorts. She began to stroke the hairy thigh. "Come on, Billy," she said, "why don't we take a break from the letters same as we always do when we're on hols?"

"You surely don't want us throwing about a thousand quid away a day, do you?" Mr Buggage said. "And quarter of it yours, don't forget that."

"We don't have the firm's notepaper and we can't use hotel paper, for God's sake."

"I brought the notepaper," Mr Buggage said, triumphant. "I got a 'ole box of it. And envelopes."

"Oh, all right," Miss Tottle said. "Are you going to fetch me some of that lobster, lover?"

"We'll go together," Mr Buggage said, and he stood up and started waddling round the pool in those almost knee‑length bathing‑trunks he had bought a couple of years back in Honolulu. They had a pattern of green and yellow and white flowers on them. Miss Tottle got to her feet and followed him.

Mr Buggage was busy helping himself at the buffet when he heard a man's voice behind him saying, "Fiona, I don't think you've met Mrs Smith‑Swithin… and this is Lady Hedgecock,"

"How d'you do"… "How d'you do," the voices said.

Mr Buggage glanced round at the speakers. There was a man and a woman in swimmingclothes and two elderly ladies wearing cotton dresses. Those names, he thought. I've heard those names before, I know I have… SmithSwithin… Lady Hedgecock. He shrugged and continued to load food on to his plate.

A few minutes later, he was sitting with Miss Tottle at a small table under a sun‑umbrella and each of them was tucking into an immense half lobster. "Tell me, does the name Lady 'Edgecock mean anything to you?" Mr Buggage asked, talking with his mouth full.

"Lady Hedgecock? She's one of our clients. Or she was. I never forget names like that. Why?"

"And what about a Mrs Smith‑Swithin? Does that also ring a bell?"

 

"It does, actually," Miss Tottle said. "Both of them do. Why do you ask that suddenly?"

"Because both of 'em's 'ere."

"Good God! How d'you know?"

"And what's more, my girl, they're together! They're chums!"

"They're not!"

"Oh, yes they are!"

Mr Buggage told her how he knew. "There they are," he said, pointing with a fork whose prongs were yellow with mayonnaise. "Those two fat old broads talkin' to the tall man and the woman."

Miss Tottle stared, fascinated. "You know," she said, "I've never actually seen a client of ours in the flesh before, not in all the years we've been in business."

"Nor me," Mr Buggage said. "One thing's for sure. I picked 'em right, didn't I? They're rolling in it. That's obvious. And they're stupid. That's even more obvious."

"Do you think it could be dangerous, Billy, the two of them knowing each other?"

"It's a bloody queer coincidence," Mr Buggage said, "but I don't think it's dangerous. Neither of 'em's ever goin' to say a word. That's the beauty of it."

"I guess you're right."

"The only possible danger," Mr Buggage said, "would be if they saw my name on the register. I got a very unusual name just like theirs. It would ring bells at once."

"Guests don't see the register," Miss Tottle said.

"No, they don't," Mr Buggage said. "No one's ever goin' to bother us. They never 'as and they never will."

"Amazing lobster," Miss Tottle said. "Lobster is sex food," Mr Buggage announced, eating more of it.

"You're thinking of oysters, lover."

"I am not thinking of oysters. Oysters is sex food, too, but lobsters is stronger. A dish of lobsters can drive some people crazy."

"Like you, perhaps?" she said, wriggling her rump in the chair.

"Maybe," Mr Buggage said. "We shall just 'ave to wait and see about that, won't we, pet?"

"Yes," she said.

"It's a good thing they're so expensive," Mr Buggage said. "If every Tom, Dick and 'Arry could afford to buy 'em, the We world would be full of sex maniacs."

"Keep eating it," she said.

After lunch, the two of them went upstairs to their suite, where they cavorted clumsily on the huge bed for a brief period. Then they took a nap.

And now they were in their private sittingroom and were wearing only dressing‑gowns over their nakedness, Mr Buggage in a plum‑coloured silk one, Miss Tottle in pastel pink and pale green. Mr Buggage was reclining on the sofa with a copy of yesterday's Times on his lap and a Who's Who on the coffee table.

Miss Tottle was at the writing‑desk with a hotel typewriter before her and a notebook in her hand. Both were again drinking champagne.

"This is a prime one," Mr Buggage was saying. "Sir Edward Leishman. Got the lead obit. Chairman of Aerodynamics Engineering. One of our major industrialists, it says."

"Nice," Miss Tottle said. "Make sure the wife's alive."

"Leaves a widow and three children," Mr Buggage read out. "And… wait a minute… in '00's 'Oo it says, Recreations, walkin' and fishin'. Clubs, White's and the Reform."

"Address?" Miss Tottle asked.

"The Red House, Andover, Wilts."

"How d'you spell Leishman?" Miss Tottle asked. Mr Buggage spelled it.

"How much shall we go for?"

"A lot," Mr Buggage said. "He was loaded. Try around nine 'undred."

"You want to slip in The Compleat Angler?

It says he was a fisherman."

 

"Yes. First edition. Four 'undred and twenty quid. You know the rest of it by 'eart. Bang it out quick. I got another good one to come."

Miss Tottle put a sheet of notepaper into the typewriter and very rapidly she began to type. She had done so many thousands of these letters over the years that she never had to pause for one word. She even knew how to compile the list of books so that it came out to around nine hundred pounds or three hundred and fifty pounds or five hundred and twenty or whatever. She could make it come out to any sum Mr Buggage thought the client would stand. One of the secrets of this particular trade, as Mr Buggage knew, was never to be too greedy. Never go over a thousand quid with anyone, not even a famous millionaire.

The letter, as miss Tottle typed it, went like this: WILLIAM BUGGAGE–RARE BOOKS 27a Charing Cross Road, London.

 

Dear Lady Leishman,

 

It is with very great regret that I trouble you at this tragic time of your bereavement, but regretfully I am left with no alternative in the circumstances.

I had the pleasure of serving your late husband over a number of years and my invoices were always sent to him care of White's Club, as indeed were many of the little parcels of books that he collected with such enthusiasm.

He was always a prompt settler and a very pleasant gentleman to deal with. I am listing below his more recent purchases, those which, alas, he had ordered in more recent times before he passed away and which were delivered to him in the usual manner.

Perhaps I should explain to you that publications of this nature are often very rare and can therefore be rather costly. Some are privately printed, some are actually banned in this country and those are more costly still.

Rest assured, dear madam, that I always conduct business in the strictest confidence. My own reputation over many years in the trade is the best guarantee of my discretion. When the bill is paid, that is the last you will hear of the matter, unless of course you happen to be able to lay hands on your late husband's collection of erotica, in which case I should be happy to make you an offer for it.

The Books: THE COMPLEAT ANGLER, Isaak Walton, First Edition. Good clean copy. Some rubbing of edges. Rare. Ј420 LOVE IN FURS, Leopold von Sacher Masoch, 1920 edition. Slip cover. Ј75 SEXUAL SECRETS, Translation from Danish. Ј40 HOW TO PLEASURE YOUNG GIRLS WHEN YOU ARE OVER SIXTY, llustrations. Private printing from Paris. Ј95 THE ART OF PUNISHMENT–THE CANE, THE WHIP AND THE LASH, Translated from German. Banned in U.K. Ј115 THREE NAUGHTY NUNS, Good clean edition. Ј60 RESTRAINT–SHACKLES AND SILKEN CORDS, Illustrations.Ј80 WHY TEENAGERS PREFER OLD MEN, Illustrations. American.Ј90 THE LONDON DIRECTORY OF ESCORTS AND HOSTESSES, Current edition. Ј20 Total now due: Ј995 Yours faithfully, William Buggage "Right," Miss Tottle said, running the notepaper out of her typewriter. "Done that one. But you realize I don't have my 'Bible' here, so I'll have to check the names when I get home before posting the letters."

"You do that," Mr Buggage said.

Miss Tottle's Bible was a massive index‑card file in which were recorded the names and addresses of every client they had written to since the beginning of the business. The purpose of this was to try as nearly as possible to ensure that no two members of the same family received a Buggage invoice. If this were to happen, there would always be the danger that they might compare notes. It also served to guard against a case where a widow who had received one invoice upon the death of her first husband might be sent another invoice on the death of the second husband. That, of course, would let the cat right out of the bag. There was no guaranteed way of avoiding this perilous mistake because the widow would have changed her name when she remarried, but Miss Tottle had developed an instinct for sniffing out such pitfalls, and the Bible helped her to do it.

"What's next?" Miss Tottle asked.

"The next is Major General Lionel Anstruther. Here 'ee is. Got about six inches in 'Oo's 'Oo. Clubs, Army and Navy. Recreations, Ridin' to 'Ounds."

"I suppose he fell off a horse and broke his flipping neck," Miss Tottle said. "I'll start with Memoirs of a Foxh un ting Man, first edition, right?"

"Right. Two 'undred and twenty quid," Mr Buggage said. "And make it between five and six 'undred altogether."

"Okay."

"And put in The Sting of the Ridin' Crop.

Whips seem to come natural to these foxhuntin' folk."

And so it went on.

The holiday in Marrakech continued pleasantly enough and nine days later Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were back in the office in Charing Cross Road, both with sun‑scorched skins as red as the shells of the many lobsters they had eaten. They quickly settled down again into their normal and stimulating routine. Day after day the letters went out and the cheques came in. It was remarkable how smoothly the business ran. The psychology behind it was, of course, very sound. Strike a widow at the height of her grief, strike her with something that is unbearably awful, something she wants to forget about and put behind her, something she wants nobody else to discover. What's more, the funeral is imminent. So she pays up fast to get the sordid little business out of the way. Mr Buggage knew his onions. In all the years he had been operating, he had never once had a protest or an angry reply. Just a cheque in an envelope. Now and again, but not often, there was no reply at all. The disbelieving widow had been brave enough to sling his letter into the waste‑paper basket and that was the end of it. None of them quite dared to challenge the invoice because they could never be absolutely positive that the late husband had been as pure as the wife believed and hoped. Men never are. In many cases, of course, the widow knew very well that her beloved had been a lecherous old bird and Mr Buggage's invoice came as no surprise. So she paid up even faster.

About a month after their return from Marrakech, on a wet and rainy afternoon in March, Mr Buggage was reclining comfortably in his office with his feet up on the top of his fine partner's desk, dictating to Miss Tottle some details about a deceased and distinguished admiral. "Recreations," he was saying, reading from Who's Who, "Gardening, sailing and stamp‑collecting… " At that point, the door from the main shop opened and a young man came in with a book in his hand. "Mr Buggage?" he said.

Mr Buggage looked up. "Over there," he said, waving towards Miss Tottle. "She'll deal with you."

The young man stood still. His navy‑blue overcoat was wet from the weather and droplets of water were dripping from his hair. He didn't look at Miss Tottle. He kept his eyes on Mr Buggage. "Don't you want the money?" he said, pleasantly enough.

"She'll take it."

"Why won't you take it?"

"Because she's the cashier," Mr Buggage said. "You want to buy a book, go ahead. She'll deal with you."

"I'd rather deal with you," the young man said.

Mr Buggage looked up at him. "Go on," he said. "Just do as you're told, there's a good lad."

"You are the proprietor?" the young man said. "You are Mr William Buggage?"

"What if I am," Mr Buggage said, his feet still up on the desk.

"Are you or aren't you?"

"What's it to you?" Mr Buggage said.

"So that's settled," the young man said. "How d'you do, Mr Buggage." There was a curious edge to his voice now, a mixture of scorn and mockery.

Mr Buggage took his feet down from the desk‑top and sat up a trifle straighter. "You're a bit of a cheeky young bugger, aren't you," he said. "If you want that book, I suggest you just pay your money over there and then you can 'op it. Right?"

The young man turned towards the still open door that led to the front of the shop. Just the other side of the door there were a couple of the usual kind of customers, men in raincoats, pulling out books and examining them.

"Mother," the young man called softly. "You can come in, Mother. Mr Buggage is here."

A small woman of about sixty came in and stood beside the young man. She had a trim figure for her age and a face that must once have been ravishing, but now it showed traces of strain and exhaustion, and the pale blue eyes were dulled with grief. She was wearing a black coat and a simple black hat. She left the door open behind her.

"Mr Buggage," the young man said. "This is my mother, Mrs Northcote."

Miss Tottle, the rememberer of names, turned round quick and looked at Mr Buggage and made little warning movements with her mouth. Mr Buggage got the message and said as politely as he could, "And what can I do for you, madam?"

The woman opened her black handbag and took out a letter. She unfolded it carefully and held it out to Mr Buggage. "Then it will be you who sent me this?" she said.

Mr Buggage took the letter and examined it at some length. Miss Tottle, who had turned right round in her chair now, was watching Mr Buggage.

"Yes," Mr Buggage said. "This is my letter and my invoice. All correct and in order. What is your problem, madam?"

"What I came here to ask you," the woman said, "is, are you sure it's right?"

"I'm afraid it is, madam."

"But it is so unbelievable… I find it impossible to believe that my husband bought those books."

"Let's see now, your 'usband, Mr… Mr "Northcote," Miss Tottle said.

"Yes, Mr Northcote, yes, of course, Mr Northcote. 'Ee wasn't in 'ere often, once or twice a year maybe, but a good customer and a very fine gentleman. May I offer you, madam, my sincere condolences on your sad loss."

"Thank you, Mr Buggage. But are you really quite certain you haven't been mixing him up with somebody else?"

"Not a chance, madam. Not the slightest chance. My good secretary over there will confirm that there is no mistake."

"May I see it?" Miss Tottle said, getting up and crossing to take the letter from Mr Buggage. "Yes," she said, examining it. "I typed this myself. There is no mistake."

"Miss Tottle's been with me a long time," Mr Buggage said. "She knows the business inside out. I can't remember 'er ever makin' a mistake."

"I should hope not," Miss Tottle said.

"So there you are, madam," Mr Buggage said.

"It simply isn't possible," the woman said.

"Ah, but men will be men," Mr Buggage said. "They all 'ave their little bit of fun now and again and there's no 'arm in that, is there, madam?" He sat confident and unmoved in his chair, waiting now to have done with it. He felt himself master of the situation.

The woman stood very straight and still, and she was looking Mr Buggage directly in the eyes. "These curious books you list on your invoice," she said, "do they print them in Braille?"

"In what?"

"In Braille."

"I don't know what you're talking about, madam."

"I thought you wouldn't," she said. "That's the only way my husband could have read them. He lost his sight in the last war, in the Battle of Alamein more than forty years ago, and he was blind for ever after."

The office became suddenly very quiet. The mother and her son stood motionless, watching Mr Buggage. Miss Tottle turned away and looked out of the window. Mr Buggage cleared his throat as though to say something, but thought better of it. The two men in raincoats, who were close enough to have heard every word through the open door, came quietly into the office. One of them held out a plastic card and said to Mr Buggage, "Inspector Richards, Serious Crimes Division, Scotland Yard." And to Miss Tottle, who was already moving back towards her desk, he said, "Don't touch any of those papers, please miss. Leave everything just where it is. You're both coming along with us."

The son took his mother gently by the arm and led her out of the office, through the shop and on to the street.

 

The Hitchhiker

 

 

I HAD a new car. It was an exciting toy, a big BMW 3.3 Li, which means 3.3 litre , long wheelbase, fuel injection. It had a top speed of 129 mph and terrific acceleration. The body was pale blue. The seats inside were darker blue and they were made of leather, genuine soft leather of the finest quality. The windows were electrically operated and so was the sunroof. The radio aerial popped up when I switched on the radio, and disappeared when I switched it off. The powerful engine growled and grunted impatiently at slow speeds, but at sixty miles an hour the growling stopped and the motor began to purr with pleasure.

I was driving up to London by myself. It was a lovely June day. They were haymaking in the fields and there were buttercups along both sides of the road. I was whispering along at 70 mph , leaning back comfortably in my seat, with no more than a couple of fingers resting lightly on the wheel to keep her steady. Ahead of me I saw a man thumbing a lift. I touched the brake and brought the car to a stop beside him. I always stopped for hitchhikers. I knew just how it used to feel to be standing on the side of a country road watching the cars go by. I hated the drivers for pretending they didn't see me, especially the ones in big empty cars with three empty seats. The large expensive cars seldom stopped. It was always the smaller ones that offered you a lift, or the rusty ones or the ones that were already crammed full of children and the driver would say, 'I think we can squeeze in one more.'

The hitchhiker poked his head through the open window and said, "Going to London , guv'nor?"

"Yes," I said. "Jump in."

He got in and I drove on.

He was a small ratty‑faced man with grey teeth. His eyes were dark and quick and clever, like rat's eyes, and his ears were slightly pointed at the top. He had a cloth cap on his head and he was wearing a greyish‑coloured jacket with enormous pockets. The grey jacket, together with the quick eyes and the pointed ears, made him look more than anything like some sort of huge human rat.

"What part of London are you headed for?" I asked him.

"I'm going right through London and out the other side," he said. "I'm goin' to Epsom, for the races. It's Derby Day today."

"So it is," I said. "I wish I were going with you. I love betting on horses."

"I never bet on horses," he said. "I don't even watch 'em run. That's a stupid silly business."

"Then why do you go?" I asked.

He didn't seem to like that question. His ratty little face went absolutely blank and he sat there staring straight ahead at the road, saying nothing.

"I expect you help to work the betting machines or something like that," I said. "That's even sillier," he answered. "There's no fun working them lousy machines and selling tickets to mugs. Any fool could do that."

There was a long silence. I decided not to question him any more. I remembered how irritated I used to get in my hitchhiking days when drivers kept asking me questions. Where are you going? Why are you going there? What's your job? Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend? What's her name? How old are you? And so forth and so forth. I used to hate it.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It's none of my business what you do. The trouble is I'm a writer, and most writers are terribly nosy."

"You write books?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Writin' books is okay," he said. "It's what I call a skilled trade. I'm in a skilled trade too. The folks I despise is them that spend all their lives doin' crummy old routine jobs with no skill in 'em at all. You see what I mean?"

"Yes."

"The secret of life," he said, "is to become very very good at somethin' that's very very 'ard to do."

"Like you," I said.

"Exactly. You and me both."

"What makes you think that I'm any good at my job?" I asked. "There's an awful lot of bad writers around."

"You wouldn't be drivin' about in a car like this if you weren't no good at it," he answered. "It must've cost a tidy packet, this little job."

"It wasn't cheap."

"What can she do flat out?" he asked.

"One hundred and twenty‑nine miles an hour," I told him.

"I'll bet she won't do it."

"I'll bet she will."

"All car‑makers is liars," he said. "You can buy any car you like and it'll never do what the makers say it will in the ads."

"This one will."

"Open 'er up then and prove it," he said. "Go on guv'nor, open 'er up and let's see what she'll do."

There is a traffic circle at Chalfont St Peter and immediately beyond there's a long straight section of divided highway. We came out of the circle onto the highway and I pressed my foot hard down on the accelerator. The big car leaped forward as though she'd been stung. In ten seconds or so, we were doing ninety.

"Lovely!" he cried. "Beautiful! Keep goin'!"

I had the accelerator jammed down against the floor and I held it there.

"One hundred!" he shouted. "A hundred and five! A hundred and ten! A hundred and fifteen! Go on! Don't slack off!"

I was in the outside lane and we flashed past several cars as though they were standing still a green Mini, a big cream‑coloured Citroen, a white Land Rover, a huge truck with a container on the back, an orange coloured Volkswagen Minibus "A hundred and twenty!" my passenger shouted, jumping up and down. "Go on! Go on! Get 'er up to one‑two‑nine!"

At that moment, I heard the scream of a police siren. It was so loud it seemed to be right inside the car, and then a cop on a motorcycle loomed up alongside us in the inside lane and went past us and raised a hand for us to stop.

"Oh, my sainted aunt!" I said. "That's torn it!"

The cop must have been doing about a hundred and thirty when he passed us, and he took plenty of time slowing down. Finally, he pulled to the side of the road and I pulled in behind him. "I didn't know police motorcycles could go as fast as that," I said rather lamely.

"That one can," my passenger said. "It's the same make as yours. It's a BMW R9OS. Fastest bike on the road. That's what they're usin' nowadays."

The cop got off his motorcycle and leaned the machine sideways onto its prop stand. Then he took off his gloves and placed them carefully on the seat. He was in no hurry now. He had us where he wanted us and he knew it.

"This is real trouble," I said. "I don't like it one little bit."

"Don't talk to 'im more than necessary, you understand," my companion said. "Just sit tight and keep mum."

Like an executioner approaching his victim, the cop came strolling slowly towards us. He was a big meaty man with a belly, and his blue breeches were skin‑tight around enormous thighs. His goggles were pulled up onto the helmet, showing a smouldering red face with wide cheeks. We sat there like guilty schoolboys, waiting for him to arrive.

"Watch out for this man," my passenger whispered, "e looks mean as the devil."

The cop came round to my open window and placed one meaty hand on the sill. "What's the hurry?" he said.

"No hurry, officer," I answered.

"Perhaps there's a woman in the back having a baby and you're rushing her to hospital? Is that it?"

"No, officer."

"Or perhaps your house is on fire and you're dashing home to rescue the family from upstairs?" His voice was dangerously soft and mocking.

"My house isn't on fire, officer."

"In that case," he said, "you've got yourself into a nasty mess, haven't you? Do you know what the speed limit is in this country?"

"Seventy," I said.

"And do you mind telling me exactly what speed you were doing just now?"

I shrugged and didn't say anything.

When he spoke next, he raised his voice so loud that I jumped. "One hundred and twenty miles per hour!" he barked. "That's fifty miles an hour over the limit!"

He turned his head and spat out a big gob of spit. It landed on the wing of my car and started sliding down over my beautiful blue paint. Then he turned back again and stared hard at my passenger. "And who are you?" he asked sharply. "He's a hitchhiker," I said. "I'm giving him a lift."

"I didn't ask you," he said. "I asked him."

"Ave I done somethin' wrong?" my passenger asked. His voice was soft and oily as haircream.

"That's more than likely," the cop answered. "Anyway, you're a witness. I'll deal with you in a minute. Driver's licence," he snapped, holding out his hand.

I gave him my driver's licence.

He unbuttoned the left‑hand breast pocket of his tunic and brought out the dreaded book of tickets. Carefully he copied the name and address from my licence. Then he gave it back to me. He strolled around to the front of the car and read the number from the licence plate and wrote that down as well. He filled in the date, the time and the details of my offence. Then he tore out the top copy of the ticket. But before handing it to me, he checked that all information had come through clearly on his own carbon copy. Finally, he replaced the book in his breast pocket and fastened the button.

"Now you," he said to my passenger, and he walked around to the other side of the car. From the other breast pocket he produced a small black notebook. "Name?" he snapped.

"Michael Fish," my passenger said.

"Address?"

"Fourteen, Windsor Lane, Luton."

"Show me something to prove this is your real name and address," the policeman said.

My passenger fished in his pockets and came out with a driver's licence of his own. The policeman checked the name and address and handed it back to him. "What's your job?" he asked sharply.

"I'm an 'od carrier."

"A what?

"An 'od carrier."

"Spell it."

"H‑o‑d c‑a–" "That'll do. And what's a hod carrier, may I ask?"

"An 'od carrier, officer, is a person 'oo carries the cement up the ladder to the bricklayer. And the 'od is what 'ee carries it in. It's got a long 'andle, and on the top you've got bits of wood set at an angle..

"All right, all right. Who's your employer?"

"Don't 'ave one. I'm unemployed."

The cop wrote this down in the black notebook. Then he returned the book to his pocket and did up the button.

"When I get back to the station I'm going to do a little checking up on you," he said to my passenger.

"Me? What've I done wrong?" the rat‑faced man asked.

"I don't like your face, that's all," the cop said. "And we just might have a picture of it somewhere in our files." He strolled round the car and returned to my window.

"I suppose you know you're in serious trouble," he said to me.

"Yes, officer."

"You won't be driving this fancy car of yours again for a very long time, not after we've finished with you. You won't be driving any car again, come to that, for several years. And a good thing, too. I hope they lock you up for a spell into the bargain."

"You mean prison?" I asked, alarmed.

"Absolutely," he said, smacking his lips. "In the clink. Behind the bars. Along with all the other criminals who break the law. And a hefty fine into the bargain. Nobody will be more pleased about that than me. I'll see you in court, both of you. You'll be getting a summons to appear."

He turned and walked over to his motorcycle. He flipped the prop stand back into position with his foot and swung his leg over the saddle. Then he kicked the starter and roared off up the road out of sight.

"Phew!" I gasped. "That's done it."

"We was caught," my passenger said. "We was caught good and proper."

"I was caught, you mean."

"That's right," he said. "What you goin' to do now, guv'nor?"

"I'm going straight up to London to talk to my solicitor," I said. I started my car and drove on.

"You mustn't believe what 'ee said to you about goin' to prison," my passenger said. "They don't put somebody in the clink just for speedin'."

"Are you sure of that?" I asked.

"I'm positive," he answered. "They can take your licence away and they can give you a whoppin' big fine, but that'll be the end of it." I felt tremendously relieved.

"By the way," I said, "why did you lie to him?"

"Who, me?" he said. "What makes you think I lied?"

"You told him you were an unemployed hod carrier. But you told me you were in a highly skilled trade."

"So I am," he said. "But it don't do to tell everythin' to a copper."

"So what do you do?" I asked him.

"Ah," he said slyly. "That'd be tellin', wouldn't it?"

"Is it something you're ashamed of?"

"Ashamed?" he cried. "Me, ashamed of my job? I'm about as proud of it as anybody could be in the entire world!"

"Then why won't you tell me?"

"You writers really is nosy parkers, aren't you?" he said. "And you ain't goin' to be 'appy, I don't think, until you've found out exactly what the answer is?"

"I don't really care one way or the other," I told him, lying.

He gave me a crafty look out of the sides of his eyes. "I think you do care," he said. "I can see it in your face that you think I'm in some kind of very peculiar trade and you're just achin' to know what it is."

I didn't like the way he read my thoughts. I kept quiet and stared at the road ahead.

"You'd be right, too," he went on. "I am in a very peculiar trade. I'm in the queerest peculiar trade of 'em all." I waited for him to go on.

"That's why I 'as to be extra careful 'oo I'm talking to, you see. 'Ow am I to know, for instance, you're not another copper in plain clothes?"

"Do I look like a copper?"

"No," he said. "You don't. And you ain't. Any fool could tell that."

He took from his pocket a tin of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers and started to roll a cigarette. I was watching him out of the corner of my eye, and the speed with which he performed this rather difficult operation was incredible. The cigarette was rolled and ready in about five seconds. He ran his tongue along the edge of the paper, stuck it down and popped the cigarette between his lips. Then, as if from nowhere, a lighter appeared in his hand. The lighter flamed. The cigarette was lit. The lighter disappeared. It was altogether a remarkable performance.

"I've never seen anyone roll a cigarette as fast as that," I said.

"Ah," he said, taking a deep suck of smoke. "So you noticed."

"Of course I noticed. It was quite fantastic."

He sat back and smiled. It pleased him very much that I had noticed how quickly he could roll a cigarette. "You want to know what makes me able to do it?" he asked.

"Go on then."

"It's because I've got fantastic fingers. These fingers of mine," he said, holding up both hands high in front of him, "are quicker and cleverer than the fingers of the best piano player in the world!"

"Are you a piano player?"

"Don't be daft," he said. "Do I look like a piano player?"

I glanced at his fingers. They were so beautifully shaped, so slim and long and elegant, they didn't seem to belong to the rest of him at all. They looked like the fingers of a brain surgeon or a watchmaker.

"My job," he went on, "is a hundred times more difficult than playin' the piano. Any twerp can learn to do that. There's titchy little kids learnin' to play the piano at almost any 'ouse you go into these days. That's right, ain't it?"

"More or less," I said.

"Of course it's right. But there's not one person in ten million can learn to do what I do. Not one in ten million! 'Ow about that?"

"Amazing," I said.

"You're darn right it's amazin'," he said.

"I think I know what you do," I said. "You do conjuring tricks. You're a conjuror."

"Me?" he snorted. "A conjuror? Can you picture me goin' round crummy kids' parties makin' rabbits come out of top 'ats?"

"Then you're a card player. You get people into card games and you deal yourself out marvellous hands."

"Me! A rotten cardsharper!" he cried. "That's a miserable racket if ever there was one."

"All right. I give up."

I was taking the car along slowly now, at no more than forty miles an hour, to make sure I wasn't stopped again. We had come onto the main London‑Oxford road and were running down the hill toward Denham.

Suddenly, my passenger was holding up a black leather belt in his hand. "Ever seen this before?" he asked. The belt had a brass buckle of unusual design.

"Hey!" I said. "That's mine, isn't it? It is mine! Where did you get it?"

He grinned and waved the belt gently from side to side. "Where d'you think I got it?" he said. "Off the top of your trousers, of course."

I reached down and felt for my belt. It was gone.

"You mean you took it off me while we've been driving along?" I asked flabbergasted.

He nodded, watching me all the time with those little black ratty eyes.

 

"That's impossible." I said. "You'd have had to undo the buckle and slide the whole thing out through the loops all the way round. I'd have seen you doing it. And even if I hadn't seen you, I'd have felt it."

"Ah, but you didn't, did you?" he said, triumphant. He dropped the belt on his lap, and now all at once there was a brown shoelace dangling from his fingers. "And what about this, then?" he exclaimed, waving the shoelace.

"What about it?" I said.

"Anyone around 'ere missing a shoelace?" he asked, grinning.

I glanced down at my shoes. The lace of one of them was missing. "Good grief!" I said. "How did you do that? I never saw you bending down."

"You never saw nothin'," he said proudly. "You never even saw me move an inch. And you know why?"

"Yes," I said. "Because you've got fantastic fingers."

"Exactly right!" he cried. "You catch on pretty quick, don't you?" He sat back and sucked away at his homemade cigarette, blowing the smoke out in a thin stream against the windshield. He knew he had impressed me greatly with those two tricks, and this made him very happy. "I don't want to be late," he said. "What time is it?"

"There's a clock in front of you," I told him.

"I don't trust car clocks," he said. "What does your watch say?"

I hitched up my sleeve to look at the watch on my wrist. It wasn't there. I looked at the man. He looked back at me, grinning.

"You've taken that, too," I said.

He held out his hand and there was my watch lying in his palm. "Nice bit of stuff, this," he said. "Superior quality. Eighteen‑carat gold. Easy to sell, too. It's never any trouble gettin' rid of quality goods."

"I'd like it back, if you don't mind," I said rather huffily.

He placed the watch carefully on the leather tray in front of him. "I wouldn't nick anything from you, guv'nor," he said. "You're my pal. You're givin' me a lift."

"I'm glad to hear it," I said.

"All I'm doin' is answerin' your question," he went on. "You asked me what I do for a livin' and I'm showin' you."

"What else have you got of mine?"

He smiled again, and now he started to take from the pocket of his jacket one thing after another that belonged to me–my driver's licence, a key ring with four keys on it, some pound notes, a few coins, a letter from my publishers, my diary, a stubby old pencil, a cigarette lighter, and last of all, a beautiful old sapphire ring with pearls around it belonging to my wife. I was taking the ring up to a jeweller in London because one of the pearls was missing.

"Now there's another lovely piece of goods," he said, turning the ring over in his fingers. "That's eighteenth century, if I'm not mistaken, from the reign of King George the Third."

"You're right," I said, impressed. "You're absolutely right."

He put the ring on the leather tray with the other items.

"So you're a pickpocket," I said.

"I don't like that word," he answered. "It's a coarse and vulgar word. Pickpockets is coarse and vulgar people who only do easy little amateur jobs. They lift money from blind old ladies."

"What do you call yourself, then?"

"Me? I'm a fingersmith. I'm a professional fingersmith." He spoke the words solemnly and proudly, as though he were telling me he was President of the Royal College of Surgeons or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"I've never heard that word before," I said. "Did you invent it?"

"Of course I didn't invent it," he replied. "It's the name given to them who's risen to the very top of the profession. You've heard of a goldsmith or a silversmith, for instance. They're experts with gold and silver. I'm an expert with my fingers, so I'm a fingersmith."

"It must be an interesting job."

"It's a marvellous job," he answered. "It's lovely."

"And that's why you go to the races?"

"Race meetings is easy meat," he said. "You just stand around after the race, watchin' for the lucky ones to queue up and draw their money. And when you see someone collectin' a big bundle of notes, you simply follows after 'im and 'elps yourself. But don't get me wrong, guv'nor. I never takes nothin' from a loser. Nor from poor people neither. I only go after them as can afford it, the winners and the rich."

"That's very thoughtful of you," I said. "How often do you get caught?"

"Caught?" he cried, disgusted. "Me get caught! It's only pickpockets get caught. Fingersmiths never. Listen, I could take the false teeth out of your mouth if I wanted to and you wouldn't even catch me!"

"I don't have false teeth," I said.

"I know you don't," he answered. "Otherwise I'd 'ave 'ad 'em out long ago!"

I believed him. Those long slim fingers of his seemed able to do anything. We drove on for a while without talking.

"That policeman's going to check up on you pretty thoroughly," I said. "Doesn't that worry you a bit?"

"Nobody's checkin' up on me," he said.

 

"Of course they are. He's got your name and address written down most carefully in his black book."

The man gave me another of his sly ratty little smiles. "Ah" he said. "So 'ee 'as. But I'll bet 'ee ain't got it all written down in 'is memory as well. I've never known a copper yet with a decent memory. Some of 'em can't even remember their own names."

"What's memory got to do with it?" I asked. "It's written down in his book, isn't it?"

"Yes, guv'nor, it is. But the trouble is, 'ee's lost the book. 'Ee's lost both books, the one with my name on it and the one with yours."

In the long delicate fingers of his right hand, the man was holding up in triumph the two books he had taken from the policeman's pockets. "Easiest job I ever done," he announced proudly.

I nearly swerved the car into a milk truck, I was so excited.

"That copper's got nothin' on either of us now," he said.

"You're a genius!" I cried.

"Ee's got no names, no addresses, no car number, no nothin'," he said.

"You're brilliant!"

"I think you'd better pull off this main road as soon as possible," he said. "Then we'd better build a little bonfire and burn these books."

"You're a fantastic fellow!" I exclaimed.

"Thank you, guv'nor," he said. "It's always nice to be appreciated."

 

The Surgeon

 

 

"YOU have done extraordinarily well," Robert Sandy said, seating himself behind the desk. "It's altogether a splendid recovery. I don't think there's any need for you to come and see me any more."

The patient finished putting on his clothes and said to the surgeon, "May I speak to you, please, for another moment?"

"Of course you may," Robert Sandy said. "Take a seat."

The man sat down opposite the surgeon and leaned forward, placing his hands, palms downward, on the top of the desk. "I suppose you still refuse to take a fee?" he said.

"I've never taken one yet and I don't propose to change my ways at this time of life," Robert Sandy told him pleasantly. "I work entirely for the National Health Service and they pay me a very fair salary."

Robert Sandy MA, M. CHIR, FRCs, had been at The Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford for eighteen years and he was now fifty‑two years old, with a wife and three grown‑up children. Unlike many of his colleagues, he did not hanker after fame and riches. He was basically a simple man utterly devoted to his profession.

It was now seven weeks since his patient, a university undergraduate, had been rushed into Casualty by ambulance after a nasty car accident in the Banbury Road not far from the hospital. He was suffering from massive abdominal injuries and he had lost consciousness. When the call came through from Casualty for an emergency surgeon, Robert Sandy was up in his office having a cup of tea after a fairly arduous morning's work which had included a gall‑bladder, a prostate and a total colostomy, but for some reason he happened to be the only general surgeon available at that moment. He took one more sip of his tea, then walked straight back into the operating theatre and started scrubbing up all over again.

After three and a half hours on the operating table, the patient was still alive and Robert Sandy had done everything he could to save his life. The next day, to the surgeon's considerable surprise, the man was showing signs that he was going to survive. In addition, his mind was lucid and he was speaking coherently. It was only then, on the morning after the operation, that Robert Sandy began to realize that he had an important person on his hands. Three dignified gentlemen from the Saudi Arabian Embassy, including the Ambassador himself, came into the hospital and the first thing they wanted was to call in all manner of celebrated surgeons from Harley Street to advise on the case. The patient, with bottles suspended all round his bed and tubes running into many parts of his body, shook his head and murmured something in Arabic to the Ambassador.

"He says he wants only you to look after him," the Ambassador said to Robert Sandy.

"You are very welcome to call in anyone else you choose for consultation," Robert Sandy said.

"Not if he doesn't want us to," the Ambassador said. "He says you have saved his life and he has absolute faith in you. We must respect his wishes."

The Ambassador then told Robert Sandy that his patient was none other than a prince of royal blood. In other words, he was one of the many sons of the present King of Saudi Arabia.

A few days later, when the Prince was off the danger list, the Embassy tried once again to persuade him to make a change. They wanted him to be moved to a far more luxurious hospital that catered only for private patients, but the Prince would have none of it. "I stay here," he said, "with the surgeon who saved my life."

Robert Sandy was touched by the confidence his patient was putting in him, and throughout the long weeks of recovery, he did his best to ensure that this confidence was not misplaced.

And now, in the consulting‑room, the Prince was saying, "I do wish you would allow me to pay you for all you have done, Mr Sandy." The young man had spent three years at Oxford and he knew very well that in England a surgeon was always addressed as 'Mister' and not 'Doctor'. "Please let me pay you, Mr Sandy," he said.

Robert Sandy shook his head. "I'm sorry," he answered, "but I still have to say no. It's just a personal rule of mine and I won't break it."

"But dash it all, you saved my life," the Prince said, tapping the palms of his hands on the desk.

"I did no more than any other competent surgeon would have done," Robert Sandy said.

The Prince took his hands off the desk and clasped them on his lap. "All right, Mr Sandy, even though you refuse a fee, there is surely no reason why my father should not give you a small present to show his gratitude."

Robert Sandy shrugged his shoulders. Grateful patients quite often gave him a case of whisky or a dozen bottles of wine and he accepted these things gracefully. He never expected them, but he was awfully pleased when they arrived. It was a nice way of saying thank you.

The Prince took from his jacket pocket a small pouch made of black velvet and he pushed it across the desk. "My father," he said, "has asked me to tell you how enormously indebted he is to you for what you have done. He told me that whether you took a fee or not, I was to make sure you accepted this little gift."

Robert Sandy looked suspiciously at the black pouch, but he made no move to take it.

"My father," the Prince went on, "said also to tell you that in his eyes my life is without price and that nothing on earth can repay you adequately for having saved it. This is simply a what shall we call it… a present for your next birthday. A small birthday present."

"He shouldn't give me anything," Robert Sandy said.

"Look at it, please," the Prince said.

Rather gingerly, the surgeon picked up the pouch and loosened the silk thread at the opening. When he tipped it upside down, there was a flash of brilliant light as something icewhite dropped on to the plain wooden desk‑top. The stone was about the size of a cashew nut or a bit larger, perhaps three‑quarters of an inch long from end to end, and it was pear shaped, with a very sharp point at the narrow end. Its many facets glimmered and sparkled in the most wonderful way.

"Good gracious me," Robert Sandy said, looking at it but not yet touching it. "What is it?"

"It's a diamond," the prince said. "Pure white. It's not especially large, but the colour is good."

"I really can't accept a present like this," Robert Sandy said. "No, it wouldn't be right. It must be quite valuable."

The Prince smiled at him. "I must tell you something, Mr Sandy," he said. "Nobody refuses a gift from the King. It would be a terrible insult. It has never been done."

Robert Sandy looked back at the Prince. "Oh dear," he said. "You are making it awkward for me, aren't you?"

"It is not awkward at all," the Prince said. "Just take it."

"You could give it to the hospital."

"We have already made a donation to the hospital," the Prince said. "Please take it, not just for my father, but for me as well."

"You are very kind," Robert Sandy said. "All right, then. But I feel quite embarrassed." He picked up the diamond and placed it in the palm of one hand. "There's never been a diamond in our family before," he said. "Gosh, it is beautiful, isn't it. You must please convey my thanks to His Majesty and tell him I shall always treasure it."

"You don't actually have to hang on to it," the Prince said. "My father would not be in the least offended if you were to sell it. Who knows, one day you might need a little pocket‑money."

"I don't think I shall sell it," Robert Sandy said. "It is too lovely. Perhaps I shall have it made into a pendant for my wife."

"What a nice idea," the Prince said, getting up from his chair. "And please remember what I told you before. You and your wife are invited to my country at any time. My father would be happy to welcome you both."

"That's very good of him," Robert Sandy said. "I won't forget."

When the Prince had gone, Robert Sandy picked up the diamond again and examined it with total fascination. It was dazzling in its beauty, and as he moved it gently from side to side in his palm, one facet after the other caught the light from the window and flashed brilliantly with blue and pink and gold. He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes past three. An idea had come to him. He picked up the telephone and asked his secretary if there was anything else urgent for him to do that afternoon. If there wasn't, he told her, then he thought he might leave early.

"There's nothing that can't wait until Monday," the secretary said, sensing that for once this most hard‑working of men had some special reason for wanting to go.

"I've got a few things of my own I'd very much like to do."

"Off you go, Mr Sandy," she said. "Try to get some rest over the weekend. I'll see you on Monday."

In the hospital car park, Robert Sandy unchained his bicycle, mounted and rode out on to the Woodstock Road. He still bicycled to work every day unless the weather was foul. It kept him in shape and it also meant his wife could have the car. There was nothing odd about that. Half the population of Oxford rode on bicycles. He turned into the Woodstock Road and headed for The High. The only good jeweller in town had his shop in The High, halfway up on the right and he was called H. F. Gold. It said so above the window, and most people knew that H stood for Harry. Harry Gold had been there a long time, but Robert had only been inside once, years ago, to buy a small bracelet for his daughter as a confirmation present.

He parked his bike against the curb outside the shop and went in. A woman behind the counter asked if she could help him.

"Is Mr Gold in?" Robert Sandy said.

"Yes, he is."

"I would like to see him privately for a few minutes, if I may. My name is Sandy."

"Just a minute, please." The woman disappeared through a door at the back, but in thirty seconds she returned and said, "Will you come this way, please."

Robert Sandy walked into a large untidy office in which a small, oldish man was seated behind a partner's desk. He wore a grey goatee beard and steel spectacles, and he stood up as Robert approached him.

"Mr Gold, my name is Robert Sandy. I am a surgeon at The Radcliffe. I wonder if you can help me."

"I'll do my best, Mr Sandy. Please sit down."

"Well, it's an odd story," Robert Sandy said. "I recently operated on one of the Saudi princes. He's in his third year at Magdalen and he'd been involved in a nasty car accident. And now he has given me, or rather his father has given me, a fairly wonderful‑looking diamond."

"Good gracious me," Mr Gold said. "How very exciting."

"I didn't want to accept it, but I'm afraid it was more or less forced on me."

"And you would like me to look at it?"

"Yes, I would. You see, I haven't the faintest idea whether it's worth five hundred pounds or five thousand, and it's only sensible that I should know roughly what the value is."

"Of course you should," Harry Gold said. "I'll be glad to help you. Doctors at the Radcliffe have helped me a great deal over the years."

Robert Sandy took the black pouch out of his pocket and placed it on the desk. Harry Gold opened the pouch and tipped the diamond into his hand. As the stone fell into his palm, there was a moment when the old man appeared to freeze. His whole body became motionless as he sat there staring at the brilliant shining thing that lay before him. Slowly, he stood up. He walked over to the window and held the stone so that daylight fell upon it. He turned it over with one finger. He didn't say a word. His expression never changed. Still holding the diamond, he returned to his desk and from a drawer he took out a single sheet of clean white paper. He made a loose fold in the paper and placed the diamond in the fold. Then he returned to the window and stood there for a full minute studying the diamond that lay in the fold of paper.

"I am looking at the colour," he said at last. "That's the first thing to do. One always does that against a fold of white paper and preferably in a north light."

"Is that a north light?"

"Yes, it is. This stone is a wonderful colour, Mr Sandy. As fine a D colour as I've ever seen. In the trade, the very best quality white is called a D colour. In some places it's called a River. That's mostly in Scandinavia. A layman would call it a Blue White."

"It doesn't look very blue to me," Robert Sandy said.

"The purest whites always contain a trace of blue," Harry Gold said. "That's why in the old days they always put a blue‑bag into the washing water. It made the clothes whiter."

"Ah yes, of course."

Harry Gold went back to his desk and took out from another drawer a sort of hooded magnifying glass. "This is a ten‑times loupe," he said, holding it up. "What did you call it?"

"A loupe. It is simply a jeweller's magnifier. With this, I can examine the stone for imperfections."

Back once again at the window, Harry Gold began a minute examination of the diamond through the ten‑times loupe, holding the paper with the stone on it in one hand and the loupe in the other. This process took maybe four minutes. Robert Sandy watched him and kept quiet.

"So far as I can see," Harry Gold said, "it is completely flawless. It really is a most lovely stone. The quality is superb and the cutting is very fine, though definitely not modern."

"Approximately how many facets would there be on a diamond like that?" Robert Sandy asked.

"Fifty‑eight."

"You mean you know exactly?"

"Yes, I know exactly."

"Good Lord. And what roughly would you say it is worth?"

"A diamond like this," Harry Gold said, taking it from the paper and placing it in his palm, "a D colour stone of this size and clarity would command on enquiry a trade price of between twenty‑five and thirty thousand dollars a carat. In the shops it would cost you double that. Up to sixty thousand dollars a carat in the retail market."

"Great Scott!" Robert Sandy cried, jumping up. The little jeweller's words seemed to have lifted him clean out of his seat. He stood there, stunned. "And now," Harry Gold was saying, "we must find out precisely how many carats it weighs." He crossed over to a shelf on which there stood a small metal apparatus. "This is simply an electronic scale," he said. He slid back a glass door and placed the diamond inside. He twiddled a couple of knobs, then he read off the figures on a dial. "It weighs fifteen point two seven carats," he said. "And that, in case it interests you, makes it worth about half a million dollars in the trade and over one million dollars if you bought it in a shop."

"You are making me nervous," Robert Sandy said, laughing nervously.

"If I owned it," Harry Gold said, "it would make me nervous. Sit down again, Mr Sandy, so you don't faint."

Robert Sandy sat down.

Harry Gold took his time settling himself into his chair behind the big partner's desk. "This is quite an occasion, Mr Sandy," he said. "I don't often have the pleasure of giving someone quite such a startlingly wonderful shock as this. I think I'm enjoying it more than you are."

"I am too shocked to be really enjoying it yet," Robert Sandy said. "Give me a moment or two to recover."

"Mind you," Harry Gold said, "one wouldn't expect much less from the King of the Saudis. Did you save the young prince's life?"

"I suppose I did, yes."

"Then that explains it." Harry Gold had put the diamond back on to the fold of white paper on his desk, and he sat there looking at it with the eyes of a man who loved what he saw. "My guess is that this stone came from the treasure‑chest of old King Ibn Saud of Arabia. If that is the case, then it will be totally unknown in the trade, which makes it even more desirable. Are you going to sell it?"

"Oh gosh, I don't know what I am going to do with it," Robert Sandy said. "It's all so sudden and confusing."

"May I give you some advice."

"Please do."

"If you are going to sell it, you should take it to auction. An unseen stone like this would attract a lot of interest, and the wealthy private buyers would be sure to come in and bid against the trade. And if you were able to reveal its provenance as well, telling them that it came directly from the Saudi Royal Family, then the price would go through the roof."

"You have been more than kind to me," Robert Sandy said. "When I do decide to sell it, I shall come first of all to you for advice. But tell me, does a diamond really cost twice as much in the shops as it does in the trade?"

"I shouldn't be telling you this," Harry Gold said, "but I'm afraid it does."

"So if you buy one in Bond Street or anywhere else like that, you are actually paying twice its intrinsic worth?"

"That's more or less right. A lot of young ladies have received nasty shocks when they've tried to re‑sell jewellery that has been given to them by gentlemen."

"So diamonds are not a girl's best friend?"

"They are still very friendly things to have," Harry Gold said, "as you have just found out. But they are not generally a good investment for the amateur."

Outside in The High, Robert Sandy mounted his bicycle and headed for home. He was feeling totally light headed. It was as though he had just finished a whole bottle of good wine all by himself. Here he was, solid old Robert Sandy, sedate and sensible cycling through the streets of Oxford with more than half a million dollars in the pocket of his old tweed jacket! It was madness. But it was true.

He arrived back at his house in Acacia Road at about half past four and parked his bike in the garage alongside the car. Suddenly he found himself running along the little concrete path that led to the front door. "Now stop that!" he said aloud, pulling up short. "Calm down. You've got to make this really good for Betty. Unfold it slowly." But oh, he simply could not wait to give the news to his lovely wife and watch her face as he told her the whole story of his afternoon. He found her in the kitchen packing some jars of home‑made jam into a basket.

"Robert!" she cried, delighted as always to see him. "You're home early! How nice!"

He kissed her and said, "I am a bit early, aren't I?"

"You haven't forgotten we're going to the Renshaws for the weekend? We have to leave fairly soon."

"I had forgotten," he said. "Or maybe I hadn't. Perhaps that's why I'm home early."

"I thought I'd take Margaret some jam."

"Good," he said. "Very good. You take her some jam. That's a very good idea to take Margaret some jam."

There was something in the way he was acting that made her swing round and stare at him. "Robert," she said, "what's happened? There's something the matter."

"Pour us each a drink," he said. "I've got a bit of news for you."

"Oh darling, it's not something awful, is it?"

"No," he said. "It's something funny. I think you'll like it."

"You've been made Head of Surgery!"

"It's funnier than that," he said. "Go on, make a good stiff drink for each of us and sit down and I'll tell you."

"It's a bit early for drinks," she said, but she got the ice‑tray from the fridge and started making his whisky and soda. While she was doing this, she kept glancing up at him nervously. She said, "I don't think I've ever seen you quite like this before. You are wildly excited about something and you are pretending to be very calm. You're all red in the face. Are you sure it's good news?"

"I think it is," he said, "but I'll let you judge that for yourself." He sat down at the kitchen table and watched her as she put the glass of whisky in front of him. "All right," she said. "Come on. Let's have it."

"Get a drink for yourself first," he said.

"My goodness, what is this?" she said, but she poured some gin into a glass and was reaching for the ice‑tray when he said, "More than that. Give yourself a good stiff one."

"Now I am worried," she said, but she did as she was told and then added ice and filled the glass up with tonic. "Now then," she said, sitting down beside him at the table, "get it off your chest."

Robert began telling his story. He started with the Prince in the consulting‑room and he spun it out long and well so that it took a good ten minutes before he came to the diamond.

"It must be quite a whopper," she said, "to make you go all red in the face and funny‑looking."

He reached into his pocket and took out the little black pouch and put it on the table. "There it is," he said. "What do you think?"

She loosened the silk cord and tipped the stone into her hand. "Oh, my God!" she cried. "It's absolutely stunning!"

"It is, isn't it."

"It's amazing."

"I haven't told you the whole story yet," he said, and while his wife rolled the diamond from the palm of one hand to the other, he went on to tell her about his visit to Harry Gold in The High. When he came to the point where the jeweller began to talk about value, he stopped and said, "So what do you think he said it was worth?"

"Something pretty big," she said. "It's bound to be. I mean just look at it!"

"Go on then, make a guess. How much?"

"Ten thousand pounds," she said. "I really don't have any idea."

"Try again."

"You mean, it's more?"

"Yes, it's quite a lot more."

"Twenty thousand pounds!"

"Would you be thrilled if it was worth as much as that?"

"Of course, I would, darling. Is it really worth twenty thousand pounds?"

"Yes," he said. "And the rest."

"Now don't be a beast, Robert. Just tell me what Mr Gold said."

"Take another drink of gin."

She did so, then put down the glass, looking at him and waiting.

"It is worth at least half a million dollars and very probably over a million."

"You're joking!" Her words came out in a kind of gasp.

"It's known as a pear‑shape," he said. "And where it comes to a point at this end, it's as sharp as a needle."

"I'm completely stunned," she said, still gasping.

"You wouldn't have thought half a million, would you?"

"I've never in my life had to think in those sort of figures," she said. She stood up and went over to him and gave him a huge hug and a kiss. "You really are the most wonderful and stupendous man in the world!" she cried.

"I was totally bowled over," he said. "I still am."

"Oh Robert!" she cried, gazing at him with eyes bright as two stars. "Do you realize what this means? It means we can get Diana and her husband out of that horrid little flat and buy them a small house!"

"By golly, you're right!"

"And we can buy a decent flat for John and give him a better allowance all the way through his medical school! And Ben… Ben wouldn't have to go on a motor‑bike to work all through the freezing winters. We could get him something better. And… and… and..

"And what?" he asked, smiling at her.

"And you and I can take a really good holiday for once and go wherever we please! We can go to Egypt and Turkey and you can visit Baalbek and all the other places you've been longing to go to for years and years!" She was quite breathless with the vista of small pleasures that were unfolding in her dreams. "And you can start collecting some really nice pieces for once in your life as well!"

Ever since he had been a student, Robert Sandy's passion had been the history of the Mediterranean countries, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt, and he had made himself into something of an expert on the ancient world of those various civilizations. He had done it by reading and studying and by visiting, when he had the time, the British Museum and the Ashmolean. But with three children to educate and with a job that paid only a reasonable salary, he had never been able to indulge this passion as he would have liked. He wanted above all to visit some of the grand remote regions of Asia Minor and also the now below‑ground village of Babylon in Iraq and he would love to see the Arch of Ctsephon and the Sphinx at Memphis and a hundred other things and places, but neither the time nor the money had ever been available. Even so, the long coffee‑table in the living‑room was covered with small objects and fragments that he had managed to pick up cheaply here and there through his life. There was a mysterious pale alabaster ushaptiu in the form of a mummy from Upper Egypt which he knew was Pre‑Dynastic from about 7000 BC. There was a bronze bowl from Lydia with an engraving on it of a horse, and an early Byzantine twisted silver necklace, and a section of a wooden painted mask from an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a Roman red‑ware bowl, and a small black Etruscan dish, and perhaps fifty other fragile and interesting little pieces. None was particularly valuable, but Robert Sandy loved them all.

"Wouldn't that be marvellous?" his wife was saying. "Where shall we go first?"

"Turkey," he said.

"Listen," she said, pointing to the diamond that lay sparkling on the kitchen table, "you'd better put your fortune away somewhere safe before you lose it."

"Today is Friday," he said. "When do we get back from the Renshaws?"

"Sunday night."

"And what are we going to do with our million‑pound rock in the meanwhile? Take it with us in my pocket?"

"No." she said, "that would be silly. You really cannot walk around with a million pounds in your pocket for a whole weekend. It's got to go into a safe‑deposit box at the bank. We should do it now."

"It's Friday night, my darling. All the banks are closed till next Monday."

"So they are," she said. "Well then, we'd better hide it somewhere in the house."

"The house will be empty till we come back," he said. "I don't think that's a very good idea."

"It's better than carrying it around in your pocket or in my handbag."

"I'm not leaving it in the house. An empty house is always liable to be burgled."

"Come on, darling," she said, "surely we can think of a place where no one could possibly find it."

"In the tea‑pot," he said.

"Or bury it in the sugar‑basin," she said.

"Or put it in the bowl of one of my pipes in the pipe‑rack," he said. "With some tobacco over it."

"Or under the soil of the azalea plant," she said.

"Hey, that's not bad, Betty. That's the best so far." They sat at the kitchen table with the shining stone lying there between them, wondering very seriously what to do with it for the next two days while they were away.

"I still think it's best if I take it with me," he said.

"I don't, Robert. You'll be feeling in your pocket every five minutes to make sure it's still there. You won't relax for one moment."

"I suppose you're right," he said. "Very well, then. Shall we bury it under the soil of the azalea plant in the sitting‑room? No one's going to look there."

"It's not one hundred percent safe," she said. "Someone could knock the pot over and the soil would spill out on the floor and presto, there's a sparkling diamond lying there."

"It's a thousand to one against that," he said. "It's a thousand to one against the house being broken into anyway."

"No, it's not," she said. "Houses are being burgled every day. It's not worth chancing it. But look, darling, I'm not going to let this thing become a nuisance to you, or a worry."

"I agree with that," he said.

They sipped their drinks for a while in silence.

"I've got it!" she cried, leaping up from her chair. "I've thought of a marvellous place!"

"Where?"

"In here," she cried, picking up the ice‑tray and pointing to one of the empty compartments. "We'll just drop it in here and fill it with water and put it back in the fridge. In an hour or two it'll be hidden inside a solid block of ice and even if you looked, you wouldn't be able to see it."

Robert Sandy stared at the ice‑tray. "It's fantastic!" he said. "You're a genius! Let's do it right away!"

"Shall we really do it?"

"Of course. It's a terrific idea."

She picked up the diamond and placed it into one of the little empty compartments. She went to the sink and carefully filled the whole tray with water. She opened the door of the freezer section of the fridge and slid the tray in. "It's the top tray on the left," she said. "We'd better remember that. And it'll be in the block of ice furthest away on the right hand side of the tray."

"The top tray on the left," he said. "Got it. I feel better now that it's tucked safely away."

"Finish your drink, darling," she said. "Then we must be off. I've packed your case for you. And we'll try not to think about our million pounds any more until we come back."

"Do we talk about it to other people?" he asked her. "Like the Renshaws or anyone else who might be there?"

"I wouldn't," she said. "It's such an incredible story that it would soon spread around all over the place. Next thing you know, it would be in the papers."

"I don't think the King of the Saudis would like that," he said.

"Nor do I. So let's say nothing at the moment."

"I agree," he said. "I would hate any kind of publicity."

"You'll be able to get yourself a new car," she said, laughing.

"So I will. I'll get one for you, too. What kind would you like, darling?"

"I'll think about it," she said.

***

Soon after that, the two of them drove off to the Renshaws for the weekend. It wasn't far, just beyond Whitney, some thirty minutes from their own house. Charlie Renshaw was a consultant physician at the hospital and the families had known each other for many years.

The weekend was pleasant and uneventful, and on Sunday evening Robert and Betty Sandy drove home again, arriving at the, house in Acacia Road at about seven pm. Robert took the two small suitcases from the car and they walked up the path together. He unlocked the front door and held it open for his wife.

"I'll make some scrambled eggs," she said, "and crispy bacon. Would you like a drink first, darling?"

"Why not?" he said.

He closed the door and was about to carry the suitcases upstairs when he heard a piercing scream from the sitting‑room "Oh no!,, she was crying. "No! No! No!"

Robert dropped the suitcase and rushed in after her. She was standing there pressing her hands to her cheeks and already tears were streaming down her face.

The scene in the sitting‑room was one of utter desolation. The curtains were drawn and they seemed to be the only things that remained intact in the room. Everything else had been smashed to smithereens. All Robert Sandy's precious little objects from the coffee‑table had been picked up and flung against the walls and were lying in tiny pieces on the carpet. A glass cabinet had been tipped over. A chest‑of‑drawers had had its four drawers pulled out and the contents, photograph albums, games of Scrabble and Monopoly and a chessboard and chessmen and many other family things had been flung across the room. Every single book had been pulled out of the big floor‑to‑ceiling bookshelves against the far wall and piles of them were now lying open and mutilated all over the place. The glass on each of the four watercolours had been smashed and the oil painting of their three children painted when they were young had had its canvas slashed many times with a knife. The armchairs and the sofa had also been slashed so that the stuffing was bulging out. Virtually everything in the room except the curtains and the carpet had been destroyed.

"Oh, Robert," she said, collapsing into his arms, "I don't think I can stand this."

He didn't say anything. He felt physically sick.

"Stay here," he said. "I'm going to look upstairs." He ran out and took the stairs two at a time and went first to their bedroom. It was the same in there. The drawers had been pulled out and the shirts and blouses and underclothes were now scattered everywhere. The bedclothes had been stripped from the double‑bed and even the mattress had been tipped off the bed and slashed many times with a knife. The cupboards were open and every dress and suit and every pair of trousers and every jacket and every skirt had been ripped from its hanger. He didn't look in the other bedrooms. He ran downstairs and put an arm around his wife's shoulders and together they picked their way through the debris of the sitting‑room towards the kitchen. There they stopped.

The mess in the kitchen was indescribable. Almost every single container of any sort in the entire room had been emptied on to the floor and then smashed to pieces. The place was a waste‑land of broken jars and bottles and food of every kind. All Betty's home‑made jams and pickles and bottled fruits had been swept from the long shelf and lay shattered on the ground. The same had happened to the stuff in the store‑cupboard, the mayonnaise, the ketchup, the vinegar, the olive oil, the vegetable oil and all the rest. There were two other long shelves on the far wall and on these had stood about twenty lovely large glass jars with big groundglass stoppers in which were kept rice and flour and brown sugar and bran and oatmeal and all sorts of other things. Every jar now lay on the floor in many pieces, with the contents spewed around. The refrigerator door was open and the things that had been inside, the leftover foods, the milk, the eggs, the butter, the yoghurt, the tomatoes, the lettuce, all of them had been pulled out and splashed on to the pretty tiled kitchen floor. The inner drawers of the fridge had been thrown into the mass of slush and trampled on. The plastic ice‑trays had been yanked out and each had been literally broken in two and thrown aside. Even the plastic‑coated shelves had been ripped out of the fridge and bent double and thrown down with the rest. All the bottles of drink, the whisky, gin, vodka, sherry, vermouth, as well as half a dozen cans of beer, were standing on the table, empty. The bottles of drink and the beer cans seemed to be the only things in the entire house that had not been smashed. Practically the whole floor lay under a thick layer of mush and goo. It was as if a gang of mad children had been told to see how much mess they could make and had succeeded brilliantly.

Robert and Betty Sandy stood on the edge of it all, speechless with horror. At last Robert said, "I imagine our lovely diamond is somewhere underneath all that."

"I don't give a damn about our diamond," Betty said. "I'd like to kill the people who did this."

"So would I," Robert said. "I've got to call the police." He went back into the sitting‑room and picked up the telephone. By some miracle it still worked.

The first squad car arrived in a few minutes. It was followed over the next half‑hour by a Police Inspector, a couple of plain‑clothes men, a finger‑print expert and a photographer. The Inspector had a black moustache and a short muscular body. "These are not professional thieves," he told Robert Sandy after he had taken a look round. "They weren't even amateur thieves. They were simply hooligans off the street. Riff‑raff. Yobbos. Probably three of them. People like this scout around looking for an empty house and when they find it they break in and the first thing they do is to hunt out the booze. Did you have much alcohol on the premises?"

"The usual stuff," Robert said. "Whisky, gin, vodka, sherry and a few cans of beer."

"They'll have drunk the lot," the Inspector said. "Lads like these have only two things in mind, drink and destruction. They collect all the booze on to a table and sit down and drink themselves raving mad. Then they go on the rampage."

"You mean they didn't come in here to steal?" Robert asked.

"I doubt they've stolen anything at all," the Inspector said. "If they'd been thieves they would at least have taken your TV set. Instead, they smashed it up."

"But why do they do this?"

"You'd better ask their parents," the Inspector said. "They're rubbish, that's all they are, just rubbish. People aren't brought up right any more these days."

Then Robert told the Inspector about the diamond. He gave him all the details from the beginning to end because he realized that from the police point of view it was likely to be the most important part of the whole business.

"Half a million quid!" cried the Inspector. "Jesus Christ!"

"Probably double that," Robert said.

"Then that's the first thing we look for," the Inspector said.

"I personally do not propose to go down on my hands and knees grubbing around in that pile of slush," Robert said. "I don't feel like it at this moment."

"Leave it to us," the Inspector said. "We'll find it. That was a clever place to hide it."

"My wife thought of it. But tell me, Inspector, if by some remote chance they had found it…

"Impossible," the Inspector said. "How could they?"

"They might have seen it lying on the floor after the ice had melted," Robert said. "I agree it's unlikely. But if they had spotted it, would they have taken it?"

"I think they would; the Inspector said." No one can resist a diamond. It has a sort of magnetism about it. Yes, if one of them had seen it on the floor, I think he would have slipped it into his pocket. But don't worry about it, doctor. It'll turn up."

"I'm not worrying about it," Robert said. "Right now, I'm worrying about my wife and about our house. My wife spent years trying to make this place into a good home."

"Now look, sir," the Inspector said, "the thing for you to do tonight is to take your wife off to a hotel and get some rest. Come back tomorrow, both of you, and we'll start sorting things out. There'll be someone here all the time looking after the house."

"I have to operate at the hospital first thing in the morning," Robert said. "But I expect my wife will try to come along."

"Good," the Inspector said. "It's a nasty upsetting business having your house ripped apart like this. It's a big shock. I've seen it many times. It hits you very hard."

Robert and Betty Sandy stayed the night at Oxford's Randolph Hotel, and by eight o'clock the following morning Robert was in the Operating Theatre at the hospital, beginning to work his way through his morning list.

Shortly after noon, Robert had finished his last operation, a straightforward non‑malignant prostate on an elderly male. He removed his rubber gloves and mask and went next door to the surgeons' small rest‑room for a cup of coffee. But before he got his coffee, he picked up the telephone and called his wife.

"How are you, darling?" he said.

"Oh Robert, it's so awful," she said. "I just don't know where to begin."

"Have you called the insurance company?"

"Yes, they're coming any moment to help me make a list."

"Good," he said. "And have the police found our diamond?"

"I'm afraid not," she said. "They've been through every bit of that slush in the kitchen and they swear it's not there."

"Then where can it have gone? Do you think the vandals found it?"

"I suppose they must have," she said. "When they broke those ice‑trays all the ice‑cubes would have fallen out. They fall out when you just bend the tray. They're meant to."

"They still wouldn't have spotted it in the ice," Robert said.

"They would when the ice melted," she said. "Those men must have been in the house for hours. Plenty of time for it to melt."

"I suppose you're right."

"It would stick out a mile lying there on the floor," she said, "the way it shines."

"Oh dear," Robert said.

"If we never get it back we won't miss it much anyway, darling," she said. "We only had it a few hours."

"I agree," he said. "Do the police have any leads on who the vandals were?"

"Not a clue," she said. "They found lots of finger‑prints, but they don't seem to belong to any known criminals."

"They wouldn't," he said, "not if they were hooligans off the street."

"That's what the Inspector said."

"Look, darling," he said, "I've just about finished here for the morning. I'm going to grab some coffee, then I'll come home to give you a hand."

"Good," she said. "I need you, Robert. I need you badly."

"Just give me five minutes to rest my feet," he said, "I feel exhausted." ***

In Number Two Operating Theatre not ten yards away, another senior surgeon called Brian Goff was also nearly finished for the morning. He was on his last patient, a young man who had a piece of bone lodged somewhere in his small intestine. Goff was being assisted by a rather jolly young Registrar named William Haddock, and between them they had opened the patient's abdomen and Goff was lifting out a section of the small intestine and feeling along it with his fingers. It was routine stuff and there was a good deal of conversation going on in the room.

"Did I ever tell you about the man who had lots of little live fish in his bladder?" William Haddock was saying.

"I don't think you did," Goff said.

"When we were students at Barts," William Haddock said, "we were being taught by a particularly unpleasant Professor of Urology. One day, this twit was going to demonstrate how to examine the bladder using a cystoscope. The patient was an old man suspected of having stones. Well now, in one of the hospital waiting‑rooms, there was an aquarium that was full of those tiny little fish, neons they're called, brilliant colours, and one of the students sucked up about twenty of them into a syringe and managed to inject them into the patient's bladder when he was under his premed, before he was taken up to Theatre for his cystoscopy."

"That's disgusting!" the theatre sister cried. "You can stop right there, Mr Haddock!" Brian Goff smiled behind his mask and said, "What happened next?" As he spoke, he had about three feet of the patient's small intestine lying on the green sterile sheet, and he was still feeling along it with his fingers.

"When the Professor got the cystoscope into the bladder and put his eye to it," William Haddock said, "he started jumping up and down and shouting with excitement.

"What is it, sir?' the guilty student asked him. "What do you see?"

"It's fish!' cried the Professor. 'There's hundreds of little fish! They're swimming about!"

"You made it up," the theatre sister said. "It's not true."

"It most certainly is true," the Registrar said. "I looked down the cystoscope myself and saw the fish. And they were actually swimming about."

"We might have expected a fishy story from a man with a name like Haddock," Goff said. "Here we are," he added. "Here's this poor chap's trouble. You want to feel it?"

William Haddock took the pale grey piece of intestine between his fingers and pressed. "Yes," he said. "Got it."

"And if you look just there," Goff said, instructing him, "you can see where the bit of bone has punctured the mucosa. It's already inflamed."

Brian Goff held the section of intestine in the palm of his left hand. The sister handed him a scalpel and he made a small incision. The sister gave him a pair of forceps and Goff probed down amongst all the slushy matter of the intestine until he found the offending object. He brought it out, held firmly in the forceps, and dropped it into the small stainless‑steel bowl the sister was holding. The thing was covered in pale brown gunge.

"That's it," Goff said. "You can finish this one for me now, can't you, William. I was meant to be at a meeting downstairs fifteen minutes ago."

"You go ahead," William Haddock said. "I'll close him up."

The senior surgeon hurried out of the Theatre and the Registrar proceeded to sew up, first the incision in the intestine, then the abdomen itself. The whole thing took no more than a few minutes.

"I'm finished," he said to the anaesthetist.

The man nodded and removed the mask from the patient's face.

"Thank you, sister," William Haddock said. "See you tomorrow." As he moved away, he picked up from the sister's tray the stainless‑steel bowl that contained the gunge‑covered brown object. "Ten to one it's a chicken bone," he said and he carried it to the sink and began rinsing it under the tap.

"Good God, what's this?" he cried. "Come and look, sister!"

The sister came over to look. "It's a piece of costume jewellery," she said. "Probably part of a necklace. Now how on earth did he come to swallow that?"

"He'd have passed it if it hadn't had such a sharp point," William Haddock said. "I think I'll give it to my girlfriend."

"You can't do that, Mr Haddock," the sister said. "It belongs to the patient. Hang on a sec. Let me look at it again." She took the stone from William Haddock's gloved hand and carried it into the powerful light that hung over the operating table. The patient had now been lifted off the table and was being wheeled out into Recovery next door, accompanied by the anaesthetist.

"Come here, Mr Haddock," the sister said, and there was an edge of excitement in her voice. William Haddock joined her under the light. "This is amazing," she went on. "Just look at the way it sparkles and shines. A bit of glass wouldn't do that."

"Maybe it's rock‑crystal," William Haddock said, "or topaz, one of those semi‑precious stones."

"You know what I think," the sister said. "I think it's a diamond."

"Don't be damn silly," William Haddock said.

A junior nurse was wheeling away the instrument trolley and a male theatre assistant was helping to clear up. Neither of them took any notice of the young surgeon and the sister. The sister was about twenty‑eight years old, and now that she had removed her mask she appeared as an extremely attractive young lady.

"It's easy enough to test it," William Haddock said. "See if it cuts glass." Together they crossed over to the frosted‑glass window of the operating‑room. The sister held the stone between finger and thumb and pressed the sharp pointed end against the glass and drew it downward. There was a fierce scraping crunch as the point bit into the glass and left a deep line two inches long.

"Jesus Christ!" William Haddock said. "It is a diamond!"

"If it is, it belongs to the patient," the sister said firmly.

"Maybe it does," William Haddock said, "but he was mighty glad to get rid of it. Hold on a moment. Where are his notes?" He hurried over to the side table and picked up a folder which said on it JOHN DIGGS. He opened the folder. In it there was an Xray of the patient's intestine accompanied by the radiologist's report. John Diggs, the report said. Age 17. Address 123 Mayfield Road, Oxford. There is clearly a large obstruction of some sort in the upper small intestine. The patient has no recollection of swallowing anything unusual, but says that he ate some fried chicken on Sunday evening. The object clearly has a sharp point that has pierced the mucosa of the intestine, and it could be a piece of bone…

"How could he swallow a thing like that without knowing it?" William Haddock said.

"It doesn't make sense," the sister said.

"There's no question it's a diamond after the way it cut the glass," William Haddock said. "Do you agree?"

"Absolutely," the sister said.

"And a bloody big one at that," Haddock said. "The question is, how good a diamond is it? How much is it worth?"

"We'd better send it to the lab right away," the sister said.

"To hell with the lab," Haddock said. "Let's have a bit of fun and do it ourselves."

"How?"

"We'll take it to Golds, the jewellers in The High. They'll know. The damn thing must be worth a fortune. We're not going to steal it, but we're damn well going to find out about it. Are you game?"

"Do you know anyone at Golds?" the sister said.

"No, but that doesn't matter. Do you have a car?"

"My Mini's in the car park."

"Right. Get changed. I'll meet you out there. It's about your lunch time anyway. I'll take the stone."

Twenty minutes later, at a quarter to one, the little Mini pulled up outside the jewellery shop of H. F. Gold and parked on the double‑yellow lines. "Who cares," William Haddock said. "We won't be long." He and the sister went into the shop.

There were two customers inside, a young man and a girl. They were examining a tray of rings and were being served by the woman assistant. As soon as they came in, the assistant pressed a bell under the counter and Harry Gold emerged through the door at the back. "Yes," he said to William Haddock and the sister. "Can I help you?"

"Would you mind telling us what this is worth?" William Haddock said, placing the stone on a piece of green cloth that lay on the counter.

Harry Gold stopped dead. He stared at the stone. Then he looked up at the young man and woman who stood before him. He was thinking very fast. Steady now, he told himself. Don't do anything silly. Act natural.

"Well well," he said as casually as he could. "That looks to me like a very fine diamond, a very fine diamond indeed. Would you mind waiting a moment while I weigh it and examine it carefully in my office. Then perhaps I'll be able to give you an accurate valuation. Do sit down, both of you."

Harry Gold scuttled back into his office with the diamond in his hand. Immediately, he took it to the electronic scale and weighed it. Fifteen point two seven carats. That was exactly the weight of Mr Robert Sandy's stone! He had been certain it was the same one the moment he saw it. Who could mistake a diamond like that? And now the weight had proved it. His instinct was to call the police right away, but he was a cautious man who did not like making mistakes. Perhaps the doctor had already sold his diamond. Perhaps he had given it to his children. Who knows?

Quickly he picked up the Oxford telephone book. The Radcliffe Infirmary was Oxford 249891. He dialled it. He asked for Mr Robert Sandy. He got Robert's secretary. He told her it was most urgent that he speak to Mr Sandy this instant. The secretary said, "Hold on, please." She called the Operating Theatre. Mr Sandy had gone home half an hour ago, they told her. She took up the outside phone and relayed this information to Mr Gold.

"What's his home number?" Mr Gold asked her.

"Is this to do with a patient?"

"No!" cried Harry Gold. "It's to do with a robbery! For heaven's sake, woman, give me that number quickly!"

"Who is speaking, please?"

"Harry Gold! I'm the jeweller in The High! Don't waste time, I beg you!"

She gave him the number.

Harry Gold dialled again.

"Mr Sandy?"

"Speaking."

"This is Harry Gold, Mr Sandy, the jeweller. Have you by any chance lost your diamond?"

"Yes, I have."

"Two people have just brought it into my shop," Harry Gold whispered excitedly. "A man and a woman. Youngish. They're trying to get it valued. They're waiting out there now."

"Are you certain it's my stone?"

"Positive. I weighed it."

"Keep them there, Mr Gold!" Robert Sandy cried. "Talk to them! Humour them! Do anything! I'm calling the police!"

Robert Sandy called the police station. Within seconds, he was giving the news to the Detective Inspector who was in charge of the case. "Get there fast and you'll catch them both!" he said. "I'm on my way, too!"

"Come on, darling!" he shouted to his wife. "Jump in the car. I think they've found our diamond and the thieves are in Harry Gold's shop right now trying to sell it!"

When Robert and Betty Sandy drove up to Harry Gold's shop nine minutes later, two police cars were already parked outside. "Come on, darling," Robert said. "Let's go in and see what's happening."

There was a good deal of activity inside the shop when Robert and Betty Sandy rushed in. Two policemen and two plain‑clothes detectives, one of them the Inspector, were surrounding a furious William Haddock and an even more furious theatre sister. Both the young surgeon and the theatre sister were handcuffed.

"You found it where?" the Inspector was saying.

"Take these damn handcuffs off me!" the sister was shouting. "How dare you do this!"

"Tell us again where you found it," the Inspector said, caustic.

"In someone's stomach!" William Haddock yelled back at him. "I've told you twice!"

"Don't give me that crap!" the Inspector said.

"Good God, William!" Robert Sandy cried as he came in and saw who it was. "And Sister Wyman! What on earth are you two doing here?"

"They had the diamond," the Inspector said. "They were trying to flog it. Do you know these people, Mr Sandy?"

It didn't take very long for William Haddock to explain to Robert Sandy, and indeed to the Inspector, exactly how and where the diamond had been found.

"Remove their handcuffs, for heaven's sake, Inspector," Robert Sandy said. "They're telling the truth. The man you want, at least one of the men you want, is in the hospital right now, just coming round from his anaesthetic. Isn't that right, William?"

"Correct," William Haddock said. "His name is John Diggs. He'll be in one of the surgical wards."

Harry Gold stepped forward. "Here's your diamond, Mr Sandy," he said.

"Now listen," the theatre sister said, still angry, "would someone for God's sake tell me how that patient came to swallow a diamond like this without knowing he'd done it?"

"I think I can guess," Robert Sandy said. "He allowed himself the luxury of putting ice in his drink. Then he got very drunk. Then he swallowed a piece of half‑melted ice."

"I still don't get it," the sister said.

"I'll tell you the rest later," Robert Sandy said. "In fact, why don't we all go round the corner and have a drink ourselves."

 

 

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