The Umbrella Man and Other Stories

by Roald Dahl

  I remember peeping cautiously over the top of our trench and seeing a small white flower growing just a few inches away from my nose. It was pure white and it had three petals. I remember looking past it and seeing three of the Germans diving on my own Hurricane which was parked on the other side of the field and I remember shouting at them, although I do not know what I said.

  Then suddenly I saw Katina. She was running out from the far corner of the aerodrome, running right out into the middle of this mass of blazing guns and burning aircraft, running as fast as she could. Once she stumbled, but she scrambled to her feet again and went on running. Then she stopped and stood looking up, raising her fists at the planes as they flew past.

  Now as she stood there, I remember seeing one of the Messerschmitts turning and coming in low straight towards her and I remember thinking that she was so small that she could not be hit. I remember seeing the spurts of flame from his guns as he came, and I remember seeing the child, for a split second, standing quite still, facing the machine. I remember that the wind was blowing in her hair.

  Then she was down.

  The next moment I shall never forget. On every side, as if by magic, men appeared out of the ground. They swarmed out of their trenches and like a crazy mob poured on to the aerodrome, running towards the tiny little bundle, which lay motionless in the middle of the field. They ran fast, crouching as they went, and I remember jumping up out of my slit trench and joining with them. I remember thinking of nothing at all and watching the boots of the man in front of me, noticing that he was a little bow-legged and that his blue trousers were much too long.

  I remember seeing Fin arrive first, followed closely by a sergeant called Wishful, and I remember seeing the two of them pick up Katina and start running with her back towards the trenches. I saw her leg, which was just a lot of blood and bones, and I saw her chest where the blood was spurting out on to her white print dress; I saw, for a moment, her face, which was white as the snow on top of Olympus.

  I ran beside Fin, and as he ran, he kept saying, “The lousy bastards, the lousy, bloody bastards”; and then as we got to our trench I remember looking round and finding that there was no longer any noise or shooting. The Germans had gone.

  Fin said, “Where’s the Doc?” and suddenly there he was, standing beside us, looking at Katina—looking at her face.

  The Doc gently touched her wrist and without looking up he said, “She is not alive.”

  They put her down under a little tree, and when I turned away I saw on all sides the fires of countless burning aircraft. I saw my own Hurricane burning near by and I stood staring hopelessly into the flames as they danced around the engine and licked against the metal of the wings.

  I stood staring into the flames, and as I stared the fire became a deeper red and I saw beyond it not a tangled mass of smoking wreckage, but the flames of a hotter and intenser fire which now burned and smouldered in the hearts of the people of Greece.

  Still I stared, and as I stared I saw in the centre of the fire, whence the red flames sprang, a bright, white heat, shining bright and without any colour.

  As I stared, the brightness diffused and became soft and yellow like sunlight, and through it, beyond it, I saw a young child standing in the middle of a field with the sunlight shining in her hair. For a moment she stood looking up into the sky, which was clear and blue and without any clouds; then she turned and looked towards me, and as she turned I saw that the front of her white print dress was stained deep red, the colour of blood.

  Then there was no longer any fire or any flames and I saw before me only the glowing twisted wreckage of a burned-out plane. I must have been standing there for quite a long time.

  All her life, Mrs. Foster had had an almost pathological fear of missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain. In other respects, she was not a particularly nervous woman, but the mere thought of being late on occasions like these would throw her into such a state of nerves that she would begin to twitch. It was nothing much—just a tiny vellicating muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink—but the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear until an hour or so after the train or plane or whatever it was had been safely caught.

  It was really extraordinary how in certain people a simple apprehension about a thing like catching a train can grow into a serious obsession. At least half an hour before it was time to leave the house for the station, Mrs. Foster would step out of the elevator all ready to go, with hat and coat and gloves, and then, being quite unable to sit down, she would flutter and fidget about from room to room until her husband, who must have been well aware of her state, finally emerged from his privacy and suggested in a cool dry voice that perhaps they had better get going now, had they not?

  Mr. Foster may possibly have had a right to be irritated by this foolishness of his wife’s, but he could have had no excuse for increasing her misery by keeping her waiting unnecessarily. Mind you, it is by no means certain that this is what he did, yet whenever they were to go somewhere, his timing was so accurate—just a minute or two late, you understand—and his manner so bland that it was hard to believe he wasn’t purposely inflicting a nasty private little torture of his own on the unhappy lady. And one thing he must have known—that she would never dare to call out and tell him to hurry. He had disciplined her too well for that. He must also have known that if he was prepared to wait even beyond the last moment of safety, he could drive her nearly into hysterics. On one or two special occasions in the later years of their married life, it seemed almost as though he had wanted to miss the train simply in order to intensify the poor woman’s suffering.

  Assuming (though one cannot be sure) that the husband was guilty, what made his attitude doubly unreasonable was the fact that, with the exception of this one small irrepressible foible, Mrs. Foster was and always had been a good and loving wife. For over thirty years, she had served him loyally and well. There was no doubt about this. Even she, a very modest woman, was aware of it, and although she had for years refused to let herself believe that Mr. Foster would ever consciously torment her, there had been times recently when she had caught herself beginning to wonder.

  Mr. Eugene Foster, who was nearly seventy years old, lived with his wife in a large six-storey house in New York City, on East Sixty-second Street, and they had four servants. It was a gloomy place, and few people came to visit them. But on this particular morning in January, the house had come alive and there was a great deal of bustling about. One maid was distributing bundles of dust sheets to every room, while another was draping them over the furniture. The butler was bringing down suitcases and putting them in the hall. The cook kept popping up from the kitchen to have a word with the butler, and Mrs. Foster herself, in an old-fashioned fur coat and with a black hat on the top of her head, was flying from room to room and pretending to supervise these operations. Actually, she was thinking of nothing at all except that she was going to miss her plane if her husband didn’t come out of his study soon and get ready.

  “What time is it, Walker?” she said to the butler as she passed him.

  “It’s ten minutes past nine, madam.”

  “And has the car come?”

  “Yes, madam, it’s waiting. I’m just going to put the luggage in now.”

  “It takes an hour to get to Idlewild,” she said. “My plane leaves at eleven. I have to be there half an hour beforehand for the formalities. I shall be late. I just know I’m going to be late.”

  “I think you have plenty of time, madam,” the butler said kindly. “I warned Mr. Foster that you must leave at nine-fifteen. There’s still another five minutes.”

  “Yes, Walker, I know, I know. But get the luggage in quickly, will you please?”

  She began walking up and down the hall, and whenever the butler came by, she asked him the time. This, she kept telling herself, was the one plane she must not miss. It had taken months to persuade her husband to allow her to go. If she missed it,
he might easily decide that she should cancel the whole thing. And the trouble was that he insisted on coming to the airport to see her off.

  “Dear God,” she said aloud, “I’m going to miss it. I know, I know, I know I’m going to miss it.” The little muscle beside the left eye was twitching madly now. The eyes themselves were very close to tears.

  “What time is it, Walker?”

  “It’s eighteen minutes past, madam.”

  “Now I really will miss it!” she cried. “Oh, I wish he would come!”

  This was an important journey for Mrs. Foster. She was going all alone to Paris to visit her daughter, her only child, who was married to a Frenchman. Mrs. Foster didn’t care much for the Frenchman, but she was fond of her daughter, and, more than that, she had developed a great yearning to set eyes on her three grandchildren. She knew them only from the many photographs that she had received and that she kept putting up all over the house. They were beautiful, these children. She doted on them, and each time a new picture arrived she would carry it away and sit with it for a long time, staring at it lovingly and searching the small faces for signs of that old satisfying blood likeness that meant so much. And now, lately, she had come more and more to feel that she did not really wish to live out her days in a place where she could not be near these children, and have them visit her, and take them for walks, and buy them presents, and watch them grow. She knew, of course, that it was wrong and in a way disloyal to have thoughts like these while her husband was still alive. She knew also that although he was no longer active in his many enterprises, he would never consent to leave New York and live in Paris. It was a miracle that he had ever agreed to let her fly over there alone for six weeks to visit them. But, oh, how she wished she could live there always, and be close to them!

  “Walker, what time is it?”

  “Twenty-two minutes past, madam.”

  As he spoke, a door opened and Mr. Foster came into the hall. He stood for a moment, looking intently at his wife, and she looked back at him—at this diminutive but still quite dapper old man with the huge bearded face that bore such an astonishing resemblance to those old photographs of Andrew Carnegie.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose perhaps we’d better get going fairly soon if you want to catch that plane.”

  “Yes, dear—yes! Everything’s ready. The car’s waiting.”

  “That’s good,” he said. With his head over to one side, he was watching her closely. He had a peculiar way of cocking the head and then moving it in a series of small, rapid jerks. Because of this and because he was clasping his hands up high in front of him, near the chest, he was somehow like a squirrel standing there—a quick clever old squirrel from the park.

  “Here’s Walker with your coat, dear. Put it on.”

  “I’ll be with you in a moment,” he said. “I’m just going to wash my hands.”

  She waited for him, and the tall butler stood beside her, holding the coat and the hat.

  “Walker, will I miss it?”

  “No, madam,” the butler said. “I think you’ll make it all right.”

  Then Mr. Foster appeared again, and the butler helped him on with his coat. Mrs. Foster hurried outside and got into the hired Cadillac. Her husband came after her, but he walked down the steps of the house slowly, pausing halfway to observe the sky and to sniff the cold morning air.

  “It looks a bit foggy,” he said as he sat down beside her in the car. “And it’s always worse out there at the airport. I shouldn’t be surprised if the flight’s cancelled already.”

  “Don’t say that, dear—please.”

  They didn’t speak again until the car had crossed over the river to Long Island.

  “I arranged everything with the servants,” Mr. Foster said. “They’re all going off today. I gave them half-pay for six weeks and told Walker I’d send him a telegram when we wanted them back.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He told me.”

  “I’ll move into the club tonight. It’ll be a nice change staying at the club.”

  “Yes, dear. I’ll write to you.”

  “I’ll call in at the house occasionally to see that everything’s all right and to pick up the mail.”

  “But don’t you really think Walker should stay there all the time to look after things?” she asked meekly.

  “Nonsense. It’s quite unnecessary. And anyway, I’d have to pay him full wages.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  “What’s more, you never know what people get up to when they’re left alone in a house,” Mr. Foster announced, and with that he took out a cigar and, after snipping off the end with a silver cutter, lit it with a gold lighter.

  She sat still in the car with her hands clasped together tight under the rug.

  “Will you write to me?” she asked.

  “I’ll see,” he said. “But I doubt it. You know I don’t hold with letter-writing unless there’s something specific to say.”

  “Yes, dear, I know. So don’t you bother.”

  They drove on, along Queen’s Boulevard, and as they approached the flat marshland on which Idlewild is built, the fog began to thicken and the car had to slow down.

  “Oh dear!” cried Mrs. Foster. “I’m sure I’m going to miss it now! What time is it?”

  “Stop fussing,” the old man said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s bound to be cancelled now. They never fly in this sort of weather. I don’t know why you bothered to come out.”

  She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to her that there was suddenly a new note in his voice, and she turned to look at him. It was difficult to observe any change in his expression under all that hair. The mouth was what counted. She wished, as she had so often before, that she could see the mouth clearly. The eyes never showed anything except when he was in a rage.

  “Of course,” he went on, “if by any chance it does go, then I agree with you—you’ll be certain to miss it now. Why don’t you resign yourself to that?”

  She turned away and peered through the window at the fog. It seemed to be getting thicker as they went along, and now she could only just make out the edge of the road and the margin of grassland beyond it. She knew that her husband was still looking at her. She glanced at him again, and this time she noticed with a kind of horror that he was staring intently at the little place in the corner of her left eye where she could feel the muscle twitching.

  “Won’t you?” he said.

  “Won’t I what?”

  “Be sure to miss it now if it goes. We can’t drive fast in this muck.”

  He didn’t speak to her any more after that. The car crawled on and on. The driver had a yellow lamp directed on to the edge of the road, and this helped him to keep going. Other lights, some white and some yellow, kept coming out of the fog towards them, and there was an especially bright one that followed close behind them all the time.

  Suddenly, the driver stopped the car.

  “There!” Mr. Foster cried. “We’re stuck. I knew it.”

  “No, sir,” the driver said, turning round. “We made it. This is the airport.”

  Without a word, Mrs. Foster jumped out and hurried through the main entrance into the building. There was a mass of people inside, mostly disconsolate passengers standing around the ticket counters. She pushed her way through and spoke to the clerk.

  “Yes,” he said. “Your flight is temporarily postponed. But please don’t go away. We’re expecting this weather to clear any moment.”

  She went back to her husband who was still sitting in the car and told him the news. “But don’t you wait, dear,” she said. “There’s no sense in that.”

  “I won’t,” he answered. “So long as the driver can get me back. Can you get me back, driver?”

  “I think so,” the man said.

  “Is the luggage out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good-bye, dear,” Mrs. Foster said, leaning into the car and giving her husband a small kiss on t
he coarse grey fur of his cheek.

  “Good-bye,” he answered. “Have a good trip.”

  The car drove off, and Mrs. Foster was left alone.

  The rest of the day was a sort of nightmare for her. She sat for hour after hour on a bench, as close to the airline counter as possible, and every thirty minutes or so she would get up and ask the clerk if the situation had changed. She always received the same reply—that she must continue to wait, because the fog might blow away at any moment. It wasn’t until after six in the evening that the loudspeakers finally announced that the flight had been postponed until eleven o’clock the next morning.

  Mrs. Foster didn’t quite know what to do when she heard this news. She stayed sitting on her bench for at least another half-hour, wondering, in a tired, hazy sort of way, where she might go to spend the night. She hated to leave the airport. She didn’t wish to see her husband. She was terrified that in one way or another he would eventually manage to prevent her from getting to France. She would have liked to remain just where she was, sitting on the bench the whole night through. That would be the safest. But she was already exhausted, and it didn’t take her long to realize that this was a ridiculous thing for an elderly lady to do. So in the end she went to a phone and called the house.

  Her husband, who was on the point of leaving for the club, answered it himself. She told him the news, and asked whether the servants were still there.

  “They’ve all gone,” he said.

  “In that case, dear, I’ll just get myself a room somewhere for the night. And don’t you bother yourself about it at all.”

  “That would be foolish,” he said. “You’ve got a large house here at your disposal. Use it.”

  “But, dear, it’s empty.”

  “Then I’ll stay with you myself.”

  “There’s no food in the house. There’s nothing.”

  “Then eat before you come in. Don’t be so stupid, woman. Everything you do, you seem to want to make a fuss about it.”