The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volume 1

by Roald Dahl

"Same with me," he said. I caught the flash of his white teeth grinning at me in the dark. "We made it, Vic!" he whispered, touching my arm. "You were right! It worked! It was sensational!"

  "See you tomorrow," I whispered. "Go home."

  We moved apart. I went through the hedge and entered my house. Three minutes later, I was safely back in my own bed, and my own wife was sleeping soundly alongside me.

  The next morning was Sunday. I was up at eight thirty and went downstairs in pyjamas and dressing-gown, as I always do on a Sunday, to make breakfast for the family. I had left Mary sleeping. The two boys, Victor aged nine, and Wally, seven, were already down.

  "Hi, daddy," Wally said.

  "I've got a great new breakfast," I announced.

  "What?" both boys said together. They had been into town and fetched the Sunday paper and were now reading the comics.

  "We make some buttered toast and we spread orange marmalade on it." I said. "Then we put strips of crisp bacon on top of the marmalade."

  "Bacon!" Victor said. "With orange marmalade!"

  "I know. But you wait till you try it. It's wonderful."

  I dished out the grapefruit juice and drank two glasses of it myself. I set another on the table for Mary when she came down. I switched on the electric kettle, put the bread in the toaster, and started to fry the bacon. At this point Mary came into the kitchen. She had a flimsy peach-coloured chiffon thing over her nightdress.

  "Good morning," I said, watching her over my shoulder as I manipulated the frying-pan.

  She did not answer. She went to her chair at the kitchen table and sat down. She started to sip her juice. She looked neither at me nor at the boys. I went on frying the bacon.

  "Hi, mummy," Wally said.

  She didn't answer this either.

  The smell of the bacon fat was beginning to turn my stomach.

  "I'd like some coffee," Mary said, not looking around. Her voice was very odd.

  "Coming right up," I said. I pushed the frying-pan away from the heat and quickly made a cup of black instant coffee. I placed it before her.

  "Boys," she said, addressing the children, "would you please do your reading in the other room till breakfast is ready."

  "Us?" Victor said. "Why?"

  "Because I say so."

  "Are we doing something wrong?" Wally asked.

  "No, honey, you're not. I just want to be left alone for a moment with daddy."

  I felt myself shrink inside my skin. I wanted to run. I wanted to rush out the front door and go running down the street and hide.

  "Get yourself a coffee, Vic," she said, "and sit down." Her voice was quite flat. There was no anger in it. There was just nothing. And she still wouldn't look at me. The boys went out, taking the comic section with them.

  "Shut the door," Mary said to them.

  I put a spoonful of powdered coffee into my cup and poured boiling water over it. I added milk and sugar. The silence was shattering. I crossed over and sat down in my chair opposite her. It might just as well have been an electric chair, the way I was feeling.

  "Listen, Vic," she said, looking into her coffee cup, "I want to get this said before I lose my nerve and then I won't be able to say it."

  "For heaven's sake, what's all the drama about?" I asked. "Has something happened?"

  "Yes, Vic, it has."

  "What?"

  Her face was pale and still and distant, unconscious of the kitchen around her.

  "Come on, then, out with it," I said bravely.

  "You're not going to like this very much," she said, and her big blue haunted-looking eyes rested a moment on my face, then travelled away.

  "What am I not going to like very much?" I said. The sheer terror of it all was beginning to stir my bowels. I felt the same way as those burglars the cops had told me about.

  "You know I hate talking about love-making and all that sort of thing," she said. "I've never once talked to you about it all the time we've been married."

  "That's true," I said.

  She took a sip of her coffee, but she wasn't tasting it. "The point is this," she said. "I've never liked it. If you really want to know, I've hated it."

  "Hated what?" I asked.

  "Sex," she said. "Doing it."

  "Good Lord!" I said.

  "It's never given me even the slightest little bit of pleasure."

  This was shattering enough in itself, but the real cruncher was still to come, I felt sure of that.

  "I'm sorry if that surprises you," she added.

  I couldn't think of anything to say, so I kept quiet.

  Her eyes rose again from the coffee cup and looked into mine, watchful, as if calculating something, then fell again. "I wasn't ever going to tell you," she said. "And I never would have if it hadn't been for last night."

  I said very slowly, "What about last night?"

  "Last night," she said, "I suddenly found out what the whole crazy thing is all about."

  "You did?"

  She looked full at me now, and her face was as open as a flower. "Yes," she said. "I surely did."

  I didn't move.

  "Oh darling!" she cried, jumping up and rushing over and giving me an enormous kiss. "Thank you so much for last night! You were marvellous! And I was marvellous! We were both marvellous! Don't look so embarrassed, my darling! You ought to be proud of yourself! You were fantastic! I love you! I do! I do!"

  I just sat there.

  She leaned close to me and put an arm around my shoulders. "And now," she said softly, "now that you have…I don't quite know how to say this…now that you have sort of discovered what it is I need, everything is going to be marvellous from now on!"

  I sat there. She went slowly back to her chair. A big tear was running down one of her cheeks. I couldn't think why.

  "I was right to tell you, wasn't I?" she said, smiling through her tears.

  "Yes," I said. "Oh, yes." I stood up and went over to the cooker so that I wouldn't be facing her. Through the kitchen window, I caught sight of Jerry crossing the garden with the Sunday paper under his ann. There was a lilt in his walk, a little prance of triumph in each pace he took, and when he reached the steps of his front porch, he ran up them two at a time.

  The Last Act

  ANNA was in the kitchen washing a head of Boston lettuce for the family supper when the doorbell rang. The bell itself was on the wall directly above the sink, and it never failed to make her jump if it rang when she happened to be near. For this reason, neither her husband nor any of the children ever used it. It seemed to ring extra loud this time, and Anna jumped extra high.

  When she opened the door, two policemen were standing outside. They looked at her out of pale waxen faces, and she looked back at them, waiting for them to say something.

  She kept looking at them, but they didn't speak or move. They stood so still and so rigid that they were like two wax figures somebody had put on her doorstep as a joke. Each of them was holding his helmet in front of him in his two hands.

  "What is it?" Anna asked.

  They were both young, and they were wearing leather gauntlets up to their elbows. She could see their enormous motor-cycles propped up along the edge of the sidewalk behind them, and dead leaves were falling around the motor-cycles and blowing along the sidewalk and the whole of the street was brilliant in the yellow light of a clear, gusty September evening. The taller of the two policemen shifted uneasily on his feet.

  Then he said quietly, "Are you Mrs Cooper, ma'am?"

  "Yes, I am."

  The other said, "Mrs Edmund J. Cooper?"

  "Yes." And then slowly it began to dawn upon her that these men, neither of whom seemed anxious to explain his presence, would not be behaving as they were unless they had some distasteful duty to perform.

  "Mrs Cooper," she heard one of them saying, and from the way he said it, as gently and softly as if he were comforting a sick child, she knew at once that he was going to tell her something terrible. A great wave of p
anic came over her, and she said, "What happened?"

  "We have to inform you, Mrs Cooper.

  The policeman paused, and the woman, watching him, felt as though her whole body were shrinking and shrinking and shrinking inside its skin. that your husband was involved in an accident on the Hudson River Parkway at approximately five forty-five this evening, and died in the ambulance… The policeman who was speaking produced the crocodile wallet she had given Ed on their twentieth wedding anniversary, two years back, and as she reached out to take it, she found herself wondering whether it might not still be warm from having been close to her husband's chest only a short while ago.

  "If there's anything we can do," the policeman was saying, "like calling up somebody to come over…some friend or relative maybe…

  Anna heard his voice drifting away, then fading out altogether, and it must have been about then that she began to scream. Soon she became hysterical, and the two policemen had their hands full trying to control her until the doctor arrived some forty minutes later and injected something into her arm.

  She was no better, though, when she woke up the following morning. Neither her doctor nor her children were able to reason with her in any way at all, and had she not been kept under almost constant sedation for the next few days, she would undoubtedly have taken her own life. In the brief lucid periods between drug-takings, she acted as though she were demented, calling out her husband's name and telling him that she was coming to join him as soon as she possibly could. It was terrible to listen to her. But in defence of her behaviour, it should be said at once that this was no ordinary husband she had lost.

  Anna Greenwood had married Ed Cooper when they were both eighteen, and over the time they were together, they grew to be closer and more dependent upon each other than it is possible to describe in words. Every year that went by, their love became more intense and overwhelming, and toward the end, it had reached such a ridiculous peak that it was almost impossible for them to endure the daily separation caused by Ed's departure for the office in the mornings. When he returned at night he would rush through the house to seek her out, and she, who had heard the noise of the front door slamming, would drop everything and rush simultaneously in his direction, meeting him head on, recklessly, at full speed, perhaps halfway up the stairs, or on the landing, or between the kitchen and the hall; and as they came together, he would take her in his arms and hug her and kiss her for minutes on end as though she were yesterday's bride. It was wonderful. It was so utterly unbelievably wonderful that one is very nearly able to understand why she should have had no desire and no heart to continue living in a world where her husband did not exist any more.

  Her three children, Angela (twenty), Mary (nineteen) and Billy (seventeen and a half), stayed around her constantly right from the start of the catastrophe. They adored their mother, and they certainly had no intention of letting her commit suicide if they could help it. They worked hard and with loving desperation to convince her that life could still be worth living, and it was due entirely to them that she managed in the end to come out of the nightmare and climb back slowly into the ordinary world.

  Four months after the disaster, she was pronounced "moderately safe' by the doctors, and she was able to return, albeit rather listlessly, to the old routine of running the house and doing the shopping and cooking the meals for her grown-up children.

  But then what happened?

  Before the snows of that winter had melted away, Angela married a young man from Rhode Island and went off to live in the suburbs of Providence.

  A few months later, Mary married a fairhaired giant from a town called Slayton, in Minnesota, and away she flew for ever and ever and ever. And although Anna's heart was now beginning to break all over again into tiny pieces, she was proud to think that neither of the two girls had the slightest inkling of what was happening to her. ("Oh, Mummy, isn't it wonderful!"

  "Yes, my darling, I think it's the most beautiful wedding there's ever been! I'm even more excited than you are!" etc., etc.) And then, to put the lid on everything, her beloved Billy, who had just turned eighteen, went off to begin his first year at Yale.

  So all at once, Anna found herself living in a completely empty house.

  It is an awful feeling, after twenty-three years of boisterous, busy, magical family life, to come down alone to breakfast in the mornings, to sit there in silence with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and to wonder what you are going to do with the day that lies ahead. The room you are sitting in, which has heard so much laughter, and seen so many birthdays, so many Christmas trees, so many presents being opened, is quiet now and feels curiously cold. The air is heated and the temperature itself is normal, but the place still makes you shiver. The clock has stopped because you were never the one who wound it in the first place. A chair stands crooked on its legs, and you sit staring at it, wondering why you hadn't noticed it before. And when you glance up again, you have a sudden panicky feeling that all the four walls of the room have begun creeping in upon you very very slowly when you weren't looking.

  In the beginning, she would carry her coffee cup over to the telephone and start calling up friends. But all her friends had husbands and children, and although they were always as nice and warm and cheerful as they could possibly be, they simply could not spare the time to sit and chat with a desolate lady from across the way first thing in the morning. So then she started calling up her married daughters instead.

  They, also, were sweet and kind to her at all times, but Anna detected, very soon, a subtle change in their attitudes toward her. She was no longer number one in their lives. They had husbands now, and were concentrating everything upon them. Gently but firmly, they were moving their mother into the background. It was quite a shock. But she knew they were right. They were absolutely right. She was no longer entitled to impinge upon their lives or to make them feel guilty for neglecting her.

  She saw Dr Jacobs regularly, but he wasn't really any help. He tried to get her to talk and she did her best, and sometimes he made little speeches to her full of oblique remarks about sex and sublimation. Anna never properly understood what he was driving at, but the burden of his song appeared to be that she should get herself another man.

  She took to wandering around the house and fingering things that used to belong to Ed. She would pick up one of his shoes and put her hand into it and feel the little dents that the ball of his foot and his toes had made upon the sole. She found a sock with a hole in it, and the pleasure it gave her to darn that sock was indescribable. Occasionally, she took out a shirt, a tie, and a suit, and laid them on the bed, all ready for him to wear, and once, one rainy Sunday morning, she made an Irish stew.

  It was hopeless to go on.

  So how many pills would she need to make absolutely sure of it this time? She went upstairs to her secret store and counted them. There were only nine. Was that enough? She doubted that it was. Oh, hell. The one thing she was not prepared to face all over again was failure the rush to the hospital, the stomach-pump, the seventh floor of the Payne Whitney Pavilion, the psychiatrists, the humiliation, the misery of it all.

  In that case, it would have to be the razorblade. But the trouble with the razor-blade was that it had to be done properly. Many people failed miserably when they tried to use the razor-blade on the wrist. In fact, nearly all of them failed. They didn't cut deep enough. There was a big artery down there somewhere that simply had to be reached. Veins were no good. Veins made plenty of mess, but they never quite managed to do the trick. Then again, the razor-blade was not an easy thing to hold, not if one had to make a firm incision, pressing it right home all the way, deep deep down. But she wouldn't fail. The ones who failed were the ones who actually wanted to fail. She wanted to succeed.

  She went to the cupboard in the bathroom, searching for blades. There weren't any. Ed's razor was still there, and so was hers. But there was no blade in either of them, and no little packet lying alongside. That was understan
dable. Such things had been removed from the house on an earlier occasion. But there was no problem. Anyone could buy a packet of razor-blades.

  She returned to the kitchen and took the calendar down from the wall. She chose September 23rd, which was Ed's birthday, and wrote r-b (for razor-blades) against the date. She did this on September 9th, which gave her exactly two weeks' grace to put her affairs in order. There was much to be done-old bills to be paid, a new will to be written, the house to be tidied up, Billy's college fees to be taken care of for the next four years, letters to the children, to her own parents, to Ed's mother, and so on and so forth.

  Yet, busy as she was, she found that those two weeks, those fourteen long days, were going far too slowly for her liking. She wanted to use the blade, and eagerly every morning she counted the days that were left. She was like a child counting the days before Christmas. For wherever it was that Ed Cooper had gone when he died, even if it were only to the grave, she was impatient to join him.

  It was in the middle of this two-week period that her friend Elizabeth Paoletti came calling on her at eight thirty one morning. Anna was making coffee in the kitchen at the time, and she jumped when the bell rang and jumped again when it gave a second long blast.

  Liz came sweeping in through the front door, talking non-stop as usual. "Anna, my darling woman, I need your help! Everyone's down with flu at the office. You've got to come! Don't argue with me! I know you can type and I know you haven't got a damn thing in the world to do all day except mope. Just grab your hat and purse and let's get going. Hurry up, girl, hurry up! I'm late as it is!"

  Anna said, "Go away, Liz. Leave me alone."

  "The cab is waiting," Liz said.

  "Please," Anna said, "don't try to bully me now. I'm not coming."

  "You are coming," Liz said. "Pull yourself together. Your days of glorious martyrdom are over."

  Anna continued to resist, but Liz wore her down, and in the end she agreed to go along just for a few hours.

  Elizabeth Paoletti was in charge of an adoption society, one of the best in the city. Nine of the staff were down with flu. Only two were left, excluding herself. "You don't know a thing about the work," she said in the cab, "but you're just going to have to help us all you can…