by Roald Dahl
‘Shall we go back to the house?’ I asked.
‘Back to the house?’
‘Yes, shall we go back and have a drink before lunch?’
‘A drink? Yes, we’ll have a drink.’ But he didn’t move. He sat very still, gone far away from me now, staring intently at the two figures. I also was staring at them. I couldn’t take my eyes away; I had to look. It was like seeing a dangerous little ballet in miniature from a great distance, and you knew the dancers and the music but not the end of the story, nor the choreography, nor what they were going to do next, and you were fascinated, and you had to look.
‘Gaudier Brzeska,’ I said. ‘How great do you think he might’ve become if he hadn’t died so young?’
‘Who?’
‘Gaudier Brzeska.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
I noticed now that something queer was happening. The woman still had her head through the hole, but she was beginning to wriggle her body from side to side in a slow unusual manner, and the man was standing motionless, a pace or so away, watching her. He seemed suddenly uneasy the way he stood there, and I could tell by the drop of the head and by the stiff intent set of the body that there was no laughter in him any more. For a while he remained still, then I saw him place his camera on the ground and go forward to the woman, taking her head in his hands; and all at once it was more like a puppet show than a ballet, with tiny wooden figures performing tiny jerky movements, crazy and unreal, on a faraway sunlit stage.
We sat quietly together on the white bench, and we watched while the tiny puppet man began to manipulate the woman’s head with his hands. He was doing it gently, there was no doubt about that, slowly and gently, stepping back every now and then to think about it some more, and several times crouching down to survey the situation from another angle. Whenever he left her alone the woman would again start to wriggle her body, and the peculiar way she did it reminded me of a dog that feels a collar round its neck for the first time.
‘She’s stuck,’ Sir Basil said.
And now the man was walking to the other side of the carving, the side where the woman’s body was, and he put out his hands and began trying to do something with her neck. Then, as though suddenly exasperated, he gave the neck two or three quick jerky pulls, and this time the sound of the woman’s voice, raised high in anger, or pain, or both, came back to us small and clear through the sunlight.
Out of the corner of one eye I could see Sir Basil nodding his head quietly up and down. ‘I got my fist caught in a jar of boiled sweets once,’ he said, ‘and I couldn’t get it out.’
The man had retreated a few yards, and was standing with hands on hips, head up, looking furious and sullen. The woman, from her uncomfortable position, appeared to be talking to him, or rather shouting at him, and although the body itself was pretty firmly fixed and could only wriggle, the legs were free and did a good deal of moving and stamping.
‘I broke the jar with a hammer and told my mother Id knocked it off the shelf by mistake.’ He seemed calmer now, not tense at all, although his voice was curiously flat. ‘I suppose we’d better go down and see if we can help.’
‘Perhaps we should.’
But still he didn’t move. He took out a cigarette and lit it, putting the used match carefully back in the box.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Will you have one?’
‘Thanks, I think I will.’ He made a little ceremony of giving me the cigarette and lighting it for me, and again he put the used match back in the box. Then we got up and walked slowly down the grass slope.
We came upon them silently, through an archway in the yew hedge, and it was naturally quite a surprise.
‘What’s the matter here?’ Sir Basil asked. He spoke softly, with a dangerous softness that I’m sure his wife had never heard before.
‘She’s gone and put her head through the hole and now she can’t get it out,’ Major Haddock said. ‘Just for a lark, you know.’
‘For a what?’
‘Basil!’ Lady Turton shouted. ‘Don’t be such a damn fool! Do something, can’t you!’ She may not have been able to move much, but she could still talk.
‘Pretty obvious we’re going to have to break up this lump of wood,’ the Major said. There was a small smudge of red on his grey moustache, and this, like the single extra touch of colour that ruins a perfect painting, managed somehow to destroy all his manly looks. It made him comic.
‘You mean break the Henry Moore?’
‘My dear sir, there’s no other way of setting the lady free. God knows how she managed to squeeze it in, but I know for a fact that she can’t pull it out. It’s the ears get in the way.’
‘Oh dear,’ Sir Basil said. ‘What a terrible pity. My beautiful Henry Moore.’
At this stage Lady Turton began abusing her husband in a most unpleasant manner, and there’s no knowing how long it would have gone on had not Jelks suddenly appeared out of the shadows. He came sidling silently on to the lawn and stationed himself at a respectful distance from Sir Basil, as though awaiting instructions. His black clothes looked perfectly ridiculous in the morning sunlight, and with his ancient pink-white face and white hands he was like some small crabby animal that has lived all its life in a hole under the ground.
‘Is there anything I can do, Sir Basil?’ He kept his voice level, but I didn’t think his face was quite straight. When he looked at Lady Turton there was a little exulting glimmer in his eyes.
‘Yes Jelks, there is. Go back and get me a saw or something so I can cut out a section of this wood.’
‘Shall I call one of the men, Sir Basil? William is a good carpenter.’
‘No, I’ll do it myself. Just get the tools – and hurry.’
While they were waiting for Jelks, I strolled away because I didn’t want to hear any more of the things that Lady Turton was saying to her husband. But I was back in time to see the butler returning, followed now by the other woman, Carmen La Rosa, who made a rush for the hostess.
‘Nata-li-a! My dear Nata-li-a! What have they done to you?’
‘Oh shut up,’ the hostess said. ‘And get out of the way, will you.’
Sir Basil took up a position close to his lady’s head, waiting for Jelks. Jelks advanced slowly, carrying a saw in one hand, an axe in the other, and he stopped maybe a yard away. He then held out both implements in front of him so his master could choose, and there was a brief moment – no more than two or three seconds – of silence, and of waiting, and it just happened that I was watching Jelks at this time. I saw the hand that was carrying the axe come forward an extra fraction of an inch towards Sir Basil. It was so slight a movement it was barely noticeable –a tiny pushing forward of the hand, slow and secret, a little offer, a little coaxing offer that was accompanied perhaps by an infinitesimal lift of the eyebrows.
I’m not sure whether Sir Basil saw it, but he hesitated, and again the hand that held the axe came edging forward, and it was almost exactly like that card trick where the man says ‘Take one, whichever one you want,’ and you always get the one he means you to have. Sir Basil got the axe. I saw him reach out in a dreamy sort of way, accepting it from Jelks, and then, the instant he felt the handle in his grasp he seemed to realize what was required of him and he sprang to life.
For me, after that, it was like the awful moment when you see a child running out into the road and a car is coming and all you can do is shut your eyes tight and wait until the noise tells you it has happened. The moment of waiting becomes a long lucid period of time with yellow and red spots dancing on a black field, and even if you open your eyes again and find that nobody has been killed or hurt, it makes no difference because so far as you and your stomach were concerned you saw it all.
I saw this one all right, every detail of it, and I didn’t open my eyes again until I heard Sir Basil’s voice, even softer than usual, calling in gentle protest to the butler.
‘Jelks,’ he was saying, and I looked and saw him
standing there as calm as you please, still holding the axe. Lady Turton’s head was there too, still sticking through the hole, but her face had turned a terrible ashy grey, and the mouth was opening and shutting and making a kind of gurgling sound.
‘Look here, Jelks,’ Sir Basil was saying. ‘What on earth are you thinking about. This thing’s much too dangerous. Give me the saw.’ And as he exchanged implements I noticed for the first time two little warm roses of colour appearing on his cheeks, and above them, all around the corners of his eyes, the twinkling tiny wrinkles of a smile.
Nunc Dimittis
It is nearly midnight, and I can see that if I don’t make a start with writing this story now, I never shall. All the evening I have been sitting here trying to force myself to begin, but the more I have thought about it, the more appalled and ashamed and distressed I have become by the whole thing.
My idea – and I believe it was a good one – was to try, by a process of confession and analysis, to discover a reason or at any rate some justification for my outrageous behaviour towards Janet de Pelagia. I wanted, essentially, to address myself to an imaginary and sympathetic listener, a kind of mythical you, someone gentle and understanding to whom I might tell unashamedly every detail of this unfortunate episode. I can only hope that I am not too upset to make a go of it.
If I am to be quite honest with myself, I suppose I shall have to admit that what is disturbing me most is not so much the sense of my own shame, or even the hurt that I have inflicted upon poor Janet; it is the knowledge that I have made a monstrous fool of myself and that all my friends – if I can still call them that – all those warm and lovable people who used to come so often to my house, must now be regarding me as nothing but a vicious, vengeful old man. Yes, that surely hurts. When I say to you that my friends were my whole life – everything, absolutely everything in it – then perhaps you will begin to understand.
Will you? I doubt it – unless I digress for a minute to tell you roughly the sort of person I am.
Well – let me see. Now that I come to think of it, I suppose I am, after all, a type; a rare one, mark you, but nevertheless a quite definite type – the wealthy, leisurely, middle-aged man of culture, adored (I choose the word carefully) by his many friends for his charm, his money, his air of scholarship, his generosity, and I sincerely hope for himself also. You will find him (this type) only in the big capitals – London, Paris, New York; of that I am certain. The money he has was earned by his dead father whose memory he is inclined to despise. This is not his fault, for there is something in his make-up that compels him secretly to look down upon all people who never had the wit to learn the difference between Rockingham and Spode, Waterford and Venetian, Sheraton and Chippendale, Monet and Manet, or even Pommard and Montrachet.
He is, therefore, a connoisseur, possessing above all things an exquisite taste. His Constables, Boningtons, Lautrecs, Redons, Vuillards, Matthew Smiths are as fine as anything in the Tate; and because they are so fabulous and beautiful they create an atmosphere of suspense around him in the home, something tantalizing, breathtaking, faintly frightening – frightening to think that he has the power and the right, if he feels inclined, to slash, tear, plunge his fist through a superb Dedham Vale, a Mont Saint-Victoire, an Aries cornfield, a Tahiti maiden, a portrait of Madame Cézanne. And from the walls on which these wonders hang there issues a little golden glow of splendour, a subtle emanation of grandeur in which he lives and moves and entertains with a sly nonchalance that is not entirely unpractised.
He is invariably a bachelor, yet he never appears to get entangled with the women who surround him, who love him so dearly. It is just possible – and this you may or may not have noticed – that there is a frustration, a discontent, a regret somewhere inside him. Even a slight aberration.
I don’t think I need say any more. I have been very frank. You should know me well enough by now to judge me fairly – and dare I hope it? – to sympathize with me when you hear my story. You may even decide that much of the blame for what has happened should be placed, not upon me, but upon a lady called Gladys Ponsonby. After all, she was the one who started it. Had I not escorted Gladys Ponsonby back to her house that night nearly six months ago, and had she not spoken so freely to me about certain people, and certain things, then this tragic business could never have taken place.
It was last December, if I remember rightly, and I had been dining with the Ashendens in that lovely house of theirs that overlooks the southern fringe of Regent’s Park. There were a fair number of people there, but Gladys Ponsonby was the only one beside myself who had come alone. So when it was time for us to leave, I naturally offered to see her safely back to her house. She accepted and we left together in my car; but unfortunately, when we arrived at her place she insisted that I come in and have ‘one for the road’, as she put it. I didn’t wish to seem stuffy, so I told the chauffeur to wait and followed her in.
Gladys Ponsonby is an unusually short woman, certainly not more than four feet nine or ten, maybe even less than that – one of those tiny persons who gives me, when I am beside her, the comical, rather wobbly feeling that I am standing on a chair. She is a widow, a few years younger than me – maybe fifty-three or four, and it is possible that thirty years ago she was quite a fetching little thing. But now the face is loose and puckered with nothing distinctive about it whatsoever. The individual features, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin, are buried in the folds of fat around the puckered little face and one does not notice them. Except perhaps the mouth, which reminds me – I cannot help it – of a salmon.
In the living-room, as she gave me my brandy, I noticed that her hand was a trifle unsteady. The lady is tired, I told myself, so I mustn’t stay long. We sat down together on the sofa and for a while discussed the Ashenden’s party and the people who were there. Finally I got up to go.
‘Sit down, Lionel,’ she said. ‘Have another brandy.’
‘No, really, I must go.’
‘Sit down and don’t be so stuffy. I’m having another one, and the least you can do is keep me company while I drink it.’
I watched her as she walked over to the sideboard, this tiny woman, faintly swaying, holding her glass out in front of her with both hands as though it were an offering; and the sight of her walking like that, so incredibly short and squat and stiff, suddenly gave me the ludicrous notion that she had no legs at all above the knees.
‘Lionel, what are you chuckling about?’ She half turned to look at me as she poured the drink, and some of it slopped over the side of the glass.
‘Nothing, my dear. Nothing at all.’
‘Well, stop it, and tell me what you think of my new portrait.’ She indicated a large canvas hanging over the fireplace that I had been trying to avoid with my eye ever since I entered the room. It was a hideous thing, painted, as I well knew, by a man who was now all the rage in London, a very mediocre painter called John Royden. It was a full-length portrait of Gladys, Lady Ponsonby, painted with a certain technical cunning that made her out to be a tall and quite alluring creature.
‘Charming,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it, though! I’m so glad you like it.’
‘Quite charming.’
‘I think John Royden is a genius. Don’t you think he’s a genius, Lionel?’
‘Well – that might be going a bit far.’
‘You mean it’s a little early to say for sure?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But listen, Lionel – and I think this will surprise you. John Royden is so sought after now that he won’t even consider painting anyone for less than a thousand guineas!’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes! And everyone’s queueing up, simply queueing up to get themselves done.’
‘Most interesting.’
‘Now take your Mr Cézanne or whatever his name is. I’ll bet he never got that sort of money in his lifetime.’
‘Never.’
‘And you say he was a genius?
’
‘Sort of–yes.’
‘Then so is Royden,’ she said, settling herself again on the sofa. ‘The money proves it.’
She sat silent for a while, sipping her brandy, and I couldn’t help noticing how the unsteadiness of her hand was causing the rim of the glass to jog against her lower lip. She knew I was watching her, and without turning her head she swivelled her eyes and glanced at me cautiously out of the corners of them. ‘A penny for your thoughts?’
Now, if there is one phrase in the world I cannot abide, it is this. It gives me an actual physical pain in the chest and I began to cough.
‘Come on, Lionel. A penny for them.’
I shook my head, quite unable to answer. She turned away abruptly and placed the brandy glass on a small table to her left; and the manner in which she did this seemed to suggest – I don’t know, why – that she felt rebuffed and was now clearing the decks for action. I waited, rather uncomfortable in the silence that followed, and because I had no conversation left in me, I made a great play about smoking my cigar, studying the ash intently and blowing the smoke up slowly towards the ceiling. But she made no move. There was beginning to be something about this lady I did not much like, a mischievous brooding air that made me want to get up quickly and go away. When she looked around again, she was smiling at me slyly with those little buried eyes of hers, but the mouth – oh, just like a salmon’s – was absolutely rigid.
‘Lionel, I think I’ll tell you a secret.’
‘Really, Gladys, I simply must get home.’
‘Don’t be frightened, Lionel. I won’t embarrass you. You look so frightened all of a sudden.’