by Roald Dahl
‘Yes, it did.’
‘Magnificent quality,’ he said. ‘Fine colour, too. You know something, my dear? I reckon a piece like this would cost you two or three hundred dollars at least if you had to buy it in a shop.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
There were two skins, two narrow mangy-looking skins with their heads still on them and glass beads in their eye sockets and little paws hanging down. One of them had the rear end of the other in its mouth, biting it.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Try it on.’ He leaned forward and draped the thing around her neck, then stepped back to admire. ‘It’s perfect. It really suits you. It isn’t everyone who has mink, my dear.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Better leave it behind when you go shopping or they’ll all think we’re millionaires and start charging us double.’
‘I’ll try to remember that, Cyril.’
‘I’m afraid you mustn’t expect anything else for Christmas. Fifty dollars was rather more than I was going to spend anyway.’
He turned away and went over to the basin and began washing his hands. ‘Run along now, my dear, and buy yourself a nice lunch. I’d take you out myself but I’ve got old man Gorman in the waiting-room with a broken clasp on his denture.’
Mrs Bixby moved towards the door.
I’m going to kill that pawnbroker, she told herself. I’m going right back there to the shop this very minute and I’m going to throw this filthy neckpiece right in his face and if he refuses to give me back my coat I’m going to kill him.
‘Did I tell you I was going to be late home tonight?’ Cyril Bixby said, still washing his hands.
‘No.’
‘It’ll probably be at least eight-thirty the way things look at the moment. It may even be nine.’
‘Yes, all right. Good-bye.’ Mrs Bixby went out, slamming the door behind her.
At that precise moment, Miss Pulteney, the secretary-assistant, came sailing past her down the corridor on her way to lunch.
‘Isn’t it a gorgeous day?’ Miss Pulteney said as she went by, flashing a smile. There was lilt in her walk, a little whiff of perfume attending her, and she looked like a queen, just exactly like a queen in the beautiful black mink coat that the Colonel had given to Mrs Bixby.
Royal Jelly
‘It worries me to death, Albert, it really does,’ Mrs Taylor said.
She kept her eyes fixed on the baby who was now lying absolutely motionless in the crook of her left arm.
‘I just know there’s something wrong.’
The skin on the baby’s face had a pearly translucent quality and was stretched very tightly over the bones.
‘Try again,’ Albert Taylor said.
‘It won’t do any good.’
‘You have to keep trying, Mabel,’ he said.
She lifted the bottle out of the saucepan of hot water and shook a few drops of milk on to the inside of her wrist, testing for temperature.
‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘Come on, my baby. Wake up and take a bit more of this.’
There was a small lamp on the table close by that made a soft yellow glow all around her.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Take just a weeny bit more.’
The husband watched her over the top of his magazine. She was half dead with exhaustion, he could see that, and the pale oval face, usually so grave and serene, had taken on a kind of pinched and desperate look. But even so, the drop of her head as she gazed down at the child was curiously beautiful.
‘You see,’ she murmured. ‘It’s no good. She won’t have it.’
She held the bottle up to the light, squinting at the calibrations.
‘One ounce again. That’s all she’s taken. No – it isn’t even that. It’s only three-quarters. It’s not enough to keep body and soul together, Albert, it really isn’t. It worries me to death.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘If only they could find out what was wrong.’
‘There’s nothing wrong, Mabel. It’s just a matter of time.’
‘Of course there’s something wrong.’
‘Dr Robinson says no.’
‘Look,’ she said, standing up. ‘You can’t tell me it’s natural for a six-weeks-old child to weigh less, less by more than two whole pounds than she did when she was born! Just look at those legs! They’re nothing but skin and bone!’
The tiny baby lay limply on her arm, not moving.
‘Dr Robinson said you was to stop worrying, Mabel. So did that other one.’
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘Isn’t that wonderful! Tm to stop worrying!’
‘Now, Mabel.’
‘What does he want me to do? Treat it as some sort of a joke?’
‘He didn’t say that.’
‘I hate doctors! I hate them all!’ she cried, and she swung away from him and walked quickly out of the room towards the stairs, carrying the baby with her.
Albert Taylor stayed where he was and let her go.
In a little while he heard her moving about in the bedroom directly over his head, quick nervous footsteps going tap tap tap on the linoleum above. Soon the footsteps would stop, and then he would have to get up and follow her, and when he went into the bedroom he would find her sitting beside the cot as usual, staring at the child and crying softly to herself and refusing to move.
‘She’s starving, Albert,’ she would say.
‘Of course she’s not starving.’
‘She is starving. I know she is. And Albert?’
‘Yes?’
‘I believe you know it too, but you won’t admit it. Isn’t that right?’
Every night now it was like this.
Last week they had taken the child back to the hospital, and the doctor had examined it carefully and told them that there was nothing the matter.
‘It took us nine years to get this baby, Doctor,’ Mabel had said. ‘I think it would kill me if anything should happen to her.’
That was six, days ago and since then it had lost another five ounces.
But worrying about it wasn’t going to help anybody, Albert Taylor told himself. One simply had to trust the doctor on a thing like this. He picked up the magazine that was still lying on his lap and glanced idly down the list of contents to see what it had to offer this week:
Among the Bees in May
Honey Cookery
The Bee Farmer and the B. Pharm.
Experiences in the Control of Nosema
The Latest on Royal Jelly
This Week in the Apiary
The Healing Power of Propolis
Regurgitations
British Beekeepers Annual Dinner
Association News
All his life Albert Taylor had been fascinated by anything that had to do with bees. As a small boy he used often to catch them in his bare hands and go running with them into the house to show to his mother, and sometimes he would put them on his face and let them crawl about over his cheeks and neck, and the astonishing thing about it all was that he never got stung. On the contrary, the bees seemed to enjoy being with him. They never tried to fly away, and to get rid of them he would have to brush them off gently with his fingers. Even then they would frequently return and settle again on his arm or hand or knee, any place where the skin was bare.
His father, who was a bricklayer, said there must be some witch’s stench about the boy, something noxious that came oozing out through the pores of the skin, and that no good would ever come of it, hypnotizing insects like that. But the mother said it was a gift given him by God, and even went so far as to compare him with St Francis and the birds.
As he grew older, Albert Taylor’s fascination with bees developed into an obsession, and by the time he was twelve he had built his first hive. The following summer he had captured his first swarm. Two years later, at the age of fourteen, he had no less than five hives standing neatly in a row against the fence in his father’s small back yard, and already – apart from the normal task of prod
ucing honey – he was practising the delicate and complicated business of rearing his own queens, grafting larvae into artificial cell cups, and all the rest of it.
He never had to use smoke when there was work to do inside a hive, and he never wore gloves on his hands or a net over his head. Clearly there was some strange sympathy between this boy and the bees, and down in the village, in the shops and pubs, they began to speak about him with a certain kind of respect, and people started coming up to the house to buy his honey.
When he was eighteen, he had rented one acre of rough pasture alongside a cherry orchard down the valley about a mile from the village, and there he had set out to establish his own business. Now, eleven years later, he was still in the same spot, but he had six acres of ground instead of one, two hundred and forty well-stocked hives, and a small house that he’d built mainly with his own hands. He had married at the age of twenty and that, apart from the fact that it had taken them over nine years to get a child, had also been a success. In fact, everything had gone pretty well for Albert until this strange little baby girl came along and started frightening them out of their wits by refusing to eat properly and losing weight every day.
He looked up from the magazine and began thinking about his daughter.
That evening, for instance, when she had opened her eyes at the beginning of the feed, he had gazed into them and seen something that frightened him to death – a kind of misty vacant stare, as though the eyes themselves were not connected to the brain at all but were just lying loose in their sockets like a couple of small grey marbles.
Did those doctors really know what they were talking about?
He reached for an ash-tray and started slowly picking the ashes out from the bowl of his pipe with a matchstick.
One could always take her along to another hospital, somewhere in Oxford perhaps. He might suggest that to Mabel when he went upstairs.
He could still hear her moving around in the bedroom, but she must have taken off her shoes now and put on slippers because the noise was very faint.
He switched his attention back to the magazine and went on with his reading. He finished the article called ‘Experiences in the Control of Nosema’, then turned over the page and began reading the next one, ‘The Latest on Royal Jelly’. He doubted very much whether there would be anything in this that he didn’t know already:
What is this wonderful substance called royal jelly?
He reached for the tin of tobacco on the table beside him and began filling his pipe, still reading.
Royal jelly is a glandular secretion produced by the nurse bees to feed the larvae immediately they have hatched from the egg. The pharyngeal glands of bees produce this substance in much the same way as the mammary glands of vertebrates produce milk. The fact is of great biological interest because no other insects in the world are known to have evolved such a process.
All old stuff, he told himself, but for want of anything better to do, he continued to read.
Royal jelly is fed in concentrated form to all bee larvae for the first three days after hatching from the egg; but beyond that point, for all those who are destined to become drones or workers, this precious food is greatly diluted with honey and pollen. On the other hand, the larvae which are destined to become queens are fed throughout the whole of their larval period on a concentrated diet of pure royal jelly. Hence the name.
Above him, up in the bedroom, the noise of the footsteps had stopped altogether. The house was quiet. He struck a match and put it to his pipe.
Royal jelly must be a substance of tremendous nourishing power, for on this diet alone, the honey-bee larva increases in weight fifteen hundred times in five days.
That was probably about right, he thought, although for some reason it had never occurred to him to consider larval growth in terms of weight before.
This is as if a seven-and-a-half-pound baby should increase in that time to five tons.
Albert Taylor stopped and read that sentence again.
He read it a third time.
This is as if a seven-and-a-half-pound baby…
‘Mabel!’ he cried, jumping up from his chair. ‘Mabel! Come here!’
He went out into the hall and stood at the foot of the stairs calling for her to come down.
There was no answer.
He ran up the stairs and switched on the light on the landing. The bedroom door was closed. He crossed the landing and opened it and stood in the doorway looking into the dark room. ‘Mabel,’ he said. ‘Come downstairs a moment, will you please? I’ve just had a bit of an idea. It’s about the baby.’
The light from the landing behind him cast a faint glow over the bed and he could see her dimly now, lying on her stomach with her face buried in the pillow and her arms up over her head. She was crying again.
‘Mabel,’ he said, going over to her, touching her shoulder. ‘Please come down a moment. This may be important.’
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Don’t you want to hear about my idea?’
‘Oh, Albert, I’m tired,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m doing any more. I don’t think I can go on. I don’t think I can stand it.’
There was a pause. Albert Taylor turned away from her and walked slowly over to the cradle where the baby was lying, and peered in. It was too dark for him to see the child’s face, but when he bent down close he could hear the sound of breathing, very faint and quick. ‘What time is the next feed?’ he asked.
‘Two o’clock, I suppose.’
‘And the one after that?’
‘Six in the morning.’
‘I’ll do them both,’ he said. ‘You go to sleep.’
She didn’t answer.
‘You get properly into bed, Mabel, and go straight to sleep, you understand? And stop worrying. I’m taking over completely for the next twelve hours. You’ll give yourself a nervous breakdown going on like this.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘I’m taking the nipper and myself and the alarm clock into the spare room this very moment, so you just lie down and relax and forget all about us. Right?’ Already he was pushing the cradle out through the door.
‘Oh, Albert,’ she sobbed.
‘Don’t you worry about a thing. Leave it to me.’
‘Albert…’
‘Yes?’
‘I love you, Albert.’
‘I love you too, Mabel. Now go to sleep.’
Albert Taylor didn’t see his wife again until nearly eleven o’clock the next morning.
‘Good gracious me!’ she cried, rushing down the stairs in dressing-gown and slippers. ‘Albert! Just look at the time! I must have slept twelve hours at least! Is everything all right? What happened?’
He was sitting quietly in his armchair smoking a pipe and reading the morning paper. The baby was in a sort of carry-cot on the floor at his feet, sleeping.
‘Hullo, dear,’ he said, smiling.
She ran over to the cot and looked in. ‘Did she take anything, Albert? How many times have you fed her? She was due for another one at ten o’clock, did you know that?’
Albert Taylor folded the newspaper neatly into a square and put it away on the side table. ‘I fed her at two in the morning,’ he said, ‘and she took about half an ounce, no more. I fed her again at six and she did a bit better that time, two ounces…’
‘Two ounces! Oh, Albert, that’s marvellous!’
‘And we just finished the last feed ten minutes ago. There’s the bottle on the mantelpiece. Only one ounce left. She drank three. How’s that?’ He was grinning proudly, delighted with his achievement.
The woman quickly got down on her knees and peered at the baby.
‘Don’t she look better?’ he asked eagerly. ‘Don’t she look fatter in the face?’
‘It may sound silly,’ the wife said, ‘but I actually think she does. Oh, Albert, you’re a marvel! How did you do it?’
‘She�
��s turning the corner,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is. Just like the doctor prophesied, she’s turning the corner.’
‘I pray to God you’re right, Albert.’
‘Of course I’m right. From now on, you watch her go.’
The woman was gazing lovingly at the baby.
‘You look a lot better yourself too, Mabel.’
‘I feel wonderful. I’m sorry about last night.’
‘Let’s keep it this way,’ he said. ‘I’ll do all the night feeds in future. You do the day ones.’
She looked up at him across the cot, frowning. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t allow you to do that.’
‘I don’t want you to have a breakdown, Mabel.’
‘I won’t, not now I’ve had some sleep.’
‘Much better we share it.’
‘No, Albert. This is my job and I intend to do it. Last night won’t happen again.’
There was a pause. Albert Taylor took the pipe out of his mouth and examined the grain on the bowl. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘In that case I’ll just relieve you of the donkey work, I’ll do all the sterilizing and the mixing of the food and getting everything ready. That’ll help you a bit, anyway.’
She looked at him carefully, wondering what could have come over him all of a sudden.
‘You see, Mabel, I’ve been thinking…’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘I’ve been thinking that up until last night I’ve never even raised a finger to help you with this baby.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘Oh yes it is. So I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to do my share of the work. I’m going to be the feed-mixer and the bottle-sterilizer. Right?’
‘It’s very sweet of you, dear, but I really don’t think it’s necessary…’
‘Come on!’ he cried. ‘Don’t change the luck! I done it the last three times and just look what happened! When’s the next one? Two o’clock, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s all mixed,’ he said. ‘Everything’s all mixed and ready and all you’ve got to do when the time comes is to go out there to the larder and take it off the shelf and warm it up. That’s some help, isn’t it?’