Completely Unexpected Tales

by Roald Dahl

  ‘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 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 Ali 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 châteaux in Bordeaux–Lafite, Labour, Haut-Brion, Margaux, Mouton-Roth-schild 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 properly be 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 i 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.’
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  ‘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 Chateau Lathe ‘45, and what’s more it is a Chateau 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.’

  ‘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 hall 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.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  The first seven stories in Tales of the Unexpected are from Someone Like You, originally published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd in 1954 and republished by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1961. The remaining stories are from Kiss Kiss, first published by Michael Joseph in 1960. All the stories appeared in an omnibus volume entitled Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl, published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1969.

  Tales of the Unexpected first published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1979

  Published in Penguin Books 1979

  Copyright © Roald Dahl, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952, 1953, 1959, 1961, 1979

  All rights reserved

  Acknowledgement is hereby made to The New Yorker, Collier’s, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Nuggett and Playboy, in which some of the stories included in Tales of the Unexpected first appeared.

  The first two stories in More Tales of the Unexpected are from Someone Like You, originally published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd in 1954 and republished by Michael Joseph Ltd, in 1961. The third and fourth stories are from Kiss Kiss, first published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1960, and the fifth is from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, first published by Jonathan Cape in 1977.

  More Tales of the Unexpected first published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1980, published simultaneously in Penguin Books

  Copyright © Roald Dahl, 1949, 1950, 1958, 1959, 1973, 1977, 1980

  All rights reserved

  Acknowledgement is hereby made to The New Yorker and Playboy, in which two of the stories included in More Tales of the Unexpected first appeared.

  First published in one volume as Completely Unexpected Tales in Penguin Books 1986

  Copyright © Roald Dahl, 1986

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193020-6

  There’s More to Roald Dahl than Great Stories …

  Did you know that 10 per cent of author royalties* from this book go to help the work of the Roald Dahl charities?

  Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity exists to make life better for seriously ill children because it believes that every child has the right to a marvellous life.

  This marvellous charity helps thousands of children each year living with serious conditions of the blood and the brain – causes important to Roald Dahl in his lifetime – whether by providing nurses, equipment or toys for today’s children in the UK, or helping tomorrow’s children everywhere through pioneering research.

  Can you do something marvellous to help others? Find out how at: www.marvellouschildrenscharity.org

  The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, based in Great Missenden just outside London, is in the Buckinghamshire village where Roald Dahl lived and wrote. At the heart of the Museum, created to inspire a love of reading and writing, is his unique archive of letters and manuscripts. As well as two fun-packed biographical galleries, the Museum boasts an interactive Story Centre. It is a place for the family, teachers and their pupils to explore the exciting world of creativity and literacy.

  Find out more at www.roalddahlmuseum.org

  Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity (RDMCC) is a registered charity no. 1137409.

  The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre (RDMSC) is a registered charity no. 1085853.

  The Roald Dahl Charitable Trust is a registered charity no. 1119330 and supports the work of RDMCC and RDMSC.

  * Donated royalties are net of commission

  Roald Dahl also wrote some rather popular children’s stories:

  ‘Roald Dahl is without question th
e most successful children’s writer in the world’

  Independent