The Umbrella Man and Other Stories

by Roald Dahl

  “If you want me to, yes.”

  “You know, I’m sort of hoping it’ll be something for you, Cyril. I’d much rather it was for you than for me.”

  “That’s very generous of you, my dear. Now I must run.”

  About an hour later, when the telephone rang, Mrs. Bixby was across the room so fast she had the receiver off the hook before the first ring had finished.

  “I got it!” he said.

  “You did! Oh, Cyril, what was it? Was it something good?”

  “Good!” he cried. “It’s fantastic! You wait till you get your eyes on this! You’ll swoon!”

  “Darling, what is it? Tell me quick!”

  “You’re a lucky girl, that’s what you are.”

  “It’s for me, then?”

  “Of course it’s for you. Though how in the world it ever got to be pawned for fifty dollars I’ll be damned if I know. Someone’s crazy.”

  “Cyril! Stop keeping me in suspense! I can’t bear it!”

  “You’ll go mad when you see it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Try to guess.”

  Mrs. Bixby paused. Be careful, she told herself. Be very careful now.

  “A necklace,” she said.

  “Wrong.”

  “A diamond ring.”

  “You’re not even warm. I’ll give you a hint. It’s something you can wear.”

  “Something I can wear? You mean like a hat?”

  “No, it’s not a hat,” he said, laughing.

  “For goodness’ sake, Cyril! Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Because I want it to be a surprise. I’ll bring it home with me this evening.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort!” she cried. “I’m coming right down there to get it now!”

  “I’d rather you didn’t do that.”

  “Don’t be so silly, darling. Why shouldn’t I come?”

  “Because I’m too busy. You’ll disorganize my whole morning schedule. I’m half an hour behind already.”

  “Then I’ll come in the lunch hour. All right?”

  “I’m not having a lunch hour. Oh well, come at one-thirty then, while I’m having a sandwich. Good-bye.”

  At half past one precisely, Mrs. Bixby arrived at Mr. Bixby’s place of business and rang the bell. Her husband, in his white dentist’s coat, opened the door himself.

  “Oh, Cyril, I’m so excited!”

  “So you should be. You’re a lucky girl, did you know that?” He led her down the passage and into the surgery.

  “Go and have your lunch, Miss Pulteney,” he said to the assistant, who was busy putting instruments into the sterilizer. “You can finish that when you come back.” He waited until the girl had gone, then he walked over to a closet that he used for hanging up his clothes and stood in front of it, pointing with his finger. “It’s in there,” he said. “Now—shut your eyes.”

  Mrs. Bixby did as she was told. Then she took a deep breath and held it, and in the silence that followed she could hear him opening the cupboard door and there was a soft swishing sound as he pulled out a garment from among the other things hanging there.

  “All right! You can look!”

  “I don’t dare to,” she said, laughing.

  “Go on. Take a peek.”

  Coyly, beginning to giggle, she raised one eyelid a fraction of an inch, just enough to give her a dark blurry view of the man standing there in his white overalls holding something up in the air.

  “Mink!” he cried. “Real mink!”

  At the sound of the magic word she opened her eyes quick, and at the same time she actually started forward in order to clasp the coat in her arms.

  But there was no coat. There was only a ridiculous little fur neckpiece dangling from her husband’s hand.

  “Feast your eyes on that!” he said, waving it in front of her face.

  Mrs. Bixby put a hand up to her mouth and started backing away. I’m going to scream, she told herself. I just know it. I’m going to scream.

  “What’s the matter, my dear? Don’t you like it?” He stopped waving the fur and stood staring at her, waiting for her to say something.

  “Why yes,” she stammered. “I . . . I . . . think it’s . . . it’s lovely . . . really lovely.”

  “Quite took your breath away for a moment there, didn’t it?”

  “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 a 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.

  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 chateaux in Bordeaux—Lafite, Latour, Haut-Brion, Margaux, Mouton-Rothschild 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 be properly 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 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 aftertaste 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.”

  “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 Château Lafite ‘45, and what’s more it is a Château 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.”

  “I 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.

  It was getting on towards six o’clock so I thought I’d buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deck chair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.

  I went to the bar and got the beer and carried it outside and wandered down the garden towards the pool.

  It was a fine garden with lawns and beds of azaleas and tall coconut palms, and the wind was blowing strongly through the tops of the palm trees, making the leaves hiss and crackle as though they were on fire. I could see the clusters of big brown nuts hanging down underneath the leaves.

  There were plenty of deck chairs around the swimming pool and there were white tables and huge brightly coloured umbrellas and sunburned men and women sitting around in bathing suits. In the pool itself there were three or four girls and about a dozen boys, all splashing about and making a lot of noise and throwing a large rubber ball at one another.

  I stood watching them. The girls were English girls from the hotel. The boys I didn’t know about, but they sounded American, and I thought they were probably naval cadets who’d come ashore from the U.S. naval training vessel which had arrived in harbour that morning.

  I went over and sat down under a yellow umbrella where there were four empty seats, and I poured my beer and settled back comfortably with a cigarette.

  It was very pleasant sitting there in the sunshine with beer and cigarette. It was pleasant to sit and watch the bathers splashing about in the green water.

  The American sailors were getting on nicely with the English girls. They’d reached the stage where they were diving under the water and tipping them up by their legs.

  Just then I noticed a small, oldish man walking briskly around the edge of the pool. He was immaculately dressed in a white suit and he walked very quickly with little bouncing strides, pushing himself high up on to his toes with each step. He had on a large creamy Panama hat, and he came bouncing along the side of the pool, looking at the people and the chairs.

  He stopped beside me and smiled, showing two rows of very small, uneven teeth, slightly tarnished. I smiled back.

  “Excuse pleess, but may I sit here?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  He bobbed around to the back of the chair and inspected it for safety, then he sat down and crossed his legs. His white buckskin shoes had little holes punched all over them for ventilation.

 
; “A fine evening,” he said. “They are all evenings fine here in Jamaica.” I couldn’t tell if the accent were Italian or Spanish, but I felt fairly sure he was some sort of a South American. And old too, when you saw him close. Probably around sixty-eight or seventy.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is wonderful here, isn’t it.”

  “And who, might I ask, are all dese? Dese is no hotel people.” He was pointing at the bathers in the pool.

  “I think they’re American sailors,” I told him. “They’re Americans who are learning to be sailors.”

  “Of course dey are Americans. Who else in de world is going to make as much noise as dat? You are not American no?”

  “No,” I said. “I am not.”

  Suddenly one of the American cadets was standing in front of us. He was dripping wet from the pool and one of the English girls was standing there with him.

  “Are these chairs taken?” he said.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He had a towel in his hand and when he sat down he unrolled it and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He offered the cigarettes to the girl and she refused; then he offered them to me and I took one. The little man said, “Tank you, no, but I tink I have a cigar.” He pulled out a crocodile case and got himself a cigar, then he produced a knife which had a small scissors in it and he snipped the end off the cigar.

  “Here, let me give you a light.” The American boy held up his lighter.

  “Dat will not work in dis wind.”

  “Sure it’ll work. It always works.”

  The little man removed his unlighted cigar from his mouth, cocked his head on one side and looked at the boy.

  “All-ways?” he said slowly.

  “Sure, it never fails. Not with me anyway.”

  The little man’s head was still cocked over on one side and he was still watching the boy. “Well, well. So you say dis famous lighter it never fails. Iss dat you say?”

  “Sure,” the boy said. “That’s right.” He was about nineteen or twenty with a long freckled face and a rather sharp birdlike nose. His chest was not very sunburned and there were freckles there too, and a few wisps of pale-reddish hair. He was holding the lighter in his right hand, ready to flip the wheel. “It never fails,” he said, smiling now because he was purposely exaggerating his little boast. “I promise you it never fails.”