Deception

by Roald Dahl

‘That’s my pound!’ my mother hissed. ‘By golly, he’s got a nerve!’

  ‘What’s in the glass?’ I asked.

  ‘Whisky,’ my mother said. ‘Neat whisky.’

  The barman didn’t give him any change from the pound.

  ‘That must be a treble whisky,’ my mother said.

  ‘What’s a treble?’ I asked.

  ‘Three times the normal measure,’ she answered.

  The little man picked up the glass and put it to his lips. He tilted it gently. Then he tilted it higher … and higher … and higher … and very soon all the whisky had disappeared down his throat in one long pour.

  ‘That was a jolly expensive drink,’ I said.

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ my mother said. ‘Fancy paying a pound for something you swallow in one go!’

  ‘It cost him more than a pound,’ I said. ‘It cost him a twenty-pound silk umbrella.’

  ‘So it did,’ my mother said. ‘He must be mad.’

  The little man was standing by the bar with the empty glass in his hand. He was smiling now, and a sort of golden glow of pleasure was spreading over his round pink face. I saw his tongue come out to lick the white moustache, as though searching for the last drop of that precious whisky.

  Slowly, he turned away from the bar and edged back through the crowd to where his hat and coat were hanging. He put on his hat. He put on his coat. Then, in a manner so superbly cool and casual that you hardly noticed anything at all, he lifted from the coat-rack one of the many wet umbrellas hanging there, and off he went.

  ‘Did you see that!’ my mother shrieked. ‘Did you see what he did!’

  ‘Ssshh!’ I whispered. ‘He’s coming out!’

  We lowered the umbrella to hide our faces, and peeped out from under it.

  Out he came. But he never looked in our direction. He opened his new umbrella over his head and scurried off down the road the way he had come.

  ‘So that’s his little game!’ my mother said.

  ‘Neat,’ I said. ‘Super.’

  We followed him back to the main street where we had first met him, and we watched him as he proceeded, with no trouble at all, to exchange his new umbrella for another pound note. This time it was with a tall thin fellow who didn’t even have a coat or hat. And as soon as the transaction was completed, our little man trotted off down the street and was lost in the crowd. But this time he went in the opposite direction.

  ‘You see how clever he is!’ my mother said. ‘He never goes to the same pub twice!’

  ‘He could go on doing this all night,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘Of course. But I’ll bet he prays like mad for rainy days.’

  The Bookseller

  First published in Playboy, January 1987

  If, in those days, you walked up from Trafalgar Square into Charing Cross Road, you would come in a few minutes to a shop on the right-hand side that had above the window the words WILLIAM BUGGAGE - RARE BOOKS.

  If you peered through the window itself you would see that the walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and if you then pushed open the door and went in, you would immediately be assailed by that subtle odour of old cardboard and tea leaves that pervades the interiors of every second-hand bookshop in London. Nearly always, you would find two or three customers in there, silent shadowy figures in overcoats and trilby hats rummaging among the sets of Jane Austen and Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, hoping to find a first edition.

  No shop-keeper ever seemed to be hovering around to keep an eye on the customers, and if somebody actually wanted to pay for a book instead of pinching it and walking out, then he or she would have to push through a door at the back of the shop on which it said OFFICE – PAY HERE. If you went into the office you would find both Mr William Buggage and his assistant, Miss Muriel Tottle, seated at their respective desks and very much preoccupied.

  Mr Buggage would be sitting behind a valuable eighteenth-century mahogany partners-desk, and Miss Tottle, a few feet away, would be using a somewhat smaller but no less elegant piece of furniture, a Regency writing-table with a top of faded green leather. On Mr Buggage’s desk there would invariably be one copy of the day’s London Times, as well as the Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian the Western Mail and the Glasgow Herald. There would also be a current edition of Who’s Who close at hand, fat and red and well thumbed. Miss Tottle’s writing-table would have on it an electric typewriter and a plain but very nice open box containing notepaper and envelopes, as well as a quantity of paper-clips and staplers and other secretarial paraphernalia.

  Now and again, but not very often, a customer would enter the office from the shop and would hand his chosen volume to Miss Tottle, who checked the price written in pencil on the fly-leaf and accepted the money, giving change when necessary from somewhere in the left-hand drawer of her writing-table. Mr Buggage never bothered even to glance up at those who came in and went out, and if one of them asked a question, it would be Miss Tottle who answered it.

  Neither Mr Buggage nor Miss Tottle appeared to be in the least concerned about what went on in the main shop. In point of fact, Mr Buggage took the view that if someone was going to steal a book, then good luck to him. He knew very well that there was not a single valuable first edition out there on the shelves. There might be a moderately rare volume of Galsworthy or an early Waugh that had come in with a job lot bought at auction, and there were certainly some good sets of Boswell and Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest, often very nicely bound in half or even whole calf. But those were not really the sort of things you could slip into your overcoat pocket. Even if a villain did walk out with half a dozen volumes, Mr Buggage wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. Why should he when he knew that the shop itself earned less money in a whole year than the back-room business grossed in a couple of days. It was what went on in the back room that counted.

  One morning in February when the weather was foul and sleet was slanting white and wet on to the window panes of the office, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were in their respective places as usual and each was engrossed, one might even say fascinated, by his and her own work. Mr Buggage, with a gold Parker pen poised above a notepad, was reading The Times and jotting things down as he went along. Every now and again, he would refer to Who’s Who and make more jottings.

  Miss Tottle, who had been opening the mail, was now examining some cheques and adding up totals.

  ‘Three today,’ she said.

  ‘What’s it come to?’ Mr Buggage asked, not looking up.

  ‘One thousand six hundred,’ Miss Tottle said.

  Mr Buggage said, ‘I don’t suppose we’ve ’eard anything yet from that bishop’s ’ouse in Chester, ’ave we?’

  ‘A bishop lives in a palace, Billy, not a house,’ Miss Tottle said.

  ‘I don’t give a sod where ’ee lives,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘But I get just a little bit uneasy when there’s no quick answer from somebody like that.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, the reply came this morning,’ Miss Tottle said.

  ‘Coughed up all right?’

  ‘The full amount.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘We never done a bishop before and I’m not sure it was any too clever.’

  ‘The cheque came from some solicitors.’

  Mr Buggage looked up sharply. ‘Was there a letter?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Read it.’

  Miss Tottle found the letter and began to read: ‘Dear Sir, With reference to your communication of the 4th Instant, we enclose herewith a cheque for £537 in full settlement. Yours faithfully, Smithson, Briggs and Ellis.’ Miss Tottle paused. ‘That seems all right, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all right this time,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘But we don’t want no more solicitors and let’s not ’ave any more bishops either.’

  ‘I agree about bishops,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘But you’re not suddenly ruling out earls and lords and all that l
ot, I hope?’

  ‘Lords is fine,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘We never ’ad no trouble with lords. Nor earls either. And didn’t we do a duke once?’

  ‘The Duke of Dorset,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘Did him last year. Over a thousand quid.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘I remember selectin’ ’im myself straight off the front page.’ He stopped talking while he prised a bit of food out from between two front teeth with the nail of his little finger. ‘What I says is this,’ he went on. ‘The bigger the title, the bigger the twit. In fact, anyone’s got a title on ’is name is almost certain to be a twit.’

  ‘Now that’s not quite true, Billy,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘Some people are given titles because they’ve done absolutely brilliant things, like inventing penicillin or climbing Mount Everest.’

  ‘I’m talking about in’erited titles,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘Anyone gets born with a title, it’s odds-on ’ee’s a twit.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘We’ve never had the slightest trouble with the aristocracy.’

  Mr Buggage leaned back in his chair and gazed solemnly at Miss Tottle. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘One of these days we might even ’ave a crack at royalty.’

  ‘Ooh, I’d love it,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘Sock them for a fortune.’

  Mr Buggage continued to gaze at Miss Tottle’s profile, and as he did so, a slightly lascivious glint crept into his eye. One is forced to admit that Miss Tottle’s appearance, when judged by the highest standards, was disappointing. To tell the truth when judged by any standards, it was still disappointing. Her face was long and horsey and her teeth, which were also rather long, had a sulphurous tinge about them. So did her skin. The best you could say about her was that she had a generous bosom, but even that had its faults. It was the kind that makes a single long tightly bound bulge from one side of the chest to the other, and at first glance one got the impression that there were not two individual breasts growing out of her body but simply one big long loaf of bread.

  Then again, Mr Buggage himself was in no position to be overly finicky. When one saw him for the first time, the word that sprang instantly to mind was ‘grubby’. He was squat, paunchy, bald and flaccid, and so far as his face was concerned, one could only make a guess at what it looked like because not much of it was visible to the eye. The major part was covered over by an immense thicket of black, bushy, slightly curly hair, a fashion, one fears, that is all too common these days, a foolish practice and incidentally a rather dirty habit. Why so many males wish to conceal their facial characteristics is beyond the comprehension of us ordinary mortals. One must presume that if it were possible for these people also to grow hair all over their noses and cheeks and eyes, then they would do so, ending up with no visible face at all but only an obscene and rather gamey ball of hair. The only possible conclusion one can arrive at when looking at one of these bearded males is that the vegetation is a kind of smoke-screen and is cultivated in order to conceal something unsightly or unsavoury.

  This was almost certainly true in Mr Buggage’s case, and it was therefore fortunate for all of us, and especially for Miss Tottle, that the beard was there. Mr Buggage continued to gaze wistfully at his assistant. Then he said, ‘Now pet, why don’t you ’urry up and get them cheques in the post because after you’ve done that I’ve got a little proposal to put to you.’

  Miss Tottle looked back over her shoulder at the speaker and gave him a smirk that showed the cutting edges of her sulphur teeth. Whenever he called her ‘pet’, it was a sure sign that feelings of a carnal nature were beginning to stir within Mr Buggage’s breast, and in other parts as well.

  ‘Tell it to me now, lover,’ she said.

  ‘You get them cheques done first,’ he said. He could be very commanding at times, and Miss Tottle thought it was wonderful.

  Miss Tottle now began what she called her Daily Audit. This involved examining all of Mr Buggage’s bank accounts and all of her own and then deciding into which of them the latest cheques should be paid. Mr Buggage, you see, at this particular moment, had exactly sixty-six different accounts in his own name and Miss Tottle had twenty-two. These were scattered around among various branches of the big three banks, Barclays, Lloyds and National Westminster, all over London and a few in the suburbs. There was nothing wrong with that. And it had not been difficult, as the business became more and more successful, for either of them to walk into any branch of these banks and open a Current Account, with an initial deposit of a few hundred pounds. They would then receive a cheque book, a paying-in book and the promise of a monthly statement.

  Mr Buggage had discovered early on that if a person has an account with several or even many different branches of a bank, this will cause no comment by the staff. Each branch deals strictly with its own customers and their names are not circulated to other branches or to Head Office, not even in these computerized times.

  On the other hand, banks are required by law to notify the Inland Revenue of the names of all clients who have Deposit Accounts containing one thousand pounds or more. They must also report the amounts of interest earned. But no such law applies to Current Accounts because they earn no interest. Nobody takes any notice of a person’s Current Account unless it is overdrawn or unless, and this seldom happens, the balance becomes ridiculously large. A Current Account containing let us say £100,000 might easily raise an eyebrow or two among the staff, and the client would almost certainly get a nice letter from the manager suggesting that some of the money be placed on deposit to earn interest. But Mr Buggage didn’t give a fig for interest and he wanted no raised eyebrows either. That is why he and Miss Tottle had eighty-eight different bank accounts between them. It was Miss Tottle’s job to see that the amounts in each of these accounts never exceeded £20,000. Anything more than that might, in Mr Buggage’s opinion, cause an eyebrow to raise, especially if it were left lying untouched in a Current Account for months or years. The agreement between the two partners was seventy-five per cent of the profits of the business to Mr Buggage and twenty-five per cent to Miss Tottle.

  Miss Tottle’s Daily Audit involved examining a list she kept of all the balances in all those eighty-eight separate accounts and then deciding into which of them the daily cheque or cheques should be deposited. She had in her filing-cabinet eighty-eight different files, one for each bank account, and eighty-eight different cheque books and eighty-eight different paying-in books. Miss Tottle’s task was not a complicated one but she had to keep her wits about her and not muddle things up. Only the previous week they had to open four new accounts at four new branches, three for Mr Buggage and one for Miss Tottle. ‘Soon we’re goin’ to ’ave over a ’undred accounts in our names,’ Mr Buggage had said to Miss Tottle at the time.

  ‘Why not two hundred?’ Miss Tottle had said.

  ‘A day will come,’ Mr Buggage said, ‘when we’ll ’ave used up all the banks in this part of the country and you and I is goin’ to ’ave to travel all the way up to Sunderland or Newcastle to open new ones.’

  But now Miss Tottle was busy with her Daily Audit. ‘That’s done,’ she said, putting the last cheque and the paying-in slip into its envelope.

  ‘’Ow much we got in our accounts altogether at this very moment?’ Mr Buggage asked her.

  Miss Tottle unlocked the middle drawer of her writing-table and took out a plain school exercise book. On the cover she had written the words My old arithmetic book from school. She considered this a rather ingenious ploy designed to put people off the scent should the book ever fall into the wrong hands. ‘Just let me add on today’s deposit,’ she said, finding the right page and beginning to write down figures. ‘There we are. Counting today, you have got in all the sixty-six branches, one million, three hundred and twenty thousand, six hundred and forty-three pounds, unless you’ve been cashing any cheques in the last few days.’

  ‘I ’aven’t,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘And what’ve you got?’

  ‘I have got … fou
r hundred and thirty thousand, seven hundred and twenty-five pounds.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘And ’ow long’s it taken us to gather in those tidy little sums?’

  ‘Just eleven years,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘What was that teeny weeny proposal you were going to put to me, lover?’

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Buggage said, laying down his gold pencil and leaning back to gaze at her once again with that pale licentious eye. ‘I was just thinkin’ …’ere’s exactly what I was thinkin’ … why on earth should a millionaire like me be sittin’ ’ere in this filthy freezin’ weather when I could be reclinin’ in the lap of luxury beside a swimmin’ pool with a nice girl like you to keep me company and flunkeys bringin’ us goblets of iced champagne every few minutes?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ Miss Tottle cried, grinning widely.

  ‘Then get out the book and let’s see where we ’aven’t been?’

  Miss Tottle walked over to a bookshelf on the opposite wall and took down a thickish paperback called The 300 Best Hotels in the World chosen by Rene Lecler. She returned to her chair and said, ‘Where to this time, lover?’

  ‘Somewhere in North Africa,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘This is February and you’ve got to go at least to North Africa to get it really warm. Italy’s not ’ot enough yet, nor is Spain. And I don’t want the flippin’ West Indies. I’ve ’ad enough of them. Where ’aven’t we been in North Africa?’

  Miss Tottle was turning the pages of the book. ‘That’s not so easy,’ she said. ‘We’ve done the Palais Jamai in Fez … and the Gazelle d’Or in Taroudant … and the Tunis Hilton in Tunis. We didn’t like that one …’

  ‘’Ow many we done so far altogether in that book?’ Mr Buggage asked her.

  ‘I think it was forty-eight the last time I counted.’

  ‘And I ’as every intention of doin’ all three ’undred of ’em before I’m finished,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘That’s my big ambition and I’ll bet nobody else ’as ever done it.’

  ‘I think Mr Rene Lecler must have done it,’ Miss Tottle said.