Tales of the Unexpected

dollars?’
    ‘I’ll loan you fifty dollars.’
    ‘It’s worth a hundred times more than that, but I know you’ll take good care of it until I return.’
    The man went over to a drawer and fetched a ticket and placed it on the counter. The ticket looked like one of those labels you tie on to the handle of your suitcase, the same shape and size exactly, and the same stiff brownish paper. But it was perforated across the middle so that you could tear it in two, and both halves were identical.
    ‘Name?’ he asked.
    ‘Leave that out. And the address.’
    She saw the man pause, and she saw the nib of the pen hovering over the dotted line, waiting.
    ‘You don’t
have
to put the name and address, do you?’
    The man shrugged and shook his head and the pen-nib moved on down to the next line.
    ‘It’s just that I’d rather not,’ Mrs Bixby said. ‘It’s purely personal.’
    ‘You’d better not lose this ticket, then.’
    ‘I won’t lose it.’
    ‘You realize that anyone who gets hold of it can come in and claim the article?’
    ‘Yes, I know that.’
    ‘Simply on the number.’
    ‘Yes, I know.’
    ‘What do you want me to put for a description.’
    ‘No description either, thank you. It’s not necessary. Just put the amount I’m borrowing.’
    The pen-nib hesitated again, hovering over the dotted line beside the word ARTICLE .
    ‘I think you ought to put a description. A description is always a help if you want to sell the ticket. You never know, you might want to sell it sometime.’
    ‘I don’t want to sell it.’
    ‘You might have to. Lots of people do.’
    ‘Look,’ Mrs Bixby said. ‘I’m not broke, if that’s what you mean. I simply lost my purse. Don’t you understand?’
    ‘You have it your own way then,’ the man said. ‘It’s your coat.’
    At this point an unpleasant thought struck Mrs Bixby. ‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘If I don’t have a description on my ticket, how can I be sure you’ll give me back the coat and not something else when I return?’
    ‘It goes in the books.’
    ‘But all I’ve got is a number. So actually you could hand me any old thing you wanted, isn’t that so?’
    ‘Do you want a description or don’t you?’ the man asked.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I trust you.’
    The man wrote ‘fifty dollars’ opposite the word VALUE on both sections of the ticket, then he tore it in half along the perforations and slid the lower portion across the counter. He took a wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted five ten-dollar bills. ‘The interest is three per cent a month,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, all right. And thank you. You’ll take good care of it, won’t you?’
    The man nodded but said nothing.
    ‘Shall I put it back in the box for you?’
    ‘No,’ the man said.
    Mrs Bixby turned and went out of the shop on to the street where the taxi was waiting. Ten minutes later, she was home.
    ‘Darling,’ she said as she bent over and kissed her husband. ‘Did you miss me?’
    Cyril Bixby laid down the evening paper and glanced at the watch on his wrist. ‘It’s twelve and a half minutes past six,’ he said. ‘You’re a bit late, aren’t you?’
    ‘I know. It’s those dreadful trains. Aunt Maude sent you her love as usual. I’m dying for a drink, aren’t you?’
    The husband folded his newspaper into a neat rectangle and placed it on the arm of his chair. Then he stood up and crossed over to the sideboard. His wife remained in the centre of the room pulling off her gloves, watching him carefully, wondering how long she ought to wait. He had his back to her now, bending forward to measure the gin, putting his face right up close to the measurer and peering into it as though it were a patient’s mouth.
    It was funny how small he always looked after the Colonel. The Colonel was huge and bristly, and when you were near to him he smelled faintly of horseradish. This one was small and neat and bony and he didn’t really smell of anything at all, except peppermint drops, which he sucked to keep his breath nice for the patients.
    ‘See what I’ve bought for measuring the vermouth,’ he said, holding up a calibrated glass beaker. ‘I can get it to the nearest milligram with this.’
    ‘Darling, how clever.’
    I really must try to make him change the way he dresses, she told herself. His suits are just too ridiculous for words. There had been a time when she thought they were wonderful, those Edwardian jackets with high