Tales of the Unexpected

a faint, misty, quickly moving outline, like the spokes of a turning wheel.
    Then she slowed down and the little man came into view again and she hauled him across the room and pushed him backwards on to one of the beds. He sat on the edge of it blinking his eyes and testing his head to see if it would still turn on his neck.
    ‘I am sorry,’ the woman said. ‘I am so terribly sorry that this should happen.’ She spoke almost perfect English.
    ‘It is too bad,’ she went on. ‘I suppose it is really my fault. For ten minutes I leave him alone to go and have my hair washed and I come back and he is at it again.’ She looked sorry and deeply concerned.
    The boy was untying his hand from the table. The English girl and I stood there and said nothing.
    ‘He is a menace,’ the woman said. ‘Down where we live at home he has taken altogether forty-seven fingers from different people, and he has lost eleven cars. In the end they threatened to have him put away somewhere. That’s why I brought him up here.’
    ‘We were only having a little bet,’ mumbled the little man from the bed.
    ‘I suppose he bet you a car,’ the woman said.
    ‘Yes,’ the boy answered. ‘A Cadillac.’
    ‘He has no car. It’s mine. And that makes it worse,’ she said, ‘that he should bet you when he has nothing to bet with. I am ashamed and very sorry about it all.’ She seemed an awfully nice woman.
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘then here’s the key of your car.’ I put it on the table.
    ‘We were only having a little bet,’ mumbled the little man.
    ‘He hasn’t anything left to bet with,’ the woman said. ‘He hasn’t a thing in the world. Not a thing. As a matter of fact I myself won it all from him a long while ago. It took time, a lot of time, and it was hard work, but I won it all in the end.’ She looked up at the boy and she smiled, a slow sad smile, and she came over and put out a hand to take the key from the table.
    I can see it now, that hand of hers; it had only one finger on it, and a thumb.

My Lady Love, My Dove
    It has been my habit for many years to take a nap after lunch. I settle myself in a chair in the living-room with a cushion behind my head and my feet up on a small square leather stool, and I read until I drop off.
    On this Friday afternoon, I was in my chair and feeling as comfortable as ever with a book in my hands – an old favourite, Doubleday and Westwood’s
The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera
– when my wife, who has never been a silent lady, began to talk to me from the sofa opposite. ‘These two people,’ she said, ‘what time are they coming?’
    I made no answer, so she repeated the question, louder this time.
    I told her politely that I didn’t know.
    ‘I don’t think I like them very much,’ she said. ‘Especially him.’
    ‘No dear, all right.’
    ‘Arthur. I said I don’t think I like them very much.’
    I lowered my book and looked across at her lying with her feet up on the sofa, flipping over the pages of some fashion magazine. ‘We’ve only met them once,’ I said.
    ‘A dreadful man, really. Never stopped telling jokes, or stories, or something.’
    ‘I’m sure you’ll manage them very well, dear.’
    ‘And she’s pretty frightful, too. When do you think they’ll arrive?’
    Somewhere around six o’clock, I guessed.
    ‘But don’t
you
think they’re awful?’ she asked, pointing at me with her finger.
    ‘Well…’
    ‘They’re
too
awful, they really are.’
    ‘We can hardly put them off now, Pamela.’
    ‘They’re absolutely the end,’ she said.
    ‘Then why did you ask them?’ The question slipped out before I could stop myself and I regretted it at once, for it is a rule with me never to provoke my wife if I can help it. There was a pause, and I watched her face, waiting for the answer – the big white face that to me was something so strange and fascinating there were occasions when I could hardly bring myself to look away from it. In the evenings sometimes – working on her embroidery, or painting those small intricate flower pictures – the face would tighten and glimmer with a subtle inward strength that was beautiful beyond words, and I would sit and stare at it minute after minute while pretending to read. Even now, at this moment, with that compressed acid look, the frowning forehead, the petulant curl of the nose, I had to admit that there was a majestic quality about this woman, something splendid, almost stately; and so tall she