Tales of the Unexpected

the photograph, but the woman still had her head through the hole, and now I saw him put both hands (as well as the camera) behind his back and advance towards her. Then he bent forward so his face was close to hers, touching it, and he held it there while he gave her, I suppose, a few kisses or something like that. In the stillness that followed, I fancied I heard a faint faraway tinkle of female laughter coming to us through the sunlight across the garden.
    ‘Shall we go back to the house?’ I asked.
    ‘Back to the house?’
    ‘Yes, shall we go back and have a drink before lunch?’
    ‘A drink? Yes, we’ll have a drink.’ But he didn’t move. He sat very still, gone far away from me now, staring intently at the two figures. I also was staring at them. I couldn’t take my eyes away; I
had
to look. It was like seeing a dangerous little ballet in miniature from a great distance, and you knew the dancers and the music but not the end of the story, nor the choreography, nor what they were going to do next, and you were fascinated, and you
had
to look.
    ‘Gaudier Brzeska,’ I said. ‘How great do you think he might’ve become if he hadn’t died so young?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Gaudier Brzeska.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
    I noticed now that something queer was happening. The woman still had her head through the hole, but she was beginning to wriggle her body from side to side in a slow unusual manner, and the man was standing motionless, a pace or so away, watching her. He seemed suddenly uneasy the way he stood there, and I could tell by the drop of the head and by the stiff intent set of the body that there was no laughter in him any more. For a while he remained still, then I saw him place his camera on the ground and go forward to the woman, taking her head in his hands; and all at once it was more like a puppet show than a ballet, with tiny wooden figures performing tiny jerky movements, crazy and unreal, on a faraway sunlit stage.
    We sat quietly together on the white bench, and we watched while the tiny puppet man began to manipulate the woman’s head with his hands. He was doing it gently, there was no doubt about that, slowly and gently, stepping back every now and then to think about it some more, and several times crouching down to survey the situation from another angle. Whenever he left her alone the woman would again start to wriggle her body, and the peculiar way she did it reminded me of a dog that feels a collar round its neck for the first time.
    ‘She’s stuck,’ Sir Basil said.
    And now the man was walking to the other side of the carving, the side where the woman’s body was, and he put out his hands and began trying to do something with her neck. Then, as though suddenly exasperated, he gave the neck two or three quick jerky pulls, and this time the sound of the woman’s voice, raised high in anger, or pain, or both, came back to us small and clear through the sunlight.
    Out of the corner of one eye I could see Sir Basil nodding his head quietly up and down. ‘I got my fist caught in a jar of boiled sweets once,’ he said, ‘and I couldn’t get it out.’
    The man had retreated a few yards, and was standing with hands on hips, head up, looking furious and sullen. The woman, from her uncomfortable position, appeared to be talking to him, or rather shouting at him, and although the body itself was pretty firmly fixed and could only wriggle, the legs were free and did a good deal of moving and stamping.
    ‘I broke the jar with a hammer and told my mother ‘I’d knocked it off the shelf by mistake.’ He seemed calmer now, not tense at all, although his voice was curiously flat. ‘I suppose we’d better go down and see if we can help.’
    ‘Perhaps we should.’
    But still he didn’t move. He took out a cigarette and lit it, putting the used match carefully back in the box.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Will you have one?’
    ‘Thanks, I think I will.’ He made a little ceremony of giving me the cigarette and lighting it for me, and again he put the used match back in the box. Then we got up and walked slowly down the grass slope.
    We came upon them silently, through an archway in the yew hedge, and it was naturally quite a surprise.
    ‘What’s the matter here?’ Sir Basil asked. He spoke softly, with a dangerous softness that I’m sure his wife had never heard before.
    ‘She’s gone and put her head through the hole and now she can’t get it out,’