The Umbrella Man and Other Stories (20 page)

When the six weeks were up, everybody was sad that she had to return to America, to her husband. Everybody, that is, except her. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem to mind as much as one might have expected, and when she kissed them all good-bye, there was something in her manner and in the things she said that appeared to hint at the possibility of a return in the not too distant future.

However, like the faithful wife she was, she did not overstay her time. Exactly six weeks after she had arrived, she sent a cable to her husband and caught the plane back to New York.

Arriving at Idlewild, Mrs. Foster was interested to observe that there was no car to meet her. It is possible that she might even have been a little amused. But she was extremely calm and did not overtip the porter who helped her into a taxi with her baggage.

New York was colder than Paris, and there were lumps of dirty snow lying in the gutters of the streets. The taxi drew up before the house on Sixty-second Street, and Mrs. Foster persuaded the driver to carry her two large cases to the top of the steps. Then she paid
him off and rang the bell. She waited, but there was no answer. Just to make sure, she rang again, and she could hear it tinkling shrilly far away in the pantry, at the back of the house. But still no one came.

So she took out her own key and opened the door herself.

The first thing she saw as she entered was a great pile of mail lying on the floor where it had fallen after being slipped through the letter box. The place was dark and cold. A dust sheet was still draped over the grandfather clock. In spite of the cold, the atmosphere was peculiarly oppressive, and there was a faint and curious odour in the air that she had never smelled before.

She walked quickly across the hall and disappeared for a moment around the corner to the left, at the back. There was something deliberate and purposeful about this action; she had the air of a woman who is off to investigate a rumour or to confirm a suspicion. And when she returned a few seconds later, there was a little glimmer of satisfaction on her face.

She paused in the centre of the hall, as though wondering what to do next. Then, suddenly, she turned and went across into her husband’s study. On the desk she found his address book, and after hunting through it for a while she picked up the phone and dialled a number.

“Hello,” she said. “Listen—this is Nine East Sixty-second Street . . . Yes, that’s right. Could you send someone round as soon as possible, do you think? Yes, it seems to be stuck between the second and third floors. At least, that’s where the indicator’s pointing . . . Right away? Oh, that’s very kind of you. You see, my legs
aren’t any too good for walking up a lot of stairs. Thank you so much. Good-bye.”

She replaced the receiver and sat there at her husband’s desk, patiently waiting for the man who would be coming soon to repair the lift.

“It worries me to death, Albert, it really does,” Mrs. Taylor said.

She kept her eyes fixed on the baby who was now lying absolutely motionless in the crook of her left arm.

“I just know there’s something wrong.”

The skin on the baby’s face had a pearly translucent quality and was stretched very tightly over the bones.

“Try again,” Albert Taylor said.

“It won’t do any good.”

“You have to keep trying, Mabel,” he said.

She lifted the bottle out of the saucepan of hot water and shook a few drops of milk on to the inside of her wrist, testing for temperature.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, my baby. Wake up and take a bit more of this.”

There was a small lamp on the table close by that made a soft yellow glow all around her.

“Please,” she said. “Take just a weeny bit more.”

The husband watched her over the top of his magazine. She was half dead with exhaustion, he could see that, and the pale oval face, usually so grave and serene, had taken on a kind of pinched and desperate look. But even so, the drop of her head as she gazed down at the child was curiously beautiful.

“You see,” she murmured. “It’s no good. She won’t have it.”

She held the bottle up to the light, squinting at the calibrations.

“One ounce again. That’s all she’s taken. No—it isn’t even that. It’s only three-quarters. It’s not enough to keep body and soul together, Albert, it really isn’t. It worries me to death.”

“I know,” he said.

“If only they could
find out
what was wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong, Mabel. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Of course there’s something wrong.”

“Dr. Robinson says no.”

“Look,” she said, standing up. “You can’t tell me it’s natural for a six-week-old child to weigh less, less by more than
two whole pounds
than she did when she was born! Just look at those legs! They’re nothing but skin and bone!”

The tiny baby lay limply on her arm, not moving.

“Dr. Robinson said you was to stop worrying, Mabel. So did that other one.”

“Ha!” she said. “Isn’t that wonderful! I’m to stop worrying!”

“Now, Mabel.”

“What does he want me to do? Treat it as some sort of a joke?”

“He didn’t say that.”

“I hate doctors! I hate them all!” she cried, and she swung away from him and walked quickly out of the room towards the stairs, carrying the baby with her.

Albert Taylor stayed where he was and let her go.

In a little while he heard her moving about in the bedroom directly over his head, quick nervous footsteps going tap tap tap on the linoleum above. Soon the footsteps would stop, and then he would have to get up and follow her, and when he went into the bedroom he would find her sitting beside the cot as usual, staring at the child and crying softly to herself and refusing to move.

“She’s starving, Albert,” she would say.

“Of course she’s not starving.”

“She
is
starving. I know she is. And Albert?”

“Yes?”

“I believe you know it too, but you won’t admit it. Isn’t that right?”

Every night now it was like this.

Last week they had taken the child back to the hospital, and the doctor had examined it carefully and told them that there was nothing the matter.

“It took us nine years to get this baby, Doctor,” Mabel had said. “I think it would kill me if anything should happen to her.”

That was six days ago and since then it had lost another five ounces.

But worrying about it wasn’t going to help anybody, Albert Taylor told himself. One simply had to trust the doctor on a thing like this. He picked up the magazine that was still lying on his lap and glanced idly down the list of contents to see what it had to offer this week:

All his life Albert Taylor had been fascinated by anything that had to do with bees. As a small boy he often used to catch them in his bare hands and go running with them into the house to show to his mother, and sometimes he would put them on his face and let them crawl about over his cheeks and neck, and the astonishing thing about it all was that he never got stung. On the contrary, the bees seemed to enjoy being with him. They never tried to fly away, and to get rid of them he would have to brush them off gently with his fingers. Even then they would frequently return and settle again on his arm or hand or knee, any place where the skin was bare.

His father, who was a bricklayer, said there must be some witch’s stench about the boy, something noxious that came oozing out through the pores of the skin, and that no good would ever come of it, hypnotizing insects like that. But the mother said it was a gift given him by God, and even went so far as to compare him with St. Francis and the birds.

As he grew older, Albert Taylor’s fascination with bees developed into an obsession, and by the time he was twelve he had built his first hive. The following summer he had captured his first swarm. Two years later, at the age of fourteen, he had no less than five hives standing neatly in a row against the fence in his father’s small back yard, and already—apart from the normal task of producing honey—he was practising the delicate and complicated business of rearing his own queens, grafting larvae into artificial cell cups, and all the rest of it.

He never had to use smoke when there was work to do inside a hive, and he never wore gloves on his hands or a net over his head. Clearly there was some strange sympathy between this boy and the bees, and down in the village, in the shops and pubs, they began to speak about him with a certain kind of respect, and people started coming up to the house to buy his honey.

When he was eighteen, he had rented one acre of rough pasture alongside a cherry orchard down the valley about a mile from the village, and there he had set out to establish his own business. Now, eleven years later, he was still in the same spot, but he had six acres of ground instead of one, two hundred and forty well-stocked hives, and a small house he’d built mainly with his own hands. He had married at the age of twenty and that, apart from the fact that it had taken them over nine years to get a child, had also been a success. In fact, everything had gone pretty well for Albert until this strange little baby girl came along and started frightening them out of their wits by refusing to eat properly and losing weight every day.

He looked up from the magazine and began thinking about his daughter.

That evening, for instance, when she had opened her eyes at the beginning of the feed, he had gazed into them and seen something that frightened him to death—a kind of misty vacant stare, as though the eyes themselves were not connected to the brain at all but were just lying loose in their sockets like a couple of small grey marbles.

Did those doctors really know what they were talking about?

He reached for an ashtray and started slowly picking the ashes out from the bowl of his pipe with a matchstick.

One could always take her along to another hospital, somewhere in Oxford perhaps. He might suggest that to Mabel when he went upstairs.

He could still hear her moving around in the bedroom, but she must have taken off her shoes now and put on slippers because the noise was very faint.

He switched his attention back to the magazine and went on with his reading. He finished the article called “Experiences in the Control of Nosema,” then turned over the page and began reading the next one, “The Latest on Royal Jelly.” He doubted very much whether there would be anything in this that he didn’t know already:

He reached for the tin of tobacco on the table beside him and began filling his pipe, still reading.

All old stuff, he told himself, but for want of anything better to do, he continued to read.

Above him, up in the bedroom, the noise of the footsteps had stopped altogether. The house was quiet. He struck a match and put it to his pipe.

That was probably about right, he thought, although for some reason it had never occurred to him to consider larval growth in terms of weight before.

Albert Taylor stopped and read that sentence again. He read it a third time.

“Mabel!” he cried, jumping up from his chair. “Mabel! Come here!”

He went out into the hall and stood at the foot of the stairs calling for her to come down.

There was no answer.

He ran up the stairs and switched on the light on the landing. The bedroom door was closed. He crossed the landing and opened it and stood in the doorway looking into the dark room. “Mabel,” he said. “Come downstairs a moment, will you please? I’ve just had a bit of an idea. It’s about the baby.”