The Umbrella Man and Other Stories (5 page)

She just couldn’t take her eyes off it. Nor, for that matter, could she wait to try it on. Quickly she slipped off her own plain red coat. She was panting a little now, she couldn’t help it, and her eyes were stretched very wide. But oh God, the feel of that fur! And those huge wide sleeves with their thick turned-up cuffs! Who was it had once told her that they always used female skins for the arms and male skins for the rest of the coat? Someone had told her that. Joan Rutfield, probably; though how
Joan
would know anything about
mink
she couldn’t imagine.

The great black coat seemed to slide on to her almost of its own accord, like a second skin. Oh boy! It was the queerest feeling! She glanced into the mirror. It was fantastic. Her whole personality had suddenly changed completely. She looked dazzling, radiant, rich, brilliant, voluptuous, all at the same time. And the sense of power that it gave her! In this coat she could walk into any place she wanted and people would come scurrying around her like rabbits. The whole thing was just too wonderful for words!

Mrs. Bixby picked up the envelope that was still lying in the box. She opened it and pulled out the Colonel’s letter:

Well!

Imagine that!

Right out of the blue, just when she was feeling so happy.

No more Colonel.

What a dreadful shock.

She would miss him enormously.

Slowly, Mrs. Bixby began stroking the lovely soft black fur of the coat.

What you lose on the swings you get back on the roundabouts.

She smiled and folded the letter, meaning to tear it up and throw it out of the window, but in folding it she noticed that there was something written on the other side:

Mrs. Bixby’s mouth, at that moment stretched wide in a silky smile, snapped back like a piece of elastic.

“The man must be mad!” she cried. “Aunt Maude doesn’t have that sort of money. She couldn’t possibly give me this.”

But if Aunt Maude didn’t give it to her, then who did?

Oh God! In the excitement of finding the coat and trying it on, she had completely overlooked this vital aspect.

In a couple of hours she would be in New York. Ten minutes after that she would be home, and the husband would be there to greet her; and even a man like Cyril, dwelling as he did in a dark phlegmy world of root canals, bicuspids, and caries, would start
asking a few questions if his wife suddenly waltzed in from a weekend wearing a six-thousand-dollar mink coat.

You know what I think, she told herself. I think that goddamn Colonel has done this on purpose just to torture me. He knew perfectly well Aunt Maude didn’t have enough money to buy this. He knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it.

But the thought of parting with it now was more than Mrs. Bixby could bear.

“I’ve
got
to have this coat!” she said aloud. “I’ve got to have this coat! I’ve got to have this coat!”

Very well, my dear. You shall have the coat. But don’t panic. Sit still and keep calm and start thinking. You’re a clever girl, aren’t you? You’ve fooled him before. The man never has been able to see much further than the end of his own probe, you know that. So just sit absolutely still and
think.
There’s lots of time.

Two and a half hours later, Mrs. Bixby stepped off the train at Pennsylvania Station and walked quietly to the exit. She was wearing her old red coat again now and carrying the cardboard box in her arms. She signalled for a taxi.

“Driver,” she said, “would you know of a pawnbroker that’s still open around here?”

The man behind the wheel raised his brows and looked back at her, amused.

“Plenty along Sixth Avenue,” he answered.

“Stop at the first one you see, then, will you please?” She got in and was driven away.

Soon the taxi pulled up outside a shop that had three brass balls hanging over the entrance.

“Wait for me, please,” Mrs. Bixby said to the driver, and she got out of the taxi and entered the shop.

There was an enormous cat crouching on the counter eating fishheads out of a white saucer. The animal looked up at Mrs. Bixby with bright yellow eyes, then looked away again and went on eating. Mrs. Bixby stood by the counter, as far away from the cat as possible, waiting for someone to come, staring at the watches, the shoe buckles, the enamel brooches, the old binoculars, the broken spectacles, the false teeth. Why did they always pawn their teeth, she wondered.

“Yes?” the proprietor said, emerging from a dark place in the back of the shop.

“Oh, good evening,” Mrs. Bixby said. She began to untie the string around the box. The man went up to the cat and started stroking it along the top of its back, and the cat went on eating the fishheads.

“Isn’t it silly of me?” Mrs. Bixby said. “I’ve gone and lost my pocket book, and this being Saturday, the banks are all closed until Monday and I’ve simply got to have some money for the weekend. This is quite a valuable coat, but I’m not asking much. I only want to borrow enough on it to tide me over till Monday. Then I’ll come back and redeem it.”

The man waited, and said nothing. But when she pulled out the mink and allowed the beautiful thick fur to fall over the counter, his eyebrows went up and he drew his hand away from the cat and came over to look at it. He picked it up and held it out in front of him.

“If only I had a watch on me or a ring,” Mrs. Bixby said, “I’d give you that instead. But the fact is I don’t have a thing with me other than this coat.” She spread out her fingers for him to see.

“It looks new,” the man said, fondling the soft fur.

“Oh yes, it is. But, as I said, I only want to borrow enough to tide me over till Monday. How about fifty 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 lapels and six buttons down the front, but now they merely seemed absurd. So did the narrow stovepipe trousers. You had to have a special sort of face to wear things like that, and Cyril just didn’t have it. His was a long bony countenance with a narrow nose and a slightly prognathous jaw, and when you saw it coming up out of the top of one of those tightly fitting old-fashioned suits it looked like a caricature of Sam Weller. He probably thought it looked like Beau Brummel. It was a fact that in the office he invariably greeted female patients with his white coat unbuttoned so that they would catch a glimpse of the trappings underneath; and in some obscure way this was obviously meant to convey the impression that he was a bit of a dog. But Mrs. Bixby knew better. The plumage was a bluff. It meant nothing. It reminded her of an ageing peacock strutting on the lawn with only half its feathers left. Or one of those fatuous self-fertilizing flowers—like the dandelion. A dandelion never has to get fertilized for the setting of its seed, and all those brilliant yellow petals are just a waste of time, a boast, a masquerade. What’s the word the biologists use? Subsexual. A dandelion is subsexual. So, for that matter, are the summer broods of water fleas. It sounds a bit like Lewis Carroll, she thought—water fleas and dandelions and dentists.

“Thank you, darling,” she said, taking the martini and seating herself on the sofa with her handbag on her lap. “And what did
you
do last night?”

“I stayed on in the office and cast a few inlays. I also got my accounts up to date.”

“Now really, Cyril, I think it’s high time you let other people do your donkey work for you. You’re much too important for that sort of thing. Why don’t you give the inlays to the mechanic?”

“I prefer to do them myself. I’m extremely proud of my inlays.”

“I know you are, darling, and I think they’re absolutely wonderful. They’re the best inlays in the whole world. But I don’t want you to burn yourself out. And why doesn’t that Pulteney woman do the accounts? That’s part of her job, isn’t it?”

“She does do them. But I have to price everything up first. She doesn’t know who’s rich and who isn’t.”

“This martini is perfect,” Mrs. Bixby said, setting down her glass on the side table. “Quite perfect.” She opened her bag and took out a handkerchief as if to blow her nose. “Oh look!” she cried, seeing the ticket. “I forgot to show you this! I found it just now on the seat of my taxi. It’s got a number on it, and I thought it might be a lottery ticket or something, so I kept it.”

She handed the small piece of stiff brown paper to her husband, who took it in his fingers and began examining it minutely from all angles, as though it were a suspect tooth.

“You know what this is?” he said slowly.

“No dear, I don’t.”

“It’s a pawn ticket.”

“A what?”

“A ticket from a pawnbroker. Here’s the name and address of the shop—somewhere on Sixth Avenue.”

“Oh dear, I
am
disappointed. I was hoping it might be a ticket for the Irish Sweep.”

“There’s no reason to be disappointed,” Cyril Bixby said. “As a matter of fact this could be rather amusing.”

“Why could it be amusing, darling?”

He began explaining to her exactly how a pawn ticket worked, with particular reference to the fact that anyone possessing the ticket was entitled to claim the article. She listened patiently until he had finished his lecture.

“You think it’s worth claiming?” she asked.

“I think it’s worth finding out what it is. You see this figure of fifty dollars that’s written here? You know what that means?”

“No, dear, what does it mean?”