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Updated 13th October 2024 |
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My Lady Love, My Love by Roahl Dahl
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.
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.
"
And shes 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.
; "
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 was, far taller than I ‑although
today, in her fifty‑first year, I think one would have to call her big
rather than tall.
Well, of course, I do"
wide those wide grey eyes
of hers, and to avoid them ‑ they sometimes made me feel
quite uncomfortable ‑ I got un and walked over to the French
windows that led into the garden. The big sloping lawn out
in front of the house was newly mown, striped with pale and dark ribbons of
green. On the far side, the two laburnums were in full flower at last, the long
golden chains making a blaze of colour against the darker trees beyond. The
roses were out too, and the scarlet in the long begonias herbaceous border of
all my lovely lupins, columbine,
delphinium, sweet william, and the huge pale. scented iris. One of
the gardeners was coming up the drive from his lunch. I could see the roof of
his cottage through the trees, and beyond it to one side, the place where the
drive went out through the iron gates on the Canterbury Road My wife'
s house. Her
garden. How beautiful it all was! How peaceful ! Now, if only Pamela would try
to be a little less solicitous of my welfare, less prone to coax me into doing
things for my own good rather than for my own pleasure, then everything would
be heaven. Mind you. I don'
t want to give the impression that I do not love
her ‑ I worship the very air she breathes ‑ or that I can'
t manage
her, or that I am not the captain of my ship. All I am trying to say is that she
can be a trifle irritating at times, the way she carries on. For example, those
little mannerisms of hers ‑ I do wish she would drop them all, especially
the way she has of pointing a finger at me to emphasise a phrase. You must
remember that I am a man who is built rather small, and a gesture like this,
when used to excess by a person like my wife, is apt to intimidate. I sometimes
find it difficult to convince myself that she is not an overbearing woman.
I turned and went over to
where she was lying on the sofa.
I knew how much she disliked being contradicted,
but there were times when I felt it necessary to assert myself, even at
considerable risk. She took her feet down from the sofa and sat up
straight.
Tommyrot ! I' ve known you do lots of worse things than this before now."
I sat myself down slowly
in the chair opposite her, and she was watching me all the time. You understand,
she was a big woman, with a big white face, and when she looked at me hard, as
she was doing now, I became ‑ how shall I say it ‑surrounded, almost
enveloped by her, as though she were a great tub of cream and I had fallen in.
It was nearly three
o'
clock.
I hesitated. It was something I made a point of
doing whenever she tried to order me about, instead of asking nicely. She didn't'
t say any more
after that; she just sat there, absolutely still, watching me, a resigned,
waiting expression on her face, as though she were in a long queue. This, I knew
from experience, was a danger signal. She was like one of those bomb things with
the pin pulled out, and it was only a matter of time before - bang! and she
would explode. In the silence that followed, I could almost hear her ticking. So I got up quietly and
went out to the workshop and collected a mike and a hundred and fifty feet of
wire. Now that I was away from her, I am ashamed to admit that I began to feel a
bit of excitement myself, a tiny warm prickling sensation under the skin, near
the tips of my fingers. It was nothing much, mind you ‑ really nothing at
all. Good heavens, I experience the same thing every morning of my life when I
open the paper to check the closing prices on two or three of my wife'
s larger
stockholdings. So I wasn't going to get carried away by a silly joke like
this. At the same time, I couldn't help being amused. I took the stairs two at a
time and entered the yellow room at the end of the passage. It had the clean,
unlived in appearance of all guest rooms, with its twin beds, yellow
satin bedspreads, pale‑yellow walls, and golden‑coloured curtains.
I began to look around for a good place to hide the mike. This was the most
important part of all, for whatever happened, it must not be discovered. I
thought first of the basket of logs by the fireplace. Put it under the logs. No
‑ not safe enough. Behind the
radiator? On top of the wardrobe?
Under the desk? None of these seemed very professional to me. All might
be subject to chance inspection because of a dropped collar stud or something
like that. Finally, with considerable cunning, I decided to put it inside of the
springing of the sofa. The sofa was against the wall, near the edge of the
carpet, and my lead wire could go straight under the carpet over to the door. I tipped up the sofa and
slit the material underneath. Then I tied the microphone securely up among the
springs, making sure that it faced the room. After that, I led the wire under
the carpet to the door. I was calm and cautious in everything I did. Where the
wire had to emerge from under the carpet and pass out of the door, I made a
little groove in the wood so that it was almost invisible. All this, of course, took
time, and when I suddenly heard the crunch of wheels on the gravel of the drive
outside, and then the slamming of car doors and the voices of our guests
I was still only half‑way down the corridor, tacking the wire along
the skirting. I stopped and straightened up, hammer in hand, and I must confess
that I felt afraid. You have no idea how unnerving that noise was to me. I
experienced the same sudden stomachy feeling of fright as when a bomb once
dropped the other side of the village during the war, one afternoon, while I
was working quietly in the library with my butterflies. Don'
t worry, I told
myself. Pamela will take care of these people. She won'
t let them come up
here. Rather frantically. I set
about finishing the job, and soon I had the wire tacked all along the corridor
and through into our bedroom. Here, concealment was not so important, although
I still did not permit myself to get careless because of the servants. So I laid
the wire under the carpet and brought it up unobtrusively into the back of the
radio. Making the final connexions was an elementary technical matter and took
me no time at all. Well ‑ I had done
it. I stepped back and glanced at the little radio. Somehow, now, it looked
different ‑ no longer a silly box for making noises but an evil little
creature that crouched on the table top with a part of its own body reaching out
secretly into a forbidden place far away. I switched it on. It hummed faintly
but made no other sound. I took my bedside clock, which had a loud tick, and
carried it along to the yellow room and placed it on the floor by the sofa. When
I returned, sure enough the radio creature was ticking away as loudly as if the
clock were in the room ‑ even louder. I fetched back the clock.
Then I tidied myself up in the bathroom, returned my tools to the workshop, and
prepared to meet the guests. But first, to compose myself, and so that I would
not have to appear in front of them with the blood, as it were, still wet on my
hands, I spent five minutes in the library with my collection. I concentrated on
a tray of the lovely Vanessa cardui ‑ the When I entered the
livingroom, our two guests, whose names I could never remember, were
seated on the sofa. My wife was mixing drinks.
I thought this was an unnecessary remark.
I had a frightful,
fantastic vision of my wife telling them, amidst roars of laughter, precisely
what I had been doing upstairs‑ She couldn't'
‑ she couldn't
have done that! I looked round at her and she too was smiling as she measured
out the gin.
I decided that if this was
going to be a joke then I'
d better join in quickly, so I forced myself to
smile with her.
I lowered myself slowly into a chair and
relaxed. It was ridiculous to be so nervous and jumpy.
The Martinis were
distributed and we settled down to a couple of hours of talk and drink before
dinner. It was from then on that I began to form the impression that our guests
were a charming couple. My wife, coming from a titled family, is apt to be
conscious of her class and breeding, and is often hasty in her judgement of
strangers who are friendly towards her - particularly tall men. She is
frequently right - but in this case I felt that she might be making a mistake.
As a rule, I myself do not like tall men either they are apt to be supercilious
and omniscient. But Henry Snape ‑ my wife had whispered his name ‑
struck me as being an amiable simple young man with good manners whose main
preoccupation, very properly. was Mrs Snape. He was handsome in a longfaced,
horsy sort of way, with dark brown eyes that seemed to be gentle and
sympathetic. I envied him his fine mop of black hair. and caught myself
wondering what lotion he used to keep it looking so healthy. He did tell us one
or two jokes, but they were on a
high level and no one could have objected.
This was rather deep and
it took me a while to work out.
At eight o'
clock.
without changing, we moved in to dinner. The meal went well, with Henry Snape
telling us some very droll stories. He also praised my Richebourg 34 in a
most knowledgeable fashion, which pleased me greatly. By the time coffee came, I
realized that I had grown to like these two youngsters immensely, and as a
result I began to feel uncomfortable about this microphone business. It would
have been all right if they had been horrid people, but to play this trick on
two such charming young persons as these filled me with a strong sense of guilt.
Don'
t misunderstand me. I was not getting cold feet. It didn't seem
necessary to stop the operation. But I refused to relish the prospect openly
as my wife seemed now to be doing, with covert smiles and winks and secret
little noddings of the head. Around
nine‑thirty, feeling comfortable and well fed, we returned to the large
living‑room to start our bridge. We were playing for a fair stake ‑
ten shillings a hundred ‑ so we decided not to split families, and I
partnered my wife the whole time. We all four of us took the game seriously,
which is the only way to take it, and we played silently, intently, hardly speaking
at all except to bid. It was not the money we played for. Heaven knows, my wife
had enough of that, and so apparently did the Snapes. But among experts it is
almost traditional that they play for a reasonable stake. That night the cards were
evenly divided, but for once my wife played badly, so we got the worst of it. I
could see that she wasn'
t concentrating fully, and as we came along towards
midnight she began not even to care. She kept glancing up at me with those large
grey eyes of hers, the eyebrows raised, the nostrils curiously open. a little
gloating smile around the corner of her mouth. Our opponents played a
fine game. Their bidding was masterly, and all through the evening they made
only one mistake. That was when the girl badly overestimated her partner'
s
hand and bid six spades. I doubled and they went three down, vulnerable, which
cost them eight hundred points. It was just a momentary lapse, but I remember
that Sally Snape was very put out by it, even though her husband forgave her at
once, kissing her hand across
the table and telling her not to worry. Around twelve‑thirty
my wife announced that she wanted to go to bed.
She herded us out of the room and we went
upstairs, the four of us together. On the way up, there was the usual talk about
breakfast and what they wanted and how they were to call the maid. We were in the passage now, standing outside our
own bedroom door, and I could see the wire I had put down that afternoon and
how it ran along the top of the skirting down to their room Although it was
nearly the same colour as the paint, it looked very conspicuous to me.
The little radio warmed up
just in time to catch the noise of their door opening and closing again.
Almost at once the voice of Henry Snape came out
of the radio, strong and clear.
My wife'
s turn to jump.
Then, in a quite different voice, the one we had
been used to hearing in the livingroom, Henry Snape said,
A pause, then
Another pause, then I' ll say one club"
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