Cruelty Read online

  ‘Good for the lungs,’ Albert Taylor said, grinning. ‘That’s the way they exercise their lungs, Mabel, did you know that?’

  ‘There, there, there,’ the wife said, kissing it all over the face. ‘There, there, there.’

  They waited another five minutes, but not for one moment did the screaming stop.

  ‘Change the nappy,’ Albert said. ‘It’s got a wet nappy, that’s all it is.’ He fetched a clean one from the kitchen, and Mrs Taylor took the old one off and put the new one on.

  This made no difference at all.

  ‘Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa!’ the baby yelled.

  ‘You didn’t stick the safety pin through the skin, did you, Mabel?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ she said, feeling under the nappy with her fingers to make sure.

  The parents sat opposite one another in their armchairs, smiling nervously, watching the baby on the mother’s lap, waiting for it to tire and stop screaming.

  ‘You know what?’ Albert Taylor said at last.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll bet she’s still hungry. I’ll bet all she wants is another swig at that bottle. How about me fetching her an extra lot?’

  ‘I don’t think we ought to do that, Albert.’

  ‘It’ll do her good,’ he said, getting up from his chair. ‘I’m going to warm her up a second helping.’

  He went into the kitchen, and was away several minutes. When he returned he was holding a bottle brimful of milk.

  ‘I made her a double,’ he announced. ‘Eight ounces. Just in case.’

  ‘Albert! Are you mad! Don’t you know it’s just as bad to overfeed as it is to underfeed?’

  ‘You don’t have to give her the lot, Mabel. You can stop any time you like. Go on,’ he said, standing over her. ‘Give her a drink.’

  Mrs Taylor began to tease the baby’s lip with the end of the nipple. The tiny mouth closed like a trap over the rubber teat and suddenly there was silence in the room. The baby’s whole body relaxed and a look of absolute bliss came over its face as it started to drink.

  ‘There you are, Mabel! What did I tell you?’

  The woman didn’t answer.

  ‘She’s ravenous, that’s what she is. Just look at her suck.’

  Mrs Taylor was watching the level of the milk in the bottle. It was dropping fast, and before long three or four ounces out of the eight had disappeared.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’ll do.’

  ‘You can’t pull it away now, Mabel.’

  ‘Yes, dear. I must.’

  ‘Go on, woman. Give her the rest and stop fussing.’

  ‘But Albert …’

  ‘She’s famished, can’t you see that? Go on, my beauty,’ he said. ‘You finish that bottle.’

  ‘I don’t like it, Albert,’ the wife said, but she didn’t pull the bottle away.

  ‘She’s making up for lost time, Mabel, that’s all she’s doing.’

  Five minutes later the bottle was empty. Slowly, Mrs Taylor withdrew the nipple, and this time there was no protest from the baby, no sound at all. It lay peacefully on the mother’s lap, the eyes glazed with contentment, the mouth half open, the lips smeared with milk.

  ‘Twelve whole ounces, Mabel!’ Albert Taylor said. ‘Three times the normal amount! Isn’t that amazing!’

  The woman was staring down at the baby. And now the old anxious tight-lipped look of the frightened mother was slowly returning to her face.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Albert asked. ‘You’re not worried by that, are you? You can’t expect her to get back to normal on a lousy four ounces, don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Come here, Albert,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said come here.’

  He went over and stood beside her.

  ‘Take a good look and tell me if you see anything different.’

  He peered closely at the baby. ‘She seems bigger, Mabel, if that’s what you mean. Bigger and fatter.’

  ‘Hold her,’ she ordered. ‘Go on, pick her up.’

  He reached out and lifted the baby up off the mother’s lap. ‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘She weighs a ton!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Now isn’t that marvellous!’ he cried, beaming. ‘I’ll bet she must almost be back to normal already!’

  ‘It frightens me, Albert. It’s too quick.’

  ‘Nonsense, woman.’

  ‘It’s that disgusting jelly that’s done it,’ she said. ‘I hate the stuff.’

  ‘There’s nothing disgusting about royal jelly,’ he answered, indignant.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Albert! You think it’s normal for a child to start putting on weight at this speed?’

  ‘You’re never satisfied!’ he cried. ‘You’re scared stiff when she’s losing and now you’re absolutely terrified because she’s gaining! What’s the matter with you, Mabel?’

  The woman got up from her chair with the baby in her arms and started towards the door. ‘All I can say is,’ she said, ‘it’s lucky I’m here to see you don’t give her any more of it, that’s all I can say.’ She went out, and Albert watched her through the open door as she crossed the hall to the foot of the stairs and started to ascend, and when she reached the third or fourth step she suddenly stopped and stood quite still for several seconds as though remembering something. Then she turned and came down again rather quickly and re-entered the room.

  ‘Albert,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I assume there wasn’t any royal jelly in this last feed we’ve just given her?’

  ‘I don’t see why you should assume that, Mabel.’

  ‘Albert!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, soft and innocent.

  ‘How dare you!’ she cried.

  Albert Taylor’s great bearded face took on a pained and puzzled look. ‘I think you ought to be very glad she’s got another big dose of it inside her,’ he said. ‘Honest I do. And this is a big dose, Mabel, believe you me.’

  The woman was standing just inside the doorway clasping the sleeping baby in her arms and staring at her husband with huge eyes. She stood very erect, her body absolutely stiff with fury, her face paler, more tight-lipped than ever.

  ‘You mark my words,’ Albert was saying, ‘you’re going to have a nipper there soon that’ll win first prize in any baby show in the entire country. Hey, why don’t you weigh her now and see what she is? You want me to get the scales, Mabel, so you can weigh her?’

  The woman walked straight over to the large table in the centre of the room and laid the baby down and quickly started taking off its clothes. ‘Yes!’ she snapped. ‘Get the scales!’ Off came the little nightgown, then the undervest.

  Then she unpinned the nappy and she drew it away and the baby lay naked on the table.

  ‘But Mabel!’ Albert cried. ‘It’s a miracle! She’s fat as a puppy!’

  Indeed, the amount of flesh the child had put on since the day before was astounding. The small sunken chest with the rib-bones showing all over it was now plump and round as a barrel, and the belly was bulging high in the air. Curiously, though, the arms and legs did not seem to have grown in proportion. Still short and skinny, they looked like little sticks protruding from a ball of fat.

  ‘Look!’ Albert said. ‘She’s even beginning to get a bit of fuzz on the tummy to keep her warm!’ He put out a hand and was about to run the tips of his fingers over the powdering of silky yellowy-brown hairs that had suddenly appeared on the baby’s stomach.

  ‘Don’t you touch her!’ the woman cried. She turned and faced him, her eyes blazing, and she looked suddenly like some kind of a little fighting bird with her neck arched over towards him as though she were about to fly at his face and peck his eyes out.

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ he said, retreating.

  ‘You must be mad!’ she cried.

  ‘Now wait just one minute, Mabel, will you please, because if you’re still thinking this stuff is dange
rous … That is what you’re thinking, isn’t it? All right, then. Listen carefully. I shall now proceed to prove to you once and for all, Mabel, that royal jelly is absolutely harmless to human beings, even in enormous doses. For example – why do you think we had only half the usual honey crop last summer? Tell me that.’

  His retreat, walking backwards, had taken him three or four yards away from her, where he seemed to feel more comfortable.

  ‘The reason we had only half the usual crop last summer,’ he said slowly, lowering his voice, ‘was because I turned one hundred of my hives over to the production of royal jelly.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Ah,’ he whispered. ‘I thought that might surprise you a bit. And I’ve been making it ever since right under your very nose.’ His small eyes were glinting at her, and a slow sly smile was creeping round the corners of his mouth.

  ‘You’ll never guess the reason, either,’ he said. ‘I’ve been afraid to mention it up to now because I thought it might … well … sort of embarrass you.’

  There was a slight pause. He had his hands clasped high in front of him, level with his chest, and he was rubbing one palm against the other, making a soft scraping noise.

  ‘You remember that bit I read you out of the magazine? That bit about the rat? Let me see now, how does it go? “Still and Burdett found that a male rat which hitherto had been unable to breed … ” ’ He hesitated, the grin widening, showing his teeth.

  ‘You get the message, Mabel?’

  She stood quite still, facing him.

  ‘The very first time I ever read that sentence, Mabel, I jumped straight out of my chair and I said to myself if it’ll work with a lousy rat, I said, then there’s no reason on earth why it shouldn’t work with Albert Taylor.’

  He paused again, craning his head forward and turning one ear slightly in his wife’s direction, waiting for her to say something. But she didn’t.

  ‘And here’s another thing,’ he went on. ‘It made me feel so absolutely marvellous, Mabel, and so sort of completely different to what I was before that I went right on taking it even after you’d announced the joyful tidings. Buckets of it I must have swallowed during the last twelve months.’

  The big heavy haunted-looking eyes of the woman were moving intently over the man’s face and neck. There was no skin showing at all on the neck, not even at the sides below the ears. The whole of it, to a point where it disappeared into the collar of the shirt, was covered all the way round with those shortish silky hairs, yellowly black.

  ‘Mind you,’ he said, turning away from her, gazing lovingly now at the baby, ‘it’s going to work far better on a tiny infant than on a fully developed man like me. You’ve only got to look at her to see that, don’t you agree?’

  The woman’s eyes travelled slowly downwards and settled on the baby. The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and white and comatose, like some gigantic grub that was approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge into the world complete with mandibles and wings.

  ‘Why don’t you cover her up, Mabel?’ he said. ‘We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.’

  Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat

  First published in Nugget (1959)

  America is the land of opportunity for women. Already they own about eighty-five per cent of the wealth of the nation. Soon they will have it all. Divorce has become a lucrative process, simple to arrange and easy to forget; and ambitious females can repeat it as often as they please and parlay their winnings to astronomical figures. The husband’s death also brings satisfactory rewards and some ladies prefer to rely upon this method. They know that the waiting period will not be unduly protracted, for overwork and hypertension are bound to get the poor devil before long, and he will die at his desk with a bottle of benzedrines in one hand and a packet of tranquillizers in the other.

  Succeeding generations of youthful American males are not deterred in the slightest by this terrifying pattern of divorce and death. The higher the divorce rate climbs, the more eager they become. Young men marry like mice, almost before they have reached the age of puberty, and a large proportion of them have at least two ex-wives on the payroll by the time they are thirty-six years old. To support these ladies in the manner to which they are accustomed, the men must work like slaves, which is of course precisely what they are. But now at last, as they approach their premature middle age, a sense of disillusionment and fear begins to creep slowly into their hearts, and in the evenings they take to huddling together in little groups, in clubs and bars, drinking their whiskies and swallowing their pills, and trying to comfort one another with stories.

  The basic theme of these stories never varies. There are always three main characters – the husband, the wife and the dirty dog. The husband is a decent clean-living man, working hard at his job. The wife is cunning, deceitful and lecherous, and she is invariably up to some sort of jiggery-pokery with the dirty dog. The husband is too good a man even to suspect her. Things look black for the husband. Will the poor man ever find out? Must he be a cuckold for the rest of his life? Yes, he must. But wait! Suddenly, by a brilliant manoeuvre, the husband completely turns the tables on his monstrous spouse. The woman is flabbergasted, stupefied, humiliated, defeated. The audience of men around the bar smiles quietly to itself and takes a little comfort from the fantasy.

  There are many of these stories going around, these wonderful wishful-thinking dreamworld inventions of the unhappy male, but most of them are too fatuous to be worth repeating, and far too fruity to be put down on paper. There is one, however, that seems to be superior to the rest, particularly as it has the merit of being true. It is extremely popular with twice- or thrice-bitten males in search of solace, and if you are one of them, and if you haven’t heard it before, you may enjoy the way it comes out. The story is called ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’, and it goes something like this:

  Dr and Mrs Bixby lived in a smallish apartment somewhere in New York City. Dr Bixby was a dentist who made an average income. Mrs Bixby was a big vigorous woman with a wet mouth. Once a month, always on Friday afternoons, Mrs Bixby would board the train at Pennsylvania Station and travel to Baltimore to visit her old aunt. She would spend the night with the aunt and return to New York on the following day in time to cook supper for her husband. Dr Bixby accepted this arrangement good-naturedly. He knew that Aunt Maude lived in Baltimore, and that his wife was very fond of the old lady, and certainly it would be unreasonable to deny either of them the pleasure of a monthly meeting.

  ‘Just so long as you don’t ever expect me to accompany you,’ Dr Bixby had said in the beginning.

  ‘Of course not, darling,’ Mrs Bixby had answered. ‘After all, she is not your aunt. She’s mine.’

  So far so good.

  At it turned out, however, the aunt was little more than a convenient alibi for Mrs Bixby. The dirty dog, in the shape of a gentleman known as the Colonel, was lurking slyly in the background, and our heroine spent the greater part of her Baltimore time in this scoundrel’s company. The Colonel was exceedingly wealthy. He lived in a charming house on the outskirts of the town. No wife or family encumbered him, only a few discreet and loyal servants, and in Mrs Bixby’s absence he consoled himself by riding his horses and hunting the fox.

  Year after year, this pleasant alliance between Mrs Bixby and the Colonel continued without a hitch. They met so seldom – twelve times a year is not much when you come to think of it – that there was little or no chance of their growing bored with one another. On the contrary, the long wait between meetings only made the heart grow fonder, and each separate occasion became an exciting reunion.

  ‘Tally-ho!’ the Colonel would cry each time he met her at the station in the big car. ‘My dear, I’d almost forgotten how ravishing you looked. Let’s go to earth.’

  Eight years went by.

  It was just before Christmas, and Mrs Bixby was standing on the station in Baltimore waiting for the train to ta
ke her back to New York. This particular visit which had just ended had been more than usually agreeable, and she was in a cheerful mood. But then the Colonel’s company always did that to her these days. The man had a way of making her feel that she was altogether a rather remarkable woman, a person of subtle and exotic talents, fascinating beyond measure; and what a very different thing that was from the dentist husband at home who never succeeded in making her feel that she was anything but a sort of eternal patient, someone who dwelt in the waiting-room, silent among the magazines, seldom if ever nowadays to be called in to suffer the finicky precise ministrations of those clean pink hands.

  ‘The Colonel asked me to give you this,’ a voice beside her said. She turned and saw Wilkins, the Colonel’s groom, a small wizened dwarf with grey skin, and he was pushing a large flattish cardboard box into her arms.

  ‘Good gracious me!’ she cried, all of a flutter. ‘My heavens, what an enormous box! What is it, Wilkins? Was there a message? Did he send me a message?’

  ‘No message,’ the groom said, and he walked away.

  As soon as she was on the train, Mrs Bixby carried the box into the privacy of the Ladies’ Room and locked the door. How exciting this was! A Christmas present from the Colonel. She started to undo the string. ‘I’ll bet it’s a dress,’ she said aloud. ‘It might even be two dresses. Or it might be a whole lot of beautiful underclothes. I won’t look. I’ll just feel around and try to guess what it is. I’ll try to guess the colour as well, and exactly what it looks like. Also how much it cost.’

  She shut her eyes tight and slowly lifted off the lid. Then she put one hand down into the box. There was some tissue paper on top; she could feel it and hear it rustling. There was also an envelope or a card of some sort. She ignored this and began burrowing underneath the tissue paper, the fingers reaching out delicately, like tendrils.

  ‘My God,’ she cried suddenly. ‘It can’t be true!’