The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl by Roald Dahl

Author:Roald Dahl [Dahl Roald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141930305
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Last Act

ANNA WAS IN THE kitchen washing a head of Boston lettuce for the family supper when the doorbell rang. The bell itself was on the wall directly above the sink, and it never failed to make her jump if it rang when she happened to be near. For this reason, neither her husband nor any of the children ever used it. It seemed to ring extra loud this time, and Anna jumped extra high.

When she opened the door, two policemen were standing outside. They looked at her out of pale waxen faces, and she looked back at them, waiting for them to say something.

She kept looking at them, but they didn’t speak or move. They stood so still and so rigid that they were like two wax figures somebody had put on her doorstep as a joke. Each of them was holding his helmet in front of him in his two hands.

‘What is it?’ Anna asked.

They were both young, and they were wearing leather gauntlets up to their elbows. She could see their enormous motor-cycles propped up along the edge of the sidewalk behind them, and dead leaves were falling around the motor-cycles and blowing along the sidewalk and the whole of the street was brilliant in the yellow light of a clear, gusty September evening. The taller of the two policemen shifted uneasily on his feet. Then he said quietly, ‘Are you Mrs Cooper, ma’am?’

‘Yes, I am.’

The other said, ‘Mrs Edmund J. Cooper?’

‘Yes.’ And then slowly it began to dawn upon her that these men, neither of whom seemed anxious to explain his presence, would not be behaving as they were unless they had some distasteful duty to perform.

‘Mrs Cooper,’ she heard one of them saying, and from the way he said it, as gently and softly as if he were comforting a sick child, she knew at once that he was going to tell her something terrible. A great wave of panic came over her, and she said, ‘What happened?’

‘We have to inform you, Mrs Cooper …’

The policeman paused, and the woman, watching him, felt as though her whole body were shrinking and shrinking and shrinking inside its skin.

‘… that your husband was involved in an accident on the Hudson River Parkway at approximately five forty-five this evening, and died in the ambulance …’

The policeman who was speaking produced the crocodile wallet she had given Ed on their twentieth wedding anniversary, two years back, and as she reached out to take it, she found herself wondering whether it might not still be warm from having been close to her husband’s chest only a short while ago.

‘If there’s anything we can do,’ the policeman was saying, ‘like calling up somebody to come over … some friend or relative maybe …’

Anna heard his voice drifting away, then fading out altogether, and it must have been about then that she began to scream. Soon she became hysterical, and the two policemen had their hands full trying to control her until the doctor arrived some forty minutes later and injected something into her arm.

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