The Umbrella Man, Part 1
Once upon a rainy day in London...
I'm going to tell you about a
funny thing that happened to my mother and me yesterday evening. I am twelve years
old and I'm a girl. My mother is thirty-four but I am nearly as tall as her already.
Yesterday afternoon, my
mother took me up to London
to see the dentist. He found one hole. It was in a back tooth and he filled it
without hurting me too much. After that, we went to a cafe. I had a banana
split and my mother had a cup of
coffee. By the time we got up to leave it was about six o'clock. When we came
out of the cafe it
had started to rain.
"We must get a
taxi," my mother said. We were wearing ordinary hats and coats, and it was
raining quite hard.
"Why don't we go back
into the cafe and
wait for it to stop?" I said. I wanted another of those banana splits.
They were gorgeous.
"It isn't going to
stop," my mother said. "We must get home." We stood on the
pavement in the rain, looking for a taxi. Lots of them came by but they all had
passengers inside them.
"I wish we had a car
with a chauffeur," my mother said.
Just then a man came up to
us. He was a small man and he was pretty old, probably seventy or more. He
raised his hat politely and said to my mother, "Excuse me, I do hope you
will excuse me... " He had a fine white moustache and bushy white eyebrows
and a wrinkly pink face. He was sheltering under an umbrella which he held high
over his head.
"Yes?" my mother
said, very cool and distant.
"I wonder if I could ask
a small favour of you," he said. "It is only a very small
favour."
I saw my mother looking at
him suspiciously. She is a suspicious person, my mother. She is especially
suspicious of two things - strange men and boiled eggs. When she cuts the top off a boiled egg, she
pokes around inside it with her spoon as though expecting to find a mouse or
something. With strange men, she has a golden rule which says, 'The nicer the man
seems to be, the more suspicious you must become.' This little old man was
particularly nice. He was polite. He was well-spoken. He was well-dressed. He
was a real gentleman. The reason I knew he was a gentleman was because of his
shoes. 'You can always spot a gentleman by the shoes he wears,' was another of
my mother's favourite sayings. This man had beautiful brown shoes.
"The truth of the matter
is," the little man was saying, "I've got myself into a bit of a situation.
I need some help. Not much I assure you. It's almost nothing, in fact, but I do
need it. You see, madam, old people like me often become terribly forgetful... My
mother's chin was up and she was staring down at him along the full length of
her nose. It was a fearsome thing, this frosty-nosed stare of my mother's. Most
people go to pieces completely when she gives it to them. I once saw my own
headmistress begin to stammer and simper like an idiot when my mother gave her
a really foul frosty-noser. But the little man on the pavement with the umbrella
over his head didn't bat an eyelid. He gave a gentle smile and said, "I beg
you to believe, madam, that I am not in the habit of stopping ladies in the street
and telling them my troubles."
"I should hope
not," my mother said.
I felt quite embarrassed by
my mother's sharpness. I wanted to say to her, 'Oh, mummy, for heaven's sake,
he's a very very old man, and he's sweet and polite, and he's in some sort of
trouble, so don't be so beastly to him.' But I didn't say anything.
The little man shifted his
umbrella from one hand to the other. "I've never forgotten it
before," he said.
"You've never forgotten
what?" my mother asked sternly.
"My wallet," he
said. "I must have left it in my other jacket. Isn't that the silliest
thing to do?"
"Are you asking me to
give you money?" my mother said.
"Oh, good gracious me,
no!" he cried. "Heaven forbid I should ever do that!"
"Then what are you
asking?" my mother said. "Do hurry up. We're getting soaked to the
skin here."
"I know you are,"
he said. "And that is why I'm offering you this umbrella of mine to
protect you, and to keep forever, if... if only...
"If only what?" my mother
said.
"If only you would give
me in return a pound for my taxi-fare just to get me home."
My mother was still
suspicious. "If you had no money in the first place," she said,
"then how did you get here?"
"I walked," he
answered. "Every day I go for a lovely long walk and then I summon a taxi
to take me home. I do it every day of the year."
"Why don't you walk home now?" my mother
asked.
"Oh, I wish I
could," he said. "I do wish I could. But I don't think I could manage
it on these silly old legs of mine. I've gone too far already."
My mother stood there chewing
her lower lip. She was beginning to melt a bit, I could see that. And the idea
of getting an umbrella to shelter under must have tempted her a good deal.
"It's a lovely
umbrella," the little man said.
"So I've noticed,"
my mother said.
"It's silk," he
said.
"I can see that."
"Then why don't you take
it, madam," he said. "It cost me over twenty pounds, I promise you.
But that's of no importance so long as I can get home and rest these old legs
of mine."
I saw my mother's hand
feeling for the clasp of her purse. She saw me watching her. I was giving her
one of my own frosty-nosed looks this time and she knew exactly what I was
telling her. Now listen, mummy, I was telling her, you simply mustn't take
advantage of a tired old man in this way. It's a rotten thing to do. My mother
paused and looked back at me. Then she said to the little man, "I don't
think it's quite right that I should take an umbrella from you worth twenty pounds.
I think I'd better just give you the taxi-fare and be done with it."
"No,
no no!" he cried. "It's
out of the question! I wouldn't dream of it! Not in a million years! I would
never accept money from you like that! Take the umbrella, dear lady, and keep
the rain off your shoulders!"
My mother gave me a
triumphant sideways look. There you are, she was telling me. You're wrong. He
wants me to have it. She fished into her purse and took out a pound note. She
held it out to the little man. He took it and handed her the umbrella. He
pocketed the pound, raised his hat, gave a quick bow from the waist, and said,
"Thank you, madam, thank you."
Then he was gone.
The time passed and no taxi was
free to pick us up to home. It was raining a lot, it looked like if the sky was
falling like a waterfall. I could note that my mother was getting impatient,
and so do I. Some minutes more passed and I said to my mother, “such a
beautiful umbrella, uh?,”. My mother just nodded, and then I asked, “Mom, I
know you were suspicious about the old man, but what do you think now that he
has gone being just the man he showed us to be.”
My mother look at me with her
eyes wide open, like if she was very surprised. She told me that it was exactly
what she was thinking of. In that precise moment, everything started feeling so
strange. My mother and I, under the silken umbrella realized that the rain was
falling each second slower and slower, the cars in the street were moving slow,
until everything and everyone but us had completely stopped moving.
We were about to lose control
when at the same time we could see how beautiful everything was and suddenly, after
a blink, all this landscape was moving again, like if nothing had happened. My
mother and I just look at each other’s eyes with a “what has just happened”
face. A taxi came and we got in. No word was spoken in the way home… I just could thought about what the old man said before he was gone, "It only works when it rains." ...
