The Way Up To Heaven

The Way up to Heaven
by
Roald Dahl


ALL HER LIFE MRS FOSTER had had an almost pathological fear of missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain. In other respects, she was not a particular¬ly nervous woman, but the mere thought of being late on occasions like these would throw her into such a state of nerves that she would begin to twitch. It was nothing much just a tinyvellicating muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink but the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear until an hour or so after the train or plane or whatever it was had been safely caught.
It was really extraordinary how in certain people a simple apprehen¬sion about a thing like catching a train can grow into a serious obsession. At least half an hour before it was timeto leave the house for the station, Mrs Foster would step out of the elevator all ready to go, with hat and coat and gloves, and then, being quite unable to sit down, she would flutter and fidget about from room to room until her husband, who must have been well aware of her state, finally emerged from his privacy and suggested in a cool dry voice that perhaps they had better get going now, hadthey not?
Mr Foster may possibly have had a right to be irritated by this foolishness of his wife's, but he could have had no excuse for increasing her misery by keeping her waiting unnecessarily. Mind you, it is by no means certain that this is what he did, yet whenever they were to go somewhere, his timing was so accurate just a minute or two late, you understand and his manner so bland thatit was hard to believe he wasn't purposely inflicting a nasty private little torture of his own on the unhappy lady. And one thing he must have known that she would never dare to call out and tell him to hurry. He had disciplined her too well for that. He must also have known that if he was prepared to wait even beyond the last moment of safety, he could drive her nearly into hysterics. On oneor two special occasions in the later years of their married life, it seemed almost as though he had wanted to miss the train simply in order to intensify the poor woman's suffering.
Assuming (though one cannot be sure) that the husband was guilty, what made his attitude doubly unreasonable was the fact that, with the exception of this one small irrepressible foible, Mrs Foster was and always hadbeen a good and loving wife. For over thirty years, she had served him loyally and well. There was no doubt about this. Even she, a very modest woman, was aware of it, and although she had for years refused to let herself believe that Mr Foster would ever consciously torment her, there had been times recently when she had caught herself beginning to wonder.
Mr Eugene Foster, who was nearlyseventy years old lived with his wife in a large six storey house in New York City, on East Sixty se¬cond Street, and they had four servants. It was a gloomy place, and few people came to visit them. But on this particu¬lar morning in January, the house had come alive and there was a great deal of bustling about. One maid was dis-tributing bundles of dust sheets to every room, while another was drapingthem over the furniture. The butler was bringing down suitcases and putting them in the hall. The cook kept popping up from the kitchen to have a word with the butler, and Mrs Foster herself, in an old fashioned fur coat and with a black hat on the top of her head, was flying from room to room and pretending to supervise these operati-ons. Actually, she was thinking of nothing at all except thatshe was going to miss her plane if her husband didn't come out of his study soon and get ready.
'What time is it, Walker?' she said to the butler as she passed him.
'It's ten minutes past nine, Madam.'
'And has the car come?'
'Yes, Madam it's waiting. I'm just going to put the luggage in now.' 'It takes an hour to get to Idlewild' she said. `My plane leaves at eleven. I have to be there half...