Mrs Field's Luck

04/04/11

Mrs Field’s Luck
As Mrs Field left the hospital, she swore she would never ‘end up like that’, like her sister had just ‘ended up’. Her sister had gone to the hospital a few days before and then died.
“Torture, it was,” Mrs Field told a neighbour.
“Surely not,” said the neighbour whose sister was a nurse.
“Yes, torture. I believe they do experiments on you there, especially when you are getting on in years.”
“O no, no, no.....”
But Mrs Field would have none of it. Once she had a notion fixed in her mind there was little anyone could do to persuade her otherwise. A smallish woman with a knowing, rather than pretty, face, with shrewish keen eyes; she always dressed and groomed herself well and, some people thought, could be taken for a woman in her late fifties not, as she was, in her early seventies.
“Thank God I’ve got my health,” she said. “Not wealth, unfortunately,” she quipped, giving her neighbour a sly wink. “But good health.” And she thumped her chest and laughed, showing an even set of good teeth - her own.

“Quite a spry little thing, that Mrs Field,” the neighbour told her sister later that day. “But getting to be a bit, you know, funny? I don’t mean exactly senile, just a bit funny. I think she’s still missing her husband. What a nice man he was! D’you know what she said the other day? She said she’d never looked at another man since he died; though, she said, she’d had plenty of offers. Can you believe that? A woman of her age?”
Oddly enough, her sister could.

“I’m not going to let myself get low and unwell,” Mrs Field thought. “I’m going to keep fit and have a good time and I’m going to stay away from that dreadful hospital. Then if I get ill and can’t cope, I’ll book myself into one of those nice homes where they take good care of you and you’re comfy and they give you tranquillisers to ease the pain and......”
But she suddenly realised she would not be able to afford to do this.

“Will my money be safe here,” Mrs Field asked Mr Hunter, the bank manager.
Mr Hunter was doing his best to be polite to this rather dotty old woman who had said she intended depositing “a large sum of money” in his bank.
“How big is the safe?” she asked.
“Quite big. Big enough for a small bank like ours.” He smiled. “Perhaps you’d like to see the safe,” he said.
She had not expected this. She wasn’t ready yet. All she was doing at the moment was ‘casing the joint’ just like she had seen Dillinger doing in a film a long time ago; he first made enquiries about security and the manager had shown him all the bank’s various devices for foiling would-be robbers; armed with this knowledge, robbing the bank was then fairly easy.
“See the safe? Now?” she said. “I haven’t the time, I have some shopping to do. How about tomorrow?”
“Certainly,” he said, giving one of his colleagues a sly wink as he led Mrs Field to the door.

The gun was in the attic. It was an old army revolver her husband had inherited from his father who had brought it back from the First World War.
She couldn’t even pull the hammer back, it was so rusty. But it looked impressive in her hand though she could barely hold it steady.
“Mustn’t shake when I point it at the manager,” she thought.
She cleaned it and polished it until it gleamed.

Mr Hunter was faithful to his promise and showed Mrs Field into the room where the large safe stood. But he took with him the under-manager, Mr Simms.
“The safe has two keys for security reasons,” he explained. “I have one and Mr Simms has the other.”
She was too upset to smile in return for the information; she had not expected to have to contend with two men.
“Perhaps you’d like to sit down for a while,” Mr Hunter said. “And here, let me take that haversack from you.”
She clutched it closer to her. “It’s for my shopping,” she said. She smiled nervously as she took a seat next to the door.
“Is there much money in the safe?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, it’s chock-full. And all used notes. If anyone decided to rob us today, they’d have a really large haul, eh Mr Simms?”
Mr Simms laughed. So did Mr Hunter.
Mrs Field laughed too as she secretly opened her handbag inside the haversack and reached inside for the gun. She grasped it firmly – at the ready!
“Is the safe open?” she asked.
“No, we never leave it open.”
“Is it difficult to open?”
“No, it’s quite easy,” Mr Hunter said.
He couldn’t see any harm in indulging the old lady’s fancies. And, in a way, he was enjoying himself. Showing off a bit. Feeling important. Doing his job responsibly by catering to people’s needs whoever they might be.
Mr Hunter and Mr Simms opened the safe.
Mrs Field’s finger was on the trigger of the gun as she began to remove it from her handbag.
Suddenly, outside, in the main body of the bank, there was a commotion and a light on the wall close to Mrs Field was flashing on and off.
Mr Hunter’s face turned a ghastly white as he looked from the flashing light to the safe, back to the light, to the door and again to the safe.
Mr Simms dashed across the room in order to secure the door leading into the bank but he was thrown back inside as a man with a stocking tightly pulled over his head burst in. The man was carrying a sawn-off shotgun.
“Get out!” he yelled, giving first Mr Simms then Mr Hunter a shove to help them on their way. In the body of the bank two other robbers with guns were threatening a group of people while Mr Hunter’s staff filled large canvas bags with the contents of the drawers.
No one had seen Mrs Field; she had been behind the door when the man had pushed his way in. Now she could see what was going on through the narrow gap between the door and the wall. She eased the door slowly and quietly forward until it was almost closed, then she quickly stuffed her haversack with notes – fifties and twenties and tens (she left the fives where they were – too bulky). She tied the haversack at the top and looked around for a means of escape, but there was no way out; only through the door leading to the main body of the bank. So she sat down, her haversack under her, and waited.
The man returned. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said.
“I came to see the manager,” she replied.
“Get out of here before I blow your brains out,” he yelled.
She complied with his request willingly and stood with the other customers.
Outside there was the distant wail of a police siren and the robbers hastily fled.
Mrs Field didn’t wait to be interrogated by the police so she surreptitiously left the bank to merge inconspicuously with the morning shoppers on the street.

Mrs Field, in a casino in the South of France, placed a bet on her lucky number and won again.
“Do you ever lose?” her handsome young companion asked.
“Rarely these days,” she said. “Though there have been times when I have not been so lucky.”
“When was that?”
“O, some time ago, back in England. Then one day my luck changed.”
Suddenly she felt rather faint. She stared at the spinning roulette wheel. In it, in a vision, she could see a man’s face staring back at her. It was Mr Hunter’s face. He was looking at her in the way he had that day when she’d left the bank carrying the full haversack.
“Are you alright?” the young man enquired solicitously.
“He must know what happened,” she said.
“Who?”
“But he daren’t tell.”
“Tell? Tell what?”
“That he opened the safe for me, of course.”
“Safe? What safe?”
“But he can never prove anything because everyone except he and Mr Simms think the robbers had taken the money. No, he can never admit opening the safe and leaving it open for me! Best for them to keep mum.”
“Keep mum? What’s mum?”
She patted his soft cheek tenderly. “Never mind,” she said. “Nothing for you to worry about. Now, Emilio, would you be a real darling and place all these chips on my lucky number once again?”
END