Bowens’ wife was surprised when he volunteered to take the laden bags to the charity shops. Usually, evenings, a tugboat couldn’t pull him out of his East Enders and Coronation Street engrossed armchair. He put two bags each in the foyers of the Air Ambulance and Tenovus, and two more in the dog charity lobby. The hated brown corduroy jacket was at the bottom of the last bag, under the Woody Allen dvds and Jean Paul Sartre books. Susan had bought it new a month back, and it had been disdain at first sight. It was the sort of quasi-academic garb she liked and he detested.
Most of her pals worked at the university, and their braying confidence made him feel inadequate, a block of mental concrete. The men were all togged in corduroy jackets and, for all he knew, some of the women too. Tomorrow he’d tell her it’d been stolen from the car, when he’d inadvertently left the window open. R.I.P. hated jacket.
As he drove off, drop done, a fellow in his fifties, rat eyes and as crafty as a lair of foxes, gathered up the six bags. Two days later half of their contents were on his ‘Animal Welfare Charity’ stall at the margin of the monthly Mumbles farmers’ market. No animal had ever benefited materially from his sales, but the foxy fellow himself copped a nifty ten pounds when a woman purchased the jacket. ‘Pristine,’ he said to her encouragingly. She heard ‘Christine’, and wondered at his familiarity.
When home she gave it to her son who was starting at the university the next month on a one-year lecturing contract. ‘You’ll look the part, anyhow,’ she said. The son didn’t like that ‘anyhow’. Did his mother think he wasn’t up to the job? The jacket, he must admit though, was impressive. He felt practically professorial in it. He preened in front of the mirror, imagining a lecture hall spilling over with impressed adolescents attending to the sesquipedalian wisdom of a master scholar in corduroy. But it was too tight under the arms, uncomfortably so actually. Quel dommage.
On Monday afternoon he dropped it into Tenovus, and on Tuesday Mrs Bowen spotted it on display. Perfect! A like-for-like replacement for the stolen jacket and, if anything, it was of better quality than the one Ross had so carelessly lost. Fate! Wasn’t life astonishing. Dr Evans, a senior Mathematics lecturer, a good acquaintance, had talked recently to her about chance, particularly about heads and tails always being fifty-fifty and nothing else. What was the chance of a replacement jacket being found so promptly? She carried her trophy to the car, mentally calculating the odds of this occurrence using the formula Dr Evans had expounded. The only measurement not on her mind was the effect of her sartorial purchase on her husband. She placed the coat carefully on the back seat, its two arms opened wide as though waiting to embrace Ross. He’d love it!
