Cruelty

A wife pawns her lover's parting gift with unexpected consequences, an unusual painting proves to be more valuable than anyone, especially its owner, could ever have predicted, a husband and wife, unable to get their new baby to feed, hit upon a disturbing solution . . . Cruelty highlights a domestic familiarity always on the edge of something much, much darker. Collected together for the first time, stories include The Butler , The Great Automatic Grammatizator , Royal jelly , Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat , The Swan, Poison , Skin , The Princess and the Poacher , Genesis and Catastrophe and Mr Feasey .