The Old Man

"The Old Man" appears in Daphne du Maurier's 1952 collection The Apple Tree (published in some editions as The Birds and Other Stories). The narrator, an onlooker, pieces together from a distance the story of an imposing old man who has settled near a stretch of water with his wife and offspring, keeping ferociously to himself and tolerating no intrusion on his family.

The telling is deliberately flat and unhurried, and du Maurier withholds one crucial fact until the closing lines — a reveal that recasts everything observed before it. It is a characteristic example of her gift for menace drawn from the everyday and for the quiet trap sprung at a story's end.