Patrick drinks two whiskey highballs before he tells his wife what is on his mind. The first highball was one she had made herself as their customary ritual for his return at the end of the day.
She took his coat and hung it in the closet. Then she walked over and made the drinks, a strongish one for him, a weak one for herself; and soon she was back again in her chair with the sewing, and he in the other, opposite, holding the tall glass with both hands, rocking it so the ice cubes tinkled against the side.
Mary is already displaying her loving attentiveness. Eventually the reader will realize that it is her mothering that bothers Patrick and explains why he is drinking more than usual. He is getting ready to drop a bomb on her. He wants a divorce. He is tired of this marriage,...
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but he feels guilty, especially since she is six months pregnant.
"Yes," he said. "I'm tired," And as he spoke, he did an unusual thing. He lifted his glass and drained it in one swallow although there was still half of it, at least half of it left. She wasn't really watching him, but she knew what he had done because she heard the ice cubes falling back against the bottom of the empty glass when he lowered his arm. He paused a moment, leaning forward in the chair, then he got up and went slowly over to fetch himself another.
Roald Dahl does not want to deviate from Mary's point of view. Therefore, he uses descriptions of Mary's solicitude and of Patrick's two big drinks to show what the problem is. When Patrick makes the second drink for himself, this shows at least two things. One is that he doesn't like being waited on hand and foot. The other is that he needs a really strong drink, and he knows that Mary would make her usual pale amber highball.
When he came back, she noticed that the new drink was dark amber with the quantity of whiskey in it.
We are still in her point of view, but Dahl is letting us know that Patrick has something very serious on his mind and is getting ready to share it with his wife. He doesn't like to hurt her. He is not a bad man. He is just "tired" of their relationship. She has made the mistake of trying to hold on to her man by slavish devotion. It might be said that the story's thesis is that is is always a mistake to treat another person with adoration and to demand too much "togetherness." Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet, says:
Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
When Mary Maloney kills her husband with the frozen leg of lamb, she may be expressing some rage at herself for her past slavish devotion, along with rage at her husband for wanting to get out of a claustrophobic marriage with a woman who loves him too much.
The description of Patrick's two highballs show that Dahl did not want to have him express his feelings in words. It is significant that when Patrick finally tells Mary how he feels and what he wants, the author only focuses on Mary's reaction.
And he told her. It didn't take long, four or five minutes at most, and she sat very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word.
Patrick's four- or five-minute speech would have been impossible for such a strong, silent type of man without the fortification of those two stiff highballs.