Loser Takes All Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Author

  Also by Graham Greene

  Loser Takes All

  Copyright Page

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  LOSER TAKES ALL

  Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel, The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.

  As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography – A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. Graham Greene died in April 1991.

  ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE

  Novels

  The Man Within

  It’s a Battlefield

  A Gun for Sale

  The Confidential Agent

  The Ministry of Fear

  The Third Man

  The End of the Affair

  The Quiet American

  A Burnt-Out Case

  Travels with my Aunt

  Dr Fischer of Geneva or

  The Bomb Party

  The Tenth Man

  Stamboul Train

  England Made Me

  Brighton Rock

  The Power and the Glory

  The Heart of the Matter

  The Fallen Idol

  Our Man in Havana

  The Comedians

  The Human Factor

  Monsignor Quixote

  The Honorary Consul

  The Captain and the Enemy

  Short Stories

  Collected Stories

  The Last Word and Other Stories

  May We Borrow Your Husband?

  Travel

  Journey Without Maps

  The Lawless Roads

  In Search of a Character

  Getting to Know the General

  Essays

  Collected Essays

  Yours etc.

  Reflections

  Mornings in the Dark

  Plays

  Collected Plays

  Autobiography

  A Sort of Life

  Ways of Escape

  Fragments of an Autobiography

  A World of my Own

  Biography

  Lord Rochester’s Monkey

  An Impossible Woman

  Children’s Books

  The Little Train

  The Little Horse-Bus

  The Little Steamroller

  The Little Fire Engine

  GRAHAM GREENE

  Loser Takes All

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  London

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409040392

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2001

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Graham Greene 1954, 1955

  A serial version of this book appeared in

  the United States of America in Harper’s Magazine

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by

  William Heinemann 1955

  Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

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  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House New Zealand Limited

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  Random House (Pty) Limited

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  South Africa

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 09 928622 X

  Dear Frere,

  As we have been associated in business and friendship for a quarter of a century I am dedicating this frivolity without permission to you. Unlike some of my Catholic critics, you, I know, when reading this little story, will not mistake me for ‘I’, nor do I need to explain to you that this tale has not been written for the purposes of encouraging adultery, the use of pyjama tops, or registry office marriages. Nor is it meant to discourage gambling.

  Affectionately and gratefully,

  Graham Greene

  PART ONE

  1

  I SUPPOSE the small greenish statue of a man in a wig on a horse is one of the famous statues of the world. I said to Cary, ‘Do you see how shiny the right knee is? It’s been touched so often for luck, like St Peter’s foot in Rome.’

  She rubbed the knee carefully and tenderly as though she were polishing it. ‘Are you superstitious?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I’m so superstitious I never walk under ladders. I throw salt over my right shoulder. I try not to tread on the cracks in pavements. Darling, you’re marrying the most superstitious woman in the world. Lots of people aren’t happy. We are. I’m not going to risk a thing.’

  ‘You’ve rubbed that knee so much, we ought to have plenty of luck at the tables.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking for luck at the tables,’ she said.

  2

  THAT night I thought that our luck had begun in London two weeks before. We were to be married at St Luke’s Church, Maida Hill, and we were going to Bournemouth for the honeymoon. Not, on the face of it, an exhilarating programme, but I thought I didn’t care a damn where we went so long as Cary was there. Le Touquet was within our means, but we thought we could be more alone in Bournemou
th – the Ramages and the Truefitts were going to Le Touquet. ‘Besides, you’d lose all our money at the Casino,’ Cary said, ‘and we’d have to come home.’

  ‘I know too much about figures. I live with them all day.’

  ‘You won’t be bored at Bournemouth?’

  ‘No. I won’t be bored.’

  ‘I wish it wasn’t your second honeymoon. Was the first very exciting – in Paris?’

  ‘We could only afford a week-end,’ I said guardedly.

  ‘Did you love her a terrible lot?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘it was more than fifteen years ago. You hadn’t started school. I couldn’t have waited all that time for you.’

  ‘But did you?’

  ‘The night after she left me I took Ramage out to dinner and stood him the best champagne I could get. Then I went home and slept for nine hours right across the bed. She was one of those people who kick at night and then say you are taking up too much room.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll kick.’

  ‘That would feel quite different. I hope you’ll kick. Then I’ll know you are there. Do you realize the terrible amount of time we’ll waste asleep, not knowing a thing? A quarter of our life.’

  It took her a long time to calculate that. She wasn’t good at figures as I was. ‘More,’ she said, ‘much more. I like ten hours.’

  ‘That’s even worse,’ I said. ‘And eight hours at the office without you. And food – this awful business of having meals.’

  ‘I’ll try to kick,’ she said.

  That was at lunch-time the day when our so-called luck started. We used to meet as often as we could for a snack at the Volunteer which was just round the corner from my office – Cary drank cider and had an unquenchable appetite for cold sausages. I’ve seen her eat five and then finish off with a hardboiled egg.

  ‘If we were rich,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t have to waste time cooking.’

  ‘But think how much more time we’d waste eating. These sausages – look, I’m through already. We shouldn’t even have finished the caviare.’

  ‘And then the sole meunière,’ I said.

  ‘A little fried spring chicken with new peas.’

  ‘A soufflé Rothschild.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be rich, please,’ she said. ‘We mightn’t like each other if we were rich. Like me growing fat and my hair falling out . . .’

  ‘That wouldn’t make any difference.’

  ‘Oh yes, it would,’ she said. ‘You know it would,’ and the talk suddenly faded out. She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn’t be spoken aloud when you are happy.

  I went back to the huge office block with its glass, glass, glass, and its dazzling marble floor and its pieces of modern carving in alcoves and niches like statues in a Catholic church. I was the assistant accountant (an ageing assistant accountant) and the very vastness of the place made promotion seem next to impossible. To be raised from the ground floor I would have to be a piece of sculpture myself.

  In little uncomfortable offices in the city people die and people move on: old gentlemen look up from steel boxes and take a Dickensian interest in younger men. Here, in the great operational room with the computers ticking and the tape machines clicking and the soundless typewriters padding, you felt there was no chance for a man who hadn’t passed staff college. I hadn’t time to sit down before a loudspeaker said, ‘Mr Bertram wanted in Room 10.’ (That was me.)

  ‘Who lives in Room 10?’ I asked.

  Nobody knew. Somebody said, ‘It must be on the eighth floor.’ (He spoke with awe as though he were referring to the peak of Everest – the eighth floor was as far as the London County Council regulations in those days allowed us to build towards Heaven.)

  ‘Who lives in Room 10?’ I asked the liftman again.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he said sourly. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Five years.’

  We began to mount. He said, ‘You ought to know who lives in Room 10.’

  ‘But I don’t.’

  ‘Five years and you don’t know that.’

  ‘Be a good chap and tell me.’

  ‘Here you are. Eighth floor, turn left.’ As I got out, he said gloomily, ‘Not know Room 10!’ He relented as he shut the gates. ‘Who do you think? The Gom, of course.’

  Then I began to walk very slowly indeed.

  I have no belief in luck. I am not superstitious, but it is impossible, when you have reached forty and are conspicuously unsuccessful, not sometimes to half-believe in a malign providence. I had never met the Gom: I had only seen him twice; there was no reason so far as I could tell why I should ever see him again. He was elderly; he would die first, I would contribute grudgingly to a memorial. But to be summoned from the ground floor to the eighth shook me. I wondered what terrible mistake could justify a reprimand in Room 10; it seemed to be quite possible that our wedding now would never take place at St Luke’s, nor our fortnight at Bournemouth. In a way I was right.

  3

  THE Gom was called the Gom by those who disliked him and by all those too far removed from him for any feeling at all. He was like the weather – unpredictable. When a new tape machine was installed, or new computers replaced the old reliable familiar ones, you said, ‘The Gom, I suppose,’ before settling down to learn the latest toy. At Christmas little typewritten notes came round, addressed personally to each member of the staff (it must have given the typing pool a day’s work, but the signature below the seasonal greeting, Herbert Dreuther, was rubber stamped). I was always a little surprised that the letter was not signed Gom. At that season of bonuses and cigars, unpredictable in amount, you sometimes heard him called by his full name, the Grand Old Man.

  And there was something grand about him with his mane of white hair, his musician’s head. Where other men collected pictures to escape death duties, he collected for pleasure. For a month at a time he would disappear in his yacht with a cargo of writers and actresses and oddments – a hypnotist, a man who had invented a new rose or discovered something about the endocrine glands. We on the ground floor, of course, would never have missed him: we should have known nothing about it if we had not read an account in the papers – the cheaper Sunday papers followed the progress of the yacht from port to port: they associated yachts with scandal, but there would never be any scandal on Dreuther’s boat. He hated unpleasantness outside office hours.

  I knew a little more than most from my position: diesel oil was included with wine under the general heading of Entertainment. At one time that caused trouble with Sir Walter Blixon. My chief told me about it. Blixon was the other power at No. 45. He held about as many shares as Dreuther, but he was not proportionally consulted. He was small, spotty, undistinguished, and consumed with jealousy. He could have had a yacht himself, but nobody would have sailed with him. When he objected to the diesel oil, Dreuther magnanimously gave way and then proceeded to knock all private petrol from the firm’s account. As he lived in London he employed the firm’s car, but Blixon had a house in Hampshire. What Dreuther courteously called a compromise was reached – things were to remain as they were. When Blixon managed somehow to procure himself a knighthood, he gained a momentary advantage until the rumour was said to have reached him that Dreuther had refused one in the same Honours List. One thing was certainly true – at a dinner party to which Blixon and my chief had been invited, Dreuther was heard to oppose a knighthood for a certain artist. ‘Impossible. He couldn’t accept it. An O.M. (or possibly a C.H.) are the only honours that remain respectable.’ It made matters worse that Blixon had never heard of the C.H.

  But Blixon bided his time. One more packet of shares would give him control and we used to believe that his chief prayer at night (he was a churchwarden in Hampshire) was that these shares would reach the market while Dreuther was at sea.

  4

  WITH despair in my heart I knocked on the door of No. 10 and entered, but even in my despair I memorized details �
� they would want to know them on the ground floor. The room was not like an office at all – there was a bookcase containing sets of English classics and it showed Dreuther’s astuteness that Trollope was there and not Dickens, Stevenson and not Scott, thus giving an appearance of personal taste. There was an unimportant Renoir and a lovely little Boudin on the far wall, and one noticed at once that there was a sofa but not a desk. The few visible files were stacked on a Regency table, and Blixon and my chief and a stranger sat uncomfortably on the edge of easy chairs. Dreuther was almost out of sight – he lay practically on his spine in the largest and deepest chair, holding some papers above his head and scowling at them through the thickest glasses I have ever seen on a human face.

  ‘It is fantastic and it cannot be true,’ he was saying in his deep guttural voice.

  ‘I don’t see the importance . . .’ Blixon said.

  Dreuther took off his glasses and gazed across the room at me. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘This is Mr Bertram, my assistant,’ the chief accountant said.

  ‘What is he doing here?’

  ‘You told me to send for him.’

  ‘I remember,’ Dreuther said. ‘But that was half an hour ago.’

  ‘I was out at lunch, sir.’

  ‘Lunch?’ Dreuther asked as though it were a new word.

  ‘It was during the lunch hour, Mr Dreuther,’ the chief accountant said.

  ‘And they go out for lunch?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Dreuther.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Most of them, I think.’

  ‘How very interesting. I did not know. Do you go out to lunch, Sir Walter?’

  ‘Of course I do, Dreuther. Now, for goodness sake, can’t we leave this in the hands of Mr Arnold and Mr Bertram? The whole discrepancy only amounts to seven pounds fifteen and fourpence. I’m hungry, Dreuther.’

  ‘It’s not the amount that matters, Sir Walter. You and I are in charge of a great business. We cannot leave our responsibilities to others. The shareholders . . .’

  ‘You are talking high falutin rubbish, Dreuther. The shareholders are you and I . . .’