Loser Takes All Read online

  ‘Don’t be mean. Watch him, I believe that’s the first food he’s had today.’

  I was on edge with wanting her, and I flared suddenly up; foolishly, for she would never have looked twice at him otherwise. So it is we prepare our own dooms. I said, ‘You wouldn’t call me mean if he weren’t young and good-looking.’

  ‘Darling,’ she said with astonishment, ‘I was only – ’ and then her mouth hardened. ‘You are mean now,’ she said. ‘I’m damned if I’ll apologize.’ She stood and stared at the young man until he raised his absurd romantic hungry face and looked back at her. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he is young, he is good-looking,’ and walked straight out of the Casino. I followed saying, ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ under my breath. I knew now how we’d spend the night.

  We went up in the lift in a dead silence and marched down the corridor and into the sitting-room.

  ‘You can have the large room,’ she said.

  ‘No, you can.’

  ‘The small one’s quite big enough for me. I don’t like huge rooms.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to change the luggage. They’ve put yours in the large room.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said and went into it and shut the door without saying good night. I began to get angry with her as well as myself – ‘a fine first night of marriage,’ I said aloud, kicking my suitcase, and then I remembered we weren’t married yet, and everything seemed silly and wasteful.

  I put on my dressing-gown and went out on to my balcony. The front of the Casino was floodlit: it looked a cross between a Balkan palace and a super-cinema with the absurd statuary sitting on the edge of the green roof looking down at the big portico and the commissionaires; everything stuck out in the white light as though projected in 3D. In the harbour the yachts were all lit up, and a rocket burst in the air over the hill of Monaco. It was so stupidly romantic I could have wept.

  ‘Fireworks, darling,’ a voice said, and there was Cary on her balcony with all the stretch of the sitting-room between us. ‘Fireworks,’ she said, ‘isn’t that just our luck?’ so I knew all was right again.

  ‘Cary,’ I said – we had to raise our voices to carry. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’

  ‘Do you think there’ll be a Catherine-wheel?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘Do you see the lights in the harbour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think Mr Dreuther’s arrived?’

  ‘I expect he’ll sail in at the last moment tomorrow.’

  ‘Could we get married without him? I mean he’s a witness, isn’t he, and his engine might have broken down or he might have been wrecked at sea or there might be a storm or something.’

  ‘I think we could manage without him.’

  ‘You do think it’s arranged all right, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, Miss Bullen’s done it all. Four o’clock tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m getting hoarse, are you, from shouting? Come on to the next balcony, darling.’

  I went into the sitting-room and out on to the balcony there. She said, ‘I suppose we’ll all have to have lunch together – you and me and your Gom?’

  ‘If he gets in for lunch.’

  ‘It would be rather fun, wouldn’t it, if he were a bit late. I like this hotel.’

  ‘We’d have just enough money for two days, I suppose.’

  ‘We could always run up terrible bills,’ she said, and then added, ‘not so much fun really as living in sin, I suppose. I wonder if that young man’s in debt.’

  ‘I wish you’d forget him.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not a bit interested in him, darling. I don’t like young men. I expect I’ve got a father fixation.’

  ‘Damn it, Cary,’ I said, ‘I’m not as old as that.’

  ‘Oh yes, you are,’ she said, ‘puberty begins at fourteen.’

  ‘Then in fiften years from tonight you may be a grandmother.’

  ‘Tonight?’ she said nervously, and then fell silent. The fireworks exploded in the sky. I said. ‘There’s your Catherine-wheel.’

  She turned and looked palely at it.

  ‘What are you thinking, Cary?’

  ‘It’s so strange,’ she said. ‘We are going to be together now for years and years and years. Darling, do you think we’ll have enough to talk about?’

  ‘We needn’t only talk.’

  ‘Darling, I’m serious. Have we got anything in common? I’m terribly bad at mathematics. And I don’t understand poetry. You do.’

  ‘You don’t need to – you are the poetry.’

  ‘No, but really – I’m serious.’

  ‘We haven’t dried up yet, and we’ve been doing nothing else but talk.’

  ‘It would be so terrible,’ she said, ‘if we became a couple. You know what I mean. You with your paper. Me with my knitting.’

  ‘You don’t know how to knit.’

  ‘Well, playing patience then. Or listening to the radio. Or watching television. We’ll never have a television, will we?’

  ‘Never.’

  The rockets were dying down: there was a long pause: I looked away from the lights in the harbour. She was squatted on the floor of the balcony, her head against the side, and she was fast asleep. When I leant over I could touch her hair. She woke at once.

  ‘Oh, how silly. I was dozing.’

  ‘It’s bed-time.’

  ‘Oh. I’m not a bit tired really.’

  ‘You said you were.’

  ‘It’s the fresh air. It’s so nice in the fresh air.’

  ‘Then come on my balcony.’

  ‘Yes, I could, couldn’t I?’ she said dubiously.

  ‘We don’t need both balconies.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come round.’

  ‘I’ll climb over.’

  ‘No. Don’t You might . . .’

  ‘Don’t argue,’ she said, ‘I’m here.’

  They must have thought us crazy when they came to do the rooms – three beds for two people and not one of them had been slept in.

  7

  AFTER breakfast we took a taxi to the Mairie – I wanted to be quite certain Miss Bullen had not slipped up, but everything was fixed; the marriage was to be at four sharp. They asked us not to be late as there was another wedding at 4.30.

  ‘Like to go to the Casino?’ I asked Cary. ‘We could spend, say, 1,000 francs now that everything’s arranged.’

  ‘Let’s take a look at the port first and see if he’s come.’ We walked down the steps which reminded me of Montmartre except that everything was so creamy and clean and glittering and new, instead of grey and old and historic. Everywhere you were reminded of the Casino – the bookshops sold systems in envelopes, ‘2,500 francs a week guaranteed’, the toyshops sold small roulette boards, the tobacconists sold ashtrays in the form of a wheel, and even in the women’s shops there were scarves patterned with figures and manqué and pair and impair and rouge and noir.

  There were a dozen yachts in the harbour, and three carried British flags, but not one of them was Dreuther’s Seagull. ‘Wouldn’t it be terrible if he’d forgotten?’ Cary said.

  ‘Miss Bullen would never let him forget. I expect he’s unloading passengers at Nice. Anyway last night you wanted him to be late.’

  ‘Yes, but this morning it feels scary. Perhaps we oughtn’t to play in the Casino – just in case.’

  ‘We’ll compromise,’ I said. ‘Three hundred francs. We can’t leave Monaco without playing once.’

  We hung around the cuisine for quite a while before we played. This was the serious time of day – there were no tourists and the Salle Privée was closed and only the veterans sat there. You had a feeling with all of them that their lunch depended on victory. It was long, hard, dull employment for them – a cup of coffee and then to work till lunch-time – if their system was successful and they could afford the lunch. Once Cary laughed – I forget what at, and an old man and an old woman raised their heads from opposite sides of the table and stonily
stared. They were offended by our frivolity: this was no game to them. Even if the system worked, what a toil went into earning the 2,500 francs a week. With their pads and their charts they left nothing to chance, and yet over and over again chance nipped in and shovelled away their tokens.

  ‘Darling, let’s bet.’ She put all her three hundred francs on the number of her age, and crossed her fingers for luck. I was more cautious: I put one carré on the same figure, and backed noir and impair with my other two. We both lost on her age, but I won on my others.

  ‘Have you won a fortune, darling? How terribly clever.’

  ‘I’ve won two hundred and lost one hundred.’

  ‘Well, buy a cup of coffee. They always say you ought to leave when you win.’

  ‘We haven’t really won. We are down four bob.’

  ‘You’ve won.’

  Over the coffee I said, ‘Do you know, I think I’ll buy a system just for fun? I’d like to see just how they persuade themselves . . .’

  ‘If anybody could think up a system, it should be you.’

  ‘I can see the possibility if there were no limit to the stakes, but then you’d have to be a millionaire.’

  ‘Darling, you won’t really think one up, will you? It’s fun pretending to be rich for two days, but it wouldn’t be fun if it were true. Look at the guests in the hotel, they are rich. Those women with lifted faces and dyed hair and awful little dogs.’ She said again with one of her flashes of disquieting wisdom, ‘You seem to get afraid of being old when you’re rich.’

  ‘There may be worse fears when you are poor.’

  ‘They are ones we are used to. Darling, let’s go and look at the harbour again. It’s nearly lunch-time. Perhaps Mr Dreuther’s in sight. This place – I don’t like it terribly.’

  We leant over a belvedere and looked down at the harbour – there wasn’t any change there. The sea was very blue and very still and we could hear the voice of a cox out with an eight – it came clearly over the water and up to us. Very far away, beyond the next headland, there was a white boat, smaller than a celluloid toy in a child’s bath.

  ‘Do you think that’s Mr Dreuther?’ Cary asked.

  ‘It might be. I expect it is.’

  But it wasn’t. When we came back after lunch there was no Seagull in the harbour and the boat we had seen was no longer in sight: it was somewhere on the way to Italy. Of course there was no need for anxiety: even if he failed to turn up before night, we could still get married. I said, ‘If he’s been held up, he’d have telegraphed.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s simply forgotten,’ Cary said.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I said, but my mind told me that nothing was impossible with the Gom.

  I said, ‘I think I’ll tell the hotel we’ll keep on one room – just in case.’

  ‘The small room,’ Cary said.

  The receptionist was a little crass. ‘One room, sir?’

  ‘Yes, one room. The small one.’

  ‘The small one? For you and madame, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’ I had to explain. ‘We are being married this afternoon.’

  ‘Congratulations, sir.’

  ‘Mr Dreuther was to have been here.’

  ‘We’ve had no word from Mr Dreuther, sir. He usually lets us know . . . We were not expecting him.’

  Nor was I now, but I did not tell Cary that. This, after all, Gom or no Gom, was our wedding day. I tried to make her return to the Casino and lose a few hundred, but she said she wanted to walk on the terrace and look at the sea. It was an excuse to keep a watch for the Seagull. And of course the Seagull never came. That interview had meant nothing, Dreuther’s kindness had meant nothing, a whim had flown like a wild bird over the snowy waste of his mind, leaving no track at all. We were forgotten. I said, ‘It’s time to go to the Mairie.’

  ‘We haven’t even a witness,’ Cary said.

  ‘They’ll find a couple,’ I said with a confidence I did not feel.

  I thought it would be gay to arrive in a horse-cab and we climbed romantically into a ramshackle vehicle outside the Casino and sat down under the off-white awning. But we’d chosen badly. The horse was all skin and bone and I had forgotten that the road was uphill. An old gentleman with an ear-appliance was being pushed down to the Casino by a middle-aged woman, and she made far better progress down than we made up. As they passed us I could hear her precise English voice. She must have been finishing a story. She said, ‘and so they lived unhappily ever after’; the old man chuckled and said, ‘Tell me that one again.’ I looked at Cary and hoped she hadn’t heard but she had. ‘Darling,’ I said, ‘don’t be superstitious, not today.’

  ‘There’s a lot of sense in superstition. How do you know fate doesn’t send us messages – so that we can be prepared. Like a kind of code. I’m always inventing new ones. For instance’ – she thought a moment – ‘it will be lucky if a confectioner’s comes before a flower shop. Watch your side.’

  I did, and of course a flower shop came first. I hoped she hadn’t noticed, but ‘You can’t cheat fate,’ she said mournfully.

  The cab went slower and slower: it would have been quicker to walk. I looked at my watch: we had only ten minutes to go. I said, ‘You ought to have sacrificed a chicken this morning and found what omens there were in the entrails.’

  ‘It’s all very well to laugh,’ she said. ‘Perhaps our horoscopes don’t match.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to call the whole thing off, would you? Who knows? We’ll be seeing a squinting man next.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘It’s awful.’ I said to the cabby, ‘Please. A little faster. Plus vite.’

  Cary clutched my arm. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Didn’t you see him when he looked round. He’s got a squint.’

  ‘But, Cary, I was only joking.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference. Don’t you see? It’s what I said, you invent a code and fate uses it.’

  I said angrily, ‘Well, it doesn’t make any difference. We are going to be too late anyway.’

  ‘Too late?’ She grabbed my wrist and looked at my watch. She said, ‘Darling, we can’t be late. Stop. Arrêtez. Pay him off.’

  ‘We can’t run uphill,’ I said, but she was already out of the cab and signalling wildly to every car that passed. No one took any notice. Fathers of families drove smugly by. Children pressed their noses on the glass and made faces at her. She said, ‘It’s no use. We’ve got to run.’

  ‘Why bother? Our marriage was going to be unlucky – you’ve read the omens, haven’t you?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘I’d rather be unlucky with you than lucky with anyone else.’ That was the sudden way she had – of dissolving a quarrel, an evil mood, with one clear statement. I took her hand and we began to run. But we would never have made it in time if a furniture-van had not stopped and given us a lift all the way. Has anyone else arrived at their wedding sitting on an old-fashioned brass bedstead? I said, ‘From now on brass bedsteads will always be lucky.’

  She said, ‘There’s a brass bedstead in the small room at the hotel.’

  We had two minutes to spare when the furniture man helped us out on to the little square at the top of the world. To the south there was nothing higher, I suppose, before the Atlas mountains. The tall houses stuck up like cacti towards the heavy blue sky, and a narrow terracotta street came abruptly to an end at the edge of the great rock of Monaco. A Virgin in pale blue with angels blowing round her like a scarf looked across from the church opposite, and it was warm and windy and very quiet and all the roads of our life had led us to this square.

  I think for a moment we were both afraid to go in. Nothing inside could be as good as this, and nothing was. We sat on a wooden bench, and another couple soon sat down beside us, the girl in white, the man in black: I became painfully conscious that I wasn’t dressed up. Then a man in a high stiff collar made a great deal of fuss about papers an
d for a while we thought the marriage wouldn’t take place at all: then there was a to-do, because we had turned up without witnesses, before they consented to produce a couple of sad clerks. We were led into a large empty room with a chandelier, and a desk – a notice on the door said Salle des Mariages, and the mayor, a very old man who looked like Clemenceau, wearing a blue and red ribbon of office, stood impatiently by while the man in the collar read out our names and our birth-dates. Then the mayor repeated what sounded like a whole code of laws in rapid French and we had to agree to them – apparently they were the clauses from the Code Napoléon. After that the mayor made a little speech in very bad English about our duty to society and our responsibility to the State, and at last he shook hands with me and kissed Cary on the cheek, and we went out again past the waiting couple on to the little windy square.

  It wasn’t an impressive ceremony, there was no organ like at St Luke’s and no wedding guests. ‘I don’t feel I’ve been married,’ Cary said, but then she added, ‘It’s fun not feeling married.’

  8

  THERE are so many faces in streets and bars and buses and stores that remind one of Original Sin, so few that carry permanently the sign of Original Innocence. Cary’s face was like that – she would always until old age look at the world with the eyes of a child. She was never bored: every day was a new day: even grief was eternal and every joy would last for ever. ‘Terrible’ was her favourite adjective – it wasn’t in her mouth a cliché – there was terror in her pleasures, her fears, her anxieties, her laughter – the terror of surprise, of seeing something for the first time. Most of us only see resemblances, every situation has been met before, but Cary saw only differences, like a wine-taster who can detect the most elusive flavour.

  We went back to the hotel and the Seagull hadn’t come and Cary met this anxiety quite unprepared as though it were the first time we had felt it. Then we went to the bar and had a drink, and it might have been the first drink we had ever had together. She had an insatiable liking for gin and Dubonnet which I didn’t share. I said, ‘He won’t be in now till tomorrow.’

  ‘Darling, shall we have enough for the bill?’