Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (36 page)

 
          
It
was four in the afternoon before William and Felicity got to Foxwoods. The
place had emptied out: colours seemed muted and the music quieter. Half the
tables were closed. Such dealers as remained worked quietly, and made no jokes;
strength was being conserved: the music was silenced.
II faut reculer pour mieux sauter.
You could hear the determined
slap, slap of cards. The revolving car on the pedestal was being changed for a
newer, brighter model. The cocktail waitresses had time to lounge around:
bosoms seemed to droop as if personal energy alone had ever kept them up. One
girl, as Felicity watched, stooped to lay down her drinks tray on the floor and
press a licked finger on a ladder in tights stretched over plump legs: an
official in a blazer with brass buttons stopped to reproach her. Her upturned
face seemed pale, tired, anxious and too young.
She's got a child back home
, thought Felicity;
she'll do anything not to lose this job. Once I was like that.
There were no bursts of laughter from the tables, no whoops or yells: and from
the slots just an unexcited, murmuring rattle.

 
          
‘It’s
the afternoon shift,’ said William.
‘The out-of-work crowd.
It’s serious business now. Eat or go
hungry,
and no
credit for anyone. You’ve got to wait ’til ten o’clock before the big boys come
in, for the fun and the laughter and the big winners.’

 
          
‘And
the big losers,’ she said.

 
          
‘Don’t
even think of it,’ he said. ‘Let alone mention it. I feel lucky today.
Morphic resonance.’

 
          
‘I
didn’t know that had anything to do with gambling,’ she said.

           
She felt fidgety and cross:
disappointed. ‘I thought it was about cows knowing about cattle grids without
being told.’

 
          
‘Same thing.
The way we all know
everything, if we don’t look at it direct.
But my luck hasn’t come in
yet.’ He seemed to be sniffing the air to get the feel of the wind. ‘We’ll wait
a bit. We’ll drink coffee.’

 
          
‘Comes
in like breast milk, does it?’ she inquired. ‘Just comes flooding in? You can
feel it?’

 
          
‘I
like that you’re tetchy,’ he said. ‘It means you’re in tune. This place, when
it’s
lying
low, ticking over, the tide ebbing, waiting
to come crashing back. Even affects the coffee machines. They get no strength
into the cup. It’ll be okay. Don’t worry about it.’

 
          
A
woman came up to him in the cafe and said, ‘Can I just touch you?’ and William
smiled and nodded, and the woman, who had bleached hair and chipped purple nail
polish touched his lapel and said, ‘I really felt that. It jumped from me to
you.’ Then she added, apologetically, because Felicity was looking surprised,
‘William’s on a lucky streak. I watched him move from eight thousand down, to
thirty up, just in a couple of hours.’

 
          
‘Really?’
asked Felicity, politely.

 
          
‘Upped his league to purple and beyond.
Way to go. I guess I
just don’t have the nerve.’ She moved off and William said, ‘Poor Kathleen.
One of the natural born losers.’

 
          
‘I
wouldn’t give my luck away like that,’ said Felicity. She was feeling better.
The tide goes out so far,
then
it has to come in
again. Though William was right, the coffee was pale and thin. ‘Sometimes
you’ve got to take chances,’ he said. ‘You know you think like a gambler?’

           
‘Always have been one, I guess,’ she
said. ‘I just didn’t know it.’ A Gamblers Anonymous poster on the wall behind
them said
Winners Know When to Quit.
Felicity suggested that they move to the next table if he was waiting for his
luck to come in. He said no, since the poster spoke of winners it had to be
okay, so they stayed. Felicity said, ‘While we wait for a following wind, tell
me why your last wife divorced you. Was it gambling?’

 
          
‘Of
course,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you ’til I was sure about you. Some
people get peculiar about Casinos.’

 
          
‘And the first two wives?’

           
‘They both died. Luck of the draw.
After that a guy feels like defying fate. The first one was cancer, the second
just walked out into the road one day. She was a lot younger than I was. She
was thinking of something else. She was on her way home from the doctor. He’d
told her she was pregnant. If I’d gone with her it wouldn’t have happened. But
I was a teacher in those days. I was at work.’

 
          
‘That’s
the terrible thing about employment,’ she said.
‘The way it
interferes with real life.’

 
          
He
was grateful for the lightness. He took her hand.

 
          
‘I
went for grief counselling,’ he said. ‘You know what I blame those people for?
They never made me laugh. If someone had made me laugh I would have got better
sooner. You make me laugh. You might even cure me of all this.’ He nodded down
towards the Casino. Another row of tables opened: an extra row of lights drew
punters away from the quarter slots to the ten dollar.

 
          
‘I
might not want to,’ she said. ‘I might like it too.’

 
          
‘Frankly,
it’s madness,’ he said.
‘Another world.
But it gets
familiar. You get to know the regulars. If people talk here they really talk:
you’re down to the basics.
Other people’s lives.
Especially on the graveyard shift, that’s just before dawn, when there’s very
little hope left.
Last post for the drunks and the drugged
and the desperate.
I keep away from the tables then. You’ve got to be
disciplined. No use thinking one last throw, one last deal, one more spin, and
all will be well. You’ve got to set about these things with a bit of energy. You
can get too tired to want to spend.’

 
          
He
snapped his finger at a waitress with bright pink cheeks and a blonde plait of
hair around her head and ordered a hamburger. It was out of mealtime, but Miss
Felicity ordered one too. Back at the Golden Bowl there’d be salad and
low-cholesterol quiche.

 
          
‘We
were talking about your wives,’ she said.
‘The last one,
please.’
‘I got to fifty on my own and then I married Meryl. I wasn’t
gambling then. I took her up to Passchendale: she loved it, her daughter
Margaret didn’t.
Nothing to do.
And I suppose I got
bored and came back to this place and ran up a few debts.
Nothing
too bad.’

 
          
* * *

 
          
But
then Meryl, egged on by Margaret, had joined a programme for the wives of
gamblers, and they’d worked on her and soon she’d begin to get hysterical if he
so much as left the house, let alone came back with the dawn, no matter how
much he had in his pocket. She thought winning was somehow worse than losing.
Finally Margaret had talked her mother into getting a divorce. The judge
awarded Meryl and Margaret Passchendale.
A bad day’s play.
And after that what was left of his family held the loss against him. Margaret
had just let the place stand and rot, warts, sculptures, paintings and all.

 
          
‘Funny
thing,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen that Judge in here. You’d have thought he’d have
known the pattern, that the debts were a temporary thing.’ At the time
Passchendale was all he had left, so Meryl got it, in Judge speak, before he
could spend that too. Meryl had gone to live in California: Margaret owned the
house now, but chose not to live in it, for all she cared it could just fall
down.
^£
She told me as much at Tommy’s funeral,’ said William.
^£
She’s
a bitter wee soul.’

 
          
He’d
gone into some other gear since the funeral, he told Felicity. His luck had
turned. He had energy, and hope, and a sense of future. He found himself
stopping while he was still ahead.

 
          
^‘
Yes,
but you’re back the next day,’ she observed.

 
          
^‘
You’re
a hard woman,’ he said. He shook tomato ketchup vigorously over the hamburger.
The previous week, he boasted, he’d changed the pattern of play, paid
attention, played crazy, and won big.
Enough to pay off
credit cards, the bank, and enough over to buy the car.

 
          
^‘
How
much?’ she said.

 
          
‘Three
hundred thousand,’ he said, almost shyly. ‘You give me courage. I’d get shaky
when the bets went up. At five hundred I’d be really scared, blinded. Money
moves fast at that level. The night I won, I was up to ten times as much: five
thousand. If you mean to win big you’ve got to spend big.’

 
          
‘No
wonder Kathleen wanted to touch you,’ said Miss Felicity, primly. She was
excited by the sum. Quarters in the slots were okay, but just a tickling of the
surface of possibility. A way to keep your hand
in, that
was all. Otherwise forget it. The real life was when the orange chips, $1,000,
were playing fast: at the purple tables, minimum bet $500, while the
lookers-over-shoulders crowded in, to watch the guys with the special chips,
$1,000 plus, move in. This was when the tension of the place rose; the life
beat quickened, the noise levels rose and fell with every drama, when the
nerves stretched.
Real man stuff.
More, if you kept
your nerve in a Casino a woman could be a man. When Dr Rosebloom’s view of the
universe came true: come on, you old whiskery thing, what are you, man, woman,
mouse? This was what he’d been trying to say: why the shifting, mouthing glint
behind the mirror glass. Time’s short. Don’t waste what’s left.

 
          
‘You
should have bought back your father’s house,’ she said, ‘not spread it about
like that.’

 
          
‘I
thought about it,’ he said, ‘but some of those debts had got rather pressing. I
cut up the cards when I paid them off: I had eight of them all up to their
limit. I’m a strictly cash man from now on. I can’t get into trouble. I got a
hundred dollars to spend. If it goes, we leave. Why should I want trouble? I
want you. You’re not going to put up with this kind of shit, not if it gets
serious.’ ‘Where are we going to live if we do get married?’ she asked. ‘We
never got round to that. You wouldn’t want to live in the Golden Bowl, and
Nurse Dawn wouldn’t like it. I don’t think I’d want to live in the Rosemount.
Not that I’ve ever been inside. You never asked me.’

 
          
‘We
can rent somewhere around here,’ he said. ‘You can get really nice places
cheap. People are leaving all the time, without a forwarding address. Another
problem while we’re about it. There’s a girl working at the Rosemount who’s
convinced I’m the father of her child.’

 
          
She
was back again somewhere else, some other time.
We’d run off together hut I’ve made this girl pregnant. I can’t just
abandon her.
Who was that? She couldn’t remember the name, the face. Oh
yes, Angel’s father, that was it. He’d lulled her with folk songs.

 
          
Oh are you going to Strawberry Fair

         
  
Where the days are merry and
bright?

           
Remember
me to
one
who lives there,

           
She
was once a true love of mine.

 
 
         
And then off they go to the other one,
and you never see them again. For someone conceived in love, however one-sided,
Angel had been very angry. Perhaps that was her, Felicity’s, trouble. She’d
spent so much of her life being brave she had forgotten to be angry. Angel had
taken it all on herself.

 
          
‘Felicity?’
he was saying, this port in a storm, any port in a storm, this gambling man.
‘Did you hear what I said?’

 
          
‘I
heard,’ she said, drearily.