Loser Takes All (3 page)

5

T
HE
next day was a Saturday. I met Cary at the Volunteer and walked all the way home with her: it was one of those spring afternoons when you can smell the country in a London street, tree smells and flower smells blew up into Oxford Street from Hyde Park, the Green Park, St James's, Kensington Gardens.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘I wish we could go a long, long way to somewhere very hot and very gay and very –' I had to pull her back or she would have been under a bus. I was always saving her from buses and taxis – sometimes I wondered how she kept alive when I wasn't there.

‘Well,' I said, ‘we can,' and while we waited for the traffic lights to change I told her.

I don't know why I expected such serious opposition: perhaps it was partly because she had been so set on a church wedding, the choir and the cake and all the nonsense. ‘Think,' I said, ‘to be married in Monte Carlo instead of Maida Hill. The sea down below and the yacht waiting . . .' As I had never been there, the details rather petered out.

She said, ‘There's sea at Bournemouth too. Or so I've heard.'

‘The Italian coast.'

‘In company with your Mr Dreuther.'

‘We won't share a cabin with him,' I said, ‘and I don't suppose the hotel in Bournemouth will be quite empty.'

‘Darling, I did want to be married at St Luke's.'

‘Think of the Town Hall at Monte Carlo – the mayor in all his robes – the, the . . .'

‘Does it count?'

‘Of course it counts.'

‘It would be rather fun if it didn't count, and then we could marry at St Luke's when we came back.'

‘That would be living in sin.'

‘I'd love to live in sin.'

‘You could,' I said, ‘any time. This afternoon.'

‘Oh, I don't count London,' she said. ‘That would be just making love. Living in sin is – oh, striped umbrellas and 80 in the shade and grapes – and a fearfully gay bathing suit. I'll have to have a new bathing suit.'

I thought all was well then, but she caught sight of one of those pointed spires sticking up over the plane trees a square ahead. ‘We've sent out all the invitations. What will Aunt Marion say?' (She had lived with Aunt Marion ever since her parents were killed in the blitz.)

‘Just tell her the truth. She'd much rather get picture-postcards from Italy than from Bournemouth.'

‘It will hurt the Vicar's feelings.'

‘Only to the extent of a fiver.'

‘Nobody will really believe we are married.' She added a moment later (she was nothing if not honest), ‘That will be fun.'

Then the pendulum swung again and she went thoughtfully on, ‘You are only hiring your clothes. But my dress is being made.'

‘There's time to turn it into an evening dress. After all, that's what it would have become anyway.'

The church loomed in sight: it was a hideous church, but no more hideous than St Luke's. It was grey and flinty and soot-stained, with reddish steps to the street the colour of clay and a text on a board that said, ‘Come to Me all ye who are heavy laden,' as much as to say, ‘Abandon Hope.' A wedding had just taken place, and there was a dingy high-tide line of girls with perambulators and squealing children and dogs and grim middle-aged matrons who looked as though they had come to curse.

I said, ‘Let's watch. This might be happening to us.'

A lot of girls in long mauve dresses with lacy Dutch caps came out and lined the steps: they looked with fear at the nursemaids and the matrons and one or two giggled nervously – you could hardly blame them. Two photographers set up cameras to cover the entrance, an arch which seemed to be decorated with stone clover leaves, and then the victims emerged followed by a rabble of relatives.

‘It's terrible,' Cary said, ‘terrible. To think that might be you and me.'

‘Well, you haven't an incipient goitre and I'm – well, damn it, I don't blush and I know where to put my hands.'

A car was waiting decorated with white ribbons and all the bridesmaids produced bags of paper rose petals and flung them at the young couple.

‘They are lucky,' I said. ‘Rice is still short, but I'm certain Aunt Marion can pull strings with the grocer.'

‘She'd never do such a thing.'

‘You can trust no one at a wedding. It brings out a strange atavistic cruelty. Now that they are not allowed to bed the bride, they try to damage the bridegroom. Look,' I said, clutching Cary's arm. A small boy, encouraged by one of the sombre matrons, had stolen up to the door of the car and, just as the bridegroom stooped to climb in, he launched at close range a handful of rice full in the unfortunate young man's face.

‘When you can only spare a cupful,' I said, ‘you are told to wait until you can see the whites of your enemy's eyes.'

‘But it's terrible,' Cary said.

‘That, my dear child, is what is called a church marriage.'

‘But ours wouldn't be like that. It's going to be very quiet – only near relatives.'

‘You forget the highways and the hedges. It's a Christian tradition. That boy wasn't a relation. Trust me. I know. I've been married in church myself.'

‘You were married in church? You never told me,' she said. ‘In that case I'd
much
rather be married in a town hall. You haven't been married in a town hall too, have you?'

‘No, it will be the first time – and the last time.'

‘Oh, for God's sake,' Cary said, ‘touch wood.'

So there she was two weeks later rubbing away at the horse's knee, asking for luck, and the great lounge of the Monte Carlo hotel spread emptily around us, and I said, ‘That's that. We're alone, Cary.' (One didn't count the receptionist and the cashier and the concierge and the two men with our luggage and the old couple sitting on a sofa, for Mr Dreuther, they told me, had not yet arrived and we had the night to ourselves.)

6

W
E
had dinner on the terrace of the hotel and watched people going into the Casino. Cary said, ‘We ought to look in for the fun. After all, we aren't gamblers.'

‘We couldn't be,' I said, ‘not with fifty pounds basic.' We had decided not to use her allowance in case we found ourselves able to go to Le Touquet for a week in the winter.

‘You are an accountant,' Cary said. ‘You ought to know all about systems.'

‘Systems are damned expensive,' I said. I had discovered that we had a suite already booked for us by Miss Bullen and I had no idea what it would cost. Our passports were still under different names, so I suppose it was reasonable that we should have two rooms, but the sitting-room seemed unnecessary. Perhaps we were supposed to entertain in it after the wedding. I said, ‘You need a million francs
*
to play a system, and then you are up against the limit. The bank can't lose.'

‘I thought someone broke the bank once.'

‘Only in a comic song,' I said.

‘It would be awful if we were really gamblers,' she said. ‘You've got to care so much about money. You don't, do you?'

‘No,' I said and meant it. All I had in my mind that night was the wonder whether we would sleep together. We never had. It was that kind of marriage. I had tried the other kind, and now I would have waited months if I could gain in that way all the rest of the years. But tonight I didn't want to wait any longer. I was as fussed as a young man – I found I could no longer see into Cary's mind. She was twenty years younger, she had never been married before, and the game was all in her hands. I couldn't even interpret what she said to me. For instance as we crossed to the Casino she said, ‘We'll only stay ten minutes. I'm terribly tired.' Was that hint in my favour or against me? Or was it just a plain statement of fact? Had the problem in my mind never occurred to her, or had she already made up her mind so certainly that the problem didn't exist? Was she assuming I knew the reason?

I had thought when they showed us our rooms I would discover, but all she had said with enormous glee was, ‘Darling. What extravagance.'

I took the credit from Miss Bullen. ‘It' only for one night. Then we'll be on the boat.' There was one huge double room and one very small single room and a medium-sized sitting-room in between: all three had balconies. I felt as though we had taken the whole front of the hotel. First she depressed me by saying, ‘We could have had two single rooms,' and then she contradicted that by saying, ‘All the beds are double ones,' and then down I went again when she looked at the sofa in the sitting-room and said, ‘I wouldn't have minded sleeping on that.' I was no wiser, and so we talked about systems. I didn't care a damn for systems.

After we had shown our passports and got our tickets we entered what they call the
cuisine
, where the small stakes are laid. ‘This is where I belong,' Cary said, and nothing was less true. The old veterans sat around the tables with their charts and their pads and their pencils, making notes of every number. They looked, some of them, like opium smokers, dehydrated. There was a very tiny brown old lady with a straw hat of forty years ago covered in daisies: her left claw rested on the edge of the table like the handle of an umbrella and her right held a chip worth one hundred francs. After the ball had rolled four times she placed her piece and lost it. Then she began waiting again. A young man leant over her shoulder, staked 100 on the last twelve numbers, won and departed. ‘There goes a wise man,' I said, but when we came opposite the bar, he was there with a glass of beer and a sandwich. ‘Celebrating three hundred francs,' I said.

‘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 3
D
. 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.'