Loser Takes All (6 page)

She said sadly, ‘You are getting like all the others.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You think numbers, you dream numbers. You wake up in the night and say “
Zéro deux
”. You write on bits of paper at meals.'

‘Do you call them meals?'

‘There are four thousand francs in my bag and they've got to last us till the
Seagull
comes. We aren't going to gamble any more. I don't believe in your system. A week ago you said you couldn't beat the bank.'

‘I hadn't studied . . .'

‘That's what the devil said – he'd studied. You'll be selling your system soon for a glass of whisky.'

She got up and walked back to the hotel and I didn't follow. I thought, a wife ought to believe in her husband to the bitter end and we hadn't been married a week; and then after a while I began to see her point of view. For the last few days I hadn't been much company, and what a life it had been – afraid to meet the porter's eye, and that was exactly what I met as I came into the hotel.

He blocked my way and said, ‘The manager's compliments, sir, and could you spare him a few moments. In his room.' I thought: they can't send her to prison too, only me, and I thought: the Gom, that egotistical bastard on the eighth floor who has let us in for all this because he's too great to remember his promises. He makes the world and then he goes and rests on the seventh day and his creation can go to pot that day for all he cares. If only for one moment I could have had him in my power – if he could have depended on my remembering
him
, but it was as if I was doomed to be an idea of his, he would never be an idea of mine.

‘Sit down, Mr Bertram,' the manager said. He pushed a cigarette box across to me. ‘Smoke?' He had the politeness of a man who has executed many people in his time.

‘Thanks,' I said.

‘The weather has not been quite so warm as one would expect at this time of year.'

‘Oh, better than England, you know.'

‘I do hope you are enjoying your stay.' This, I supposed, was the routine – just to show there was no ill-feeling – one has one's duty. I wished he would come to an end.

‘Very much, thank you.'

‘And your wife too?'

‘Oh yes. Yes.'

He paused, and I thought: now it comes. He said, ‘By the way, Mr Bertram, I think this is your first visit?'

‘Yes.'

‘We rather pride ourselves here on our cooking. I don't think you will find better food in Europe.'

‘I'm sure you're right.'

‘I don't want to be intrusive, Mr Bertram, please forgive me if I am, but we have noticed that you don't seem to care for our restaurant, and we are very anxious that you and your wife should be happy here in Monte Carlo. Any complaint you might have – the service, the wine . . . ?'

‘Oh, I've no complaint. No complaint at all.'

‘I didn't think you would have, Mr Bertram. I have great confidence in our service here. I came to the conclusion – you will forgive me if I'm intrusive –'

‘Yes. Oh yes.'

‘I know that our English clients often have trouble over currency. A little bad luck at the tables can so easily upset their arrangements in these days.'

‘Yes. I suppose so.'

‘So it occurred to me, Mr Bertram, that perhaps – how shall I put it – you might be, as it were, a little – you will forgive me, won't you – well, short of funds?'

My mouth felt very dry now that the moment had come. I couldn't find the bold frank words I wanted to use. I said, ‘Well,' and goggled across the desk. There was a portrait of the Prince of Monaco on the wall and a huge ornate inkstand on the desk and I could hear the train going by to Italy. It was like a last look at freedom.

The manager said, ‘You realize that the Administration of the Casino and of this hotel are most anxious – really most anxious – you realize we are in a very special position here, Mr Bertram, we are not perhaps' – he smiled at his fingernails – ‘quite ordinary
hôteliers.
We have had clients here whom we have looked after for – well, thirty years' – he was incredibly slow at delivering his sentence. ‘We like to think of them as friends rather than clients. You know here in the Principality we have a great tradition – well, of discretion, Mr Bertram. We don't publish names of our guests. We are the repository of many confidences.'

I couldn't bear the man's rigmarole any more. It had become less like an execution than like the Chinese water-torture. I said, ‘We are quite broke – there's a confidence for you.'

He smiled again at his nails. ‘That was what I suspected, Mr Bertram, and so I hope you will accept a small loan. For a friend of Mr Dreuther. Mr Dreuther is a very old client of ours and we should be most distressed if any friend of his failed to enjoy his stay with us.' He stood up, bowed and presented me with an envelope – I felt like a child receiving a good-conduct prize from a bishop. Then he led me to the door and said in a low confidential voice, ‘Try our
Château Gruaud Larose
1934: you will not be disappointed.'

I opened the envelope on the bed and counted the notes. I said, ‘He's lent us 250,000 francs.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘What it is to be a friend of the Gom. I wish I liked the bastard.'

‘How will we ever repay it?'

‘The Gom will have to help. He kept us here.'

‘We'll spend as little as we can, won't we, darling?'

‘But no more coffee and rolls. Tonight we'll have a party – the wedding party.' I didn't care a damn about the
Gruaud Larose
1934: I hired a car and we drove to a little village in the mountains called Peille. Everything was rocky grey and gorse-yellow in the late sun which flowed out between the cold shoulders of the hills where the shadows waited. Mules stood in the street and the car was too large to reach the inn, and in the inn there was only one long table to seat fifty people. We sat alone at it and watched the darkness come, and they gave us their own red wine which wasn't very good and fat pigeons roasted and fruit and cheese. The villagers laughed in the next room over their drinks, and soon we could hardly see the enormous hump of hills.

‘Happy?'

‘Yes.'

She said after a while, ‘I wish we weren't going back to Monte Carlo. Couldn't we send the car home and stay? We wouldn't mind about toothbrushes tonight, and tomorrow we could go – shopping.' She said the last word with an upward inflexion as though we were at the Ritz and the Rue de la Paix round the corner.

‘A toothbrush at Cartier's,' I said.

‘Lanvin for two pyjama tops.'

‘Soap at Guerlain.'

‘A few cheap handkerchiefs in the Rue de Rivoli.' She said, ‘I can't think of anything else we'd want, can you? Did you ever come to a place like this with Dirty?' Dirty was the name she always used for my first wife who had been dark and plump and sexy with pekingese eyes.

‘Never.'

‘I like being somewhere without footprints.'

I looked at my watch. It was nearly ten and there was half an hour's drive back. I said, ‘I suppose we'd better go.'

‘It's not late.'

‘Well, tonight I want to give my system a real chance. If I use 200-franc tokens I've got just enough capital.'

‘You aren't going to the Casino?'

‘Of course I am.'

‘But that's stealing.'

‘No it isn't. He gave us the money to enjoy ourselves with.'

‘Then half of it's mine. You shan't gamble with my half.'

‘Dear, be reasonable. I need the capital. The system needs the capital. When I've won you shall have the whole lot back with interest. We'll pay our bills, we'll come back here if you like for all the rest of our stay.'

‘You'll never win. Look at the others.'

‘They aren't mathematicians. I am.'

An old man with a beard guided us to our car through the dark arched streets: she wouldn't speak, she wouldn't even take my arm. I said, ‘This is our celebration night, darling. Don't be mean.'

‘What have I said that's mean?' How they defeat us with their silences: one can't repeat a silence or throw it back as one can a word. In the same silence we drove home. As we came out over Monaco the city was floodlit, the Museum, the Casino, the Cathedral, the Palace – the fireworks went up from the rock. It was the last day of a week of illuminations: I remembered the first day and our quarrel and the three balconies.

I said, ‘We've never seen the
Salle Privée
. We must go there tonight.'

‘What's special about tonight?' she said.

‘
Le mari doit protection à sa femme, la femme obéissance à son mari.'

‘What on earth are you talking about?'

‘You told the mayor you agreed to that. There's another article you agreed to – “The wife is obliged to live with her husband and to follow him wherever he judges it right to reside.” Well, tonight we are damned well going to reside in the
Salle Privée
.'

‘I didn't understand what he was saying.' The worst was always over when she consented to argue.

‘Please, dear, come and see my system win.'

‘I shall only see it lose,' she said and she spoke with strict accuracy.

At 10.30 exactly I began to play and to lose and I lost steadily. I couldn't change tables because this was the only table in the
Salle Privée
at which one could play with a 200-franc minimum. Cary wanted me to stop when I had lost half of the manager's loan, but I still believed that the moment would come, the tide turn, my figures prove correct.

‘How much is left?' she asked.

‘This.' I indicated the five two-hundred-franc tokens. She got up and left me: I think she was crying, but I couldn't follow her without losing my place at the table.

And when I came back to our room in the hotel I was crying too – there are occasions when a man can cry without shame. She was awake: I could tell by the way she had dressed herself for bed how coldly she was awaiting me. She never wore the bottoms of her pyjamas except to show anger or indifference, but when she saw me sitting there on the end of the bed, shaking with the effort to control my tears, her anger went. She said, ‘Darling, don't take on so. We'll manage somehow.' She scrambled out of bed and put her arms round me. ‘Darling,' she said, ‘I've been mean to you. It might happen to anybody. Look, we'll try the ices, not the coffee and rolls, and the
Seagull
's sure to come. Sooner or later.'

‘I don't mind now if it never comes,' I said.

‘Don't be bitter, darling. It happens to everybody, losing.'

‘But I haven't lost,' I said, ‘I've won.'

She took her arms away. ‘Won?'

‘I've won five million francs.'

‘Then why are you crying?'

‘I'm laughing. We are rich.'

‘Oh, you beast,' she said, ‘and I was sorry for you,' and she scrambled back under the bedclothes.

1

O
NE
adapts oneself to money much more easily than to poverty: Rousseau might have written that man was born rich and is everywhere impoverished. It gave me great satisfaction to pay back the manager and leave my key at the desk. I frequently rang the bell for the pleasure of confronting a uniform without shame. I made Cary have an Elizabeth Arden treatment, and I ordered the
Gruaud Larose
1934 (I even sent it back because it was not the right temperature). I had our things moved to a suite and I hired a car to take us to the beach. At the beach I hired one of the private bungalows where we could sunbathe, cut off by bushes and shrubs from the eyes of common people. There all day I worked in the sun (for I was not yet quite certain of my system) while Cary read (I had even bought her a new book).

I discovered that, as on the stock exchange, money bred money. I would now use ten-thousand-franc squares instead of two-hundred-franc tokens, and inevitably at the end of the day I found myself richer by several million. My good fortune became known: casual players would bet on the squares where I had laid my biggest stake, but they had not protected themselves, as I had with my other stakes, and it was seldom that they won. I noted a strange aspect of human nature, that though my system worked and theirs did not, the veterans never lost faith in their own calculations – not one abandoned his elaborate schemes, which led to nothing but loss, to follow my victorious method. The second day, when I had already increased my five million to nine, I heard an old lady say bitterly, ‘What deplorable luck,' as though it were my good fortune alone that prevented the wheel revolving to her system.

On the third day I began to attend the Casino for longer hours – I would put in three hours in the morning in the kitchen and the same in the afternoon, and then of course in the evening I settled down to my serious labour in the
Salle Privée
. Cary had accompanied me on the second day and I had given her a few thousand francs to play with (she invariably lost them), but on the third day I thought it best to ask her to stay away. I found her anxious presence at my elbow distracting, and twice I made a miscalculation because she spoke to me. ‘I love you very much, darling,' I said to her, ‘but work is work. You go and sunbathe, and we'll see each other for meals.'

‘Why do they call it a game of chance?' she said.

‘How do you mean?'

‘It's not a game. You said it yourself – it's work. You've begun to commute. Breakfast at nine thirty sharp, so as to catch the first table. What a lot of beautiful money you're earning. At what age will you retire?'