Loser Takes Al

I thought of the Gom at sea in his yacht with his headline guests and the two of us forgotten—what did he care about his assistant accountant? I remembered the way he had turned to Miss Bullen and said, “Arrange for Mr Bertrand (he couldn’t bother to get my name right) to be married.” Would he arrange through Miss Bullen for our children to be born and our parents to be buried? I thought, with these shares at Blixon’s call I shall have him fixed—he’ll be powerless, I’ll be employing him for just as long as I want him to feel the sting: then no more room on the eighth floor, no more yacht, no more of his ‘luxe, calme et volupté’. He had taken me in with his culture and his courtesy and his phoney kindness until I had nearly accepted him for the great man he believed himself to be. Now, I thought with a sadness for which I couldn’t account, he will be small enough to be in my hands, and I looked at my ink-stained fingers with disrelish.

“You see,” the Other said, “you don’t believe any longer.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” I said, “I’ll take your bet. I was just thinking of something else—that’s all.”

THREE

I went and fetched the money and we drew up the option right away on a sheet of notepaper and the nurse—who had returned by then—and the barman witnessed it. The option was to be taken up at 9 a.m. prompt in the same spot next day: the Other didn’t want his gambling to be interrupted before his dinner-hour whether by good or bad news. Then I made him buy me a glass of whisky, though Moses had less trouble in extracting his drink from a rock in Sinai, and I watched him being pushed back to the Salle Privée. To all intents and purposes, for the next twenty-four hours, I was the owner of Sitra. Neither Dreuther nor Blixon in their endless war could make a move without the consent of their assistant accountant. It was strange to think that neither was aware of how the control of the business had changed—from a friend of Dreuther to an enemy of Dreuther. Blixon would be down in Hampshire reading up tomorrow’s lessons, polishing up his pronunciation of the names in Judges—he would feel no exhilaration. And Dreuther—Dreuther was at sea, out of reach, playing bridge probably with his social lions—he would not be touched by the sense of insecurity. I ordered another whisky: I no longer doubted my system and I had no sense of regret. Blixon would be the first to hear: I would telephone to the office on Monday morning. It would be tactful to inform him of the new position through my chief, Arnold. There must be no temporary rapprochement between Dreuther and Blixon against the intruder: I would have Arnold explain to Blixon that for the time being he could count on me. Dreuther would not even hear of the matter unless he rang up his office from some port of call. Even that I could prevent: I could tell Arnold that the secret must be kept till Dreuther’s return, for then I would have the pleasure of giving him the information in person.

I went out to tell Cary the news, forgetting about our engagements: I wanted to see her face when I told her she was the wife of the man who controlled the company. You’ve hated my system, I wanted to say to her, and the hours I have spent at the Casino, but there was no vulgar cause—it wasn’t money I was after, and I quite forgot that until that evening I had no other motive than money. I began to believe that I had planned this from the first two-hundred-franc bet in the cuisine.

But of course there was no Cary to be found—“Madame went out with a gentleman,” the porter needlessly told me, and I remembered the date at the simple students’ café. Well, there had been a time in my life when I had found little difficulty in picking up a woman and I went back to the Casino to fulfil my word. But the beautiful woman had got a man with her now: their fingers nuzzled over their communal tokens, and I soon realized that single women who came to the Casino to gamble were seldom either beautiful or interested in men. The ball and not the bed was the focal point. I thought of Cary’s questions and my own lies—and there wasn’t a lie she wouldn’t see through.