Loser Takes Al

I got rid of her at last and went home. I was afraid that Cary wouldn’t be there, but she was sitting up in bed reading one of those smart phrase books that are got up like a novel and are terribly bright and gay. When I opened the door she looked up over the book and said, “Entrez, mon colonel.”

“What are you reading that for?” I said.

“J’essaye de faire mon français un peu meilleur.”

“Why?”

“I might live in France one day.”

“Oh? Who with? The hungry student?”

“Philippe has asked me to marry him.”

“After what his dinner must have cost you tonight, I suppose he had to take an honourable line.”

“I told him there was a temporary impediment.”

“You mean your bad French?”

“I meant you, of course.”

Suddenly she began to cry, burying her head under the phrase book so that I shouldn’t see. I sat down on the bed and put my hand on her side: I felt tired: I felt we were very far from the public house at the corner: I felt we had been married a long time and it hadn’t worked. I had no idea how to pick up the pieces—I have never been good with my hands.

I said, “Let’s go home.”

“Not wait any more for Mr Dreuther?”

“Why should we? I practically own Mr Dreuther now.”

I hadn’t meant to tell her, but out it came, all of it. She emerged from under the phrase book and she stopped crying. I told her that when I had extracted the last fun out of being Dreuther’s boss, I would sell my shares at a good profit to Blixon—and that would be the final end of Dreuther. “We’ll be comfortably off,” I said.

“We won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Darling, I’m not hysterical now and I’m not angry. I’m talking really seriously. I didn’t marry a well-off man. I married a man I met in the bar of the Volunteer—someone who liked cold sausages and travelled by bus because taxis were too expensive. He hadn’t had a very good life. He’d married a bitch who ran away from him. I wanted—oh, enormously—to give him fun. Now suddenly I’ve woken up in bed with a man who can buy all the fun he wants and his idea of fun is to ruin an old man who was kind to him. What if Dreuther did forget he’d invited you? He meant it at the time. He looked at you and you seemed tired and he liked you—just like that, for no reason, just as I liked you the first time in the Volunteer. That’s how human beings work. They don’t work on a damned system like your roulette.”

“The system hasn’t done so badly for you.”

“Oh yes, it has. It’s destroyed me. I’ve lived for you and now I’ve lost you.”

“You haven’t. I’m here.”

“When I return home and go into the bar of the Volunteer, you won’t be there. When I’m waiting at the 19 bus stop you won’t be there either. You won’t be anywhere where I can find you. You’ll be driving down to your place in Hampshire like Sir Walter Blixon. Darling, you’ve been very lucky and you’ve won a lot of money, but I don’t like you any more.”

I sneered back at her, but there wasn’t any heart in my sneer, “You only love the poor, I suppose?”

“Isn’t that better than only loving the rich? Darling, I’m going to sleep on the sofa in the sitting-room.” We had a sitting-room again now, and a dressing-room for me, just as at the beginning.

I said, “Don’t bother. I’ve got my own bed.”

I went out on to the balcony. It was like the first night when we had quarrelled, but this time she didn’t come out on to her balcony, and we hadn’t quarrelled. I wanted to knock on her door and say something, but I didn’t know what word to use. All my words seemed to chink like the tokens in Bird’s Nests’ bag.

FOUR

I didn’t see her for breakfast, nor for lunch. I went into the Casino after lunch and for the first time I didn’t want to win. But the devil was certainly in my system and win I did. I had the money to pay Bowles, I owned the shares, and I wished I had lost my last two hundred francs in the kitchen. After that I walked along the terrace—sometimes one gets ideas walking, but I didn’t. And then looking down into the harbour I saw a white boat which hadn’t been there before. She was flying the British flag and I recognized her from newspaper photographs. She was the Seagull. The Gom had come after all—he wasn’t much more than a week late. I thought, you bastard, if only you’d troubled to keep your promise, I wouldn’t have lost Cary. I wasn’t important enough for you to remember and now I’m too important for her to love. Well, if I’ve lost her, you are going to lose everything too—Blixon will probably buy your boat.