For a little while they watched the crowd surrounding a roulette table. Presently they obtained seats.
“Faites vos jeux, messieurs-dames — faites vos jeux.”
The sound of the monotonous voices of the croupiers was followed by a kind of general rustling movement all round the table, as the players placed their stakes. One or two spoke, but for the most part there was silence.
It became almost intense at: “Rien ne va plus,” and the dry rattle of the little ball, racing round and round as the wheel twirled, was clearly audible.
“Le trente-cinq.... Rouge, impair, et passe....”
As the tension round the table relaxed, people spoke, exclaimed, and moved again freely.
The croupiers raked counters backwards and forwards across the green cloth.
“Thirty-five. That’s your age, isn’t it?” said Buckland in an undertone to Mrs. Romayne. “I shall bet on it next time.”
“How do you know my age?” she asked innocently.
“Anyway, the same number won’t come up twice running.”
“I’ve a hunch it will,” declared Buck confidently.
He counted out the maximum stake and placed it en plein on the number.
“Buck, you’re loopy.”
“You wait and see.”
Superstitiously impressed by his air of assurance, Coral followed Buckland’s lead to the extent of placing money on red, impair, and passe.
“Faites vos jeux....”
“You’re a fool,” said Coral. “You know you can’t afford to lose that.”
“I’m not going to lose it.”
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush had joined them, with Courteney and Angie Moon.
Hilary was nowhere to be seen.
“Rien ne va plus....”
The saucer-shaped disk twirled again. None of them could see the ball. They heard an exclamation or two:
“Le dix-sept....”
“Non, ce sera le vingt-et-un....”
And then a woman’s high, shrill, American voice:
“Why, it’s the same as last time — —”
“Trente-cinq.... Rouge, impair, et manque.”
“My God!” said Coral, really impressed.
Buckland laughed triumphantly. People standing near turned to look at him, as he pocketed his winnings without counting them.
“How much have you won?” gasped Mrs. Wolverton-Gush at his elbow.
“Quite enough to stand drinks all round,” said Buckland, grinning broadly.
“Buck, you’re a wonder. I swear I’ll follow you next time,” said Coral.
“Can’t be done, my dear. What I’ve got, I mean to stick to.”
“You don’t mean you’re not going on playing?”
“We’ll see, later.”
“Your luck may have turned later. Don’t be such a fool — you should always follow your luck when it’s in.”
Coral pushed counters recklessly into his hand.
“Put on something for me — anywhere you like,” she commanded.
“What’ll you do to me if I lose your money?”
“Curse you, I expect,” she declared with a high, excited laugh. “Look here, if you win I’ll go fifty-fifty with you.”
“Done,” said Buckland swiftly, taking the counters.
Behind him, Ruth Wolverton-Gush made an irrepressible sound that expressed mingled envy, impatience, and boundless disgust at her friend’s prodigality.
(4)
By four o’clock Mervyn Morgan had decided that Monte Carlo was the hottest and most crowded town that he had ever in his life visited.
Olwen had gone in and out of a number of shops, and had spent what seemed to him a great deal of time in selecting small, useless presents; Dulcie Courteney had stood first on one foot and then on the other, looking in at all the shop windows, especially those which displayed cheap jewellery, and uttering exclamations; Patrick Romayne had remained transfixed for a quarter of an hour in front of a large Rolls-Royce, drawn up beside the pavement; and Chrissie Challoner had visited three libraries and bought eight Tauchnitz volumes, of which Morgan carried six, and Patrick four.
The sun blazed down upon them, and heat struck upward from the asphalt. A shimmering haze lay over everything.
“Let’s have tea and ices,” said Chrissie suddenly.
Mervyn looked at her approvingly.
He had not been sure, at first, that he was going to like her. He did not approve of professional women, although if they did insist upon a profession, writing was amongst the less unsuitable ones. But he thought her rather pretty and appealing, and she showed no signs of cleverness. He was now, in fact, glad of her company. He was sorry for Patrick, and thought him a nice lad, and he tolerated Dulcie by dint of never looking at her or speaking to her if he could help it, and was definitely proud of taking Olwen about with him — but a whole day spent in the society of children was boring.
Chrissie Challoner, to his great surprise, had proved a most agreeable companion. She had asked him about his Army days, and made intelligent comments on his replies, and she had found out — Morgan could not imagine how — that the question of tithes preoccupied his mind very often. It appeared that she had once read a book on the subject and been interested.
They found a vacant table outside a large pâtisserie, and sat down thankfully.
“I do wonder how Pops has got on at the Casino,” Dulcie remarked. “It does seem such a shame that we’re not allowed to go in, doesn’t it, Olwen?”
“I don’t mind,” said Olwen. “Though it would be fun to win some money. I wonder if any of them will.”
“Here comes the Man who broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” said Captain Morgan.
Denis Waller, hurrying past them, turned at the sound.
“Hallo!”
“Sit down and have a cup of tea,” said Morgan. “Well, have you lost your last penny?”
“I’m sorry to say that I’ve lost four hundred francs, which is a great deal more than I can afford. I suppose it was silly of me to play at all, really.”
Denis, looking highly perturbed, sat down next to Dulcie.
“Oh, Mr. Waller! Have you really? I’m so sorry.”
“Have you seen anything of the others?” Chrissie asked.
“Yes. Buckland has been winning the whole afternoon. It’s most extraordinary. And I think Mrs. Romayne has been winning too.”
“What’s Gushie doing?”
“She left the Rooms some time ago. I think she found it too hot or something. She said she was going to sit in the gardens for a little while, and then look for an English tea-shop.”
“And ask for a pot of Indian tea and a tea-cake, I suppose. Let’s come and choose some cakes, shall we?”
Olwen and Patrick and Dulcie went into the shop with her.
Denis stood up, and then sat down again.
“Courteney’s been winning, too,” he said resentfully. “I shouldn’t have thought a man in his position would play, I must admit.”
“I don’t suppose he put on very much,” Morgan said.
“Oh no, I don’t think he did. He told me he was about sixty francs to the good, or something like that. I only wish I hadn’t thrown away my own money.”
“Hard luck,” returned Morgan, not in the least interested. He thought Denis a young ass, when he thought about him at all, and was not surprised that he should have wasted four hundred francs at roulette, nor that, having done so, he should whine about his losses.
Except for the gloom of Denis, tea was a cheerful meal. They ate cakes and ices, and drank orangeade through straws.
Chrissie Challoner was talkative and animated, and Mervyn found her very amusing. She talked to him nearly all the time, though she made Patrick join in too. The boy was much more gay, and less silent, than Mervyn had ever seen him. Probably he’s less self-conscious without his mother, reflected Mervyn.
“What are we going to do now?” he enquired. “Go home?”
“Oh no,
daddy,” Olwen protested. “You know we aren’t going home till after dinner.”
Patrick looked at Dulcie.
“What else is there we could do? You know this place.”
“There are the swimming-baths,” Dulcie suggested.
“Oh, lovely! Let’s go.”
Mervyn Morgan asked for the bill. Chrissie protested, but he overruled her. No woman should ever be allowed to pay for herself in Mervyn’s opinion. He would have made no demur at all had Denis Waller offered to settle his own share of the bill, but Denis, looking abstracted and miserable, was standing at a distance, talking in a low voice to Dulcie.
He appeared to take it for granted that he was to remain with them, and Mervyn supposed, without much satisfaction, that they must take it for granted also.
(5)
“Chrissie, why didn’t you come in, at the Casino?”
“I didn’t want to, that’s all.”
“But you suggested it. If I’d known you weren’t coming in I shouldn’t have gone myself.”
“I expect you would, Denis, all the same. No one goes to Monte Carlo for the first time without going into the Rooms.”
“I joined in this expedition to-day entirely in order to see something of you. Don’t you think you’re letting me down rather badly?”
There was a silence, of which both Denis and Chrissie were more sharply aware than they were of the noisy cries and splashes that surrounded them in the big swimming-bath.
At last she turned her great dark eyes on him. They were full of concern, but there was no emotional force behind her words when she spoke.
“I’m sorry. I think perhaps I am being rather unfair. Don’t take any notice, Denis dear. We’ll talk — to-morrow or some time.”
“I see exactly what’s happened. You think you made a mistake in offering me your friendship, and you’re wondering how you can get out of it. You needn’t worry, Chrissie — I shan’t make it difficult for you. I’m not that kind of man.”
Denis, standing with folded arms in his favourite Napoleonic attitude, gazing at her morosely, waited for her denial.
It did not come.
CHAPTER XII
(1)
“I want some money. I haven’t a cent.”
“Allow me to be your banker, Mrs. Moon.”
Angie, who was angry with Courteney for not bringing Buckland with him, took no notice of him. She continued to look at her husband.
“It’s no use coming to me. I’m cleaned out.”
“You’ve been losing, I suppose.”
“Well, so have you.”
Angie stared reflectively at Hilary.
She guessed that, in all probability, he really had staked and lost all the ready money that he possessed in the world. And she knew well that there was nothing in the Bank at home.
It was the first time since their marriage that they had found themselves in exactly those straits, but not the first time that they had been obliged to change their quarters at short notice, leaving their bills unpaid.
Angie, however, did not want to leave the Hôtel d’Azur. She wanted to go on wearing her lovely and expensive new clothes, and to remain where Buckland was. She was violently attracted by him, and the attraction had become doubly strong during the course of the day, when she had been angered and bewildered by his neglect of her and ostentatious devotion to Mrs. Romayne, whilst at the same time she felt him to be acutely aware of her own presence.
It was not in Angie’s nature to seek for explanations, either in herself or from other people. She was actuated almost entirely by her instincts, and of these one of the strongest was that of acquisitiveness. She wanted Buckland, and it was her intention that he should become her lover.
Angie had taken her first lover at the age of sixteen. She was the only and unwanted child of a mother who herself had taken lovers promiscuously. The man to whom she was married had refused to hold himself responsible for Angie’s paternity. Angie had been disposed of at a cheap school where her bills were left for the most part unpaid, until the Headmistress threatened to refer the matter to her solicitors.
Angie, by that time, had learnt from a series of surreptitious, stolen, giggling meetings with semi-grown youths hanging round the back door of the villa that called itself “Marine View,” that she could enjoy herself in the society of boys.
She was sent to spend the holidays with her mother’s sister, who lived in respectable poverty at Ealing, struggling to bring up a family that increased annually on the salary of a shabby, harassed little bank-clerk. In childhood Angie had quarrelled with all the family and hated them violently. At sixteen she suddenly discovered that it was amusing to make the bigger boys, aged sixteen and seventeen, fall violently in love with her.
The elder one, Kenneth, was already mildly vicious, and Angie was ripe for mischief.
They were discovered, and Kenneth’s mother — determined to believe that her innocent boy had been seduced against his will — turned the girl out of the house. She neither knew nor cared what was to become of her.
Angie, who had too little imagination for self-pity, or even for alarm, decided not to return to her mother whom she disliked.
She went to London, walked into a cheap hair-dresser’s shop where a card was displayed in the window, “Young girl wanted,” and obtained a job without the slightest difficulty.
She was lazy, but clever with her fingers, and her developing prettiness and unusual degree of sexual magnetism saved her from ever being unemployed.
Just before her eighteenth birthday she became the mistress of a middle-aged Jew, who installed her in a small flat in St. John’s Wood and was genuinely fond of her. His wrath was proportionate when he found that she was being unfaithful to him, as of course she was. By that time, however, Angie had made a fairly wide circle of acquaintances, including several women whose social standing was above her own. One of them offered her her board and lodging in return for her help in a small, rather good clothes-shop. Angie accepted, as she accepted almost everything that came her way, in the vague hope that it would lead to something else.
It led to meeting more people, and to parties where everyone got drunk, and there was a good deal of indiscriminate petting.
Eventually, it led to Hilary Moon. Angie thought him superior to most of the men whom she knew because he spoke in a more cultivated manner, and posed as being artistic. When he suggested marriage she was really impressed.
She agreed, exactly as she would have agreed to live with him unmarried, had he asked her to do so. Her attitude to life could be called neither moral nor immoral. It was simply that of a generation born into utter insecurity, mental, moral, and financial.
She had remained with Hilary, after their brief mutual passion had flared and died, but she would have had no hesitation in leaving him, nor experienced any astonishment had he left her.
Buckland attracted her more strongly than Hilary had ever done, or indeed than any man whom she had met at all. She was certain that he was in love with her, and could not understand even the degree of self-control that enabled him to refrain from showing it openly in the presence of his employer.
She supposed dimly that Mrs. Romayne would be angry if Buckland paid more attention to a younger woman than to herself, but she was unable to understand why Buckland would not risk incurring her anger.
The loss of a job was, in Angie’s experience, an everyday affair. One either got another job, or lived, on credit and on borrowed money, without one.
It was what she and Hilary had been doing for more than two years. She never looked far enough ahead to wonder how long they would be able to go on doing so.
Even the realisation that they now owed a great deal of money at the Hôtel d’Azur, and that Hilary had just declared he had nothing left at all, did not really dismay her very deeply.
She looked at him contemptuously, and shrugged her shoulders.
“What are you going to do?”
“God knows.”
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Courteney discreetly moved away.
“Why didn’t you ask Courteney to lend you something? He offered to, just now.”
“I dare say I shall, later on,” said Angie coolly. “It wouldn’t be much, anyway. What are you going to do about the Hotel bill?”
“I don’t know, I tell you. The only chance is if I can sell the car, and make something on the deal. If only I hadn’t had such damned bad luck with that blasted boat — —”
“It was your own fault.”
“My sweet, you’re always so comforting, aren’t you? It doesn’t ever occur to you, I suppose, that you might help a little sometimes, instead of running up bills for clothes, and signing for drinks, all day long.”
In a moment they were in the midst of one of their violent quarrels. No one paid any attention to them. They sat on red plush, in a corner of one of the huge rooms, and viciously spat out insults and reproaches at one another.
Suddenly Angie saw Courteney coming back to them. He was wearing a rather odd expression, and waved a small bundle of notes in one hand.
“Do you know that Buckland’s been having the most amazing run of luck, in there? They’re all following him, now. I’ve just won a few hundred francs myself — oh, nothing at all, I never play seriously — but he’s been raking in I don’t know how much.”
Angie and Hilary both sprang to their feet.
“In there,” said Courteney. “I don’t ever remember seeing a visitor from the Azur win like that before. He simply can’t go wrong.”
The throng round the big roulette table was now a large one.
“There,” said Courteney. “You won’t be able to get near him — they’re all crowding round.”
They were.
A Frenchman on the outside of the group turned round as they approached, both hands outspread.
“Encore! Mais c’est formidable.”
“C’est une farce!”
“He’ll lose it all, if he goes on long enough,” Hilary muttered spitefully.
Angie suddenly began to push her way through the people. She could see Coral Romayne’s yellow hair, and guessed that Buckland was close beside her. In another moment, she was near enough to put her hand on his arm.
He took not the faintest notice. She saw the sweat shining on his upper lip, and rolling down his temples. His eyes were fixed on the table.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 402