Crimson (19 page)

Adam could confide anything to Mike and Mike wouldn’t raise an eyebrow or tell anyone: Mike had worshipped Adam through their lonely childhood, in which neither brother had ever felt close to their rather cold parents who seemed to love neither their children nor each other. The boys had spent their early years with a rota of swiftly changing nannies, who never seemed able to reach Mrs. Grant’s imperiously high standards. Adam and Mike had shared an expensively efficient, forlorn, and loveless life in the nursery, devoid of any tenderness except that which they had shown to each other. Now each knew that he could depend on the other, and neither really trusted anyone else.

As Adam drove the Humber a little too fast towards the casino, Mike sighed. It was such a beautiful night.-Perfect for a bike ride. Wistfully he remembered his first night rides on the Norton Dominator with the feather-bed his first brand-new bike. Motorbikes were Mike’s on. When he was fourteen, he had acquired his first a second-hand army surplus BSA M2o; it was a messenger bike with a bouncy saddle and no suspension. Mike had concealed it in an unused potting shed, where it was later joined by an equally ancient Triumph Speed Twill 500, which had a lot of poke for its size. None of his subsequent smarter bikes had given him as much pleasure as those two.

At the Palm Beach Casino considered more chic than the Casino Municipal the brothers produced their passports and purchased chips with which to gamble: to avoid theft, cash bets weren’t allowed at the table.

Waiters glided around the gaming room; cigarette girls proffered their trays. A couple of security men in dark uniforms stood, immobile, although their eyes never stopped moving.

“They’re shills,” Adam murmured as he stared at the “Iving stools glamorously dressed women who sat on revo before the long bar, their sophisticated faces reflected in the mirrored rear wall.

“Their job is to get the punters to play the tables.”

At the bar, Adam and Mike ordered whisky sodas, sniffing the agreeable odour of good food and expensive perfume; they swivelled their stools around to watch the gambling.

An effervescent excitement hovered above the sixteen tables. People stood around them, the men in dinner jackets and the women wearing long strapless dresses cut to display dicolletage. A few elderly ladies sat firmly clutching their purses, their wrinkled bosoms bulging over strapless net bodices. The gamblers seemed to be mostly French, German, or Greek, although Mike heard a couple of Englishmen playing at a nearby table while their noisily disapproving wives worried about British currency restrictions.

-Wall, how do we start?” Michael asked.

“You’d better tell me what the form is. I was never asked to any of the smart games at Eton.” The Grant brothers were not nearly so rich or aristocratic as most of their schoolfellows.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Adam was obliged to admit.

“I’ll show you if you like,” offered a pale, angular Englishman who sat next to Adam.

“The name’s Giles Milroy Browne You should start on roulette most beginners do, because you need no knowledge to start playing.”

The three men drifted to the nearest roulette table and stood behind the players. Here the atmosphere was tense, the anxiety level high, and the action very fast. The three croupiers handsome, clean-cut young men in immaculate dinner jackets moved with great speed as they called out the winning numbers or paid winnings.

“The easiest way to bet is simply to gamble that the ball will fall in a red or a black slot,” Mr. Milroy-Browne explained to Adam.

“There are thirty-six slots and the odds are even, which means that if you put two thousand francs on, you win two thousand. If you “play the dozens”, you gamble on which of three sequences of twelve numbers the ball will fall in and that pays two to one. But the most exciting and dangerous way to play is to bet the numbers. Actually pick one number because the casino pays out thirty-five to one. So, if you put a thousand francs down, you get thirty-five thousand back.” Carefully Adam bet, on red, a chip that cost the equivalent of one pound. He felt a rush of anxiety as the ball clattered around the wheel, slower … and slower It settled in a red slot, number 3. Adam had won! He lost his winnings on the next throw, but told himself that it didn’t matter because, overall, he’d lost nothing. Still, he trembled as he laid the equivalent of ten pounds a week’s pay on red. But suddenly Adam no longer felt self ous and anxious; he felt sophisticated and excited. although determined to play modestly with small kes, he nevertheless felt a weird new impulse: a need to challenge fate.

Again red won! Adam felt his fingers and toes tingle. Then, as if it didn’t belong to him, he watched his right hand carefully place twenty pounds on red. It would hurt if he lost, but the pain would feel exquisite … Again the ball fell into a red slot! Clearly, he had been right to bet on red. It was as though he were guided in his choice by some invisible, benevolent force. He felt as if he were breathing rare air, and a tremendous sense of well-being flooded his body.

Adam did not always win, but he lost very little. Playing roulette seemed a begailingly easy way of getting rich in a couple of hours, without doing any work. It was as if money grew on trees and Adam merely had to stretch out his hand to pluck banknotes. Each time he won, he felt release, and relief, as with a sexual encounter. Winning made him feel more manly, more virile. It also made him feel different from the other people gathered around the table: Adam had thi golden Jouch; he was favoured by the gods.

Two hours later, when Adam had won a total of one hundred pounds the equivalent of ten weeks” salary Michael whispered in his ear, “Stop now, Adam, while you’re ahead, you silly ass. You know it’s a mug’s game. You know that the only people who win are the organizers, the casinos, the bookies.”

“Shut up and let me concentrate.” Adam shook off the restraining arm, but he knew that Michael was right. Adam looked at his pile of winnings; he should take them now and leave. Leave! Leave! But he couldn’t. Just one more bet then he would go.

tut Adam could no more stop himself than an alcoholic could stop himself from picking up an open bottle of whisky.

His earlier tentativeness had vanished and he now looked around the table with increasing confidence; no longer was he merely a junior articled clerk. As he had always subconsciously suspected, Adam was one of God’s chosen. He began to experience a feeling of power: if he concentrated, then that little white ball would obediently fall where he wished it to.

The exhilaration of winning made Adam feel a little high and a lot larger than life. His heart pounded, adrenalin coursing through his blood. He was almost ill with excitement, this dark joy that spread throughout his body, making him feel aglow, as if his veins were red neon tubes.

Michael, who had not bet at all, returned to Adam’s side at two o’clock in the morning and suggested once again thattheyleave.

“No, not yet.” Adam looked at his pile of winnings, which totalled a hundred and eighty pounds.

“Okay,” he relented.

“Just let me have one more’ bet Half expecting to lose, he put his original ten-pound stake on a number 36.

The ball rolled into slot 36. Adam had just won thirty-five times his stake! The croupier paid him three hundred and fifty pounds almost a year’s pay! Inside his head, Adam shrieked with joy, for he knew that his winnings were not due to blind chance. He felt as if he were smelling the hair of the most beautiful woman on earth and inhaling the perfume of her skin: Lady Luck was at his side.

After that first casino visit, Mike refused to accompany his brother. Their father, who believed that Adam had found a girlfriend, winked as, each night, he handed over the car keys.

Sometimes Adam won and sometimes he lost. After ten days, he had won a total of more than two years” salary, and in a manner far more exciting than doing the donkey work for some lawyer.

On the tenth evening, Adam started to lose steadily. At first he didn’t worry because he knew he’d win it all back on the next throw.

But by two o’clock in the morning, when Adam usually left the casino, he had lost over six hundred pounds and could hardly believe it. He felt the desolate despair of a man who discovers his loved one in bed with somebody else. He felt guilty and ashamed. How could he stupidly have lost so much money so fast? It had taken him two weeks to win six hundred pounds and then he had lost it in less than an hour. Why hadn’t he stuck to his system? Adam had abandoned the system he had decided upon, because at times, in order to follow it, he had to stop gambling and he was now unable to do this: he felt so strongly that his luck would return on the next throw … in a few minutes … within an hour … Adam slowly left the casino and, in a daze, drove home. His clothes felt crumpled and grubby, and as he slumped in the driving seat, he felt depressed, as if he were about to catch influenza.

“Adam seems down in the dumps,” Mrs. Grant said to her husband the next day at sundown, as she tucked the Ambre Solaire bottle into her beach bag.

“He turned down that invitation to visit the Boccasso yacht, and he’s spoken to nobody all day. He ignored that nice girl he water-skied with yesterday.

Adam’s father could not keep back a grin.

“I think he’s got a woman tucked away,” he said in a man-of-the-world voice.

“He’s clearly had a row with her.”

“But why hasn’t he brought her to the beach?” A new thought-struck Mrs. Grant.

“Joe, do you think she’s a … shop girl type?” “She’s more likely to be one of the married women on the beach with young children. Nothing to do after the little ‘uns have been put to bed … husband slaving away somewhere … No, Ethel, you’re to say nothing to Adam. He’s twenty-three, he’s spent two years in the navy, and he won’t thank a mother who tries to interfere in his love life.” On the following day, Adam found it hard to get out of bed. He only did so eventually because he knew that if he didn’t his mother would call a doctor, and then maybe he wouldn’t be able to get to the casino that evening.

All day, Adam baked his body on the beach as feelings of apathy and lethargy swaddled him like a wet, dark fog. He couldn’t eat or drink. He could only wonder if his luck would turn tonight at the casino.

One of the great failings of gamblers is to follow their losses. Adam did this, returning each evening to lose. He kept hoping that the next throw would cancel out those losses. It never did.

He borrowed thirty pounds from Giles Milroy-Browne who by now knew quite a lot about Adam’s background, but he didn’t win it back.

Two days before he was due to return to London Adam sold his gold wristwatch a twenty-first birthday present, but when he attempted to repay his borrowing Milroy Browne refused to accept the money, saying that the debt could wait.

By midnight, Adam had lost the proceeds from the sale of his watch.

Giles lent him a further fifty pounds, which Adam also lost.

Adam left the south of France deeply grateful and three hundred pounds in debt to the obliging Mr. Milroy Browne, who said there was no hurry, Adam could repay it when convenient. Adam agreed to pay one per cent interest per month on this debt.

Adam was not unduly worried. When he returned to London, where gambling was illegal, he’d go to a private gambling party and make it back.

He was simply, temporarily, on a losing streak.

SATURDAY, 15 DECEMBER 1956

“Do you think it will stop snowing before lunch? It’s so boring indoors with nothing to do.” Kneeling on a window seat, sixteen-year-old Annabel twisted her blonde ponytail with one finger as she pressed her nose to the diamond leaded panes of the drawing-room window. Seen through flickering snowflakes, the garden that encircled Starlings was a lumpy white blanket; beyond it, the bony branches of the orchard were weighed down by snow.

Annabel turned to look at her two sisters: Miranda was waltzing around the piano, tartan skirt aswirl. Clare, in a black batwing sweater and black stretch pants, lay on the carpet in front of the fire, reading a book.

Two years before, Clare had left her smart boarding school for an equally smart finishing school in Lausanne. No dreary secretarial school threatened the three sisters; neither Elinor nor Buzz considered it necessary: of course, the girls were destined for marriage.

At the finishing school, Clare had not learned to speak French, cook, sew, or write business letters; she had learned to jitterbug, to apply make-up, and not much else, except to glide downstairs gracefully.

By the time Clare returned from her year in Switzerland, Elinor had planned her eldest granddaughter’s social debut with the painstaking thoroughness that she reserved for her book launches. So Clare was photographed regularly at chic events for the newspaper gossip columns or for Tatler, high society’s picture magazine. Lady Rushleigh presented her to the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Clare 16o wore a slim, white satin dress that looked like an” up-ended arum fily; she hated it because it was so different from the white net crinolines of the other d8butantes, which was why Elinor had chosen it.

Clare then devoted herself to the exhausting life of pleasure that constituted a London season, during which a girl was introduced, at great expense, to society. Clare, like all the other girls, was conscious of the unspoken hope that she might ‘meet someone nice” by which all the mothers of the debutantes meant someone well-born and rich.

She went to debutante lunches, at which girls became acquainted, and then she was made to rest at home during the afternoon, in order to save her strength for the cocktail parties, dinners, dances, or balls of the evening. She cheered loudly at the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, clapped sedately during cricket at Lord’s, clamped binoculars to her eyes at Ascot, ate strawberries and cream between tennis matches at Wimbledon, held her breath with excitement at the clash of polo sticks at Cowdray Park and Cirencester, appreciatively sniffed the Chelsea Flower Show, and admired the mediocre pictures at the Royal Academy summer opening: at the previous year’s exhibition, Pietro Annigoni’s romantic portrait of the Queen looking remarkably like Ingrid Bergman had drawn unprecedented crowds, but this year there was no showstopper.. Finally, having sent thick, properly engraved invitation cards from Smythsons, Clare appeared at her own comin gout ball, which was held at the Orangery in Holland Park. A new young designer, David Hicks, had turned the place into a white net, candlelit fairyland.