ear.
‘I’m experimenting,’ she said, slapping my hand as I tried to steal a slice of avocado from her salad. ‘Go and get me a glass of wine.’
I chose a Chateauneuf-du-Pape and opened it with my favourite cork remover. It consisted of a sharp spike that one drove through the cork. Then a pump forced air down the spike and the increased pressure forced the cork out of the bottle. Easy.
I had been severely chastised by a wine-loving friend for using it.
‘You’re pressurising the wine!’ he had cried in horror. ‘I’ll buy you a Screwpull for Christmas.’
And so he had, and very fancy and expensive it was too, with multiple levers and cogs. I am sure it worked very well providing, of course, that one had two hands to operate it. I stuck to my tried and tested pump although I had to be careful to buy a bottle that had a ‘cork’ rather than a ‘plastic’. It was impossible to push the spike through a ‘plastic’.
I poured two generous glasses of my favourite Rhone red and handed one to Marina in the kitchen.
‘It’s not going well,’ she said. ‘Do you fancy beans on toast?’
‘I just want you,’ I said, kissing her on the neck.
‘Not now,’ she screamed. ‘Can’t you see that my souffle needs folding. Go away. Dinner will be ready in about half an hour, if you’re lucky. Otherwise we’re going to the pub.’
‘I’ll be in my office,’ I said, pinching another slice of avocado.
The flat had three bedrooms but I had turned one end of the smallest into an office the previous year. I sat at my desk and switched on my computer. Over the years I had become quite good at typing one-handed. I used my left thumb simply to depress the ‘shift’ key by rotating the arm at the elbow. I would never have made a typing-pool typist but I could still churn out client reports at a reasonable pace.
The computer slowly came to life and I checked my e-mails. Most were the usual trash trying to sell me stuff I didn’t want or need. It never ceased to amaze me why anyone could think that this type of direct marketing sells anything. I deleted all of them without reading them. In amongst the masses of junk and spam, however, were three messages actually meant for me personally. Two were from clients thanking me for reports delivered and the third was from Chris Beecher.
It read: ‘Lovely photo, shame he missed the gun.’
Not as far as I was concerned.
I declined to reply and deleted it instead.
I one-handedly typed www.make-a-wager.com into the machine and entered an alien world.
I had witnessed, as a child, the daily struggle of my widowed mother to earn enough to buy something to eat. Often she herself would go hungry to keep me fed. To gamble away such meagre resources would have been unthinkable. As I became successful and financially buoyant, even well-off, I had never felt the need to wager my hard-earned cash on the horses or on anything else. The rules of racing were meant to prohibit professional jockeys from having a bet but it wasn’t the rules that stopped me, it was the lack of desire.
However, in races, I had gambled every day, with my life as the stake. I had enjoyed a long winning streak and, when it ran out, I had paid a heavy price but at least I hadn’t broken my neck.
I entered the make-a-wager.com website like a child let loose in a toyshop. I was truly amazed at how many different ways there were to lose one’s money. Without moving from my seat I could back horses racing in South Africa or Hong Kong, in Australia or America; I could have a flutter on football matches in Argentina or Japan, and I could bet that a single snowflake, or more, would fall on the London Weather Centre on Christmas Day. I could wager that the Miami Dolphins would win the next Super Bowl or that the number of finishers in the Grand National would be greater than twenty or any other number I might choose. I could gamble that the London Stock Market index would go up, or down, and by how much. I could put my money on Tipperary to win the ‘All-Ireland’ hurling in the Gaelic Games, or on the Swedish team Vetlanda to win at bandy, whatever that might be.
The choice was almost overwhelming and that didn’t include the on-line bingo and poker that was readily available at just a further click of my mouse. I could bet to win or I could bet to lose. I could be both the punter and the bookmaker.
Was my computer the door to Aladdin’s Cave or to Pandora’s Box?
The website was an ‘exchange’. Rather than simply being a method of placing a bet with a bookmaker, as was the case with those sites run by the high-street betting shop companies, an exchange was a site that matched people who wanted to have a wager between themselves. Like a couple of mates in a pub discussing a football match where one might say, ‘I’ll bet you a fiver that United win.’ If the other thinks they won’t then they have a wager between them. The barman might hold the stake, a fiver from each, and give both fivers to the winner after the game.
The make-a-wager.com website was like a very big pub where you could usually find two people with opposite opinions to make a bet between them, provided the odds were right. And find them they did. The site showed the amount of money actually matched in wagers and it ran into millions. The company that ran the site, George Lochs’s company, acted like the barman and held the stakes until the event was over and the result known. George Lochs made his money by simply creaming off a 5 % commission from the winner of each wager. It made no difference to him if all the favourites won: in fact, it was to his advantage as there would be more winners so more commissions. He couldn’t lose, no matter what the result.
A nice little earner, I thought. No wonder such websites were, to use Archie’s words, ‘breaking out like a rash’.
Marina came in and cuddled my back. ‘It’s ready,’ she said. ‘I hope you like it. It doesn’t quite look like it does in my cook book.’
‘What is it?’ I replied.
‘Beef medallions with marsala and creme fraiche sauce, accompanied by a cheese souffle and avocado salad. I think the souffle was a mistake and it will be a complete disaster if you don’t come and eat it
We ate it on trays on our knees and it was delicious. Marina had prepared the medallions so that they were single-mouthful size and they were tender and juicy. I rarely ordered beef in a restaurant due to the inconvenience and embarrassment of having to ask someone to cut it up for me, so this was a real treat.
She kept apologising about the souffle which, in truth, was not quite cooked through and didn’t really go with the beef, but it didn’t matter. This was the first time she had cooked a ‘special’ meal here and it was, I hoped, a sort of ‘marking out of territory’. We finished the bottle of wine with a rich homemade chocolate mousse and coffee, and then went straight to bed.
Marina was poles apart from my ex-wife.
When I had first met Jenny, we had almost bounced around the room with happiness. Our courtship had been steamy and sensual with passion and laughter and fun. We had married quickly and without her father’s blessing. Charles had not attended the service. We hadn’t cared, we had each other and that was all we’d needed. We were so desperate to be together that I would travel halfway through the night to get back to her. I had once driven all the way home with a fractured ankle because I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone in hospital without her.
It was difficult to say exactly when things had begun to go wrong. She hadn’t liked what I did for a living and the demands it made on my body but it was more than that. A long time after we were divorced, she had finally said some of the things that she had bottled up for so long.
I could still recall the words she had used, ‘selfishness’ and ‘pigheadedness’ were merely two. She’d said, ‘Girls want men who’ll come to them for comfort. Men who’d say, I need you, help me, comfort me, kiss away my troubles. You can’t do that. You’re so hard. Hard on yourself. Ruthless to yourself. You’ll do anything to win. I want someone who’s not afraid of emotion, someone uninhibited, someone weaker. I want… an ordinary man.’
To me, I
Love for Jenny had come quickly, with huge energy and passion. It had then, inexorably, drained away to nothing, at least on her part. Worse still, where no love remained, bitterness and hatred had made a home. Joy and laughter were just a memory and an uncomfortable one at that. More recently, the loathing and disgust had lessened and those, in time, might also fade away to nothing. We might then again be able to meet as normal human beings without the urge to damage and to hurt.
