“Men are so much more modest than women. If I had deeds of derring-do to my credit I would never tire of telling them. Cheltenham must seem very quiet to you.” I heard a spoon drop at a neighbouring table.
I said weakly, “Oh well, I don’t mind quiet. What will you eat?”
“I have such a teeny-weeny appetite, colonel. A langouste thermidor…”
“And a bottle of the Widow?” I could have bitten my tongue—the hideous words were out before I could stop them. I wanted to turn to Cary and say, “This isn’t me. I didn’t write this. It’s my part. Blame the author.”
A voice I didn’t know said, “But I adore you. I adore everything you do, the way you talk, the way you are silent. I wish I could speak English much much better so that I could tell you…” I turned slowly sideways and looked at Cary. I had never, since I kissed her first, seen so complete a blush. Bird’s Nest said, “So young and so romantic, aren’t they? I always think the English are too reticent. That’s what makes our encounter so strange. Half an hour ago we didn’t even know each other, and now here we are with—what did you call it?—a bottle of the Widow. How I love these masculine phrases. Are you married, colonel?”
“Well, in a way…”
“How do you mean?”
“We’re sort of separated.”
“How sad. I’m separated too—by death. Perhaps that’s less sad.”
A voice I had begun to detest said, “Your husband does not deserve you to be faithful. To leave you all night while he gambles…”
“He’s not gambling tonight,” Cary said. She added in a strangled voice, “He’s in Cannes having dinner with a young, beautiful, intelligent widow.”
“Don’t cry, cherie.”
“I’m not crying, Philippe. I’m, I’m, I’m laughing. If he could see me now…”
“He would be wild with jealousy, I hope. Are you jealous?”
“So touching,” Bird’s Nest said. “One can’t help listening. One seems to glimpse an entire life…”
The whole affair seemed to me abominably onesided. “Women are so gullible,” I said, raising my voice a little. “My wife started going around with a young man because he looked hungry. Perhaps he was hungry. He would take her to expensive restaurants like this and make her pay. Do you know what they charge for a langouste thermidor here? It’s so expensive, they don’t even put the price on the bill. A simple inexpensive cafe for students.”
“I don’t understand, colonel. Has something upset you?”
“And the wine. Don’t you think I had to draw the line at his drinking wine at my expense?”
“You must have been treated shamefully.”
Somebody put down a glass so hard that it broke. The detestable voice said, “Cherie, that is good fortune for us. Look—I put some wine behind your ears, on the top of your head…Do you think your husband will sleep with the beautiful lady in Cannes?”
“Sleep is about all he’s capable of doing.”
I got to my feet and shouted at her—I could stand no more. “How dare you say such things?”
“Philippe,” Cary said, “let’s go.” She put some notes on the table and led him out. He was too surprised to object.
Bird’s Nest said, “They were really going too far, weren’t they? Talking like that in public. I love your old– fashioned chivalry, colonel. The young must learn.”
She took nearly an hour before she got through her langouste thermidor and her strawberry ice. She began to tell me the whole story of her life, beginning over the langouste with a childhood in an old rectory in Kent and ending over the ice-cream with her small widow’s portion at Cheltenham. She was staying in a little pension in Monte Carlo because it was ‘select’, and I suppose her methods at the Casino very nearly paid for her keep.
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 francais 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.
4
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
