small stakes are laid. “This is where I belong,” Cary said, and nothing was less true. The old veterans sat around the tables with their charts and their pads and their pencils, making notes of every number. They looked, some of them, like opium smokers, dehydrated. There was a very tiny brown old lady with a straw hat of forty years ago covered in daisies: her left claw rested on the edge of the table like the handle of an umbrella and her right held a chip worth one hundred francs. After the ball had rolled four times she placed her piece and lost it. Then she began waiting again. A young man leant over her shoulder, staked 100 on the last twelve numbers, won and departed. “There goes a wise man,” I said, but when we came opposite the bar, he was there with a glass of beer and a sandwich. “Celebrating three hundred francs,” I said.
“Don’t be mean. Watch him, I believe that’s the first food he’s had today.”
I was on edge with wanting her, and I flared suddenly up; foolishly, for she would never have looked twice at him otherwise. So it is we prepare our own dooms. I said, “You wouldn’t call me mean if he weren’t young and good-looking.”
“Darling,” she said with astonishment, “I was only—” and then her mouth hardened. “You are mean now,” she said. “I’m damned if I’ll apologize.” She stood and stared at the young man until he raised his absurd romantic hungry face and looked back at her. “Yes,” she said, “he is young, he is good-looking,” and walked straight out of the Casino. I followed saying, “Damn, damn, damn,” under my breath. I knew now how we’d spend the night.
We went up in the lift in a dead silence and marched down the corridor and into the sitting-room.
“You can have the large room,” she said.
“No, you can.”
“The small one’s quite big enough for me. I don’t like huge rooms.”
“Then I’ll have to change the luggage. They’ve put yours in the large room.”
“Oh, all right,” she said and went into it and shut the door without saying good night. I began to get angry with her as well as myself—“a fine first night of marriage,” I said aloud, kicking my suitcase, and then I remembered we weren’t married yet, and everything seemed silly and wasteful.
I put on my dressing-gown and went out on to my balcony. The front of the Casino was floodlit: it looked a cross between a Balkan palace and a super-cinema with the absurd statuary sitting on the edge of the green roof looking down at the big portico and the commissionaires; everything stuck out in the white light as though projected in 3D. In the harbour the yachts were all lit up, and a rocket burst in the air over the hill of Monaco. It was so stupidly romantic I could have wept.
“Fireworks, darling,” a voice said, and there was Cary on her balcony with all the stretch of the sitting-room between us. “Fireworks,” she said, “isn’t that just our luck?” so I knew all was right again.
“Cary,” I said—we had to raise our voices to carry. “I’m so sorry…”
“Do you think there’ll be a Catherine-wheel?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Do you see the lights in the harbour?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think Mr Dreuther’s arrived?”
“I expect he’ll sail in at the last moment tomorrow.”
“Could we get married without him? I mean he’s a witness, isn’t he, and his engine might have broken down or he might have been wrecked at sea or there might be a storm or something.”
“I think we could manage without him.”
“You do think it’s arranged all right, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, Miss Bullen’s done it all. Four o’clock tomorrow.”
“I’m getting hoarse, are you, from shouting? Come on to the next balcony, darling.”
I went into the sitting-room and out on to the balcony there. She said, “I suppose we’ll all have to have lunch together—you and me and your Gom?”
“If he gets in for lunch.”
“It would be rather fun, wouldn’t it, if he were a bit late. I like this hotel.”
“We’d have just enough money for two days, I suppose.”
“We could always run up terrible bills,” she said, and then added, “not so much fun really as living in sin, I suppose. I wonder if that young man’s in debt.”
“I wish you’d forget him.”
“Oh, I’m not a bit interested in him, darling. I don’t like young men. I expect I’ve got a father fixation.”
“Damn it, Cary,” I said, “I’m not as old as that.”
“Oh yes you are,” she said, “puberty begins at fourteen.”
“Then in fifteen years from tonight you may be a grandmother.”
“Tonight?” she said nervously, and then fell silent. The fireworks exploded in the sky. I said. “There’s your Catherine-wheel.”
She turned and looked palely at it.
“What are you thinking, Cary?”
“It’s so strange,” she said. “We are going to be together now for years and years and years. Darling, do you think we’ll have enough to talk about?”
“We needn’t only talk.”
“Darling, I’m serious. Have we got anything in common? I’m terribly bad at mathematics. And I don’t understand poetry. You do.”
“You don’t need to—you are the poetry.”
“No, but really—I’m serious.”
“We haven’t dried up yet, and we’ve been doing nothing else but talk.”
“It would be so terrible,” she said, “if we became a couple. You know what I mean. You with your paper. Me with my knitting.”
“You don’t know how to knit.”
“Well, playing patience then. Or listening to the radio. Or watching television. We’ll never have a television, will we?”
“Never.”
The rockets were dying down: there was a long pause: I looked away from the lights in the harbour. She was squatted on the floor of the balcony, her head against the side, and she was fast asleep. When I leant over I could touch her hair. She woke at once.
“Oh, how silly. I was dozing.”
“It’s bed-time.”
“Oh. I’m not a bit tired really.”
“You said you were.”
“It’s the fresh air. It’s so nice in the fresh air.”
“Then come on my balcony.”
“Yes, I could, couldn’t I?” she said dubiously.
“We don’t need both balconies.”
“No.”
“Come round.”
“I’ll climb over.”
“No. Don’t You might…”
“Don’t argue,” she said, “I’m here.”
They must have thought us crazy when they came to do the rooms—three beds for two people and not one of them had been slept in.
7
After breakfast we took a taxi to the Mairie—I wanted to be quite certain Miss Bullen had not slipped up, but everything was fixed; the marriage was to be at four sharp. They asked us not to be late as
