Second Violin

by John Lawton

  He watched roulette for a while. Indeed, gambling for the first time struck him as a spectator sport – as many people watching as playing. And he concluded his father was right. No skill was required and none possible. All the same, the looks of concentration and calculation on the faces of the players showed that they believed in some sort of system. A large woman, wearing a small fortune in diamonds – Troy’s immediate mnemonic for her was Mrs van Hopper from Rebecca – repeatedly bet the same number and repeatedly lost. And no doubt she thought of it as her lucky number.

  Troy moved on to chemin-de-fer. The game his dad had recommended. The old man had said ‘it’s like that English game you appear to have learnt furtively in your schooldays in some act of adolescent rebellion behind the bike sheds’. ‘What,’ Troy had replied, ‘Conkers?’ ‘No,’ said his father, ‘Pontoon . . . vingt-et-un, pay twenty-one . . . whatever.’ Only when Troy sat down at a chemin-de-fer table in one of the casino’s inner rooms did he realise it wasn’t exactly like pontoon, and that, really, he hadn’t a clue what he was doing. And that now people were watching him.

  The shoe was in the hands of an Englishman of about Troy’s own age. Unlike Troy he seemed completely at his ease, drawing on a distinctive custom-made cigarette with three gold rings, gunmetal case and lighter set out like props on the table, staring back at his opponents with unflinching self-confidence, a lock of unruly hair curling over one eye like a comma – he looked to Troy like a raffish version of Hoagy Carmichael, an effect at once dispelled by the cruel twist of his lips as he mocked Troy openly for putting down a jack and an ace in the fond illusion that he had won.

  ‘Learn the rules, old man,’ he said. ‘We’re not playing for ha’pennies in a London pub. Face cards don’t count.’

  With that he passed the shoe, scooped up his winnings, tossed a hefty chip to the croupier and left. Troy was tempted to follow, give up and go to bed early with a good book. He’d still got most of the money his dad had given him – that alone would buy dinner for two. Just as he put a hand on the table to lever himself up, there was a swish of silk and the chair the Englishman had vacated was taken by a woman. It was the same woman he had seen on the train, the simple black suit replaced by an equally simple, but rather daring black dress, and the hair that had been so neatly tucked up into a pillbox hat now bouncing off her shoulders in thick black ringlets. She was a study in monochrome. A fantasy in black and white. And she was talking to him. Softly, leaning in to keep her words private.

  ‘What a snob! Don’t judge the English by him. We’re not all Lord Muck, you know.’

  ‘I am English,’ Troy replied, and before he could explain further, the table was betting again. He wasn’t even sure she had heard him.

  ‘Five is the sticky point,’ she whispered. ‘Simple maths really. Everything comes down to numbers in the end. You’re aiming for nine. Five and four make nine. Double figures, say sixteen, only count the last digit so really you’ve only got six, which is not much better than five. And what Snobby forgot to tell you is tens don’t count either.’

  Troy watched a painfully thin, deeply lined old man – so many old Englishmen seemed to end up looking like Ernest Thesiger in The Bride of Frankenstein – lose twice, and then heard the woman say ‘Banco. My friend will play.’

  The young Arab – more Charles Boyer than Valentino – holding the shoe dealt two cards. The croupier scooped them up on his giant fish slice and set them in front of Troy. Then the banker dealt himself two, face up – an ace and a seven. More than enough to stick at. Troy looked at his own hand – the ten of clubs, the five of hearts. Five was what he had, all he had, if the woman’s method of calculation was correct.

  ‘I always ask for another card at five,’ she whispered, ‘because the bank will usually do the same. You’re simply evening up the odds.’

  ‘The bank already has eight,’ Troy said.

  ‘Just play,’ she said.

  The banker was looking at Troy. A hint of impatience. Troy hesitated. The banker had won twice in a row. The pot had tripled to two million francs. He had enough to cover the bet and no more. And he needed the maximum to win. Lose this and dinner would be brown bread and dripping.

  ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘You bet the two million when you said banco.’

  ‘I didn’t say banco. You did.’

  ‘You have, trust me, absolutely nothing to lose.’

  ‘Suivi,’ Troy said.

  The banker slipped a card out of the shoe and turned it face up.

  Four of diamonds. Troy hoped he wasn’t smirking. More than that he hoped the woman, whoever she was, had got the rules right. One more put-down and he’d feel obliged to leave the table.

  ‘Huit à la banque. Neuf seulement,’ the croupier said.

  Troy turned over his first two cards.

  ‘Well done, M’sieur,’ said the banker. ‘I can only wish the same muse would whisper in my ear.’

  Troy had now amassed in the region of four million. Almost, as he felt, inadvertently.

  The woman spoke softly to him, less a whisper now than a confidence.

  ‘Often as not the banker would pass the shoe now, but he can still play another round – if he has the funds that is.’

  The banker spoke directly to her.

  ‘Will Madame be playing? The seats are really meant for players not guardian angels.’

  She smiled at him, a smile that would have disarmed the Mongol Horde, and tipped her purse out on the table.

  ‘Quite,’ she said ‘I think our apprentice is au fait with the game now. Please, deal me in.’

  Then she spoke to Troy again, ‘Made quite a killing on the roulette wheel. Only came in with the price of a packet of crisps.’

  ‘So much, he thought, for the mug’s game.

  The Arab lost with good grace. After the woman took another six million from him, he kissed her hand, thanked her for the pleasure of the game, passed the shoe to the monocled Frenchman on his left – a Gallic Oliver Hardy as Troy saw him – and quit the table.

  ‘I think we should follow, don’t you,’ she said to Troy ‘I don’t believe in luck, and I don’t believe in pushing it either.’

  Coming up the steps to the caisse they encountered the Englishman who had been so rude to them – casually tapping another cigarette against the gunmetal case, with all the sang froid that Troy never seemed to be able to muster.

  ‘If I’d known we had lady luck at the table, I’d’ve stayed for the second house,’ he said, slightly sibilant on his s’s – ‘shecond houshe’ – all but leering at the woman, utterly ignoring Troy.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said, kicked him on the shin, and left him hopping on one leg.

  ‘Bastard, I know his sort. Sort of man who thinks you’re just waiting to be tumbled into bed.’

  Out on the front steps, beyond the papier-maché façade once more. A large wad of notes in his pocket, a larger one in her handbag.

  She said, ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the Paris, just across the square.’

  ‘Me too. But of course . . . I’m sharing a room.’

  ‘I’m not. I have a suite to myself.’

  ‘That settles it then, doesn’t it?’

  Crossing the square, she said, ‘Did you notice the waxworks?’

  ‘Waxworks?’

  ‘All those people who looked like characters from the old silent films. As though the place preserved them and rolled them out on special occasions.’

  ‘Yes. I noticed. What do you think the special occasion is?’

  She slipped an arm through his. It was a small but startling gesture. It should not have been. She had taken possession nearly an hour ago. He looked. She was his height. The same black hair, the same dark eyes. A looking glass.

  ‘Oh . . .’ she replied, ‘I think we’re both about to find out. Now, did you spot Fatty Arbuckle?’

  ‘I thought he was Oliver Hardy?’

  ‘Oh no . . . far too jowly, and besides yo
u never see Ollie without Stan.’

  § 72

  One of the many things a boy is not taught in an English public school is what to do with a full condom. Or even how to do it. What is the post-coital protocol? Men buy condoms in an all-male-world – the barber shop. Once used they seemed to Troy to default to that all-male world. There seemed no place for a woman in an awkward moment or more made up of smelly latex and cooling semen. Does one discreetly head for the bathroom – always supposing there is one? Does one perch on the side of the bed, peel the damn thing off a detumescent member, knot it with one of the many knots learnt in the boy scouts and fling it carelessly to the floor with the air of a man-of-the-world who has sexual relations daily and doesn’t care that the woman might be watching?

  The woman was watching. One hand buried in the mass of black ringlets, her upper body weight on one elbow. Troy could see her out of the corner of his eye. The teat of the condom hung on his cock, opaque and glutinous like a strand of toadspawn.

  ‘Am I your first?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘You can tell me, you know.’

  ‘Did it feel that way?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  Then the other hand snaked out, plucked the condom off him and let it drop. The hand regripped his cock.

  ‘Everybody has to start somewhere.’

  ‘You’re not the first. Really you’re not.’

  The hand began to work life back into him.

  ‘But there haven’t been many?’

  ‘No there haven’t.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s get some practice in shall we?’

  After the third bout, he was exhausted. There was nothing left to come, and he hoped she had wrought some pleasure out of him. He hoped even more she did not want a fourth.

  Now she seemed coolly chatty. Not all passion spent perhaps, but all urgency gone from her voice. She lay on her side, stroking his thigh with one hand – it seemed perilously like affection – musing far from idly.

  ‘Who was the old man you were sitting with on the train?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘Oh . . . I see . . . well, I don’t really . . . what language was that the two of you were speaking?’

  ‘Russian. My father’s an emigré from an old revolution.’

  ‘Ah, I get it . . . he’s sort of an Alex Troy figure.’

  ‘No, not sort of.’

  ‘How not sort of?’

  ‘He is Alex Troy.’

  She propped herself up on both elbows. Belief and disbelief competing for the expression in her eyes. A quick shake of her head as though clearing cobwebs from the mind, her hair brushing his chest, only to be swept back again with the upward jerk of her chin.

  ‘You know I think I’ve been rather stupid.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Did you not recognise the man I’m travelling with?’

  ‘No more than you recognised my father. I just assumed . . .’

  ‘Assumed what, Mr Troy? Assumed what?’

  ‘That . . .’

  ‘That I was a gold-digger and he was my sugar daddy?’

  ‘Yes, that’s pretty well word for word what I thought.’

  ‘Well, half-right, he is my sugar daddy. Of course, he is. It’s just that I’m not digging for gold. And he’s also my boss by-the-bye.’

  ‘Boss of what?’

  ‘He runs the low-temperature physics lab at Cambridge. I am, as you can readily deduce I’m sure, a low-temperature research physicist.’

  ‘Chilled to the marrow already.’

  ‘Quite. But there’s more. He’s also a whatnot to a politician.’

  ‘Whatnot?’

  ‘Advisor, consultant, expert. That sort of thing.’

  ‘And his name?’

  ‘Gustav Lindfors.’

  Now Troy felt stupid. He should have recognised Lindfors as surely as she should have known his father.

  ‘Ah, Churchill’s expert on the price of chewing gum and the level of German jackboot production.’

  ‘Quite. As you say, a bit of a Poo Ba . . . a Lord-High-Everything-Else. And we’ve both been stupid. Your father is here to meet Lindfors. And they got us both out of the way by giving us a tanner each and sending us to the flicks, didn’t they?’

  ‘Some flick. But as you say there’s more. They’re not here to meet one another, they could have done that in London. On the train they ignored each other. It was as though they’d never met. No, they’re here to meet a third party. And you and I are the cover.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Wonder who? Not – !!?!?’

  ‘Of course not . . . he’s rather busy invading Poland.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Do you really need to know?’

  ‘Need be damned. I want to know. I thought I was going to Monte for a dirty weekend . . .’

  ‘I think you’ll find you’re having that right now.’

  ‘. . . Not to be his . . . his . . . fig-leaf.’

  ‘Well, my dad’s not leaving any clues.’

  She flopped down on top of him. Hunger struck.

  ‘I could eat a horse.’

  ‘Don’t ask. They’d probably serve you one,’ Troy replied. ‘But I have a better idea. An old favourite of my father’s. Champagne with scrambled eggs and crisp bacon. Perfect after-midnight munching.’

  ‘Sounds rather sybaritic to me.’

  ‘Even more so when prepared by someone else and consumed in bed. Let me call room service.’

  ‘OK. I believe you now. You have done this before.’

  A quarter of an hour later there was a tap at the door. Troy answered it in his dressing gown – his, as yet, nameless lover discreet behind the bathroom door – and the waiter wheeled in a trolley. Veuve Clicquot in an ice bucket, bacon and eggs under silver hoods. Standing in the doorway to sign for the meal, Troy saw the next door down on the opposite side open. A small man in a grey suit emerged from his father’s suite. The waiter and the stranger passed each other in the corridor, just as the woman, wrapped in a bath towel peeked over his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t dawdle – the smell’s driving me wild.’

  ‘Look,’ said Troy, and she leaned out.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Not from the back I don’t.’

  ‘He just came out of my father’s room.’

  Then the door to his father’s suite opened again, and Lindfors stood in the doorway, speaking softly to a face still hidden in the room, and she ducked back with a muttered, ‘Oh hell . . . close the door.’

  She dropped the towel and ran naked for the bed. Troy closed the door. She lay back like an Ingres odalisque, feet crossed at the ankle, one arm raised high across the pillow to set both breasts quivering.

  ‘Indulge me, Mr Troy. Indulge me.’

  Troy lifted the lids on the dorm feast.

  ‘You like close shaves, don’t you? You like danger.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Who doesn’t? Don’t tell me you don’t.’

  ‘I’m . . . not indifferent . . . that’s not the word . . . but I take it as an occupational hazard.’

  ‘My God . . . I’d never have guessed. You’re in the army!’

  Troy shoved a piece of crisp, smoked bacon into her mouth.

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Alright, then the RAF or the Navy . . .?’

  Troy twisted the bottle of Veuve Clicquot and eased the cork out with a gentle hiss.

  ‘Still no comment.’

  § 73

  Troy and his father breakfasted together. He scarcely heard a word his father said for the roaring of last night’s woman through his veins. She started off somewhere in his groin, sped to the head and all but deafened him to the outside world.

  She passed him, almost as closely as she had done on the train, arm in arm with Lindfors. She did not acknowledge him, Lindfors and Alex ignored each other just as steadily. It was, Troy thought, just a bit farcical. But whilst he spoke not, he thought too soon.

&nbs
p; As they left the dining room the other man, the ‘Third Man’ as Troy had come to think of him, was descending the staircase from the mezzanine. He was dressed outlandishly, like a parody of an English country gentleman, tweedy plus fours and a matching, far-from-fetching baggy jacket. The factotum behind him lugged a set of golf clubs. Alex and he passed without a word.

  Now, Troy thought, they were even dressing for a farce.

  § 74

  All farces involve a bedroom as a necessary setting. A farce is incomplete without one. If at all possible the protagonist should lose his trousers.

  More scrambled eggs, more crispy bacon, more chilled Veuve Clicquot. No trousers. A second night together.

  ‘You do realise I don’t know your name?’

  ‘You do realise you haven’t asked? And besides, all I know is Troy, Mr Troy.’

  Troy bit on the bullet. Toted the burden his parents had lumbered him with in a fit of madness one day in 1915. Felt her fingertips trail lazily down his chest.

  ‘Frederick.’

  Her hand stopped in its tracks.

  ‘Frederick. You mean you’re a Fred? I don’t do it with Freds!’

  ‘Quite. As an old school chum of mine put it, “You can ruin anything with the word Fred”.’

  ‘What’s it to be then, Fred or Frederick?’

  ‘At home I’m Freddie. Anywhere else I find Troy suffices. One syllable is quite enough. And you?’

  She was toying with a strand of her hair, head down close to his chest, enunciating slowly, stringing out the word.