February 1971
‘The bank wagers £1,000,’ Conrad said.
It was not a bet he particularly believed in. It was almost 3 o’clock, he had been playing for two hours, and he had not particularly believed in a single bet he had placed during that time. The table was trouble. He had seen that the moment he walked into the Blue Room. It was a ferocious table: angry and chaotic. He was used to seeing the energy now; it had become a physical phenomenon he could observe; he could watch it, predict it, track its progress. But it was different tonight. Tonight he saw the energy darting and bouncing this way and that around the table without any pattern, seemingly thrown into orbit around one player at random, then around another at random, by the sheer force of their wills. It was a table impossible to read or to predict: a very dangerous table.
It was a table Conrad would never have joined if Greta hadn’t been with him, daring him, wordlessly cajoling, even threatening him, making it impossible for him to back away. James Goldsmith, Lucky Lucan, Lord Derby, Dominick Elwes, and the inevitable Ian Maxwell-Scott were among those at the table, and they were in a predatory mood. Lord Derby’s last bid before losing control of the bank at a high cost had been £2,500. The bank had passed to Conrad. John Aspinall, advised of the mood in the Blue Room by some nameless member of his staff, had come to observe, sitting quietly but conspicuously across the room, facing the table. Susie Maxwell-Scott was sitting by herself in a corner, a nervous wreck.
His visits to the Clermont Club with Greta had become routine, at least once a week, sometimes twice or even three times, and they were taking a toll. Some of the toll was due simply to a lack of rest. He was waking up feeling exhausted, sometimes at Greta’s flat – she allowed him to stay sometimes now, when it suited her – in which case he had to make his way home to change before going into chambers, or to court. His concentration was suffering. The fraud case had been tried over three weeks in October, and by the end the numbers had rearranged themselves in his mind into meaningless sequences, and he could no longer reconstruct all the complex financial history involved in the case. He was not sure his closing speech to the judge had even been coherent. The result was not a total catastrophe – fortunately the merits were largely on his client’s side, and Mr Justice Overton had seen that long before the case came down to closing speeches – but it could have been much better. He was still worrying about it.
He worried about other things, too. Not, so much, about Greta: she still excited him, and she still seemed to enjoy him. Under her tutelage he had become a better lover, more precise and competent, and that increased his confidence. He no longer felt any need to feign resistance to the spankings, which he now accepted as part of his desire for her. On the surface, that was all going well. Still, he did worry about how important a part of his life she had become, and what would happen if one day she tired of him. He knew Greta well enough by now to know that the day she tired of him was the day she would throw him out of her life, like last season’s cocktail dress, without remorse or ceremony. He was addicted to her now, and he worried about the coming of that day.
He worried about Deborah, too. Now that the fraud case was over, logically enough, she was expecting him to come home to Guildford at night. Every night away now required a plausible story. There were always chambers meetings, and parties, and other cases to work on; moreover, he had to justify the Barbican flat to the tax man and he couldn’t do that without using it regularly. But he had to be careful about repeating the same story too often. He worried about making a mistake, and he worried about what would happen if she tried to call him during the night and he wasn’t there. She suffered from bouts of insomnia, and there were times when, in her misery, she woke him to ask why God had punished her by making her barren, or why the people she most looked up to at church never seemed to warm to her, despite everything she did for them. And what if there were an emergency at home, and she needed him, and he wasn’t on the other end of the phone? Those were dangerous thoughts to have running through your head when you were at the table trying to read the energy.
And then he worried about money. When he first joined the Clermont Club, his luck had been good. There were nights when he won and nights when he lost, but once he had learned to see the energy, he learned to control his play well. He knew when to stop, and even if the punishment for stopping was sometimes severe later, in Knightsbridge, he knew how to walk away. But then – at some time he could never quite pinpoint – his luck started to change: imperceptibly at first, the sequence of losing nights becoming longer, the winning nights becoming fewer and farther between.
He had a successful practice in Silk and he was earning high fees. But as a barrister, he was self-employed, and being self-employed, he depended for his income on the cheques written by solicitors. The arrival of a cheque for a barrister’s fee was a notoriously unpredictable event. The solicitors often kept barristers’ fees for a year or more to boost the interest on their client trust accounts before sending a cheque to chambers. The practice was grossly unethical, but if chambers wanted the solicitor’s work, nothing would be done except for the occasional gentle reminder by the senior clerk. Often, the clerk was fobbed off with the disclaimer that their client had not put them in funds, which was usually untrue. Conrad had heard that in Hong Kong the Bar had dealt with the problem by boycotting solicitors who treated them in that way, but in England, the prospect of the profession coming together with such a show of solidarity on a subject as infra dig as money was remote.
He had to budget for the many expenses in his life: the house in Guildford, the Barbican flat, his chambers rent, and his clerk’s fees – which, alone, accounted for ten per cent of his gross income – not to mention putting something by for when the tax man came calling. His professional and personal survival depended on his ability to meet those expenses as and when they came due. And then, he needed enough money to go to the Clermont Club at least once a week, and keep Greta happy by being prepared to lose. He had tried once or twice to explain all this to Greta, but she seemed indifferent, and if she reacted at all, it was to punish him, for what she called his weakness, even more firmly than usual.
It was within his power, of course, to walk away; to resume the life he had led with some success before John Aspinall had made him a member of the Clermont Club; before he had met Greta. But he had to admit to himself that it was not only Greta he was addicted to. He had been a gambler before he met her. All she had done was raise the stakes. He was just as addicted to the thrill of the table as he was to Greta herself. He didn’t want to walk away. He no longer saw a way back to his former life; and in any case, it had been a life to endure rather than to live. He was living now, and he was determined that nothing should get in his way.
The problem facing him tonight, as he sat amid the chaos and violence of that turbulent table, was that his adverse run of luck had taken him beyond the point where he could provide for his losses out of his income. He had a Post Office savings account in his sole name, which contained £10,000. It was an account he had opened as a student, and had paid into as and when he could, and which, as a prosperous QC, he had kept intact largely for nostalgic reasons. Tonight that money was with Vicente at the cash desk. Some £2,000 had already gone.