Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

now let us have a meal to celebrate.”

I should have said that. What I said was this.

“O Duncan please take me away from here!

Let us play billiards — billiards need some skill.

Come, let us set the perfect ivory globes

gliding and clicking on the smooth green cloth.”

His face, from white, went red. He frightened me.

“You hate to see me win? You hate roulette?”

he hissed. “Then woman, know I hate it too!

Hate and despise it! And to prove I do

will now AMAZE, APPAL AND PUT TO SHAME

THE CROUPIERS WHO CONTROL—

THE FOOLS WHO PLAY THIS GAME!”

He stood, strode past me to another table,

sat down and started playing as before.

I would have left and gone to our hotel

but did not know the way, nor yet the name.

That was what came of too much sleep-walking —

I’d ended up not knowing where I was.

I sat upon a sofa by the wall

while Wedder left each table where he won

and shifted to the next. Folk followed him.

I heard much babble, voices shout “Bravo!”

then rumpus, stramash, pandemonium.

The other gamblers thought he was a hero.

Some praised his courage. Ladies in low-cut gowns

gave him glad looks, meaning “Come wed me quick.”

A Jewish broker, weeping like a fountain,

begged him to leave before his luck ran out.

He played until they shut shop for the night.

It took a while to pack his money up.

While this was done poor Wedderburn got wooed,

fawned on and flattered all he wished, though not

by me. I heard a cough and someone say,

“Madame, will you forgive if I intrude?”

and looking sideways ding ding whoopee God!

The dinner bell! I’m feeling ravenous —

hungry parched famished and athirst for bortsch,

a splendid beetroot soup, but still have time

to finish off this entry with a rhyme.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I will not write like Shakespeare any more. It slows me down, especially now I am trying to spell words in the long way most people do. Another warm Odessa day. The sky is a high sheet of perfectly smooth pale-grey cloud which does not even hide the horizon. I sit with my little writing-case open on my knees on the topmost step of a huge flight of steps descending to the harbour front. It is wide enough to march an army down, and very like the steps down to the West End Park near our house, 16God. All kinds of people promenade here too, but if I sat writing a letter on the Glasgow steps many would give me angry or astonished looks, and if I was poorly dressed the police would move me on. The Russians ignore me completely or smile in a friendly way. Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A. and Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past? The friend I made in the betting-shop who talked to me about roulette and freedom and the soul is Russian. He said Russia is as young a country as the U.S.A. because a nation is only as old as its literature.

“Our literature began with Pushkin, a contemporary of your Walter Scott,” he told me. “Before Pushkin Russia was not a true nation, it was an administered region. Our aristocracy spoke French, our bureaucracy was Prussian, and the only true Russians — the peasants — were despised by rulers and bureaucracy alike. Then Pushkin learned the folk-tales from his nursemaid, a woman of the people. His novellas and poems made us proud of our language and aware of our tragic past — our peculiar present — our enigmatic future. He made Russia a state of mind — made it real. Since then we have had Gogol who was as great as your Dickens and Turgénieff who is greater than your George Eliot and Tolstoï who is as great as your Shakespeare. But you had Shakespeare centuries before Walter Scott.”

Not since Miss MacTavish fled from my embraces in San Francisco had I heard so many writers mentioned in so few sentences, and I had read none of them! To stop him thinking Bell Baxter a total ignoramus I said Burns was a great Scottish poet who lived before Scott, and Shakespeare and Dickens et cetera were all English; but he could not grasp the difference between Scotland and England, though he is wise about other things. I also said most folk thought novels and poetry were idle pastimes — did he not take them too seriously?

“People who care nothing for their country’s stories and songs,” he said, “are like people without a past — without a memory — they are half people.”

Imagine how that made me feel! But perhaps, like Russia, I am making up for lost time.

This was the stranger who spoke to me in the betting-shop while the rabble fussed around Wedder. He was a neat little man like Candle, but (I find this hard to explain) more humble than Candle, and also more proud. I saw by his clothes that he was poor, and by his face that he was clever. I felt he was a lovable man, though maybe not a quick wedder, and I was delighted. Nobody but Wedderburn had spoken to me since the policeman in Regent’s Park. I said, “Well, you look interesting! What have you to say to me?”

He brightened at that and also seemed surprised. He said, “But surely you are a great lady — the daughter of an English milord or baron?”

“Not me. Why think that?”

“You talk as great ladies in Russia talk. They too say at once what they feel without regard for convention. Since you are that sort I will talk fast, without introducing myself except to say I am an inveterate gambler— a quite unnecessary person who wants to give advice which will cost me nothing but may save you from a terrible loss.”

This was exciting. I said, “Go on.”

“The Englishman who has such success, he is your. .?” He was looking at the fingers of my left hand for a wedding ring. I said, “He and I are wed.”

This was fooling him slightly because most people think wedding and marriage are the same, but it was easier than complicated explanations. He said, “And your husband has never played roulette before?”

“Not roulette.”

“That explains why he played so systematically. His system was the most obvious in the world — all thinking gamblers discover it during their first game and abandon it before the end. But tonight your husband had the best luck in the world, or worst, depending on how it takes him. The pattern of play, by sheer accident, conformed to his childish system again and again! Astonishing! This hardly ever happens, but when it does it usually befalls a beginner who (forgive me, I could not say this to a conventional Englishwoman) is very much in love, and therefore more confident or desperate than usual. Yes, Cupid and cupidity once in a lifetime coincide to flatter us. That happened to me. I won a fortune but lost the woman I loved, and then, of course, the fortune, for the gambling fever entered my blood. It made me what I am — a lost soul — an existence manqué. If you cannot persuade your husband to leave this infernal little town tomorrow he will return to this casino, lose all he has won, then throw everything else away in an effort to recover it. The revenues of the municipality depend exclusively on the casinos, so the banks have the most modern facilities for speedily converting property into cash at iniquitous rates of exchange. I have seen a great princess — a woman of eighty but still sharp-witted and sensible — I have seen her fooled by beginners’ luck into squandering nearly everything but the lives of her servants before she regained her senses.”