Lawrence Osborne: The Ballad of a Small Player

It was by now nearing dawn and the other rooms had their occupants, wealthy punters from the Territories in sleek suits, with briefcases of money laid at their feet like waiting dogs.

I settled down with a cigar courtesy of management and played a few hands at a more relaxed pace than I am used to. I had to admit to myself that the game was much more enjoyable played like this, without the hustle and bustle of a Chinese mob around me, at my own pace and without the internal tension that usually drove me forward. I thought a little more carefully about what I was doing. These are the ideal conditions for gaming if the individual doesn’t want to lose a lot of money quickly on a series of small, fast bets. The game is the same, but the ambience is not.

It was now that I felt the compulsion that always drives me from within as I see the pallet turn the cards and I feel them slipping like skin under my finger pads. A sensual moment, empty but charged with anticipation. The mind emptying out like a drain, or else scurrying like a small, wingless bug.

There are a few moments of this total calm before I start to move, like the moments that I imagine precede jumping off a cliff. Even in these exclusive rooms the dealer will tell you the table’s “luck numbers” if you ask him, and there will be a place in your mind that wrestles with the superstition.

The gambler is a man finely tuned to the supernatural. He is superstitious, wary of portents and omens. He is on edge for this reason. I wear kid gloves at the table, a habit in which I had indulged those past two years, and this was also a superstition. I put them on at the last moment after I have felt the cards, and through their supple material I feel the laminated surfaces all over again. I feel ready to win or lose.

Lose, in this case. It didn’t matter so much this time because I had written off any losses that night in advance. I did not sweat it as the first ten grand hit the dust. I poured myself another glass of wine. The dealer rolled back on his heels and asked me if I felt confident enough to go up to fifteen thousand, and perhaps provoked by the undertow of his tone, I said that I would.

“Good for you, sir. Courage often wins.”

Does it? I thought. Does it really play a part in outcomes?

“It’s a superstition,” I replied.

A manager came in then and shook my hand. He was beautifully dressed and he asked me if everything was to my satisfaction.

“Lord Doyle, isn’t it?”

“Well, if you say so.”

He laughed.

“I do say so.”

The dealer then bowed.

“Do you like the cards? Special from Germany,” the manager said. “Binokel with Württemberg artwork.”

I glanced down; they were indeed unusual.

“They are fine.”

“Mr. Hui here will look after you. He is one of our best bankers. We can bring you some light dishes if you need them. Do you?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“As you prefer.”

I felt the sweat now moving slowly down my back, clinging to the spine, an area of moistness developing between my eyes. When the manager had retired, I asked Mr. Hui if I might have some iced water with some lemon juice. While waiting for it, I looked over the English equestrian paintings on the walls and the iron dogs of the fireplace. It reminded me of an actual room I had seen in England, a room in a large country house that I had been in once upon a time, perhaps a famous country house. I tried to think if I knew those long, aquiline faces of long-dead noblemen, their Caucasian faces subtly distorted by copiers not familiar with them. One of them might have been the real Lord Doyle for all I knew. I wondered if indeed there was one, or whether I had chosen my Macau name with inspired good luck all those years ago. I half-remembered, in fact, reading the name in a newspaper somewhere and it must have stuck in my unconscious. Alternatively, perhaps, I had been to a house where Lord Doyle was mentioned or represented. I could no longer remember.

Yet the past, at that particular moment, was suddenly vividly present. I became distracted and lost my focus. Memories that I had long repressed must have been aroused in me by the cold sweat running in a trickle down my back, but why would a trickle of sweat make me think of my long-lost days in Cuckfield, I wondered. Though then again perhaps I had heard of a Lord Doyle in that Sussex village where I had lived for years as a lawyer, and it was possible he might even have been one of our firm’s clients. It was unlikely, however. I looked again at the Binokel cards and I felt myself lost in time, and I was sure that it must have been because of this intensely English and nostalgic décor in which I was now immersed. The cartoon lords were staring down at me as if I owed them money. No one in China knew why I was there, why I was sitting there at that very moment looking down at some Binokel cards after almost a decade in exile. They never asked why I never went home, or even if I had a home. They were never indiscreet enough to ask, and even if they had asked I would not have been able to tell them. It was not a pretty story I could recount over dinner.

Ihad been accused of an embezzlement with regard to one of my elderly clients, and I had not departed in a way that reflected well upon me. It had been a flight under cover of dark, a sudden sauve qui peut . I had not even told my sisters. The money was gone from the lady’s account and it was I who was in charge of that account, and worse than that I had spent everything and could not restore it. The directors of the firm had discovered the matter on a Thursday; by Friday night I was out of the country with a suitcase of money that I took with me and did not declare. The bulk of the money had already been wired to Hong Kong.

The lady I had stolen it from was one of those elderly widows one sees everywhere holed up secretively in the suburban houses of Haywards Heath or Wivelsfield, in the timbered Tudor mansions of Hassocks or Cuckfield or Lindfield. Plump townlets and manicured villages filled with colonial and military retirees and outpastured bank managers, with their yew hedges and their grumbling lawns and their churches filled with tattered flags. This was the world into which I was born, having won (as Cecil Rhodes once had it) first draw in the lottery of life: born an Englishman.

Mrs. Butterworth was married to a copper mining executive and had inherited all his money. They had once lived in South America, and her house retained a strange and faint tropicality. She loved caged birds and dark yellow silks, and there was a sunroom at the back of the house that seemed to rise to the occasion even of a dull English summer. The husband had been dead a quarter century. It’s possible that I reminded her of him. A young man in a dark suit, with hesitant manners. But I must have been more insecure than her former husband. He had gone to Rugby and belonged to a decent London club — I think it was even White’s. It is possible that she was too senile already to notice these unfortunate aspects of her well-groomed visitor. Perhaps she didn’t care to look too closely. I was able to fake the accent and the easy charm, and it is likely that she took these at surface value and didn’t look further.

We were soon having tea together every week. She was obsessed with her savings and her investments, and being a creature of intuition and habit she refused to discuss these with anyone else at the firm. Every Thursday morning I walked from the firm’s offices to her timbered mock-Tudor on Summerhill Lane and pulled the iron bell chain set into the door and waited under a fringe of honeysuckle for her padded step. We took Earl Grey and sandwiches in the sunroom, and she talked about her husband. She called him “my glorious Teddy.”