The Man Whose Dream Came True by Julian Symons Read Free Book Online

down in Landford?’
    ‘It could be,’ he said shortly. He did not care for jokes about roulette. He explained to her the Prudential system which they would be playing. You made two bets at each spin of the wheel, a ten pound bet on passe covering the high numbers, and a five pound bet on the numbers from one to six. If a high number came up you won ten pounds and lost five, if a number from one to six turned up you were paid at odds of five to one so that you won twenty-five pounds and lost ten.
    ‘And if it’s one of the other numbers?’
    ‘If it’s seven to eighteen or zero we lose, but the odds are two to one in our favour. We’ll stop when we’ve won a hundred.’
    They very nearly did it, too. She sat on the opposite side of the table from him playing the six number transversal, and the first time she won she gave a small scream of pleasure. At one time they were seventy pounds up. Then the bank had a run in which the numbers between seven and eighteen came up half a dozen times running followed by zero. They were losing a little, Fiona was looking slightly bored, and to amuse her he committed a roulette player’s cardinal sin. He changed systems, and began to play a modified version of the Capitalist’s system, which involves covering every number on the board except zero and three. When zero turned up he bought another hundred pounds’ worth of chips. They lost these when three came up twice in eight spins.
    ‘Two hundred pounds,’ she said, and repeated it. ‘Just think, if we’d stopped when we were winning–’
    ‘You make rules and you have to keep them,’ he said sharply, although he had failed to do so. The exhilaration of gambling was so great for him that it remained for an hour or two afterwards, like the effect of drink, and he had the true gambler’s dislike of complaints about losing. ‘Better luck next time.’
    ‘Next time?’
    ‘When we’re on the other side of the fence, running the club.’
    ‘It was a lovely evening,’ she said when they were back at the flat. ‘But I wish we hadn’t lost that money.’
    Euphoria had worn off and he now wished it too, but he controlled his irritation. ‘Part of the ceremony of freeing the princess. Let’s have a nightcap. We’re still celebrating.’
    The celebration ended abruptly on Sunday morning.
    He woke at half past nine. The princess was still asleep. He went into the living-room, picked up the papers from the hall – he had ordered them with the feeling that the daily delivery of newspapers gave an air of permanency – and carried them into the kitchen to look at while he made breakfast. Turning the pages idly he saw a picture and a story in the gossip column of one paper, passed it by and returned to it, looking incredulously at picture and story.
    The picture showed a girl wearing a mini-skirt and a sleeveless brocaded blouse with a hooded headdress through which part of her face was visible. The story was headed: ‘Millionaire’s Daughter Starts Yashmak Fashion’ and it began:
     
    Fiona, up-and-corning daughter of industrial merger-maker Jacob Mallory, is touring Europe in search of something new in the fashion line to rock the younger set. Fiona’s landed up in Ismir, Turkey, where she’s certainly shaken the natives. It’s not the mini-skirt that shocks them, they’ve seen those before, or even the local dress turned into something so, so sophisticated in the form of the brocaded blouse. No, its the way Fiona uses that traditionally concealing yashmak combined with the rest of the outfit that produces an effect on males. Just imagine what a glance from under that hood will do to them over here. Fiona, a working fashion-spotter for Philippa Phillips Associates, is going on looking for that elusive new something in Greece and Yugoslavia before she comes home.
     
    He went into the living-room and sat down. He felt as dazed as somebody involved in an accident. As he read the story again his lips moved like those of a