My husband’s mistress was a twirling roulette wheel

Tony was 14 years older than me, and he had already been married, and had children, but I loved the way his energy spilt out in all directions. As time went on, suspicion crept in.

Dianne Sangste with husband Tony before his gambling problem surfaced.

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I met my husband, Tony, at the London restaurant he was managing when I, as a young Australian, went looking for a job. He used to love to tell people that he’d noticed my legs first, which were probably golden from Southeast Asian sun, and maybe also from Far North Queensland, where I’d been teaching, before setting off to see the world.

I liked him straight away. Tony was 14 years older than me, and he had already been married, and had children, but I loved the way his energy spilt out in all directions. He had so much more experience in the world, and he would happily talk about anything, although there were times, when sharing a meal with friends, for example, that I doubted the veracity of what he was saying.

Maybe he was reinforcing a tale to make it more interesting, but I was cursed with an in-built Aussie bullshit detector and a tendency to call a spade a spade.

I’m not sure when it first dawned on me that he was a gambler. He had once taken a small amount of money from me, promising to turn it into a windfall, and I’d never seen that money again. It had seemed like a one-off, but then he started missing meals at home and failing to show for planned outings. Everything was rushed – he was always flying in or out. He got snappy if I questioned him about it.

Dianne and her husband.

He told me he had to work late, a lot. I was fine on my own early in the evening, but after about 11pm I would start to wonder and then worry. It wouldn’t be another woman … would it?

I felt confident and secure in his devotion to me. I didn’t like being suspicious, particularly as he could usually deliver a convincing explanation for being late. He couldn’t sneak into our tiny place without disturbing me, and his late-night arrivals became more frequent. I managed to swallow some unbelievable stories.

Too often during waking hours he would arrange something and then change his mind. I became less certain of his movements. The rushing around was distracting and bamboozling. I began doubting much of what he told me, which was unsettling. I hated suspecting that he was lying to me.

Another source of puzzlement was that we seemed to live on bread and cheese. Our expenses were not huge even with the maintenance for his girls, from his first marriage, but we ate out rarely. Increasingly the suspicion crept in: Could he be going to the casino, something he’d once told me he’d stopped doing, after the role gambling had played in the collapse of his first marriage?

Finally one night I confronted him. Tony was again late home, and when I heard the key in the lock, I didn’t give him a chance to speak.

“Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear. You’ve been gambling. And you’ve been lying to me.”

He didn’t try to deny it. He was on the verge of tears himself.

“You’re right. I’m sorry … and I think I’m out of control …”

Later, I asked him to explain how the addiction had developed, and he explained it by saying that when he was safely inside a casino, he could escape from the boring, stressful reality outside. Once at the table, he had eyes only for the twirling roulette wheel.

“The gambling genie filled my skull,” he said.

“Eventually, nothing mattered but getting back there. I tried to be sensible. Like a normal person I would set myself a limit, say 10 pounds. But unlike that normal person, I would hide extra stashes of cash; in the back pocket of my trousers or inside my jacket, sometimes even in my shoes. I’d place a bet on my special numbers, hoping for their magic to work, picturing the croupier pushing a winning pile of chips in front of me.

“My heart would get going in time with the wheel, thumping away in my chest. When the ball slowed and dropped, I forgot to breathe. Had I won? If the dream came true, my winning chips towered up. But more often they were raked away.

“Surely with the next spin, my numbers would come up. No? But they would the next time! Or the next? Such was my gambler’s emotional rollercoaster. If I did have a win, I was obviously on a winning streak; with the next spin of the wheel, I’d be able to get that bike for my daughter, pay off the mortgage, buy the family a trip around the world … until all the money was gone. Then I would ask for credit from the casino. Anything to stay at the table a bit longer to prolong the slightest chance of winning. Sadly, the losses were far more frequent. The casino always wins.

Author Dianne Sangster.

“There was one awful night when I’d been gambling non-stop. It was about 2am. I’d been sitting at the roulette table for hours getting uncomfortably desperate for a pee, but the ball kept settling in my favour, so leaving the table was not an option. I needed to be present with all my willpower to ensure my numbers came up again. There was no way I would leave while winning, which had a predictable consequence. Then I couldn’t move until my trousers dried enough to be unnoticeable, which took all night until the casino booted me out.

“By this time all my winnings had reverted to losses. I had gained nothing and felt horrible.

“As soon as I hit the pavement, I knew there would be trouble. If I hadn’t kept enough money for the train, I faced a long walk home, exhausted, sweaty and filthy. Those treks back were dreadful as reality set in. How will l scrape together the mortgage that month? Where was left to get money? Who might lend me some? How could I be so stupid? Again!

“When I had the urge to gamble, nothing could stop me. I was a mess of raging, reckless matter, a pressure hose blasting obstacles out of the way. My only purpose was to get to the green baize table and stare at the spinning wheel; to listen to the heart-stopping click … click … click, as it slowed; to will the ball to drop in the right place.”

Tony told me he had stolen from people, including his boss.

“One weekend when the owner of the restaurant was away, I took some of the restaurant’s takings to the casino, thinking I could make up some of the money I regularly lost,” he said.

“I sat there gambling all through the night with the restaurant’s money. Madness, yes, idiotic and immoral, yes. But in my twisted way of thinking, I had borrowed it. At some point during the evening, I won enough to pay off all the bills and get myself out of trouble. But I was on a winning streak, and you don’t jinx that by stopping, do you?

“I ended up skint, as usual.

“When my boss returned on Tuesday he said: ‘The safe’s empty. You said we had a good weekend, Tony. Where’s the money?’ I said: ‘Oh, I banked it’ and my heart was thumping as he said, ‘Well, I have to pay the wages, so let’s go and get it!’.”

They went to the bank together and he strode in firmly.

“Believe it or not, I came out with the money, having persuaded the bank manager to give me a loan on the spot,” he said.

“Crisis averted, for the moment … that did stop me from visiting the casino for quite a while. But I started again, and in no time my gambling was fast and furious … One night, after plundering my usual hiding places, I borrowed money from a dubious character sitting beside me at the table. And then I kept losing. I lost his money. But I promised he’d have it the following week.

“I fobbed him off at the casino once and tried a few more evasive tactics, until he cornered me and said: ‘Look mate, I need that dosh, I don’t care about your wife and kiddies, that’s your lookout. Get me my money or I can’t vouch for your safety, or your family’s. Do you geddit?’

“I got it. If that bloke saw me again without his money, I was in danger of being beaten up. But I didn’t know how to live if I wasn’t gambling, with no chance of making the big money I needed to plug the holes in my finances. How do I know I won’t just miss out on that big win that could solve everything? I can’t afford to not gamble … I told so many lies I didn’t know what’s true anymore.

“And was I happy? Only when I was gambling – until I started losing. I knew I couldn’t go on like that, but facing people – how do I tell people? I’ve borrowed money left, right and centre, and stolen it. Maybe if I can get to the casino just one more time, I’ll be able to win the money …. But just one more go, just one more visit to the casino – surely, I can fix this.”

I urged Tony to attend Gamblers Anonymous, and, even after just one meeting, he could see that this worked for the people. But the program makes it clear that you have to repay your debts as part of your recovery. You’re supposed to go and see them all, explaining that you are a compulsive gambler, getting help to stop, and offering a repayment plan.

I asked him: “How many people do you owe money to?”

He said: “I think it’s just one or two …”

But when he started to remember one creditor and then another, he fell into a sweat, thinking about the lies he had told.

“The thought of going to see all these people, explaining that I had lied to them was appalling,” he said. “It beggared belief that I had been such an idiot getting myself into this mess, and how I’d used people. But I laid it out neatly like a spreadsheet, and I went to see the first creditor with my heart in my mouth, half expecting the door to be slammed in my face.

“To my surprise, this man listened to me, without interruption, and as soon as he grasped what I was trying to say he shook my hand and congratulated me. I could hardly believe that a person could be so nice after I had done the dirty on them. I expected humiliation and instead, it was liberating. It was with a humble kind of pride that I ticked the box next to the name of my first creditor, indicating their agreement to a repayment plan.

“Eventually, I went to see everyone on that list and without exception they were supportive. By the time I had explained the situation 20 times, I was feeling a lot stronger and much more able to resist that demon voice. And I hadn’t gambled. At all. It was miraculous, I felt less anxious, slept better, and even began to feel happy for moments at a time.”

This essay is based on an extract from Flutter, a memoir by Dianne Sangster, out this month.

If you need help, call the National Gambling Helpline: 1800 858 858

  

About the author

Dianne Sangster is an artist and writer who has also been a community worker and teacher. Born in Melbourne, she grew up in Queensland, lived in London for most of her adult life and now resides in the sweet village of Frome, Somerset. She has had poems and stories published in anthologies and recently collaborated with award-winning artist David Daniels on Feathers in My Path, a book of her poems and his drawings. Flutter is her first
full-length work of
memoir.