They used to say that he was going to be a great person, a president maybe or a great scientist. At the tender age of 3, he already could recite as an actor. In other words, Lotto was his parents and aunt’s love and pride. Gawain had stopped even dreaming about marriage and children, for he was unlucky in love. So was Antoinette, Lotto’s mother. Not without Sally’s help, they got together and quite surprisingly made a good couple. He was rich and she was attractive, but the best thing was that they were in love.
Lotto was still a child when his father died of aneurysm. That was a hard blow to the whole family. Poor Antoinette was so affected by his death that she decided to sell an estate to deposit money, so that her children could use them later. She was pregnant with Rachel and scared. It was Sally who took care of everything. At the same very time Lotto started transforming from a child into a rowdy teenager. He spent his time with other teenagers whom his mother and aunt disapproved of. Lotto had met a girl, Gwinnie, who was the first girl he slept with. Several years later, he would find out that she committed suicide and it would be an underestimation to say that he didn’t grieve.
To protect him from negative influence of his friends, Antoinette decided to send the boy to a boarding school. That was a difficult period for Lotto. He was bullied and made fun of almost by everyone. One day he had discovered a body of his classmate who hanged himself and thoughts about suicide stuck in his head. High school and college years earned him a reputation of “a man whore.” He chased every girl and managed to charm all of them. Mathilde put an end to it. He met her during a party and proposed to her immediately. She was a part-time model, elegant, blonde.
Contrary to their friends’ expectations, they didn’t get divorced neither in a year nor ten nor twenty. Their marriage had lasted for 23 years. Lotto turned out to be a lousy actor, so it was Mathilde who earned money. The man was convinced that she was going to leave him. She even stopped looking at him. He wanted to cry, but didn’t want to disturb her sleep, for she worked so hard to support him, so he wrote a play which turned out to be decent enough to be staged. Lotto was happy to be useful, his already enormous ego grew even bigger. Although the following years were full of ups and downs, they had been relatively happy until Lotto found out that his saint, his idol, his dear wife used to sleep with other man. It broke his heart and he died of a heart stroke.
Mathilde used to live under a different name. She was a little girl when she had decided not to save her younger brother from falling from the stairs though she could and as the result was sent away by her parents. She lived poorly and had to sleep with a wealthy man to pay school tuition. Even Lotto was a part of her plan. She knew that he was supposed to have money. She had an abortion, for she was sure that her children were going to be monsters. However, the woman loved her husband. His death was a tragedy for her.
