Now I greatly revered women tennis players. When they came on to the court, smiling in trim uniforms, they seemed plain, remote persons: yet, after an hour of sweat and malice … A couple of years back, there had been a particularly simian little number: squat torso, arms like legs, and a face as contorted and spiteful as you could possibly wish. She had obsessed me all through the Wimbledon fortnight. Not an afternoon passed without me thinking how much I’d like to corner her after an eighty-game, four-hour final (which she had lost), wrench off – or aside – her porky shorts, bear down on her in the steamed-up dressing-room or, better, much better, in some nicotine-mantled puddle, and grind myself empty to her screams.
Neither of the present sportswomen was up to that standard. In my excitement I missed the initial roll-call, and had to sit through twenty minutes of elegant variation – ‘the 28-year-old Australian’, ‘the young Wiltshire housewife’ – before I caught the ladies’ names, so intent were the unctuous commentators on concealing the fact that they had bugger-all to say. However, of the two I vastly preferred the enormous Aussie. The British Wightman Cup player made the mistake of trying to appear recognizably feminine, doubtless in order to show the older woman that you don’t necessarily have to look like an orang-utan to play a damn good game of tennis. The wife of the Great Bedwin dentist skipped up to the net to volley and pirouetted when she served. The Darwin-born PT instructress, on the other hand, her glossy shoulder-muscles rippling in the ninety-degree heat, threw her bulk round the court in frank virility – as she bulleted passing-shots, as she leapt four feet to punch the shit out of last year’s quarter-finalist’s weedy lobs. That mother of two wailed like a tragic heroine whenever she lost a point; the ex-junior champene showed emotion only when she double-faulted (with strident bellows that brought the commentary to nervous ten-second silences) before pounding back into the match. – At last I got their names: Mrs Joyce Parky and Miss Lurleen Bone. Miss Bone took Joyce apart in the second set. Joyce, quaking at the net on match-point, love-six, got a mouthful of tennis ball from Miss Bone’s top-spin drive. She limped off the court in tears, without shaking hands.
‘Here’s to you, Lurl,’ I said, glass raised. There followed twenty minutes of one-day cricket, a makeshift eleven of boozy has-beens versus some itinerant Negroes. It left me wondering why, according to the commentators, Malcolm Sprockington, or whoever, always managed to ‘turn’ or ‘steer’ the ball between the slips, when it was all Cyprian Uwanki, or whoever, could do to ‘snick’ or ‘chip’ it through them. But it was sorry stuff after that gladiatorial combat between innocence and experience.
I collected my notes, had a drop more port, and fell down the stairs to my parents’ bedroom.
Rachel’s mother answered. She wanted to know who it was but didn’t reply when, with drunken mellifluousness, I gave my name. Now, in the fifteen seconds silence, the fear I had been hiding from all day came to find me. I saw the gormless face in the mirror. Through the window I heard the children cry. I stared down at the folder open on my lap, at my tiny, immaculate handwriting.
Rachel said hello and started telling me about the crash she and DeForest had nearly been in on the way back. I wondered what was going on, tried to interrupt, no voice. Stop all this. She stopped. But she couldn’t hear me. Could I speak up? I inhaled and exhaled. Rachel wanted to know whether I was still there.
‘Stop all this. What are you talking about ? Tell me —’
‘I can’t hear.’
‘Wait.’
I put the telephone on the bed and unthinkingly took a piece of paper from my breast-pocket. It said: ‘Of course you had to leave, don’t worry about me. I just feel sorry for DeForest. How is he?’ I accumulated twenty words’ worth of breath and picked up the receiver.
‘Listen. Please tell me what you’re going to do. Don’t tell me about… fucking car accidents, tell me – ‘