The Only Story(21)

I didn’t get much post in those days. Cards from friends, letters from the university reminding me about stuff, bank statements.

‘Local postmark,’ said my mother, handing me an envelope. The address was typed, and there was a heartening ‘Esq.’ after my name.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

‘I shall, Mum.’

She huffed off.

The letter came from the secretary of the tennis club. He was informing me that my temporary membership had been terminated with immediate effect. Further, that ‘due to the circumstances’, none of the membership fee I had paid was refundable. The ‘circumstances’ were not specified.

Susan and I had arranged to meet at the club for a pick-up foursome. So after lunch I took my racket and sports bag and set off as if for the courts.

‘Was the letter interesting?’ my mother asked impedingly.

I waved my racket in its press.

‘Tennis club. Asking if I want to join on a permanent basis.’

‘That’s gratifying, Paul. They must be pleased with your game.’

‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it?’

I drive to Susan’s house.

‘I got one too,’ she says.

Her letter is much the same as mine, except more strongly worded. Instead of her membership being terminated ‘due to the circumstances’ it is terminated ‘due to the evident circumstances of which you will be fully aware’. The adjusted wording is for Jezebels, for scarlet women.

‘How long have you been a member?’

‘Thirty years, I suppose. Give or take.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault.’

She shakes her head in disagreement.

‘Shall we protest?’

No.

‘I could burn the place down.’

No.

‘Do you think we were spotted somewhere?’

‘Stop asking questions, Paul. I’m thinking.’

I sit down beside her on the chintz sofa. What I don’t like to say, or not immediately, is that part of me finds the news exhilarating. I – we – are a cause of scandal! Love persecuted yet again by small-minded petty officialdom! Our expulsion might not have been an Obstacle on which Passion Thrives, but the moral and social condemnation implicit in the phrase ‘due to the circumstances’ act, to my mind, as an authentication of our love. And who does not want their love authenticated?

‘It’s not as if we were caught snogging in the long grass behind the roller.’

‘Oh, do be quiet, Paul.’

So I sit there quietly, my thoughts noisy. I try to remember cases of boys expelled from my school. One for pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a master’s car. One for getting his girlfriend pregnant. One for being drunk after a cricket match, urinating in a train compartment and then pulling the communication cord. At the time, all this seemed pretty impressive stuff. But my own rule-breaking struck me as thrilling, triumphant, and, most of all, grown-up.

‘Well, now look what the cat’s brought in,’ was Joan’s greeting as she answered the door a few afternoons later. I hadn’t warned her of my visit. ‘Just give me a moment to shut up the yappers.’

The door closed again, and I stood by an elderly boot scraper thinking about the distance that had grown between Susan and me since the tennis club’s dismissal of us. I had let my exhilaration show too clearly, which displeased her. She said that she was still ‘thinking’. I couldn’t see what there was to think about. She told me there were complications I didn’t understand. She told me not to come round until the weekend. I felt downcast, like one awaiting judgement even though no crime that I could see had been committed.

‘Sit yourself down,’ Joan instructed as we reached the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room. ‘You’ll have something to put a few hairs on your chest?’

‘Yes, please.’ I didn’t drink gin – I hated the smell of it, and it made me feel even worse than wine or beer did. But I didn’t want to come across as a prig.

‘Good man.’ She handed me a tumblerful. There was a smear of lipstick at its rim.

‘That’s an awful lot,’ I said.

‘We don’t pour fucking pub measures in this establishment,’ she replied.

I sipped at the thick, oily, lukewarm substance which didn’t smell at all like the juniper berries on the bottle.

Joan lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in my direction as if to nudge me.

‘So?’

‘So. Well. Perhaps you’ve heard about the tennis club.’

‘The Village tom-tom speaks of nothing else. The drumheads have been taking a real pasting.’

‘Yes, I thought you—’

‘Two things, young man. One, I don’t want to know any details. Two, how can I help?’

‘Thank you.’ I was genuinely touched, but also puzzled. How could she help if she didn’t know the details? And what counted as a detail? I thought about this.

‘Come on. What are you here to ask me?’

That was the problem. I didn’t know what I’d come to ask. I somehow thought that what I wanted from Joan would become clear to me when I saw her. Or she would know anyway. But it hadn’t, and she apparently didn’t. I tried to explain this, haltingly. Joan nodded, and let me sip my gin and ponder.