The Only Story(3)

She chuckled, as if she knew exactly what I meant. But how could she have?

‘Does your husband play?’

‘My husband? Mr E.P.?’ She laughed. ‘No. Golf’s his game. I think it’s plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball. Don’t you agree?’

There was too much in this answer for me to unpack at once, so I just gave a nod and a quiet grunt.

The second match was harder, against a couple who kept breaking off to have quiet tactical conversations, as if preparing for marriage. At one point, when Mrs Macleod was serving, I tried the cheap ploy of crouching below the level of the net almost on the centre line, aiming to distract the returner. It worked for a couple of points, but then, at 30–15, I rose too quickly on hearing the thwock of the serve, and the ball hit me square in the back of the head. I keeled over melodramatically and rolled into the bottom of the net. Caroline and Hugo raced forward in a show of concern; while from behind me came only a riot of laughter, and a girlish ‘Shall we play a let?’ which our opponents naturally disputed. Still, we squeaked the set 7–5, and were into the quarter-finals.

‘Trouble up next,’ she warned me. ‘County level. On their way down now, but no free gifts.’

And there weren’t any. We were well beaten, for all my intense scurrying. When I tried to protect us down the middle, the ball went wide; when I covered the angles, it was thumped down the centre line. The two games we got were as much as we deserved.

We sat on a bench and fed our rackets into their presses. Mine was a Dunlop Maxply; hers a Gray’s.

‘I’m sorry I let you down,’ I said.

‘No one let anyone down.’

‘I think my problem may be that I’m tactically naive.’

Yes, it was a bit pompous, but even so I was surprised by her giggles.

‘You’re a case,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to call you Casey.’

I smiled. I liked the idea of being a case.

As we went our separate ways to shower, I said, ‘Would you like a lift? I’ve got a car.’

She looked at me sideways. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want a lift if you haven’t got a car. That would be counterproductive.’ There was something in the way she said it that made it impossible to take offence. ‘But what about your reputation?’

‘My reputation?’ I answered. ‘I don’t think I’ve got one.’

‘Oh dear. We’ll have to get you one then. Every young man should have a reputation.’

Writing all this down, it seems more knowing than it was at the time. And ‘nothing happened’. I drove Mrs Macleod to her house in Duckers Lane, she got out, I went home, and gave an abbreviated account of the afternoon to my parents. Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles. Partners chosen by lot.

‘Quarter-finals, Paul,’ said my mother. ‘I’d have come along and watched if I’d known.’

I realized that this was probably the last thing in the history of the world that I wanted, or would ever want.

Perhaps you’ve understood a little too quickly; I can hardly blame you. We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a pre-existing category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see – feel – only what is individual and particular to them. We say: how predictable; they say: what a surprise! One of the things I thought about Susan and me – at the time, and now, again, all these years later – is that there often didn’t seem words for our relationship; at least, none that fitted. But perhaps this is an illusion all lovers have about themselves: that they escape both category and description.

My mother, of course, was never stuck for a phrase.

As I said, I drove Mrs Macleod home, and nothing happened. And again; and again. Except that this depends on what you mean by ‘nothing’. Not a touch, not a kiss, not a word, let alone a scheme or a plan. But there was already, just in the way we sat in the car, before she said a few laughing words and then walked off up her driveway, a complicity between us. Not, I insist, as yet a complicity to do anything. Just a complicity which made me a little more me, and her a little more her.

Had there been any scheme or plan, we would have behaved differently. We might have met secretly, or disguised our intentions. But we were innocent; and so I was taken aback when my mother, over a supper of stultifying boredom, said to me,

‘Operating a taxi service now, are we?’

I looked at her in bewilderment. It was always my mother who policed me. My father was milder, and less given to judgement. He preferred to allow things to blow over, to let sleeping dogs lie, not to stir up mud; whereas my mother preferred facing facts and not brushing things under the carpet. My parents’ marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a ‘car crash of cliché’ is itself a cliché.

But I refused to be a cliché, at least this early in my life, and so I looked across at my mother with blank belligerence.

‘Mrs Macleod will be putting on weight, the amount you’re ferrying her around,’ was my mother’s unkindly elaboration of her original point.

‘Not with all the tennis she plays,’ I answered casually.

‘Mrs Macleod,’ she went on. ‘What’s her first name?’

‘I don’t actually know,’ I lied.