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Squash Match
Excerpt from Ian McEwan's latest novel |
' After he’s parked, and before getting out of the car, he phones Rosalind at work – his long fingers still trembling, fumbling with the miniature keys. On this important day for her he doesn’t intend to distract her with the story of his nearthrashing. And he doesn’t need sympathy. What he wants is more fundamental – the sound of her voice in an everyday exchange, the resumption of normal existence. What can be more reassuringly plain than husband and wife discussing the details of tonight’s dinner? He speaks to a temp, what they call in Rosalind’s office a hot-desker, and learns that her meeting with the editor has started late and is running on. He leaves no message, and says he’ll try later. It’s unusual to see the glass-fronted squash courts deserted on a Saturday. He walks along the row, on stained blue carpet, past the giant Coke and energy bar dispensers, and finds the consultant anaesthetist at the far end, in number five, smacking the ball in fast repeated strokes low along the backhand wall, giving the appearance of a man working off a bad temper. But, it turns out, he’s been waiting only ten minutes. He lives across the river in Wandsworth; the march forced him to abandon his car by the Festival Hall. Furious with himself for being late, he jogged across Waterloo Bridge and saw below him tens of thousands pouring along the Embankment towards Parliament Square. Too young for the Vietnam war protests, he’s never in his life seen so many people in one place. Despite his own views, he was somewhat moved. This, he told himself, is the democratic process, however inconvenient. He watched for five minutes, then jogged up Kingsway, against the flow of bodies. He describes all this while Perowne sits on the bench removing his sweater and tracksuit bottom, and making a heap of his wallet, keys and phone to store at one of the corners by the front wall – he and Strauss are never serious enough to insist on a completely cleared court. ‘They dislike your Prime Minister, but boy do they fucking loathe my President.’ Jay is the only American medic Perowne knows to have taken a huge cut in salary and amenities to work in England. He says he loves the health system. He also loved an Englishwoman, had three children by her, divorced her, married another similar-looking English rose twelve years younger and had another two children – still toddlers, and a third is on its way. But his respect for socialised medicine or his love of children do not make him an ally of the peace cause. The proposed war, Perowne finds, generally doesn’t divide people predictably; a known package of opinions is not a reliable guide. According to Jay, the matter is stark: how open societies deal with the new world situation will determine how open they remain. He’s a man of untroubled certainties, impatient of talk of diplomacy, weapons of mass destruction, inspection teams, proofs of links with Al-Qaeda and so on. Iraq is a rotten state, a natural ally of terrorists, bound to cause mischief at some point and may as well be taken out now while the US military is feeling perky after Afghanistan. And by taken out, he insists he means liberated and democratised. The USA has to atone for its previous disastrous policies – at the very least it owes this to the Iraqi people. Whenever he talks to Jay, Henry finds himself tending towards the anti-war camp. Strauss is a powerful, earthbound, stocky man, physically affectionate, energetic, direct in manner – to some of his English colleagues, tiresomely so. He’s been completely bald since he was thirty. He works out for more than an hour each day, and looks like a wrestler. When he busies himself around his patients in the anaesthetic room, readying them for oblivion, they are reassured by the sight of the sculpted muscles on his forearms, the dense bulk of his neck and shoulders, and by the way he speaks to them – matter-of-fact, cheerful, without condescension. Anxious patients can believe this squat American will lay down his life to spare them pain. They have worked together six years. As far as Henry is concerned, Jay is the key to the success of his firm. When things go wrong, Strauss becomes calm. If, for example, Perowne is obliged to cut off a major blood vessel to make a repair, Jay keeps time in a soothing way, ending with a murmured, ‘You’ve got one minute, Boss, then you’re out of there.’ On the rare occasions when things go really badly, when there’s no way back, Strauss will find him out afterwards, alone in a quiet stretch of corridor, and put his hands on his shoulders, squeeze tightly and say, ‘OK Henry. Let’s talk it through now. Before you start crucifying yourself.’ This isn’t the way an anaesthetist, even a consultant, usually speaks to a surgeon. Consequently, Strauss has an above average array of enemies. On certain committees, Perowne has protected his friend’s broad back from various collegiate daggers. Now and then he finds himself saying to Jay something like, ‘I don’t care what you think. Be nice to him. Remember our funding next year.’ While Henry does his stretching exercises, Jay goes back on court to keep the ball warm, driving it down the righthand wall. There appears to be an extra punch today in his low shots, and the sequence of fast volleys is surely planned to intimidate an opponent. It works. Perowne feels the echoing rifle-shot crack of the ball as an oppression; there’s an unusual stiffness in his neck as he goes through his routine, pushing with his left hand against his right elbow. Through the open glass door, he raises his voice to explain why he’s late, but it’s a truncated account, centred mostly on the scrape itself, the way the red car pulled out, and how he swerved, how the damage to the paintwork was surprisingly light. He skips the rest, saying only that it took a while to sort out. He doesn’t want to hear himself describe Baxter and his friends. They’ll interest Strauss too much, and prompt questions he doesn’t feel like answering yet. He’s already feeling a rising unease about the encounter, a disquiet he can’t yet define, though guilt is certainly an element. He feels his left knee creak as he stretches his hamstrings. When will it be time to give up this game? His fiftieth birthday? Or sooner. Get out before he rips an anterior cruciate ligament, or crashes to the parquet with his first coronary. He’s working on the tendons of his other leg, Strauss is still performing his rapid-fire volleys. Perowne suddenly feels his own life as fragile and precious. His limbs appear to him as neglected old friends, absurdly long and breakable. Is he in mild shock? His heart will be all the more vulnerable after that punch. His chest still aches. He has a duty to others to survive, and he mustn’t endanger his own life for a mere game, smacking a ball against a wall. And there’s no such thing as a gentle game of squash, especially with Jay. Especially with himself. They both hate to lose. Once they get going, they fight points like madmen. He should make excuses and pull out now, and risk irritating his friend. A negligible price. As he straightens up, it occurs to Perowne that what he really wants is to go home and lie down in the bedroom and think it through, the dispute in University Street, and decide how he should have handled it, and what it was he got wrong. But even as he’s thinking this, he’s pulling on his goggles and stepping onto the court and closing the door behind him. He kneels to settle his valuables in a front- wall corner. There’s a momentum to the everyday, a Saturday morning game of squash with a good friend and colleague, that he doesn’t have the strength of will to interrupt. He stands on the backhand side of the court, Strauss sends a brisk, friendly ball down the centre, automatically Perowne returns it, back along its path. And so they are launched into the familiar routines of a warm-up. The third ball he mishits, slapping it loudly into the tin. A couple of strokes later he stops to retie his laces. He can’t settle. He feels slow and encumbered and his grip feels misaligned, too open, too closed, he doesn’t know. He fiddles with his racket between strokes. Four minutes pass and they’ve yet to have a decent exchange. There’s none of that easy rhythm that usually works them into their game. He notices that Jay is slowing his pace, offering easier angles to keep the ball in play. At last, Perowne feels obliged to say he’s ready. Since he lost last week’s game – this is their arrangement – he is to serve. He takes up his position in the right-hand service box. From behind him on the other side of the court, he hears Jay mutter, ‘OK.’ The silence is complete, of that hissing variety rarely heard in a city; no other players, no street sounds, not even from the march. For two or three seconds Perowne stares at the dense black ball in his left hand, willing himself to narrow the range of his thoughts. He serves a high lob, well placed in so far as it arcs too high for a volley, and slides off the side wall onto the back. But even as it leaves him, he knows he’s hit it too hard. It comes off the back wall with some residual speed, leaving Jay plenty of space to drive a straight return down the side wall to a good length. The ball dies in the corner, dribbling off the back wall as Perowne reaches it. With barely a pause, Jay snatches up the ball to serve from the right box. Perowne, gauging his opponent’s mood, is expecting an overarm smash and is crouched forwards, prepared to take a volley before the ball nicks the side wall. But Strauss has made his own calculations about mood. He serves a soft bodyline, angled straight into Perowne’s right shoulder. It’s the perfect shot to play at an indecisive opponent. He steps back, but too late and not far enough and, at some point in his confusion, loses sight of the ball. His return drops into the front of the court and Strauss drives it hard into the right-hand corner. They’ve been playing less than a minute, Perowne has lost his serve, is one point down and knows already that he’s lost control. And so it goes on, relentlessly for the next five points, with Jay in possession of the centre of the court, and Perowne, dazed and defensive, initiating nothing. At six-love, Strauss finally makes an unforced error. Perowne serves the same high lob, but this time it falls nicely off the back wall. Strauss does well to hook it out, but the ball sits up on the short line and Perowne amazes himself with a perfect dying-length drive. With that little swoon of euphoria comes the ability to concentrate. He takes the next three points without trouble, and on the last of these, clinched by a volley drop, he hears Jay swearing at himself as he walks to the back of the court. Now, the magical authority, and all the initiatives are Henry’s. He has possession of the centre of the court and is sending his opponent running from front to back. Soon he’s ahead at seven-six and is certain he’ll take the next two points. Even as he thinks this, he makes a careless cross-court shot which Strauss pounces on and, with a neat slice, drops into the corner. Perowne manages to resist the lure of self-hatred as he walks to the left-hand court to receive the serve. But as the ball floats off the front wall towards him, unwanted thoughts are shaking at his concentration. He sees the pathetic figure of Baxter in the rear-view mirror. This is precisely the moment he should have stepped forwards for a backhand volley – he could reach it at a stretch – but he hesitates. The ball hits the nick – the join between the wall and the floor – and rolls insultingly over his foot. It’s a lucky shot, and in his irritation he longs to say so. Seven-all. But there’s no fight to the end. Perowne feels himself moving through a mental fog, and Jay takes the last two points in quick succession. Neither man has any illusions about his game. They are halfway decent club players, both approaching fifty. Their arrangement is that between games – they play the best of five – they pause to let their pulse rates settle. Sometimes they even sit on the floor. Today, the first game hasn’t been strenuous, so they walk slowly up and down the court. The anaesthetist wants to know about the Chapman girl. He’s gone out of his way to make friends with her. The girl’s street manner didn’t withstand the pep talk that Perowne, passing in the corridor, overheard Strauss deliver. The anaesthetist had gone up to the ward to introduce himself. He found a Filipino nurse in tears over some abuse she’d received. Strauss sat on the bed and put his face close to the girl’s. ‘Listen honey. You want us to fix that sorry head of yours, you’ve got to help us. You hear? You don’t want us to fix it, take your attitude home. We got plenty of other patients waiting to get in your bed. Look, here’s your stuff in the locker. You want me to start putting it in your bag? OK. Here we go. Toothbrush. Discman. Hairbrush . . . No? So which is it to be? Fine. OK, look, I’m taking them out again. No, look, I really am. You help us, we help you. We got a deal? Let’s shake hands.’ Perowne reports on her good progress this morning. ‘I like that kid,’ Jay says. ‘She reminds me of myself at that age. A pain in the ass in every direction. She might go down in flames, she might do something with herself.’ ‘Well, she’ll pull through this one,’ Perowne says as he takes up his position to receive. ‘At least it’ll be her own decision to crash. Let’s go.’ He’s spoken too soon. Jay’s serve is on him, but his own word ‘crash’, trailing memories of the night as well as the morning, fragments into a dozen associations. Everything that’s happened to him recently occurs to him at once. He’s no longer in the present. The deserted icy square, the plane and its pinprick of fire, his son in the kitchen, his wife in bed, his daughter on her way from Paris, the three men in the street – he occupies the wrong time coordinates, or he’s in them all at once. The ball surprises him – it’s as if he left the court for a moment. He takes the ball late, scooping it from the floor. At once Strauss springs out from the ‘T’ for the kill shot. And so the second game begins as the first. But this time Henry has to run hard to lose. Jay’s prepared to let the rallies go on while he hogs centre court and lobs to the back, drops to the front, and finds his angle shots. Perowne scampers around his opponent like a circus pony. He twists back to lift balls out of the rear corners, then dashes forwards at a stretch to connect with the drop shots. The constant change of direction tires him as much as his gathering selfhatred. Why has he volunteered for, even anticipated with pleasure, this humiliation, this torture? It’s at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid – and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place. As intimate and selfevident as the feel of his tongue in his mouth. Only he can go wrong in quite this way, and only he deserves to lose in just this manner. As the points fall he draws his remaining energy from a darkening pool of fury. He says nothing, to himself or his opponent. He won’t let Jay hear him curse. But the silence is another kind of affliction. They’re at eight-three. Jay plays a cross-court drive – probably a mistake, because the ball is left loose, ready for interception. Perowne sees his chance. If he can get to it, Jay will be caught out of position. Aware of this, Jay moves out from his stroke towards centre court, blocking Perowne’s path. Immediately Perowne calls for a let. They stop and Strauss turns to express surprise. ‘Are you kidding?’ ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Perowne says through his furious breathing, and pointing his racket in the direction he was heading. ‘You stepped right into me.’ The language startles them both. Strauss immediately concedes. ‘OK, OK. It’s a let.’ As he goes to the service box and tries to calm himself, Perowne can’t help considering that at eight-three, and already a game up, it’s ungenerous of Jay to query such an obvious call. Ungenerous is generous. The judgment doesn’t help him deliver the service he needs, for this is his last chance to get back in the game. The ball goes so wide of the wall that Jay is able to step to his left and reach for an easy forehand smash. He takes the service back, and the game is over in half a minute. The prospect of making small talk on court for a few minutes is now unendurable. Henry puts his racket down, pulls off his goggles and mutters something about needing water. He leaves the court and goes to the changing room and drinks from the fountain there. The place is deserted except for an unseen figure in the showers. A TV high on the wall is showing a news channel. He splashes his face at a basin, and rests his head on his forearms. He hears his pulse knocking in his ears, sweat is dribbling down his spine, his face and feet are burning. There’s only one thing in life he wants. Everything else has dropped away. He has to beat Strauss. He needs to win three games in a row to take the set. Unbelievably difficult, but for the moment he desires and can think of nothing else. In this minute or two alone, he must think carefully about his game, cut to the fundamentals, decide what he’s doing wrong and fix it. He’s beaten Strauss many times before. He has to stop being angry with himself and think about his game. When he raises his head, he sees in the washroom mirror, beyond his reddened face, a reflection of the silent TV behind him showing the same old footage of the cargo plane on the runway. But then, briefly, enticingly, two men with coats over their heads – surely the two pilots – in handcuffs being led towards a police van. They’ve been arrested. Something’s happened. A reporter outside a police station is talking to the camera. Then the anchor is talking to the reporter. Perowne shifts position so the screen is no longer in view. Isn’t it possible to enjoy an hour’s recreation without this invasion, this infection from the public domain? He begins to see the matter resolving in simple terms: winning his game will be an assertion of his privacy. He has a right now and then – everyone has it – not to be disturbed by world events, or even street events. Cooling down in the locker room, it seems to Perowne that to forget, to obliterate a whole universe of public phenomena in order to concentrate is a fundamental liberty. Freedom of thought. He’ll emancipate himself by beating Strauss. Stirred, he walks up and down between the changing-room benches, averting his eyes from a ripplingly obese teenager, more seal than human, who’s emerged from the shower without a towel. There isn’t much time. He has to arrange his game around simple tactics, play on his opponent’s weakness. Strauss is only five foot eight, with no great reach and not a brilliant volleyer. Perowne decides on high lobs to the rear corners. As simple as that. Keep lobbing to the back. When he arrives back on court, the consultant anaesthetist comes straight over to him. ‘You all right Henry? You pissed off?’ ‘Yeah. With myself. But having to argue that let didn’t help.’ ‘You were right, I was wrong. I’m sorry. Are you ready?’ Perowne stands in the receiving position, intent on the rhythm of his breathing, prepared to perform a simple move, virtually a standard procedure: he’ll volley the serve before it touches the side wall, and after he’s hit it he’ll cross to the ‘T’ at the centre of the court and lob. Simple. It’s time to dislodge Strauss. ‘Ready.’ Strauss hits a fast serve, and once again it’s a bodyline, aimed straight for the shoulder. Perowne manages to push his racket through the ball, and the volley goes more or less as he hoped, and now he’s in position, on the ‘T’. Strauss flicks the ball out of the corner, and it comes back along the same side wall. Perowne goes forward and volleys again. Half a dozen times the ball travels up and down the lefthand wall, until Perowne finds the space on his backhand to lift it high into the right-hand corner. They play that wall in hard straight drives, dancing in and out of each other’s path, then they’re chasing shots all over the court, with the advantage passing between them. They’ve had this kind of rally before – desperate, mad, but also hilarious, as if the real contest is to see who will break down laughing first. But this is different. It’s humourless, and longer, and attritional, for hearts this age can’t race at above one hundred and eighty beats per minute for long, and soon someone will tire and fumble. And in this unwitnessed, somewhat inept, merely social game, both men have acquired an urgent sense of the point’s importance. Despite the apology, the disputed let hangs between them. Strauss will have guessed that Perowne has given himself a good talking-to in the changing room. If his fightback can be resisted now, he’ll be demoralised in no time and Strauss will take the match in three straight sets. As for Perowne, it’s down to the rules of the game; until he’s won the serve, he can’t begin to score points. It’s possible in a long rally to become a virtually unconscious being, inhabiting the narrowest slice of the present, merely reacting, taking one shot at a time, existing only to keep going. Perowne is already at that state, digging in deep, when he remembers he’s supposed to have a game plan. As it happens, just then the ball falls short and he’s able to get under it to lob high into the rear left corner. Strauss raises his racket to volley, then changes his mind and runs back. He boasts the ball out, and Perowne lobs to the other side. Running from corner to corner to grub the ball out when you’re tired is hard work. Each time he hits the ball, Strauss grunts a little louder, and Perowne is encouraged. He resists the kill shot because he thinks he’ll mishit. Instead, he goes on lobbing, five times in a row, wearing his man down. The point ends on the fifth w hen Strauss’s powerless ball falls feebly against the tin. Love-all. They put down their rackets, and stand bent over, breathless, hands on knees, staring blindly into the floor, or press their palms and faces into the cool white walls, or wander aimlessly about the court mopping their brows with their untucked T-shirts and groaning. At other times they’d have a post-mortem on a point like that, but neither man speaks. Keen to force the pace, Perowne is ready first, and waits in the service box bouncing the ball against the floor. He serves right over Strauss’s head and the ball, cooler and softer now, dies in the corner. One-love, and no effort wasted. This, rather than the point before, might be the important one. Perowne has his height and length now. The next point goes his way, and the next. Strauss is becoming exasperated by a series of identical serves, and because the rallies are brief or non-existent, the ball remains cold and inert, like putty, difficult to fish out of a tight space. And as he becomes more annoyed, Jay becomes even less competent. He can’t reach the ball in the air, he can’t get under it once it falls. A couple of serves he simply walks away from, and goes to the box to wait for the next. It’s the repetition, the same angle, the same impossible height, the same dead ball that’s getting to him. Soon he’s lost six points. Perowne wants to laugh wildly – an impulse he disguises as a cough. He isn’t gloating, or triumphant – it’s far too early for that. This is the delight of recognition, sympathetic laughter. He’s amused because he knows exactly how Strauss is feeling: Henry is too well acquainted with the downward spiral of irritation and ineptitude, the little ecstasies of selfloathing. It’s hilarious to recognise how completely another person resembles your imperfect self. And he knows how annoying his serve is. He wouldn’t be able to return it himself. But Strauss was merciless when he was on top, and Perowne needs the points. So he keeps on and on, floating the ball over his opponent’s head and cruising right through to take the game, no effort at all, nine-love. ‘I need a piss,’ Jay says tersely, and leaves the court, still wearing his goggles and holding his racket. Perowne doesn’t believe him. Though he sees that it’s a sensible move, the only way to interrupt the haemorrhaging of points, and even though he did the same thing less than ten minutes before, he still feels cheated. He could have taken the next set too with his infuriating serve. Now Strauss will be dousing his head under the tap and rethinking his game. Henry resists the temptation to sit down. Instead he steps out to take a look at the other games – he’s always hoping to learn something from the classier players. But the place is still deserted. The club members are either massing against the war, or unable to find a way through central London. As he comes back along the courts, he lifts his T-shirt and examines his chest. There’s a dense black bruise to the left of his sternum. It hurts when he extends his left arm. Staring at the discoloured skin helps focus his troubled feelings about Baxter. Did he, Henry Perowne, act unprofessionally, using his medical knowledge to undermine a man suffering from a neurodegenerative disorder? Yes. Did the threat of a beating excuse him? Yes, no, not entirely. But this haematoma, the colour of an aubergine, the diameter of a plum – just a taste of what might have come his way – says yes, he’s absolved. Only a fool would stand there and take a kicking when there was a way out. So what’s troubling him? Strangely, for all the violence, he almost liked Baxter. That’s to put it too strongly. He was intrigued by him, by his hopeless situation, and his refusal to give up. And there was a real intelligence there, and dismay that he was living the wrong life. And he, Henry, was obliged, or forced, to abuse his own power – but he allowed himself to be placed in that position. His attitude was wrong from the start, insufficiently defensive; his manner may have seemed pompous, or disdainful. Provocative perhaps. He could have been friendlier, even made himself accept a cigarette; he should have relaxed, from a position of strength, instead of which he was indignant and combative. On the other hand, there were three of them, they wanted his cash, they were eager for violence, they were planning it before they got out of their car. The loss of a wing mirror was cover for a mugging. He arrives back outside the court, his unease intact, just as Strauss appears. His thick shoulders are drenched from his session at the washbasin, and his good humour is restored. ‘OK,’ he says as Perowne goes to the service box. ‘No more Mister Nice Guy.’ Perowne finds it disabling, to have been left alone with his thoughts; just before he serves, he remembers his game plan. But the fourth game falls into no obvious pattern. He takes two points, then Strauss gets into the game and pulls ahead, three-two. There are long, scrappy rallies, with a run of unforced errors on both sides which bring the score to seven-all, Perowne to serve. He takes the last two points without trouble. Two games each. They take a quick break to gather themselves for the final battle. Perowne isn’t tired – winning games has been less physically demanding than losing them. But he feels drained of that fierce desire to beat Jay and would be happy to call it a draw and get on with his day. All morning he’s been in some form of combat. But there’s no chance of backing out. Strauss is enjoying the moment, playing it up, and saying as he goes to his position, ‘Fight to the death,’ and ‘No pasaran!’ So, with a suppressed sigh, Perowne serves and, because he’s run out of ideas, falls back on the same old lob. In fact, the moment he hits the ball, he knows it’s near-perfect, curving high, set to drop sharply into the corner. But Strauss is in a peculiar, elated mood and he does an extraordinary thing. With a short running jump, he springs two, perhaps three feet into the air, and with racket fully extended, his thick, muscular back gracefully arched, his teeth bared, his head flung back and his left arm raised for balance, he catches the ball just before the peak of its trajectory with a whip-like backhand smash that shoots the ball down to hit the front wall barely an inch above the tin – a beautiful, inspired, unreturnable shot. Perowne, who’s barely moved from his spot, instantly says so. A fabulous shot. And suddenly, with the serve now in his opponent’s hands, all over again, he wants to win. Both men raise their games. Every point is now a drama, a playlet of sudden reversals, and all the seriousness and fury of the third game’s long rally is resumed. Oblivious to their protesting hearts, they hurl themselves into every corner of the court. There are no unforced errors, every point is wrested, bludgeoned from the other. The server gasps out the score, but otherwise they don’t speak. And as the score rises, neither man moves more than one point ahead. There’s nothing at stake – they’re not on the club’s squash ladder. There’s only the irreducible urge to win, as biological as thirst. And it’s pure, because no one’s watching, no one cares, not their friends, their wives, their children. It isn’t even enjoyable. It might become so in retrospect – and only to the winner. If a passer-by were to pause by the glass back wall to watch, she’d surely think these elderly players were once rated, and even now still have a little fire. She might also wonder if this is a grudge match, there’s such straining desperation in the play. What feels like half an hour is in fact twelve minutes. At seven-all Perowne serves from the left box and wins the point. He crosses the court to serve for the match. His concentration is good, his confidence is up and so he plays a forceful backhand serve, at a narrow angle, close to the wall. Strauss slices it with his backhand, almost a tennis stroke, so that it drops to the front of the court. It’s a good shot, but Perowne is in position and nips forward for the kill. He catches the ball on the rise and smashes it on his forehand, into the left rear corner. End of game, and victory. The instant he makes his stroke, he steps back – and collides with Strauss. It’s a savage jolt, and both men reel and for a moment neither can talk. Then Strauss, speaking quietly through heavy breathing, says, ‘It’s my point, Henry.’ And Perowne says, ‘Jay, it’s over. Three games to two.’ They pause again to take the measure of this calamitous difference. Perowne says, ‘What were you doing at the front wall?’ Jay walks away from him, to the box where, if they play the point again, he’ll receive the serve. He’s wanting to move things on – his way. He says, ‘I thought you’d play a drop shot to your right.’ Henry tries to smile. His mouth is dry, his lips won’t easily slide over his teeth. ‘So I fooled you. You were out of position. You couldn’t have returned it.’ The anaesthetist shakes his head with the earthbound calm his patients find so reassuring. But his chest is heaving. ‘It came off the back wall. Plenty of bounce. Henry, you were right in my path.’ This deployment of each other’s first name is tipped with poison. Henry can’t resist it again himself. He speaks as though reminding Strauss of a long-forgotten fact. ‘But Jay. You couldn’t’ve reached that ball.’ Strauss holds Perowne’s gaze and says quietly, ‘Henry, I could.’ The injustice of the claim is so flagrant that Perowne can only repeat himself. ‘You were way out of position.’ Strauss says, ‘That’s not against the rules.’ Then he adds, ‘Come on Henry. I gave you the benefit of the doubt last time.’ So he thinks he’s calling in a debt. Perowne’s tone of reasonableness becomes even harder to sustain. He says quickly, ‘There was no doubt.’ ‘Sure there was.’ ‘Look, Jay. This isn’t some kind of equal-opportunity forum. We take the case on its merits.’ ‘I agree. No need to give a lecture.’ Perowne’s falling pulse rises briefly at the reproof – a moment’s sudden anger is like an extra heartbeat, an unhelpful stab of arrhythmia. He has things to do. He needs to drive to the fishmonger’s, go home and shower, and head out again, come back, cook a meal, open wine, greet his daughter, his father-in-law, reconcile them. But more than that, he needs what’s already his; he fought back from two games down, and believes he’s proved to himself something essential in his own nature, something familiar that he’s forgotten lately. Now his opponent wants to steal it, or deny it. He leans his racket in the corner by his valuables to demonstrate that the game is over. Likewise, Strauss stands resolutely in the service box. They’ve never had anything like this before. Is it possibly about something else? Jay is looking at him with a sympathetic half-smile through pursed lips – an entirely concocted expression designed to further his claim. Henry can see himself – his pulse rate spikes again at the thought – crossing the parquet in four steps to give that complacent expression a brisk backhand slap. Or he could shrug and leave the court. But his victory is meaningless without consent. Fantasy apart, how can they possibly resolve this, with no referee, no common power? Neither man has spoken for half a minute. Perowne spreads his hands and says, in a tone as artificial as Strauss’s smile, ‘I don’t know what to do, Jay. I just know I hit a winner.’ But Strauss knows exactly what to do. He raises the stakes. ‘Henry, you were facing the front. You didn’t see the ball come off the back wall. I did because I was going towards it. So the question is this. Are you calling me a liar?’ This is how it ends. ‘Fuck you, Strauss,’ Perowne says and picks up his racket and goes to the service box. And so they play the let, and Perowne serves the point again, and as he suspected might happen, he loses it, then he loses the next three points and before he knows it, it’s all over, he’s lost, and he’s back in the corner picking up his wallet, phone, keys and watch. Outside the court, he pulls on his trousers and ties them with the chandler’s cord, straps on his watch and puts on his sweater and fleece. He minds, but less than he did two minutes ago. He turns to Strauss who is just coming off the court. ‘You were bloody good. I’m sorry about the dispute.’ ‘Fuck that. It could’ve been anyone’s game. One of our best.’ They zip their rackets into their cases and sling them over their shoulders. Freed from red lines and the glaring white walls and the rules of the game, they walk along the courts to the Coke machine. Strauss buys a can for himself. Perowne doesn’t want one. You have to be an American to want, as an adult, anything quite so sweet. As they leave the building Strauss, pausing to drink deep, says, ‘They’re all going down with the flu and I’m on call tonight.’ Perowne says, ‘Have you seen next week’s list? Another heavy one.’ ‘Yeah. That old lady and her astrocytoma. She’s not going to make it, is she?’ They are standing on the steps above the pavement on Huntley Street. There’s more cloud now, and the air is cold and damp. It could well rain on the demonstration. The lady’s name is Viola, her tumour is in the pineal region. She’s seventy-eight, and it turns out that in her working life she was an astronomer, something of a force at Jodrell Bank in the sixties. On the ward, while the other patients watch TV, she reads books on mathematics and string theory. Aware of the lowering light, a winter’s late-morning dusk, and not wanting to part on a bad note, a malediction, Perowne says, ‘I think we can help her.’ Understanding him, Strauss grimaces, raises a hand in farewell, and the two men go their separate ways. |
