by Thomas Hinde
No doubt it was partly the effect of the heat. That afternoon seemed to be the hottest we’d had. It was humid too. Soon after lunch there were tall columns of cloud and in the distance several heavy rolls of thunder. They were some way off but I thought they’d be coming closer.
First to arrive were the Draycotts. Rene was in white shorts, white socks and white tunic. In this costume she looked more than usually like a mousey schoolgirl. Wilfred had both hands in bandages, one arm in a sling and a piece of plaster on the side of his nose.
How had he got his nose into it?
As we weren’t yet enough to play we listened while they made apologies. They seemed to drive each other on, falling into a competition of self-humiliation. As if they sensed something, they came to a faltering halt.
‘It just would happen yesterday,’ Rene said.
I braced myself to interpose a new subject, however rudely, but already they were telling us that as well as our tennis invitation (if anything could be as well as that) Rene’s parents had been coming next day. Could you beat it? It was as if unless Wilfred had both hands in full use he did not trust himself to show sufficient gratitude.
The Quorums came next. Charlie wore white flannels tied up by a mauve handkerchief. Though big, this was so stretched by his belly that its corners could only meet in a tiny knot in front. His belly didn’t sag but stuck out solidly below his ribs with the curved shape of a squat gas cylinder.
‘I’ll have you,’ Charlie began.
‘He means for damages, dear,’ Queenie explained.
She wore a white pleated skirt above her knees, which were mottled, and a tight vest of horizontal orange and white stripes. She wore several golden bracelets on each of her big sandy arms, which were bare to the shoulder. Though dressed to play, she later refused and I guessed she hadn’t meant to.
‘It’s his heart,’ she explained, putting her arms round me, then round several others, letting them kiss her cheeks while she kissed the air. In her progress I noticed her take a step towards Charlie, who was next in the line, then see him. ‘Not you, dear,’ she said and changed direction.
While I was arranging the set I heard Charlie saying to Molly, ‘This fellow? Your husband, isn’t he? What’s he got against me?’
I had a fast serve and foolishly I let my feelings get into it. This gave Charlie the excuse to turn his back and make remarks about professionalism. In the third game I hit him full toss half-way up the thigh. For the rest of the afternoon, whenever he saw me watching him he started to limp heavily, glowering sideways with mock fury. He knew how angry it was making me because he knew it hadn’t been an accident.
Annoyingly, Charlie could play well. Without moving much he made good shots and placed them cleverly. Molly played as she always did, with absent-minded talent. I loved her best when she pretended she’d intended some killing shot which hurried down the sideline, five yards from the nearest opponent. Rene was hopeless. She played – the phrase came to me instinctively – like someone whose nerve had gone. In command of her regiment I’d have returned her to base before she deserted in the face of the enemy.
Near the close of the set I saw, with a relief which surprised me, Janie and Jim Brightworth coming up the drive. I wanted to go and meet them. If I had had suspicions of Jim they were then totally dissolved.
I was surprised that Janie had come, knowing what she thought of Englishmen playing games. ‘Look at them wasting themselves,’ I’d heard her say, too upset to enjoy her anger. Certainly she had no intention of playing and wore a summer dress almost too narrow at the knees for her to walk, let alone run. It was a bright blue tube, with nothing above her breasts, showing all her olive brown neck, shoulders and arms. Below it she wore only expensive soft leather sandals. It was an outfit which on anyone else would have seemed like fancy dress. Strangely, a point or two later when we’d all seen her, the game did come to a spontaneous pause and we moved to meet them.
‘It’s awful,’ Janie said. I think she was genuinely embarrassed.
‘Cute, isn’t she,’ Jim shouted, taking a playful swing at her buttocks with his racket.
‘You like it?’ Janie said, as if willing for a second to be persuaded. ‘Oh, you can’t.’ And she went to sit by herself in a deckchair. We all watched but didn’t follow because Jim stood with arms and racket raised to keep us back. ‘Hands off there.’
Only then did I see Hubert Brightworth sloping into our drive. He must have been following them thirty yards behind. I was astonished but also flattered.
I guessed that after he’d decided to come he’d seen his mother’s dress and refused, till he’d thought of this compromise. Whenever I noticed him that afternoon he seemed to be looking carefully away from it.
From then on things got worse. They seemed to be slipping out of my control, or more exactly, out of my view. If two people visited us I knew what was happening. Even when I was talking to one of them and Molly to the other I had a sense of what was going on. If there were more I lost touch. I was aware that jokes were being told which I didn’t understand or people laughing when I hadn’t even heard anything said. I got angry. I wanted to drive them away.
That was what happened that afternoon. And gradually it seemed that all this laughing and talking which I couldn’t properly hear was one big joke, a joke they were all sharing, a joke about me.
It had sometimes occurred to me that I was liked by our local friends because I amused them. They thought me slow and serious and rather stupid and I hadn’t tried too hard to change this impression but even found myself encouraging it by saying slowly and seriously things which referred to subjects of conversation that had been left behind. I think I had wanted them to laugh so that they would not be alarmed by mistaking me for an intellectual. This laughter was nothing like that. It was hostile and jeering.
When Mrs. Willis arrived it seemed to increase. I began to feel a great pressure inside my head. As a boy I’d often had this feeling, but not for many years. It wasn’t painful – at first. It just felt as if it might burst.
I couldn’t think what Mrs. Willis was dressed for, certainly not a cup of tea beside a tennis lawn. She had a grey hat with pink artificial flowers and a veil with quarter-inch black spots. Her grey dress, of thick material, came to her wrists but ended above her grey-stockinged knees. She was thickly powdered. She suggested a Victorian woman at her own divorce case, who hadn’t decided whether she wanted to provoke the judge’s sympathy or lust. She seemed to become the centre of this conspiracy of laughter.
Gathered round her, apparently watching but actually saying things to each other, they were secretly convulsed. But they never let a flicker of this show. I couldn’t even catch them speaking, though I tried out of the corner of my eye and several times turned suddenly when they wouldn’t expect it.
Molly was there. That upset me, though because she was filling and passing tea cups she might not be part of it. I couldn’t tell. The only other person it seemed to upset was Jim. He was part of it but occasionally he would point his racket at me and cry, ‘Look at old Harry there.’ He did it at less and less appropriate moments.
I was playing singles with Rene. I should have beaten her easily but I couldn’t concentrate. Suddenly I was having an idea about Jim Brightworth. It was the way he alone went on calling to me as if to include me that roused my suspicions; which shows that you can be too clever.
I was wondering whether, under my nose, I’d been failing to see, not the triple bluff of which I’d suspected Draycott, nor the double bluff of which I’d suspected Quorum, but a simple bluff. Someone whom I’d never suspected because he was obviously brainless, but who was simply acting brainless and acting very well.
Without insistence I tried out the idea. It began to take hold. I thought of what I might have to do to Jim Brightworth. I served a double fault. Then I knew I could do it. If I was right I would want to do it.
The set ended, I took my tea and walked about. I wanted to
be alone. But I was glad we’d given this tennis party. I was alarmed to think how ignorant I might have stayed.
Now I seemed to be watching them again, as well as them me. Perhaps I had been imagining things.
‘Cake, dear?’ Molly called.
‘In a minute.’ I walked to the edge of the lawn and looked out over the low lands to those white and black clouds towering behind the far hills. The thunder still grumbled though it had come no nearer.
Peggy brought me a slice on a plate.
But instead of joining them I carried it with me across the foot of the court to the drive, as if to fetch something from the house. I was five paces on to the gravel when I saw Percy Goyle. He was standing at my drive gate, looking in.
Later I wondered why Percy had been in the New Lane at that time. Pekes had to be exercised, of course, and I’d often seen him doing that. But why had he been staring up my drive? It wasn’t as detached as I’d have expected. At the time I assumed that something incidental to my tennis party must have caught his attention, the swallows flying close above the lawn, or a passing hover-fly.
‘Hallo,’ I called. ‘Come and have some tea.’
When his peke heard me it stopped snuffling and also stared. It gave a couple of preliminary yaps, flexing its knees in time. I think I had the idea that I would use Percy Goyle to break up the others. I could lead him to them, talking casually to him.
It worked. As soon as I brought him across they ceased to be united and began to talk in pairs. I was able, quite naturally, to talk now to one, now to another of them. At the same time I could hear other conversations going on around me, for instance Jim and Percy Goyle.
‘You should have a bash,’ Jim said.
‘Oh no.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like till you’ve tried.’
‘No no.’
‘Here, I’ll teach you.’
‘No, really, no.’
‘Never too late. You’ve certainly got the reach.’ But he saw he was losing.
‘Anyway I have tried,’ Percy said.
‘You’ve played,’ Jim said. ‘Well, there you are!’
‘I think so,’ Percy said. He seemed less sure, now that he had heard the improbable idea said aloud. ‘A long time ago.’
‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ Jim said.
They went on and on. It was as if Jim had found a better contact with Percy than he had ever found before and had to keep touching it in case he lost it. It was as if he were intent on showing himself as stupidly insensitive as possible. Had he always overacted in this way?
Presently I had an idea. I see how rash this was and can only suppose that at the time I was puffed up with conceit at my discovery.
‘Do you make cheese?’ I said, in the general direction of Mrs. Willis though not so that she could be certain I meant it for her. At once the other conversations around me were stopping with astonishment.
‘What, me?’ Mrs. Willis said. She glanced left and right as if hoping for someone else to answer. That was something I foolishly thought unimportant but at the time I was only interested in the way Wilfred was nervously rubbing his ear with a bandaged hand and Charlie had forgotten to finish a joke about de Gaulle and Jim had actually let his mouth fall open as he listened.
‘Out of sour milk,’ I went on, enjoying myself, I admit.
‘I certainly do not,’ Mrs. Willis said, recovering now. ‘Disgusting.’
‘It’s the right weather,’ I said casually, as if the subject had become a bore.
By this time the others were also recovering.
‘Oh but it’s lovely,’ Rene said.
‘Well to be honest . . .’ Wilfred began.
‘Fermented with camel’s urine,’ Charlie said.
They were too late. As if to support me, there was a long distant roll of thunder and for a moment of silence we all listened to it. Or rather they listened and I watched them. At once I was applying to Jim the old theory about size of nose varying with size of penis. I’d always thought it biological nonsense but, staring at Jim’s huge nose, I realized that about Jim I instinctively believed it. No doubt my momentary preoccupation took my attention from the conversation and by the time I listened again it was general and unimportant. It didn’t matter. I’d learned more than I’d hoped.
After tea I watched. Hubert was playing. He played in black shoes with shirt sleeves buttoned. Without his glasses he was like a nocturnal animal put out in the daylight. It wasn’t till six when the afternoon was getting cooler and the sun going down that I next played.
As soon as I got on to the court my suspicions returned. The joke had begun again. But this time they weren’t together in a united group. They were laughing in pairs round the shadowy edges of the court. This time there was Percy as well.
It was essential that I should call on the Brightworths. Time was short. Ideally I’d have liked them to be away, as the Draycotts had been. That sort of luck didn’t happen twice.
The fine weather had come again. It had never really gone. Just that afternoon of distant thunder. Perhaps the sun took a few minutes longer to grow warm in the morning. And more often there was morning mist in the low lands over my orchards, hinting at the autumn which was coming. The dews were heavy, making the lawn as wet as a shower. By ten o’clock they were forgotten and by midday the temperature was in the eighties. The flowers drooped in their beds; I’d not seen that before. I found several long cracks where the lawn had split. I liked it. I’ve always liked the heat. It made me feel more alive.
Molly didn’t like it. It made her tired and she looked pale. She was too fair to sit in the sun, though she liked wearing big hats. Our children had other, more interesting things to like or dislike – more adult things.
I was upstairs making a few final plans till I could go when I heard voices below. There was Molly’s voice, light and puzzled; she seemed to be listening more than talking. And there was a heavy voice. I got Peggy’s window open without a sound and eased my shaving mirror out behind the curtain. I couldn’t see Molly because she was in the doorway. Facing it stood the two policemen with their bicycles.
I listened but I could make no sense of it. I heard phrases like, ‘There it is then,’ and ‘It’s certainly a problem.’ Often I heard only silence, as if they were all thinking. I heard one of them say, ‘Your husband has a gun?’ I went downstairs.
A few paces into the hall I came in sight of the front door. Already, in the seconds I had been coming, the conversation had ended and they had begun to mount their bicycles. I came past Molly into the doorway but now they were in wobbly flight. ‘Good morning,’ I called.
‘Morning, sir,’ they said, glancing round, but only for a second before concentrating again on the stones and ruts. I had the feeling that they wanted to come back but this problem was intervening and then the moment had passed. Using their brakes and working their handlebars they let themselves be carried out of sight round the north side of the house towards the back drive.
‘What did they want?’ I said.
She paused for a second. I knew those pauses. ‘The rabbits,’ she said.
It was far too improbable. I believed her at once.
‘Someone’s complained.’
‘But that’s fantastic,’ I said. ‘There isn’t a hole on the place.’
She didn’t argue.
‘Who’s complained?’ I said. ‘We haven’t a single neighbouring farmer.’
‘You have to control them,’ she said.
‘What was the first thing they said?’ I asked.
‘Just that,’ she said. She seemed to be growing increasingly nervous. I had an idea that it would be easy to drive her away from the truth, less because she didn’t want to tell it than because she would be too upset to be able to concentrate on it.
‘Didn’t I hear something about a gun?’ I said gently.
‘That’s right,’ she said. It seemed to relieve her. I thought she wanted to smile but
she was still worried. ‘That was how they began.’
I was appalled by this new and, as far as I could see, totally unnecessary lie. I didn’t know where to start.
‘You’re sure?’ I said. I hurried on, afraid how my doubt might affect her. ‘I mean it seemed to me . . .’
‘Oh, they went back to it,’ she said with increasing confidence. ‘I think they wanted to help. They wanted to make sure you had one. For shooting them,’ she added, growing doubtful again.
I can’t explain why I found this final and unnecessary information particularly shocking.
As I went down our drive I tried to make sense of it. To my right I could hear Dan and Peggy beyond the court on the hillside, shouting among the trees. Close on my left there was a sharp snap which made my hand close in my empty pocket and I hesitated about going back at least for a knife, but it was only a broom pod snapping in the sun. I could make nothing of it.
I forced myself to think of the job ahead. I went over some of the ideas I’d had in the almost sleepless night which had followed yesterday’s tennis. First was the fact that genuine stupid hearties don’t succeed in commerce. They make good salesmen but they don’t buy the business as Jim had done.
Second, I couldn’t any longer see Jim’s behaviour as the behaviour of a real person. The two had come apart in a way I couldn’t control so that even if someone had said to me, ‘That’s what he’s like, those are real words coming out of him,’ I wouldn’t have been able to fit him to them any more.
But it wasn’t till I’d crossed the New Lane and was in his drive that I saw the really obvious clue which had been right in front of me all summer. I saw it when I realized that I wouldn’t find Jim at the house. He was taking his holiday at home, he’d told me, to finish his swimming pool. His swimming pool . . .