‘She wouldn’t let me go to her,’ said Mr Armitage, distressed at the implication. ‘I tried, but she told me to keep still. You heard her.’
‘I know,’ said Mum, and she wept afresh.
It was the land-girl’s turn to make the tea and fetch the cheese and biscuits – at this time of the evening Mr White was busy in the bar – but before going through into the kitchen she went upstairs to the first floor. The Hardwick children slept in No. 4, and they, of course, were downstairs at the supper table. She was in and out in a jiffy, the stoat in her arms. It would be such a joke.
She had just closed the door of No. 1 behind her, the small room at the back overlooking the cowshed, when she heard muffled voices coming from Mum’s room. No matter how hard she strained to hear the words she could make neither head nor tail of them, but Mum was upset, that much was obvious. Bursting with curiosity, the land-girl went downstairs to put on the kettle.
‘Something’s up,’ she announced importantly as she carried in the tray, and then stopped; she had forgotten that Miss Emmet was still at the table.
Mr Armitage and Mum appeared again shortly before nine o’clock. As soon as they entered the room Miss Emmet rose from her chair by the fire. It was quite marked, the way she left just as they came in.
Some of the crowd went into the library to play cards. Molly Berwick and Mrs Lambert sat with Mum at the dining-room table. They whispered together, as though there was illness in the house. Mr Armitage sat by the fire, alone, and saw monsters in the flames.
Miss Emmet had felt ill during supper. Undressing in her tiny room, she began to shudder. Such a reaction was only to be expected, she told herself, and pulling back the sheets she climbed into her bed.
At first she thought the thing in her bed was a dead dog, and that too was to be expected. A moment before she had been feverish; now, cold with anger, she put on her dressing-gown and slippers, and holding the stoat by one leg so that its sawdust blood dripped onto the floorboards, she went in search of Mum.
Talking it over with her friends had done Mum the world of good. Molly Berwick had practically proved that Miss Emmet was almost entirely at fault. No one had asked her to get out of the car, certainly not Mum, who by her own admission had said it was a silly thing to do. And in any case, no harm had come from it, though – God knows – it sounded a close thing. Miss Emmet hadn’t been scratched, let alone bitten, and if she had been going to suffer a heart attack from the experience, she would have had one there and then, on the path, or coming home in the car.
‘I do feel better,’ Mum said. ‘Thank you.’
‘What are friends for?’ asked Molly, and only fleetingly did Mum wonder if she knew the answer.
It was at that precise moment that Miss Emmet thrust open the door and ran into the room. She was carrying the stuffed stoat in her arms, and wore her hair net. ‘I have known all kinds of people,’ said Miss Emmet, ‘rich and poor, stupid and intelligent, but none of them have exhibited the degree of malice to be found in you. It is obvious that you have never known what it is to be vulnerable or unhappy.’
It was an impressive speech, and they looked at her with respect, though some had not understood what she said. Mum couldn’t make out what it was she held in her arms. At first she thought it was some kind of fur tippet, stiffened with age. Lifting the stoat into the air with both hands, Miss Emmet flung it at her. The stoat skimmed above the table, raking Mum’s turban from her head, and bounced on the floor behind the gramophone.
Afterwards those of the regular crowd who had been in the bar or in the library said that they were glad to have missed the excitement. They could not have borne the sight of Mum, humiliated at the table, the waxen skin of her burnt scalp shining like an egg in the lamplight. So they said.
BEGGARS WOULD RIDE
On 22 December 1605, two men on horseback, cloaks billowing, hoofs striking sparks from the frozen ground, rode ferociously from the Guildhall to a hill near the village of Hampstead. Dismounting some yards from the summit and a little to the east, they kicked a shallow depression in the earth. Several villagers, knowing in advance the precise and evil properties of the talisman they carried, gawped from a safe distance. Dropping to their knees, the horsemen buried a small round object wrapped in a piece of cloth. Upon rising, the taller of the two men was heard to observe that he wished he was in front of a warm hearth; at which moment the earth erupted and belched fire. For an instant the men stood transfixed and then, cloaks peeled by dancing flame, they whirled upwards, two lumps of burning rag spinning in a blazing arc against the sky.
On the Friday before Christmas, Ben Lewis and Frobisher met as usual in the car park behind the post office. Ben Lewis arrived a quarter of an hour late and, grimacing through the windscreen of his estate car, proceeded to take off his shoes. It annoyed Frobisher, still left waiting in the cold. When the wind stirred the dead leaves on the concrete ground, there was a sound like rats scampering.
‘Bloody parky,’ shouted Frobisher, but the man in the car was now out of sight, slumped between seat and clutch as he struggled to remove his trousers.
Frobisher, chilled to the bone, jogged to the boundaries of the car park and back again, passing two women seated inside a green Mini, one reading a newspaper, the other noticeably crying.
Ben Lewis emerged wearing shorts and a pair of white sneakers with blue toecaps.
‘There’s two women back there,’ Frobisher told him: ‘By the wire netting. One’s blubbing into a handkerchief.’
‘Really,’ said Ben Lewis.
‘The other’s reading,’ said Frobisher. He looked down at Ben Lewis’s sneakers and smiled insincerely.
‘They’re new,’ he said. Privately he thought them ridiculous; his own plimsolls, though stained and short on laces, were otherwise all that they should be.
Ben Lewis unlocked the boot of his car and took out a long canvas bag. ‘Let’s go into the bushes,’ he shouted, and ducking through a gap in the fence shouldered his way into a dense undergrowth of alder and old privet.
The ground was liberally strewn with broken glass and beer cans. ‘Funny,’ remarked Ben Lewis, ‘how few whatsits one sees these days.’
‘Don’t follow you,’ said Frobisher.
‘Contraceptives,’ said Ben Lewis, whose mind was often on such things.
Labouring over the rusted frame of a child’s pushchair, Frobisher stubbed his toe on a small, round object half buried beneath decaying leaves. ‘I wish,’ he panted, ‘we could get the hang of the game. Just for an hour or so.’
Twice a week, during the lunch hour, they played tennis together. Frobisher worked just across the road in the National Westminster Bank, and Ben Lewis drove from Hampstead where he was a partner in a firm of estate agents.
‘Whose turn is it to pay?’ asked Frobisher, when, out of breath, they reached the entrance to the tennis courts.
He always asked that. He knew perfectly well that he had paid on Wednesday. He had a horror of being thought mean.
‘Yours,’ said Ben Lewis, who had no such fears.
The attendant marked them down for Court 14, which was listing slowly and surrounded on three sides by trees. Though the court itself was full of pot-holes and the net invariably wound too high, it did have the advantage of privacy. Neither Frobisher nor Ben Lewis cared to be watched. When they had first started to play together, having chummed up in a pub in Belsize Park and mutually complained of being unfit, they had imagined it would be a matter of weeks before their game improved. Both had last played, slackly, at school. A year had passed and improvement had not come. Ben Lewis’s service was quite good but he gained little advantage from it because it was too good for Frobisher to return. Frobisher had a nice forehand of a sort, the sort that lobbed the ball high into the air. Ben Lewis couldn’t see the ball unless it came low over the net. They comforted themselves with the thought of the benefit they obviously derived from bending down and trotting about in the open air.
O
f the two, Ben Lewis was the more outwardly narcissistic. He used aftershave and he hinted that he’d once had a sauna. He worried about his hair, which was now sparse, and the way his cheeks were falling in. He felt it was all right for Frobisher to sport a weathered crown – his particular height and porky-boy belly put him into a defined category – but he himself was on the short side and slender. He didn’t want to degenerate into an elderly whippet with emaciated flanks, running like hell after the rabbit in the Waterloo Cup, and balding into the bargain.
‘People are awfully callous these days, aren’t they?’ said Frobisher.
‘What?’ said Ben Lewis.
‘The way they read while other people cry.’
‘I shouldn’t care for it,’ said Ben Lewis. ‘Not outdoors. Not in this weather.’ He pushed open the rusted gate to Court 14 and began to unzip his bag.
‘How’s Margaret?’ asked Frobisher.
‘Fine, fine,’ said Ben Lewis. He didn’t inquire after Frobisher’s wife. Not any more. Frobisher’s wife was called Beth, and Ben Lewis, who some years ago had directed Little Women for his local Amateur Dramatic Society, had once referred to her, jokingly of course, as ‘Keep Death Off the Road’. Frobisher, not having seen the play, hadn’t seen the joke. Far from it. He’d made some pretty silly remarks about it sounding disrespectful to his wife. Ben Lewis thought it was hypocritical of him, seeing that Frobisher had admitted to having a woman on the side. The previous summer, when excessive heat had forced Frobisher to remove his shirt, he had positively boasted about the two scratch marks Ben Lewis had noticed on his back. At the time, Ben Lewis had thought of rubbing his own back against a rose bush in his front garden, only he forgot.
Frobisher removed his overcoat and scarf and was discovered to be wearing a dark-blue tracksuit with white stripes on each shoulder.
‘That’s new,’ said Ben Lewis, smiling insincerely. He had the strangest notion, when he strolled into position on the court, that his new shoes had springs in the heel.
Without warning, Frobisher hit a very good ball down the line. Ben Lewis returned it, though he was dazzled as usual by the horizontal of the grimy net and the glittering rectangles of the tower block built lower down the hill. For perhaps half a remarkable minute they successfully kept the ball in play until Ben Lewis, misjudging his own strength, sent it flying into the wire netting with such force that it lodged there like some unlikely fruit. ‘You won’t believe it,’ he told Frobisher. ‘But I thought the net was higher or you were lower.’
‘Optical illusion,’ said Frobisher kindly, scrambling up the grass bank to pluck the ball from the wire. ‘It’s that jetstream.’ And he indicated with his racket two white and wobbling lines stretched across the sky. He felt unusually light on his feet and remarked confidently that it was all a question of rhythm. He could feel, he asserted, a definite sense of rhythm creeping into his stroke. They were both exhilarated at this sudden improvement in form. Secretly, Ben Lewis thought it had something to do with his shoes. Frobisher openly expressed the belief that his tracksuit had contributed to his new-found skill.
‘A fellow in the office,’ said Ben Lewis, ‘started to get into trendy trousers last summer. His wife egged him on. He pulled off a fairly complicated land deal in South Woodford.’
‘Direct result, you mean?’ said Frobisher.
‘Nothing was ever proved,’ replied Ben Lewis, and he bounced on his toes and served with quite extraordinary speed and verve.
After a quarter of an hour an awed Ben Lewis said that in his opinion they were Wimbledon standard and possibly better than that bad-tempered fellow on the box who was always arguing with the man up the ladder. ‘And you’re right about the rhythm,’ he said. He kept to himself the fanciful idea that they were dancing a slow foxtrot, championship standard, not a foot wrong, every move correctly timed, sweeping backwards and forwards across the court to the beat of an invisible orchestra.
Frobisher would have given anything for his wife Beth to have been watching him. She was always telling the children that he had no sense of co-ordination. It struck him as absurd that only last week he and Ben Lewis, trailing towards the bushes to return to the car park, had openly sneered at the dedicated players on Court 12. The tall man with the sweat-band round his head, who was generally there on Wednesday and Friday, had caused them particular amusement – ‘that ass with the hair ribbon’, as Ben had called him. Frobisher wondered if it would be going too far to have a band round his own forehead.
It came to Ben Lewis, fleetingly, sadly, as he arched his back in preparation for a particularly deadly service, how different things might have been if he had always played like this. Only once in his life had he experienced applause, at the curtain call of Little Women in East Finchley. In imagination he multiplied the volume of that first, last and giddy applause, and flinging his racket to the linesman leaped, gazelle-like, over the net.
After a further twenty inspired minutes, Frobisher suggested that perhaps they should rest. Though perspiring, neither of them was the least tired.
‘I do feel,’ said Ben Lewis, with a touch of hysteria, ‘that we might be hospital cases tomorrow.’ Weak with laughter they flopped down on the sodden bench at the side of the court and lolled against each other.
‘Doing anything for Christmas?’ asked Frobisher at last. It was better to behave as if everything was normal.
‘Usual thing,’ said Ben Lewis. ‘Margaret’s mother, Margaret’s mother’s sister … that sort of thing. What about you?’
‘Nothing special,’ said Frobisher. ‘Just me and Death.’ From beyond the trees came the fragmented screams of children running in the playground of the Catholic school.
‘Do you think,’ said Frobisher, unable to contain himself, ‘that it’s the same thing as riding a bike?’
‘A knack, you mean,’ said Ben Lewis. ‘Once learnt, never lost?’
‘Yes,’ said Frobisher.
‘Maybe,’ said Ben Lewis. But he didn’t think it was. They both fell silent, reliving the last three-quarters of an hour, until Frobisher remarked generously that Ben Lewis might have won the last set if the ground hadn’t been so full of pot-holes. ‘Not your fault,’ he added. ‘It was jolly bad luck.’
Ben Lewis found that he was gripping the edge of the bench so tightly that a splinter of wood pierced his finger. He knew that if he relaxed his hold he would spring upward and in one bound rip from the rusted fence a length of wire to tie round Frobisher’s neck. He said as calmly as he was able, ‘I don’t believe in luck, bad or otherwise.’
From the playground came the blast of a whistle. The chattering voices receded as the children flocked indoors. Frobisher stood up, and, adjusting the top half of his tracksuit, strode purposefully back to his previous position on the court. ‘My service,’ he called curtly.
His first ball bounced low on the ground. Ben Lewis, gripping his racket in both hands as if running in an egg-and-spoon race, stumbled forward and scooped it skywards. It flew over his head, over the wire, and vanished into the trees.
‘My God,’ said Frobisher. He stood with one hand on his hip and gazed irritably at Ben Lewis. ‘You’d better retrieve it,’ he ordered, as though Ben Lewis were a dog. He watched his opponent lumber through the gate and heard him squelch down the muddy path in the direction of the attendant’s hut. Frobisher took a running jump at the net and hurdled it with ease.
Ben Lewis, passing Court 12, saw that the man with the sweat-band round his head had a new opponent. A woman. She was crouching down, racket held in both hands, head swinging from side to side like a bull about to charge.
Having skirted the attendant’s hut and entered the bushes, Ben Lewis tried to visualise the flight path of the erratic ball. He was probably not far enough back. He tried to clamber up the bank to see if Court 14 was visible, but the bushes grew too thickly. He scuffed with his shoes at the broken glass and refuse, thinking his search was hopeless, and almost at once uncovered the missing ball. He bent down
and picked it up. He was now sweating and the muscles in his legs were trembling. He found he held not only the ball but something round and small clinging to a scrap of rotting cloth. Shivering with revulsion, he flung both ball and rag away from him and wiped his hands on his shorts.
He wished he was in a nice hot bath …
Frobisher, fretting on Court 14, was startled by the noise of steam escaping from some large funnel. He supposed it came from the ventilation system of the tower block further down the hill. When he looked in the direction of the car park he observed a large white cloud drifting above the trees. He went in pursuit of his opponent. Struggling through the bushes calling Ben Lewis’s name, he was astonished to see that the ground had been swept clear of rubbish. Ben Lewis’s car was still parked near the fence. The woman at the steering-wheel of the green Mini said she hadn’t seen anybody, she’d been too busy reading.
‘Didn’t you hear that noise?’ asked Frobisher severely. ‘Like a train stopping. A puffer train.’
The woman stared at him. ‘Perhaps he’s just gone home,’ she suggested.
‘He’s not wearing trousers,’ said Frobisher. He retraced his steps to Court 14 and found it deserted.
Frobisher told his colleagues in the bank that his friend Ben Lewis had in some mysterious way disappeared. They weren’t interested. Most of them thought Frobisher a bit of a slouch.
Before it grew dark, Frobisher slipped over the road to see if Ben Lewis’s car was still near the gap in the fence. It was. Frobisher went into the bushes again and this time found the tennis ball and a smooth round object lying side by side on the ground.
He wished he knew where Ben Lewis had gone …
THE LONGSTOP
Collected Stories Page 3