by Jo Bannister
‘I think that’s everyone,’ said Miriam. ‘Time’s getting on and we’ve a lot of ground to cover. I suggest we make a start.’
Chapter Four
There were eight chairs in a circle at one end of the room. Miriam Graves watched who sat where as if their choices were significant.
All Will cared about was that he didn’t find himself eyeballing the pilot of an inbound flight to Heathrow. He set his back to the window. Tessa took a chair beside him, marking her territory with an old-fashioned snap-jawed medical bag she pushed underneath it.
Richard liked the view and took a chair facing Will’s. But it was low and, ill at ease, he couldn’t think what to do with his legs. When he crossed them he couldn’t see past his knees; stuck out in front they became a hazard to navigation.
Sheelagh tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Swap?’ Her chair was higher and when she sat back only her toes touched the floor. Changing places solved both problems.
Larry took the seat next to her simply because it was nearest. Tariq sat beside Tessa, the orientation of his large, supple body suggesting that the ten-year difference in their ages need be no obstacle if the chance arose for some other sort of personal exploration. Joe Lockhead held one of the remaining chairs for the psychologist before settling heavily on the other, palms flat on his knees, feet square on the floor, as if modelling for a toby jug.
Now they were assembled in all their idiosyncratic glory Richard began to think his wife had been right. Seeking equilibrium in this company was like a glue-sniffer going cold turkey at a model-plane convention. Of course they weren’t actually crazy, but they were people who’d elevated individuality to an art form. A phobic, a paranoid, a gigolo, an android and a man who’d retired too soon. The only one who struck him as normal was Tessa and she was being paid to be here. Even the psychologist would have attracted uneasy glances anywhere else.
He knew he was being unfair. They had as much right to be here as he had; his motivation only seemed less frivolous to him. Perhaps they too had worries for which they wanted professional advice. Will’s fear of heights, for instance, and Sheelagh‘s temper. Though she claimed to have been shanghaied it could have been an excuse; perhaps she too was seeking enlightenment. Presumably they each had an agenda, were probably as unimpressed with Richard as he was with them.
That coaxed a little inward grin from him – at least, he hoped it was purely internal; he didn’t want to have to explain it. There was one positive aspect to all this. At work, at home, he felt to be riding an emotional roller coaster. Among these people he felt like a paragon of self-control.
‘Everyone comfortable?’ Miriam smiled. ‘Make the most of it. It’ll be the last time for a while.
‘We’ve got three days to give you people something worth the money you’ve shelled out’ – her eye caught Sheelagh’s and the smile turned impish – ‘or had shelled out for you. Right now you’re thinking you made a mistake, but by close of play on Sunday I hope you’ll feel it was the most useful weekend you ever spent. But it takes work, not all of it mine, and commitment and even some grief to get there.
‘Don’t be anxious about that: nobody’s going to be hurt or humiliated. You may have heard of people being torn apart and put back together differently in encounter sessions but that’s not personal development, it’s brainwashing. Nor am I interested in sibling rivalry over nursery toys.
‘Instead we’ll be exploring the reasons you aren’t making the most of yourselves: personally, professionally, in relationships, inside your own skins. We’ll discuss areas where you’d like to be more successful and work out where these elusive increments might come from.’
Larry stretched in his seat, met her gaze in a deliberate challenge. ‘What makes you think we’re underachieving?’
‘You’re here. Why would someone who believed himself fulfilled come on a Personal Development course?’
‘Because he was sent?’ Larry spoke in a kind of clipped drawl, his tone sardonic. But it was an artifice: underneath he was tense.
‘By whom?’
‘You want to hear my life story?’ He was fencing with her but there was a slightly troubled twist to his lips and in the narrowed corners of his eyes as if the tennis-player was afraid of being wrong-footed.
‘I’m sure we’d all find it instructive,’ said Miriam. ‘But since we only have three days, give us the potted version. Who you are, what you do, why you’re here.’
He was here because of an eleven-year-old girl called Selina, a pretty, energetic child with a modest talent for tennis. Larry was the professional at the club where she played and one of his duties was teaching the juniors on Saturday mornings. He called her Dumpling.
He gave all the kids nicknames but Selina didn’t like hers. Eleven is a tender age: hovering between childhood and adolescence, she was too old to accept anything a grown-up chose to throw at her, too young to deal with it on an adult level – by letting his tyres down, for instance, or spreading gossip about his sex life. So she sulked. When her mother discovered why, she went round to the club with murder in her heart.
If he’d been in his office Larry could have contained the damage. But the working day was over and he was in the bar. He never drank alcohol – he cared too much about his reactions – but he could have done without the audience.
She did not, spat Selina’s mother, pay her membership to have a washed-up tennis bum upset her daughter. If he had a problem with girls who were girl-shaped he ought to offer his services to the Anorexia Foundation because a family club was always going to challenge his delicate sensibilities.
Larry was genuinely taken aback. He had no great liking for children, except on rare occasions when he found one with the talent and hunger to be a competitor, but he considered himself a good coach with all grades of player and was amazed that so trivial a matter could give rise to such acrimony. He tried to be reasonable. ‘Selina’s a nice kid but she is plump. It’s bad for her and you’re doing her no favours by pretending it doesn’t matter. A little encouragement now and maybe she won’t be fat all her life.’
Selina’s mother went ape. Whatever qualified him to advise her on bringing up a daughter? All he knew about children was that a few with enough natural ability and no one looking out for their welfare could be turned into tennis prodigies: great at twelve, stupendous at fifteen, burnt out at twenty.
He plucked his stars out of a healthy adolescence, enjoying their sport as part of a range of activities, and turned them into automata, not an ounce of spare flesh on their bodies or a surplus thought in their heads. Just eat tennis, sleep tennis, play tennis, and try not to look blank when someone asks if you’re happy. Was it conceivable that he was proud of that?
It was possible, Selina’s mother conceded icily, that Selina would grow from a plump child into a fat woman. That would affect her prospects of happiness hardly at all. Were Selina to acquire, thanks to genes, hormones or a taste for good living, a backside like a buffalo’s, she would still be an intelligent capable caring person loved by her family and valued by a wide circle of friends. A future infinitely brighter than that awaiting those who sacrificed all the extras that did nothing for their game – like schoolfriends and riding lessons and pop music – to pursue another second-per-second acceleration on their service and another mile per hour across the court.
And almost none of them would see rewards worth half what they gave up. For a while they would play better and better, winning enough to keep them hooked. Their education, home life and social development would suffer but there’d be enough silverware on the mantelpiece that for a while no one would notice. By their late teens, however, the cracks would be showing. The constant stressing of immature bodies would cause injuries that were slow to heal; some of them would be in constant pain. Then it would dawn on them that they didn’t have the ultimate degree of skill that would let them make a career of this.
Soon after that the game would be over. By their early twenties they’d
be physically and mentally exhausted, with no idea how to spend the rest of their lives. They’d have no friends outside tennis, no skills outside tennis, no qualifications, no job prospects, no hopes, no dreams. And this faced not just an unlucky few, trapped with a bit too much talent and not quite enough, but almost all of them.
So he was worried about Selina’s weight, was he? If need be, said Selina’s mother, she’d force-feed the child cream eclairs to keep her out of the hands of men like Larry Ford.
A cheer went up from the assembled membership as if she’d beaten him in aces. After weeks of bad feeling and rumour, so that he wondered each morning if he’d still have a job by teatime, the committee made him an ultimatum and an offer. He had to change his attitude. To help him they would sponsor him on a Personal Discovery course.
Miriam nodded slowly. ‘How did you feel about that?’
Larry sprawled in his chair in the casual attitude of a man telling a funny story. But the nonchalance of his pose was betrayed by his fingers, laced so tightly across his chest they’d gone white.
‘I felt I’d wasted fifteen months. I’d sweated blood for those people. I’d got them fit, taught them to play a game they loved. I’d taken their snotty children and given them a glimpse of the magic world of the athlete. And this was my thanks. I felt like walking out. In six months they’d be back where I found them, patting the ball to each other like a bunch of old ladies, clapping whenever someone got a service in.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
He smiled tightly. ‘Even an athlete has to eat. There aren’t that many jobs for a tennis pro. You think twice before chucking one.’
‘So you want some way of reconciling your professionalism with the gentler ambitions of your members.’
‘I want to keep my job, Miriam.’ He lifted the powerful head that was nothing more than bone overlaid with muscle to blast her with his ice-blue eyes. ‘That’s all. I came because I had to. But I don’t want to be here and I don’t expect to gain anything from it.’
He was a difficult, uncompromising man, possibly the last man in the world who should have been teaching tennis in suburbia; but his honesty won him a ripple of respect. Richard found within himself an embryonic admiration for someone who could face the ridicule of strangers in cold blood, unbuttressed by any sense of self-mockery. For a man who took himself as seriously as Larry, telling a story that made him look foolish must have been agony.
That he’d done it without hiding, without flinching, paradoxically made the Olympian rhetoric seem less absurd. The same strength of purpose, hardly distinguishable from courage, that made him hungry for victory lent him dignity in defeat. It occurred to Richard that he might have been wrong to dismiss these people as stereotypes. If Larry Ford was a little less than he himself believed, he was still rather more than Richard had given him credit for.
Others may have shared the same feeling, but Will wasn’t one of them. Edgily wondering how the group would react to a cowardly reporter, scanning the watching faces to see how they responded to a martinet coach, Richard was startled to see an animosity bordering on hatred in the set jaw and blazing eyes of a young man he’d thought so mild as to have practically no personality at all.
He opened his mouth with the question already framed. Then he thought better of it, looked quickly at Larry to see if he’d noticed – he hadn’t – and back at Will. But by then the murder was gone from his face, and his gaze had dropped to his knees where he was quietly picking a little lint off a trouser-leg.
Chapter Five
When they broke for coffee Richard got Will alone, wanting to ask about what he’d seen. But Will got in first. No trace of the mute fury remained. His clear grey eyes were puzzled and he kept his voice low. ‘Is there something weird going on here?’
Richard didn’t know how to answer. ‘You tell me.’
‘Nobody’s here of their own free will. Or am I wrong – are you?’
He was about to say that he was, but realized it wasn’t strictly true. ‘My station’s medico booked me in. I’d no objections but it wasn’t my idea.’
‘And Sheelagh was sent by a client, and Larry by his committee, and I won mine in a competition.’
‘What’s weird about that?’
‘I didn’t enter any competition.’
A sensation like ants crawled up Richard’s back. ‘Did you tell them?’
‘Of course. I called the number on the letterhead. They said the entry was in my name so the prize was mine. They suggested a girlfriend must have entered me.’
‘Possible?’
Will’s gaze went distant for a moment. ‘No. I decided, though she denied it, it was my secretary. She tends to mother me. Maybe she thought I needed my head examining and was too polite to say so. I’d been a bit low—’ He heard himself rambling, shook his head irritably. ‘A relationship ended and I didn’t get over it as quickly as I should have done. I thought maybe that was why she put me forward. But hellfire, Richard, it’s bloody odd that everyone’s here at someone else’s behest. As if we were – conscripted.’
Richard chuckled, feeling his spirits lighten at the rare sensation of being surrounded by people more neurotic than him. Whether or not this weekend helped him get back to work, it was going to be entertaining. ‘You don’t think that’s a little paranoid?’
Will looked at him quickly, then sniffed. ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’
‘OK, let’s find out.’ Richard raised his voice. ‘Excuse me, folks, but we’re curious to know if everyone’s here under duress or if some of you came from choice.’
Joe Lockhead stuck up his hand like a small boy anxious to get into teacher’s good books. ‘I did.’ A moment later Tariq added, ‘Me too. Well, more or less.’
‘How much more,’ asked Will suspiciously, ‘and how much less?’
Tariq gave an elegant shrug. For a big man he was surprisingly graceful. He dressed confidently – a pale grey suit with a faint expensive sheen over a burgundy shirt with a diamond stud instead of a tie – which, combined with the theatrical hairstyle, argued scant desire to blend into the background. ‘A friend did one of these courses and found it fascinating. She said she learnt stuff about herself and other people that improved her professional effectiveness. She thought I should give it a try.’
‘Personal recommendation is the best advertisement,’ nodded Miriam. If she was offended by the line the conversation had taken it didn’t show.
Tariq grinned, a white slash in the olive skin. ‘Oh no it isn’t. A really good campaign devised by an outstanding promotions agent is the best advertisement.’
The psychologist chuckled. ‘Are you sure you need help promoting yourself effectively, Tariq?’
He had no difficulty taking that as a compliment. If in doubt he took everything as a compliment. Optimism was a creed that served him well: he saw business less as a rat race than a river of opportunities. And he liked women – any age, any colour, any shape. He basked in their attention. ‘Perfection is the prerogative of God,’ he said modestly. ‘For the rest of us there’s usually room for improvement.’
Sheelagh ran on high-octane fuel, impatience never more than a breath away. She said testily, ‘What is this, a mutual admiration society? Can we get on?’
Miriam raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s interesting. You say you don’t want to be here, Sheelagh, but you resent being left out. Is there something you want to contribute?’
Sheelagh glowered, a tetchy David squaring up to an intellectual Goliath. ‘Since you ask, I’d quite like to put on record that I think you’re all mad – sitting on top of an hotel that isn’t even open yet, swapping CVs. It’s like being on Miss World! “Tariq is a promotions agent, his main interest is himself and his ambition is to find someone who finds this subject as engrossing as he does.”‘
Miriam laughed out loud, a generous laugh without rancour. ‘All right, so what do we tell the judges about you? “Sheelagh i
s in advertising—”‘
‘”Sheelagh is the proprietor of an advertising agency,”‘ she amended, torn between reluctance to play this game and the desire to win it.
‘”Sheelagh is the proprietor of an advertising agency,”‘ agreed the psychologist. ‘” She has worked hard for this and is proud of her achievement. Her hobby is the same as her work. So is her ambition.” Yes?’
The younger woman was fighting the urge to smile. ‘Boring, huh?’
‘Oh yes, being happy’s a real bummer.’
Sheelagh looked surprised. ‘Happy? Am I?’
Miriam gave a hefty shrug. ‘Can’t help you with that. You are if you think you are. But as a rule, people who’re not happy with their lot want something different, not more of the same.’
‘So it’s all right to be a workaholic.’
‘I didn’t say that. I said it made you happy. Whether it’s good for you is something else.’
‘Perhaps I should broaden my horizons.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Get out and meet people?’
‘Yes.’
Sheelagh nodded thoughtfully. ‘See if any of them want to buy advertising.’ It was hard to know if she was joking.
Before resuming, Miriam sent the group off to find their rooms. ‘Mrs Venables has put your bags in them so if you recognize your own gear, that’s where you’re sleeping.’
‘Don’t we get a jolly dorm and pillow-fights after lights out?’ murmured Tariq.
‘You get,’ said Miriam, ‘seven of the best rooms in what will be, when it’s furnished, one of the best hotels in London. The facilities aren’t luxury standard yet. You have a bed each, a chair and a chest, but we haven’t got a television between us. On the other hand, the view will never be better.’