Читать книгу Whoring Around - John Bryson - Страница 4

More and more we lunched at his tennis club. He had recently become its Honorary Treasurer. I remember an afternoon, with the washed blues and faint yellows of early winter, when we ate on the terrace. The stonework was damp where the sun had not touched it. The other tables were empty, so it was early in the week.

The grounds were set in a natural bowl. Although the city centre must have been less than a mile away, we looked over lawn courts, rose walks and a gazebo as displaced and untimely as a country club from the thirties. A groundsman began to tie together a new court with white strings and wooden pegs. On a slope below the graveled driveway, a gardener lifted dripping squares of turf to clear a collapsed drain which was, Humphrey told me, the single most disturbing item of unplanned expenditure facing the current year.

One court was in use. The two women were not playing well, and the sound of the ball was dissonant and irregular, but they laughed with the fun of it and the white pleating in their short skirts fluttered in the cold sunlight. The player at the closer end was younger than I had first noticed, a girl perhaps not yet eighteen. Her splendid hair swept about as she hit the ball.

The texture of the game suddenly roughened.

The older woman struck more firmly and shot often to the limit of the girl’s reach as though she had become aware we were watching. Her feet were light and her arm swung with the loaded memory of a once commanding player. Her hairstyle held fast in the cumulus fashion of that season, but the alpine tan on her arms and throat began to glisten and her breath misted at each sudden effort.

The girl fell back to the baseline. She mis-hit into the ground and high into the air. Her lucky shots were pointless and confused. Finally, she held up her hand and play stopped. As they walked together to the dressing-rooms the girl chattered incessantly and her laughter was careful.

I was glad that nasty little display had ended, but Humphrey must have been admiring the older woman throughout. He was smiling. Quality tells, he said.

I do not remember what pieces of his stories Humphrey told me then. He always told them readily and I had heard many before. But I know that when he began I thought his laughter, too, was careful.

During his first pauses we watched the groundsman stalk the periphery of his new court, pushing a paint-roller shaped like a broom, so he seemed to be sweeping away an opaque layer to expose the bright and indelible design he knew was already there.

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