Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [37]
The steward was in my stateroom when I went there to change, unlocking the porthole. He said he’d be back in an hour to close it, once the fresh air had circulated. He was flushed in the face and none too steady on his feet, but I let it go. His was a servile enough position and I reckoned he needed a prop to sustain him.
It wasn’t an evenly matched game. F. White was on duty on court and made up a pair with Melchett. The two of them were streets ahead of Hopper and me, White being a professional and Melchett having excelled at the game during his years at Eton. He had a powerful backhand and a beautiful turn of wrist. When he flung up the ball and lent his head back to serve, his teeth gleamed under the lights. Though he should have known better, White kept calling out, ‘Excellent stroke, sir,’ and smirking.
Hopper was too tiddly to hit the ball straight on; his shots went all over the place. As a second string he was a liability and in the middle of the fourth game, our opponents well on the way to winning a love rubber, I lunged forward and felt a stinging blow to my head, either from his racquet or the belt of his trousers, and staggered about the court, blood streaming from a cut above the eye. It wasn’t serious and we hadn’t had a hope of winning, but I groaned a bit to let Hopper stew. I have never been foolish enough to believe it’s the game that counts.
Not that I could keep it up for long, not with Hopper carrying on in such a remorseful manner. I swear I saw tears in his eyes as he dabbed at my forehead with the sleeve of his pullover. ‘What a fool I am,’ he kept repeating, ‘what an absolute fool.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any sticklebacks with you?’ I asked, but he was too upset to catch the reference and looked more concerned than ever, convinced I was delirious. Once, long ago, he’d pitched me from the orchard wall and sent me spread-eagled on to the melon patch, my cheek splitting open on the shard of a broken pot. Thinking he’d killed me he’d run and hidden down by the boat-house, until, after nightfall, I was dispatched to look for him. ‘Are you alive?’ he’d demanded, seeing me standing in moonlight. Then, as if to reassure himself of the truth, he’d stretched out his hand to take the warmth of my face on his fingertips, spat into the grass and swaggered off ahead to the house. Before I went to sleep he gave me his jar of sticklebacks. In the morning he took them back again.
White was all for treating me like a big soft girl, expecting me to lie down, but I said I had to meet someone urgently. Hopper, never one to stay contrite for long, having first insisted he accompany me to the lift suddenly remembered he wanted to send a wireless message to a woman he knew in Boston and abruptly left me. I shook off Melchett by telling him I needed to be quiet.
Armed with two volumes of poetry and a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet I sat down at a library table and struggled to write to Wallis. I soon gave up on Shakespeare, having forgotten that Romeo’s intentions were honourable and how often Juliet blushed. Besides, considering it was life I was after, the emphasis on death was unsuitable. Nor were the poems of much help, the only lines that appealed, When we are gone, love, Gone with the breeze, Woods will be sweet, love, Even as these, striking me as more expressive of an affair drawing to a close rather than one just starting. In the end, after much crossing out I simply wrote, Dear Wallis, I think you’re wonderful. Please, I must talk to you. Will you meet me tonight at seven o’clock on the port side promenade? I had wanted to suggest we meet on deck but I knew what a flap girls got into when they thought their hair might be blown about. I had just put my name to this admittedly gauche note when a small drop of blood from the cut