by Ian Mcewan
While Henry does his stretching exercises, Jay goes back on court to keep the ball warm, driving it down the right-hand wall. There appears to be an extra punch today in his low shots, and the sequence of fast volleys is surely planned to intimidate an opponent. It works. Perowne feels the echoing rifle-shot crack of the ball as an oppression; there's an unusual stiffness in his neck as he goes through his routine, pushing with his left hand against his right elbow. Through the open glass door, he raises his voice to explain why he's late, but it's a truncated account, centred mostly on the scrape itself, the way the red car pulled out, and how he swerved, how the damage to the paintwork was surprisingly light. He skips the rest, saying only that it took a while to sort out. He doesn't want to hear himself describe Baxter and his friends. They'll interest Strauss too much, and prompt questions he doesn't feel like answering yet. He's already feeling a rising unease about the encounter, a disquiet he can't yet define, though guilt is certainly an element.
He feels his left knee creak as he stretches his hamstrings. When will it be time to give up this game? His fiftieth birthday? Or sooner. Get out before he rips an anterior cruciate ligament, or crashes to the parquet with his first coronary. He's working on the tendons of his other leg, Strauss is still performing his rapid-fire volleys. Perowne suddenly feels his own life as fragile and precious. His limbs appear to him as neglected old friends, absurdly long and breakable. Is he in mild shock? His heart will be all the more vulnerable after that punch. His chest still aches. He has a duty to others to survive, and he mustn't endanger his own life for a mere game, smacking a ball against a wall. And there's no such thing as a gentle game of squash, especially with Jay. Especially with himself. They both hate to lose. Once they get going, they fight points like madmen. He should make excuses and pull out now, and risk irritating his friend. A negligible price. As he straightens up, it occurs to Perowne that what he really wants is to go home and lie down in the bedroom and think it through, the dispute in University Street, and decide how he should have handled it, and what it was he got wrong.
But even as he's thinking this, he's pulling on his goggles and stepping onto the court and closing the door behind him. He kneels to settle his valuables in a front-wall corner. There's a momentum to the everyday, a Saturday-morning game of squash with a good friend and colleague, that he doesn't have the strength of will to interrupt. He stands on the backhand side of the court, Strauss sends a brisk, friendly ball down the centre, automatically Perowne returns it, back along its path. And so they are launched into the familiar routines of a warm-up. The third ball he mis-hits, slapping it loudly into the tin. A couple of strokes later he stops to retie his laces. He can't settle. He feels slow and encumbered and his grip feels misaligned, too open, too closed, he doesn't know. He fiddles with his racket between strokes. Four minutes pass and they've yet to have a decent exchange. There's none of that easy rhythm that usually works them into their game. He notices that Jay is slowing his pace, offering easier angles to keep the ball in play. At last, Perowne feels obliged to say he's ready. Since he lost last week's game—this is their arrangement—he is to serve.
He takes up his position in the right-hand service box. From behind him on the other side of the court, he hears Jay mutter, “OK.” The silence is complete, of that hissing variety rarely heard in a city; no other players, no street sounds, not even from the march. For two or three seconds Perowne stares at the dense black ball in his left hand, willing himself to narrow the range of his thoughts. He serves a high lob, well placed in so far as it arcs too high for a volley, and slides off the side wall onto the back. But even as it leaves him, he knows he's hit it too hard. It comes off the back wall with some residual speed, leaving Jay plenty of space to drive a straight return down the side wall to a good length. The ball dies in the corner, dribbling off the back wall as Perowne reaches it.
With barely a pause, Jay snatches up the ball to serve from the right box. Perowne, gauging his opponent's mood, is expecting an overarm smash and is crouched forwards, prepared to take a volley before the ball nicks the side wall. But Strauss has made his own calculations about mood. He serves a soft bodyline, angled straight into Perowne's right shoulder. It's the perfect shot to play at an indecisive opponent. He steps back, but too late and not far enough and, at some point in his confusion, loses sight of the ball. His return drops into the front of the court and Strauss drives it hard into the right-hand corner. They've been playing less than a minute, Perowne has lost his serve, is one point down and knows already that he's lost control. And so it goes on, relentlessly for the next five points, with Jay in possession of the centre of the court, and Perowne, dazed and defensive, initiating nothing.
At six-love, Strauss finally makes an unforced error. Perowne serves the same high lob, but this time it falls nicely off the back wall. Strauss does well to hook it out, but the ball sits up on the short line and Perowne amazes himself with a perfect dying-length drive. With that little swoon of euphoria comes the ability to concentrate. He takes the next three points without trouble, and on the last of these, clinched by a volley drop, he hears Jay swearing at himself as he walks to the back of the court. Now, the magical authority, and all the initiatives are Henry's. He has possession of the centre of the court and is sending his opponent running from front to back. Soon he's ahead at seven-six and is certain he'll take the next two points. Even as he thinks this, he makes a careless cross-court shot which Strauss pounces on and, with a neat slice, drops into the corner. Perowne manages to resist the lure of self-hatred as he walks to the left-hand court to receive the serve. But as the ball floats off the front wall towards him, unwanted thoughts are shaking at his concentration. He sees the pathetic figure of Baxter in the rear-view mirror. This is precisely the moment he should have stepped forwards for a backhand volley—he could reach it at a stretch—but he hesitates. The ball hits the nick—the join between the wall and the floor—and rolls insultingly over his foot. It's a lucky shot, and in his irritation he longs to say so. Seven-all. But there's no fight to the end. Perowne feels himself moving through a mental fog, and Jay takes the last two points in quick succession.
Neither man has any illusions about his game. They are halfway decent club players, both approaching fifty. Their arrangement is that between games—they play the best of five—they pause to let their pulse rates settle. Sometimes they even sit on the floor. Today, the first game hasn't been strenuous, so they walk slowly up and down the court. The anaesthetist wants to know about the Chapman girl. He's gone out of his way to make friends with her. The girl's street manner didn't withstand the pep talk that Perowne, passing in the corridor, overheard Strauss deliver. The anaesthetist had gone up to the ward to introduce himself. He found a Filipino nurse in tears over some abuse she'd received. Strauss sat on the bed and put his face close to the girl's.
“Listen, honey. You want us to fix that sorry head of yours, you've got to help us. You hear? You don't want us to fix it, take your attitude home. We got plenty of other patients waiting to get in your bed. Look, here's your stuff in the locker. You want me to start putting it in your bag? OK. Here we go. Toothbrush. Discman. Hairbrush . . . No? So which is it to be? Fine. OK, look, I'm taking them out again. No, look, I really am. You help us, we help you. We got a deal? Let's shake hands.”
Perowne reports on her good progress this morning.
“I like that kid,” Jay says. “She reminds me of myself at that age. A pain in the ass in every direction. She might go down in flames, she might do something with herself.”
“Well, she'll pull through this one,” Perowne says as he takes up his position to receive. “At least it'll be her own decision to crash. Let's go.”
He's spoken too soon. Jay's serve is on him, but his own word “crash,” trailing memories of the night as well as the morning, fragments into a dozen associations. Everything that's happened to him recently occurs to him at once. He's no longer in the present. The deserted icy square, the plane
and its pinprick of fire, his son in the kitchen, his wife in bed, his daughter on her way from Paris, the three men in the street—he occupies the wrong time coordinates, or he's in them all at once. The ball surprises him—it's as if he left the court for a moment. He takes the ball late, scooping it from the floor. At once Strauss springs out from the “T” for the kill shot. And so the second game begins as the first. But this time Henry has to run hard to lose. Jay's prepared to let the rallies go on while he hogs centre court and lobs to the back, drops to the front, and finds his angle shots. Perowne scampers around his opponent like a circus pony. He twists back to lift balls out of the rear corners, then dashes forwards at a stretch to connect with the drop shots. The constant change of direction tires him as much as his gathering self-hatred. Why has he volunteered for, even anticipated with pleasure, this humiliation, this torture? It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place. As intimate and self-evident as the feel of his tongue in his mouth. Only he can go wrong in quite this way, and only he deserves to lose in just this manner. As the points fall he draws his remaining energy from a darkening pool of fury.
He says nothing, to himself or his opponent. He won't let Jay hear him curse. But the silence is another kind of affliction. They're at eight-three. Jay plays a cross-court drive—probably a mistake, because the ball is left loose, ready for interception. Perowne sees his chance. If he can get to it, Jay will be caught out of position. Aware of this, Jay moves out from his stroke towards centre court, blocking Perowne's path. Immediately Perowne calls for a let. They stop and Strauss turns to express surprise.
“Are you kidding?”
“For fuck's sake,” Perowne says through his furious breathing, and pointing his racket in the direction he was heading. “You stepped right into me.”
The language startles them both. Strauss immediately concedes. “OK, OK. It's a let.”
As he goes to the service box and tries to calm himself, Perowne can't help considering that at eight-three, and already a game up, it's ungenerous of Jay to query such an obvious call. Ungenerous is generous. The judgment doesn't help him deliver the service he needs, for this is his last chance to get back in the game. The ball goes so wide of the wall that Jay is able to step to his left and reach for an easy forehand smash. He takes the service back, and the game is over in half a minute.
The prospect of making small talk on court for a few minutes is now unendurable. Henry puts his racket down, pulls off his goggles and mutters something about needing water. He leaves the court and goes to the changing room and drinks from the fountain there. The place is deserted except for an unseen figure in the showers. A TV high on the wall is showing a news channel. He splashes his face at a basin, and rests his head on his forearms. He hears his pulse knocking in his ears, sweat is dribbling down his spine, his face and feet are burning. There's only one thing in life he wants. Everything else has dropped away. He has to beat Strauss. He needs to win three games in a row to take the set. Unbelievably difficult, but for the moment he desires and can think of nothing else. In this minute or two alone, he must think carefully about his game, cut to the fundamentals, decide what he's doing wrong and fix it. He's beaten Strauss many times before. He has to stop being angry with himself and think about his game.
When he raises his head, he sees in the washroom mirror, beyond his reddened face, a reflection of the silent TV behind him showing the same old footage of the cargo plane on the runway. But then, briefly, enticingly, two men with coats over their heads—surely the two pilots—in handcuffs being led towards a police van. They've been arrested. Something's happened. A reporter outside a police station is talking to the camera. Then the anchor is talking to the reporter. Perowne shifts position so the screen is no longer in view. Isn't it possible to enjoy an hour's recreation without this invasion, this infection from the public domain? He begins to see the matter resolving in simple terms: winning his game will be an assertion of his privacy. He has a right now and then—everyone has it—not to be disturbed by world events, or even street events. Cooling down in the locker room, it seems to Perowne that to forget, to obliterate a whole universe of public phenomena in order to concentrate is a fundamental liberty. Freedom of thought. He'll emancipate himself by beating Strauss. Stirred, he walks up and down between the changing-room benches, averting his eyes from a ripplingly obese teenager, more seal than human, who's emerged from the shower without a towel. There isn't much time. He has to arrange his game around simple tactics, play on his opponent's weakness. Strauss is only five foot eight, with no great reach and not a brilliant volleyer. Perowne decides on high lobs to the rear corners. As simple as that. Keep lobbing to the back.
When he arrives back on court, the consultant anaesthetist comes straight over to him. “You all right, Henry? You pissed off?”
“Yeah. With myself. But having to argue that let didn't help.”
“You were right, I was wrong. I'm sorry. Are you ready?”
Perowne stands in the receiving position, intent on the rhythm of his breathing, prepared to perform a simple move, virtually a standard procedure: he'll volley the serve before it touches the side wall, and after he's hit it he'll cross to the “T” at the centre of the court and lob. Simple. It's time to dislodge Strauss.
“Ready.”
Strauss hits a fast serve, and once again it's a bodyline, aimed straight for the shoulder. Perowne manages to push his racket through the ball, and the volley goes more or less as he hoped, and now he's in position, on the “T.” Strauss flicks the ball out of the corner, and it comes back along the same side wall. Perowne goes forward and volleys again. Half a dozen times the ball travels up and down the left-hand wall, until Perowne finds the space on his backhand to lift it high into the right-hand corner. They play that wall in hard straight drives, dancing in and out of each other's path, then they're chasing shots all over the court, with the advantage passing between them.
They've had this kind of rally before—desperate, mad, but also hilarious, as if the real contest is to see who will break down laughing first. But this is different. It's humourless, and longer, and attritional, for hearts this age can't race at above one hundred and eighty beats per minute for long, and soon someone will tire and fumble. And in this unwitnessed, somewhat inept, merely social game, both men have acquired an urgent sense of the point's importance. Despite the apology, the disputed let hangs between them. Strauss will have guessed that Perowne has given himself a good talking-to in the changing room. If his fightback can be resisted now, he'll be demoralised in no time and Strauss will take the match in three straight sets. As for Perowne, it's down to the rules of the game; until he's won the serve, he can't begin to score points.
It's possible in a long rally to become a virtually unconscious being, inhabiting the narrowest slice of the present, merely reacting, taking one shot at a time, existing only to keep going. Perowne is already at that state, digging in deep, when he remembers he's supposed to have a game plan. As it happens, just then the ball falls short and he's able to get under it to lob high into the rear left corner. Strauss raises his racket to volley, then changes his mind and runs back. He boasts the ball out, and Perowne lobs to the other side. Running from corner to corner to grub the ball out when you're tired is hard work. Each time he hits the ball, Strauss grunts a little louder, and Perowne is encouraged. He resists the kill shot because he thinks he'll mis-hit. Instead, he goes on lobbing, five times in a row, wearing his man down. The point ends on the fifth when Strauss's powerless ball falls feebly against the tin.
Love-all. They put down their rackets, and stand bent over, breathless, hands on knees, staring blindly into the floor, or press their palms and faces into the cool
white walls, or wander aimlessly about the court mopping their brows with their untucked T-shirts and groaning. At other times they'd have a post-mortem on a point like that, but neither man speaks. Keen to force the pace, Perowne is ready first, and waits in the service box bouncing the ball against the floor. He serves right over Strauss's head and the ball, cooler and softer now, dies in the corner. One-love, and no effort wasted. This, rather than the point before, might be the important one. Perowne has his height and length now. The next point goes his way, and the next. Strauss is becoming exasperated by a series of identical serves, and because the rallies are brief or non-existent, the ball remains cold and inert, like putty, difficult to fish out of a tight space. And as he becomes more annoyed, Jay becomes even less competent. He can't reach the ball in the air, he can't get under it once it falls. A couple of serves he simply walks away from, and goes to the box to wait for the next. It's the repetition, the same angle, the same impossible height, the same dead ball that's getting to him. Soon he's lost six points.
Perowne wants to laugh wildly—an impulse he disguises as a cough. He isn't gloating, or triumphant—it's far too early for that. This is the delight of recognition, sympathetic laughter. He's amused because he knows exactly how Strauss is feeling: Henry is too well acquainted with the downward spiral of irritation and ineptitude, the little ecstasies of self-loathing. It's hilarious to recognise how completely another person resembles your imperfect self. And he knows how annoying his serve is. He wouldn't be able to return it himself. But Strauss was merciless when he was on top, and Perowne needs the points. So he keeps on and on, floating the ball over his opponent's head and cruising right through to take the game, no effort at all, nine-love.
“I need a piss,” Jay says tersely, and leaves the court, still wearing his goggles and holding his racket.
Perowne doesn't believe him. Though he sees that it's a sensible move, the only way to interrupt the haemorrhaging of points, and even though he did the same thing less than ten minutes before, he still feels cheated. He could have taken the next set too with his infuriating serve. Now Strauss will be dousing his head under the tap and rethinking his game.
