The Stars' Tennis Balls

by Stephen Fry

‘Aha, methinks I hear the musical rattle of a Fiat,’ said Pete, head cocked in the direction of the driveway, ‘bearing, perchance, dispatches from England.’

  Portia jumped up. She forgave herself her moodiness. As a junkie needs a fix, so had she been needing a letter. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I need to practise my Italian on him.’

  Hillary called after her. ‘Porsh, you know your results won’t be coming through for at least another week! Besides, Mrs Worrell said she would telephone us here if anything arrived that looked like it might be from the examination board . . .’

  But Portia was already out of the house and stepping into the harsh whiteness of day. Never mind exam results. Never mind anything. A letter from Ned, let there be a letter from Ned.

  ‘Buongiorno, Signor Postino!’

  ‘Buongiorno, ragazza mia.’

  ‘Come va, questo giorno?’

  ‘Bene, grazie, bene. E lei?’

  ‘Anche molto bene, mille grazie. Um . . . una lettera per mi?’

  ‘Momento, momentino, Signorina. Eccola! Ma solamente una carta. Mi dispiace, cara mia.’

  A postcard, only a postcard. She fought back her disappointment and took it with trembling hands. He was sailing, she told herself. A letter would be difficult. Besides, looking at the postcard with a growing sense of delight, she saw that he had covered it in the tiniest script he could manage and even put the address of the villa in bright red ink so that it stood out against the minuscule blue handwriting which wormed around almost every square millimetre of the card. He had even managed to weave narrow threads of words between the lines of the address, she saw. It was better than a letter. To see how much care he had taken. A thousand times better. She was so full of delight and love that she almost broke into sobs.

  ‘Ciao, bella!’

  ‘Ciao, Signor Postino!’

  She turned the card over and looked at the photograph on the front, shielding her eyes from the reflective dazzle. A small fishing port glittered in a softer sunlight than the one that glared down on her now. ‘The Harbour, Tobermorey’ the caption read in old-fashioned yellow cursive letters. The photograph looked as if it might have been taken in the nineteen-fifties. There was a small Morris Minor van parked on the quayside. Then Portia noticed that amongst the jostling crowd of fishing boats there was a little yacht there, hand drawn in red ink. A nervous smile and eyes had been sketched in on its hull, giving it the frightened look that Thomas the Tank Engine adopted when he was squeezed between the big scowling locomotives. An arrow pointed down to the boat from the sky and across the top was written, ‘The pirate ship “Nedlet” lies pining at anchor.’

  ‘News from lover boy?’ Gordon had come out into the sunshine with The World According to Garp and a cup of coffee. He sat himself on a lounger in front of the terrace that ran round the front of the villa and looked up at Portia through dark sunglasses.

  She nodded, not trying to disguise her happiness. Gordon crossed his right arm over his chest and scratched his left shoulder-blade. The compressed skin in the V of his elbow, cradled in his chin as he scratched, looked tanned almost to black. When he straightened out his arm again the effect was gone.

  ‘He’s sailing, right?’

  ‘In Scotland.’

  ‘I never been on a sailboat.’

  ‘Nor me. I’m sure I’d be completely sick.’ Portia had started using the word ‘completely’ a lot recently. Ned peppered his letters with it, and she thought of it as his word. Saying it was like wearing an old shirt of his and made her comfortable and proud.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Gordon nodded seriously as if she had said a profound and interesting thing. Then he picked up a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil. ‘You want to rub some of this on me?’

  ‘Okay . . .’

  Portia put down the postcard and took the bottle.

  ‘I’ll turn around here and you can do my back.’

  A wave of coconut arose from the palms of her hands as she rubbed them together. She noticed, smoothing oil over his skin, that Gordon had silvery filaments of hair growing in the small of his back, feathered and whorled like a wheat field after a storm, while darker hairs snaked along his shoulders from the base of the neck. She could feel their slight roughness under her hands. His chest was already dense with tight curly black hairs and his beard line heavier than Pete’s who was more than twice his age. She wondered why this might be. It wasn’t an ethnic thing. Pete was no less Jewish than Gordon. Perhaps it was something to do with the English climate. She thought of Ned and how proudly he had announced that he was ‘going to have a bash’ at growing a moustache over the summer.

  Portia poured a small puddle of oil into the hollow at the base of Gordon’s back. Ned was strong, but she did not think he had muscles that were packed as hard and tight under the skin as Gordon’s. Every afternoon Gordon had gone into a routine of press-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups in the shade of the paved courtyard behind the villa, to Pete’s apparent amusement and Hillary’s poorly feigned lack of interest. Portia had watched Hillary watching from the kitchen and Pete had watched Portia watch Hillary watching and Portia knew that Pete had been thinking about his own drooping flab and evolving a socio-political explanation that would justify and ennoble it.

  In New York Gordon played regularly on his school’s tennis and lacrosse teams. He had been outraged to learn that in England lacrosse was a game played almost exclusively by girls in private schools. ‘He’s quite right,’ Ned had told Portia in a letter. ‘Lacrosse is a very hard, tough and physical game. It would scare me stiff. That’s why I think it is much better left to you girls.’

  Portia smiled as she contemplated the future. She pictured the days when she would be able to rub sun tan lotion on Ned’s back on holidays yet to come in places yet to be imagined. It was strange, she thought, that she didn’t yet know his body. She had never seen him in shorts or swimming trunks. She had never seen him naked. Once, when they had kissed, she had felt something push against her thigh. A hot rush of blood spread across her face at this memory and she giggled inside herself as she recalled the naivety with which she had originally supposed him to have had something in his pocket. Perhaps next week, in his father’s flat they would go upstairs together. Perhaps –

  ‘Where is “The Harbor, Tobermorey”?’

  ‘Hey!’ Portia snatched the card from Gordon’s hands. ‘That’s private! Oh no!’

  Portia looked down in horror. Her oily thumb had smeared across the card obliterating a whole trail of Ned’s careful writing.

  ‘No!’ she wailed. ‘It’s ruined! Ruined! How could you! You, you fucker!’

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry. I was only –’

  Portia ran into the house, tears springing from her eyes. Gordon watched her go, shrugged and rearranged his khaki shorts to alleviate the discomfort of a pressing erection.

  *

  Gordon wondered if it was the fact of her being in love that awoke such a flood of desire within him. He considered that he might be just as much in love himself, only where he came from the phrase ‘got the hots for’ was more acceptable. Even most British kids, he had noticed, would rather say ‘I fancy her’ than ‘I love her’.

  The way Portia confided in him so instantly on his arrival in London had done more to disorient him than the strange food, incomprehensible accents and bewildering geography of the place. He had expected from the British Fendemans more of the chilly reticence and uptight reserve that his father used to talk about when explaining the irrefutable logic of his leaving England for America. Portia’s directness not only confused Gordon, it needled him too. It was as if her emotions were more profound than anyone else’s. Her very ability to describe them so freely and expressively stopped him from being able to say anything open and honest about himself and he hated that. He had feelings too and right now he felt like he wanted to take this virgin, lay her in a bed and fuck her till her eyes popped out.

  That was the crazy injustice of it. She had painted him so far into a
corner that the only territory left him was that of a predatory animal. It was so totally unfair. He wasn’t like that. He was a good man, a feeling man with a feeling man’s heart. He could be charming. He could be romantic. But she gave him no chance to be. Mr Wonderful, Mr Perfect absorbed her whole being. Gordon could see in her eyes that whenever she responded warmly to him she was really responding to Ned. By talking about him so much she had planted the faggoty English goy asshole right inside his head. It was like he was the host to a parasite, and the parasite’s name was Ned Maddstone.

  If his mother and father had died a year earlier, Gordon would have met Portia just at the moment she was ready to give her whole being to someone. But he had been just too late. By the time he arrived the door was already closed to him. That’s why now he felt like he wanted to batter it down and splinter it into pieces. All he had needed was to have been given a chance. The chance to knock gently and have her open up, but instead the door was locked against him and the key had been turned by Ned Maddstone.

  Ned fucking Maddstone.

  Gordon did not think of himself as a bad man, but he knew that lately he had been having bad thoughts. He had stopped being able to think of the shock of seeing his father tumble in a heap to the ground in front of him, roaring in pain and clutching at his throat. He had lost any sense of his mother, retaining only the memory of his suffocating desire to get out of the hospital and into the open air, away from that thin, yellow-skinned woman with a tube up her nose and a frightened look in her eyes.

  He had considered his new situation on the flight over.

  ‘One, these guys are atheists,’ he had said to himself. ‘Saturdays, I won’t have to go to synagogue. Two, they’re anti-Zionist. I won’t be forced to go on kibbutz August. Three, they’re British, I won’t have to talk about my “feelings” like I did after Mom died. Four, these guys are obscenely rich. Aunt Hillary’s family were multi-millionaire retailers or something, so I won’t be in that shotgun shit-hole in Brooklyn. I’ll have a car. We’ll vacation twice a year. Barbados and Hawaii.’

  But oh no . . .

  ‘This will be your bicycle. We don’t believe in cars.’

  ‘E. P. Thompson is delivering a lecture on Cultural Imperialism to the Fabian Society, we’ve forty-five minutes to get there.’

  ‘We booked a villa in the Tuscan hills. Porsh wants to see the Duccios in Siena and Hills is collecting material for her next novel.’

  ‘Gordon, let’s consider how you feel about Rose and Leo’s death, yeah?’

  ‘You’ll enjoy it! CND marches are always good fun. And they’re making a difference too.’

  What a fucking joke. But worst of all was . . .

  ‘I’ve got this boyfriend . . .’

  ‘His name is Ned . . .’

  ‘There! That’s him, sitting in the middle, holding a cricket ball . . .’

  ‘Look, Gordon! He’s done a drawing of himself bored in the middle of a French lesson . . .’

  ‘Look at that smile . . .’

  ‘Look, another letter already . . .’

  ‘Look . . .’

  Ned fucking Maddstone.

  Ned leant over the Orphana’s gunwale and felt the spray fly up into his face. The sea glistened like wet coal under a sky heavy with stars. It was Ned’s private ocean tonight.

  Below, the school sailing instructor Paddy Leclare and the five other boys on the trip were asleep in their berths. When it had become clear that, because of the extra hours spent in the Giant’s Causeway, they were going to have to sail back to Scotland through the night, Ned had offered himself at once for this watch. In the past he might have done so out of duty or good citizenship, but Ned knew that he had volunteered on this occasion because he so relished time alone with himself, time to think about Portia and time simply to take pleasure in being. On nights like these, in a good boat running free, a person could imagine himself the king of the world. On land, it seemed to Ned, man was always inferior to the animals and disconnected from nature. Cars and machines might be clever, but they bullied the natural world. At sea, man was using nature, but not using nature up. He would put this point in his next letter to Portia. Love was turning him into something of a philosopher. The clever ones, Ashley Barson-Garland for instance, would think him immeasurably stupid, but then Ashley might not understand that Ned liked being a little stupid. It was sometimes a comfortable thing to be. After all, Ashley’s cleverness was no kind of solace to him. In fact it seemed to make him deeply unhappy. Unhappiness to Ned, especially in his present condition of unassailable elation, was an incomprehensible and alien thing to afflict a fellow human, like acne or bad hand-eye co-ordination. He knew there were people who suffered from these plights, but he could only wonder why they didn’t snap themselves out of it and have more fun.

  To be a lover was to be part of a group singled out by fate for special attention. Ned had never imagined that he might have possessed such pleasure in simply being himself. His skill at sport, his good looks, his easy-going nature, his popularity – he would never for a moment think of those with satisfaction – if anything they were sources of embarrassment. His being a Lover though, a Lover with the most capital of Ls, made him burst with so much pride he could scarcely recognise himself. He wondered for the millionth time if Portia really felt the same. Perhaps her feelings were stronger. Perhaps his were stronger. Perhaps she imagined that hers were stronger and would never believe how strong –

  A sudden sound from below made him turn in surprise.

  ‘Maddstone!’

  Peering astern Ned made out the shape of a head appearing in the hatchway.

  ‘Hello?’ he called into the darkness. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Maddstone, you’ve got to come below.’

  ‘Rufus? Is that you?’

  ‘There’s something wrong with Paddy. He’s been making weird noises.’

  Ned leapt to the hatch and scrambled down into the galley.

  Lit by nothing more than a single tile-lamp and the glow of the radio set, Paddy Leclare’s body was slumped forward in his chair, face down over the charts.

  Ned approached him softly. ‘Skipper?’

  ‘Is he dead?’ whispered Cade.

  ‘I can’t tell,’ said Ned, stretching out a hand to Leclare’s neck. ‘Skipper! Paddy! Are you all right?’ He felt a bumping pulse beneath his fingertips and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Leclare suddenly gave a great cough and started to struggle upright. Ned was shocked to see a long trail of bloody saliva suspended between his mouth and the chart table.

  ‘Is that you Ned? Is it you?’

  ‘Yes, Skipper, it’s me. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Ah, well now, I wouldn’t say that . . . who’s that with you?’ Leclare stared over Ned’s shoulder, a look of fright in his eyes.

  ‘Sir, it’s only Rufus, sir.’

  ‘Rufus, that you there?’

  ‘Yes, Skipper.’

  Leclare’s breath came in short shallow bursts and his skin gleamed with sweat.

  ‘Well then,’ he panted. ‘I want you to do me a favour, young Rufus. I want you to go astern to the starboard locker.’

  Rufus nodded, white-faced.

  ‘You remember when I showed you the locker where the flares are stowed? Good lad. The locker beside it is padlocked. Here’s the key . . .’ Leclare pushed a keyring across the table. ‘It’s the bright gold one. I want you to open it up and fetch me out a bottle of Jameson’s . . .’

  ‘Skipper are you sure?’ said Ned. ‘If you’re not well . . .’

  ‘I know what I need, so I do,’ said Leclare. ‘You stay with me, young Ned. Off you go, Rufus. Quick as you like.’

  Rufus turned and clambered noisily up the ladder to the main deck.

  ‘What a lump,’ said Leclare. ‘He’ll never make a sailor, that one.’

  Ned put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Paddy, please don’t be angry with me, but I really don’t think you should be drinking. Whatever it is tha
t’s wrong with you, I’m sure it won’t be made any better by –’

  ‘Calm down, Ned. There’s no whisky in that locker, and I told him the wrong key too. It gives us a little time.’ Laughter at the neatness of his strategy set Leclare off into a renewed fit of coughing that sprayed blood and spittle into Ned’s face.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Skipper. Look, I’m going to radio for a helicopter.’

  ‘Pass me that bag over there,’ said Leclare, as if he hadn’t heard.

  ‘This one?’

  ‘That’s the feller, hand it to me. Now Ned, look into my eyes.’

  Ned looked into eyes that he recalled as being merrily blue. They were bloodshot now and leaking tears from the effort of coughing.

  ‘I can trust you, can’t I, Ned?’

  ‘Of course, Skipper.’

  ‘Tell me the thing in your life that you hold most holy.’

  ‘Skipper . . .’

  ‘For fuck’s sake will you answer me, boy!’ Leclare grabbed Ned’s wrist and squeezed it hard. ‘What is the thing that matters to you most in all the world? Are you thinking of it, is it in your head right now?’

  Ned nodded as a vision of a laughing Portia arose before him.

  ‘Good. Now I want you to swear on that most holy thing that what I ask you to do you will do without telling a soul. Do you understand? Not a soul.’

  Ned nodded once more.

  ‘Out loud! Swear it out loud.’

  ‘I swear it, Paddy, I swear it.’

  ‘Good . . . good. I trust you. Now then . . .’ Leclare scrabbled inside his bag. ‘Take this envelope here. It is sealed. If I don’t make it back and healthy to land I want you to deliver it for me. Personally. It must go direct into the hands of . . .’ Leclare beckoned for Ned to come close and leaned up to whisper a name and address, his hot breath panting into Ned’s ear. ‘There! You’ve got that?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Say it back to me. Whisper it to me now.’

  Ned cupped his mouth round Leclare’s ear and breathed, ‘Philip R. Blackrow, 13 Heron Square, London SW1.’

  ‘You’ve got it. And you’ll not forget?’