The house was grey and square with two small wings, a stone Georgian house with wide stone steps leading to a front door that had pillars on either side of it and a fanlight above it. The gravel expanse in front of it was grassy now, and slippery in wet weather because of moss that had accumulated. French windows opened on to it on either side of the hall door, from the rooms that had been the drawing-room and the dining-room. Lawns stretched around the house, with grass like a meadow on them now. The tennis court, which we’d never known about until Mrs Ashburton mentioned it, was hidden away, beyond the jungle of shrubbery.
‘You see?’ she said. ‘You see, Dick?’ She was wearing a long, old-fashioned dress and a wide-brimmed white hat, and sunglasses because the afternoon was fiercely bright.
The grass on the tennis court was a yard high, as high as the rusty iron posts that were there to support the net. ‘Look,’ Mrs Ashburton said.
She led us to the stable-yard, past the outhouse where the motor-car was, and into a smaller outhouse. There was a lawn-mower there, as rusty as the tennis posts, and a marker in the same condition, and an iron roller. Tucked into the beams above our heads was a rolled-up tennis net. ‘He adored tennis,’ she said. He really loved it.’
She turned and we followed her across the stable-yard, into the kitchen by the back door. She talked about her husband while she made tea.
We ate the bought fruitcake, listening to her. We’d heard it all before, but we always considered it was worth it because of the cake and the biscuits and the buttered bread and the pots of jam. And always before we left she gave us ginger beer and pieces of chocolate broken upon a saucer. She told us about the child which might have been born to her husband and herself, six months after the old queen died, but which had miscarried. ‘Everything went wrong,’ she said. She told us about the parties there’d been at Challacombe Manor. Champagne and strawberries and cream, and parties with games that she described, and fancy dress.
‘No reason at all,’ she said, ‘why we shouldn’t have a tennis party.’
Dick made a sighing sound, a soft, slight noise that Mrs Ashburton didn’t hear.
‘Tennis party?’ Betty murmured.
‘No reason, dear.’
That morning Dick and Betty had had an argument. Betty had said that of course he must go to tea with Mrs Ashburton, since he’d always gone in the past. And Dick had said that Mrs Ashburton had been cunning: all these years, he said, she’d been inviting us to tea so that when the time was ripe she could get us to clean up her old tennis court. ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ Betty had cried, and then had said that it would be the cruellest thing that Dick had ever done if he didn’t go to tea with an old woman just because she’d mentioned her tennis court. I’d been cross with Dick myself, and none of us felt very happy because the matter of the tennis court had unattractively brought into the open the motive behind our putting up with Mrs Ashburton. I didn’t like it when she called me her Matilda and put her arms around me, and said she was sure her child would have been a little girl, and that she was almost as sure that she’d have called her Matilda. I didn’t like it when she went on and on about the war and her husband coming back a wreck, or about the champagne and the strawberries and cream. ‘Poor Mrs Ashburton!’ we’d always said, but it wasn’t because she was poor Mrs Ashburton that we’d filled the emptiness of Saturday afternoons by cycling over to Challacombe Manor.
‘Shall we go and have another look at it?’ she said when we’d eaten all the food that was on the table. She smiled in her frail, almost beautiful way, and for a moment I wondered if Dick wasn’t perhaps right about her cunning. She led the way back to the overgrown tennis court and we all four stood looking at it.
‘It’s quite all right to smoke, Dick,’ Mrs Ashburton said, ‘if you want to.’
Dick laughed because he didn’t know how else to react. He’d gone as red as a sunset. He kicked at the rusty iron tennis post, and then as casually as he could he took a packet of squashed Woodbines from his pocket and began to fiddle with a box of matches. Betty poked him with her elbow, suggesting that he should offer Mrs Ashburton a cigarette.
‘Would you like one, Mrs Ashburton?’ Dick said, proffering the squashed packet.
‘Well, you know, I think I would, Dick.’ She laughed and took the cigarette, saying she hadn’t smoked a cigarette since 1915. Dick lit it for her. Some of the matches fell from the matchbox on to the long grass. He picked them up and replaced them, his own cigarette cocked out of the corner of his mouth. They looked rather funny, the two of them, Mrs Ashburton in her big white hat and sunglasses.
‘You’d need a scythe,’ Dick said.
That was the beginning of the tennis party. When Dick walked over the next Saturday with a scythe, Mrs Ashburton had a packet of twenty Player’s waiting for him. He scythed the grass and got the old hand-mower going. The stubble was coarse and by the time he’d cut it short there were quite large patches of naked earth, but Betty and Mrs Ashburton said they didn’t matter. The court would do as it was for this summer, but in the spring, Dick said, he’d put down fresh grass-seed. It rained heavily a fortnight later, which was fortunate, because Dick was able to even out some of the bumps with the roller. Betty helped him, and later on she helped him mark the court out. Mrs Ashburton and I watched, Mrs Ashburton holding my hand and often seeming to imagine that I was the child which hadn’t been born to her.
We took to going to Challacombe Manor on Sunday mornings as well as Saturdays. There were always packets of Craven A, and ginger beer and pieces of chocolate. ‘Of course, it’s not her property,’ my father said whenever anyone mentioned the tennis court, or the net that Mrs Ashburton had found rolled up in an outhouse. At dinnertime on Sundays, when we all sat around the long table in the kitchen, my father would ask Dick how he’d got on with the court. He’d then point out that the tennis court and everything that went with it was the property of Lloyd’s Bank. Every Sunday dinnertime we had the same: roast beef and roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, and carrots or brussels sprouts according to the seasonal variation, and apple pie and cream.
Dick didn’t ever say much when my father asked him about the tennis court. ‘You want to be careful, lad,’ my father used to say, squashing roast potatoes into gravy. ‘Lloyd’s is strict, you know.’ My father would go on for ages, talking about Lloyd’s Bank or the Aga cooker my mother wanted, and you never quite knew whether he was being serious or not. He would sit there with his jacket on the back of his chair, not smiling as he ate and talked. Farmers were like that, my mother once told Betty when Betty was upset by him. Farmers were cautious and watchful and canny. He didn’t at all disapprove of what Betty and Dick and Mrs Ashburton were doing with the tennis court, my mother explained, rather the opposite; but he was right when he reminded them that everything, including the house itself, was the property of Lloyd’s Bank.
Mrs Ashburton found six tennis racquets in presses, which were doubtless the property of Lloyd’s Bank also. Dick examined them and said they weren’t too bad. They had an antiquated look, and the varnish had worn off the frames, but only two of them had broken strings. Even those two, so Dick said, could be played with. He and Mrs Ashburton handed the racquets to one another, blowing at the dust that had accumulated on the presses and the strings. They lit up their cigarettes, and Mrs Ashburton insisted on giving Dick ten shillings to buy tennis balls with.
I sat with Mrs Ashburton watching Dick and Betty playing their first game on the court. The balls bounced in a peculiar way because in spite of all the rolling there were still hollows and bumps on the surface. The grass wasn’t green. It was a brownish yellow, except for the bare patches, which were ochre-coloured. Mrs Ashburton clapped every time there was a rally, and when Dick had beaten Betty 6–1, 6–4, he taught me how to hit the ball over the net, and how to volley it and keep it going. ‘Marvellous, Matilda!’ Mrs Ashburton cried, in her throaty voice, applauding again. ‘Marvellous!’
We played all that summer,
every Saturday and Sunday until the end of term, and almost every evening when the holidays came. We had to play in the evenings because at the end of term Dick began to work on the farm. ‘Smoke your cigarettes if you want to,’ my father said the first morning of the holidays, at breakfast. ‘No point in hiding it, boy.’ Friends of Dick’s and Betty’s used to come to Challacombe Manor to play also, because that was what Mrs Ashburton wanted: Colin Gregg and Barbara Hosell and Peggy Goss and Simon Turner and Willie Beach.
Sometimes friends of mine came, and I’d show them how to do it, standing close to the net, holding the racquet handle in the middle of the shaft. Thursday, August 31st, was the day Mrs Ashburton set for the tennis party: Thursday because it was half-day in the town.
Looking back on it now, it really does seem that for years and years she’d been working towards her tennis party. She’d hung about the lanes in her governess cart waiting for us because we were the children from the farm, the nearest children to Challacombe Manor. And when Dick looked big and strong enough and Betty of an age to be interested, she’d made her bid, easing matters along with fruitcake and cigarettes. I can imagine her now, on her own in that ruin of a house, watching the grass grow on her tennis court and watching Dick and Betty growing up and dreaming of one more tennis party at Challacombe, a party like there used to be before her husband was affected in the head by the Kaiser’s war.
‘August the 31st,’ Betty reminded my parents one Sunday at dinnertime. ‘You’ll both come,’ she said fiercely, blushing when they laughed at her.
‘I hear Lloyd’s is on the rampage,’ my father said laboriously. ‘Short of funds. Calling everything in.’
Dick and Betty didn’t say anything. They ate their roast beef, pretending to concentrate on it.
‘’Course they’re not,’ my mother said.
‘They’ll sell Challacombe to some building fellow, now that it’s all improved with tennis courts.’
‘Daddy, don’t be silly,’ Betty said, blushing even more. All three of us used to blush. We got it from my mother. If my father blushed you wouldn’t notice.
‘True as I’m sitting here, my dear. Nothing like tennis courts for adding a bit of style to a place.’
Neither my mother nor my father had ever seen the tennis court. My father wouldn’t have considered it the thing, to go walking over to Challacombe Manor to examine a tennis court. My mother was always busy, cooking and polishing brass. Neither my father nor my mother knew the rules of tennis. When we first began to play Betty used to draw a tennis court on a piece of paper and explain.
‘Of course we’ll come to the tennis party,’ my mother said quietly. ‘Of course, Betty.’
In the middle of the tennis party, my father persisted, a man in a hard black hat from Lloyd’s Bank would walk on to the court and tell everyone to go home.
‘Oh, Giles, don’t be silly now,’ my mother said quite sharply, and added that there was such a thing as going on too much. My father laughed and winked at her.
Mrs Ashburton asked everyone she could think of to the tennis party, people from the farms round about and shopkeepers from the town. Dick and Betty asked their friends and their friends’ parents, and I asked Belle Frye and the Gorrys and the Seatons. My mother and Betty made meringues and brandy-snaps and fruitcakes and Victoria sponge cakes and scones and buns and shortbread. They made sardine sandwiches and tomato sandwiches and egg sandwiches and ham sandwiches. I buttered the bread and whipped up cream and wrapped the plates of sandwiches in damp tea-cloths. Dick cleared a place in the shrubbery beside the tennis court and built a fire to boil kettles on. Milk was poured into bottles and left to keep cool in the larder. August 31st was a fine, hot day.
At dinnertime my father pretended that the truck which was to convey the food, and us too, to the tennis court had a broken carburettor. He and Joe had been working on it all morning, he said, but utterly without success. No one took any notice of him.
I remember, most of all, what they looked like. Mrs Ashburton thin as a rake in a long white dress and her wide-brimmed white hat and her sunglasses. My father in his Sunday clothes, a dark blue suit, his hair combed and his leathery brown face shining because he had shaved it and washed it specially. My mother had powder on her cheeks and her nose, and a touch of lipstick on her lips, although she didn’t usually wear lipstick and must have borrowed Betty’s. She was wearing a pale blue dress speckled with tiny white flowers. She’d spent a fortnight making it herself, for the occasion. Her reddish hair was soft and a little unruly, being freshly washed. My father was awkward in his Sunday suit, as he always was in it. His freckled hands lolled uneasily by his sides, or awkwardly held tea things, cup and saucer and plate. My mother blushed beneath her powder, and sometimes stammered, which she did when she was nervous.
Betty was beautiful that afternoon, in a white tennis dress that my mother had made her. Dick wore long white flannels that he’d been given by old Mr Bowe, a solicitor in the town who’d been to other tennis parties at Challacombe Manor but had no further use for white flannel trousers, being seventy-two now and too large for the trousers he’d kept for more than fifty years. My mother had made me a tennis dress, too, but I felt shy that day and didn’t want to do anything except hand round plates of meringues and cake. I certainly didn’t want to play, for the tennis was serious: mixed doubles, Betty and Colin Gregg against Dick and Peggy Goss, and Simon Turner and Edie Turner against Barbara Hosell and Willie Beach.
People were there whom my father said he hadn’t seen for years, people who had no intention of playing tennis, any more than he had. Between them, Dick and Betty and Mrs Ashburton had cast a wide net, and my father’s protests at the mounds of food that had been prepared met with their answer as car after car drew up, and dog-carts and pony and traps. Belle Frye and I passed around the plates of meringues, and people broke off in their conversations to ask us who we were. Mrs Ashburton had spread rugs on the grass around the court, and four white ornamental seats had been repainted by Dick the week before. ‘Just like the old days,’ a man called Mr Race said, a corn merchant from the town. My mother nervously fidgeted, and I could feel her thinking that perhaps my father’s laborious joke would come true, that any moment now the man from Lloyd’s Bank would arrive and ask people what on earth they thought they were doing, playing tennis without the Bank’s permission.
But that didn’t happen. The balls zipped to and fro across the net, pinging off the strings, throwing up dust towards the end of the afternoon. Voices called out in exasperation at missed shots, laughter came and went. The sun continued to shine warmly, the tennis players wiped their foreheads with increasing regularity, the rugs on the grass were in the shade. Belle Frye and I collected the balls and threw them back to the servers. Mr Bowe said that Dick had the makings of a fine player.
Mrs Ashburton walked among the guests with a packet of Player’s in her hand, talking to everyone. She kept going up to my mother and thanking her for everything she’d done. Whenever she saw me she kissed me on the hair. Mr Race said she shook hands like a duchess. The rector, Mr Throataway, laughed jollily.
At six o’clock, just as people were thinking of going, my father surprised everyone by announcing that he had a barrel of beer and a barrel of cider in the truck. I went with him and there they were, two barrels keeping cool beneath a tarpaulin, and two wooden butter-boxes full of glasses that he’d borrowed from the Heart of Oak. He drove the truck out from beneath the shade of the trees and backed it close to the tennis court. He and Dick set the barrels up and other men handed round the beer and cider, whichever anyone wanted. ‘Just like him,’ I heard a woman called Mrs Garland saying. ‘Now, that’s just like him.’
It was a quarter to ten that evening before they stopped playing tennis. You could hardly see the ball as it swayed about from racquet to racquet, looping over the net, driven out of court. My father and Mr Race went on drinking beer, and Joe and Arthur, who’d arrived after milking, stood some distance away from th
em, drinking beer also. Mrs Garland and my mother and Miss Sweet and Mrs Tissard made more tea, and the remains of the sandwiches and cakes were passed around by Belle Frye and myself. Joe said he reckoned it was the greatest day in Mrs Ashburton’s life. ‘Don’t go drinking that cider now,’ Joe said to Belle Frye and myself.
We all sat around in the end, smacking at midges and finishing the sandwiches and cakes. Betty and Colin Gregg had cider, and you could see from the way Colin Gregg kept looking at Betty that he was in love with her. He was holding her left hand as they sat there, thinking that no one could see because of the gloom, but Belle Frye and I saw, all right. Just before we went home, Belle Frye and I were playing at being ghosts round at the front of the house and we came across Betty and Colin Gregg kissing behind a rhododendron bush. They were lying on the grass with their arms tightly encircling one another, kissing and kissing as though they were never going to stop. They didn’t even know Belle Frye and I were there. ‘Oh, Colin!’ Betty kept saying. ‘Oh, Colin, Colin!’
We wanted to say goodbye to Mrs Ashburton, but we couldn’t find her. We ran around looking everywhere, and then Belle Frye suggested that she was probably in the house.
‘Mrs Ashburton!’ I called, opening the door that led from the stable-yard to the kitchen. ‘Mrs Ashburton!’
It was darker in the kitchen than it was outside, almost pitch-dark because the windows were so dirty that even in daytime it was gloomy.
‘Matilda,’ Mrs Ashburton said. She was sitting in an armchair by the oil-stove. I knew she was because that was where her voice came from. We couldn’t see her.
The Collected Stories Page 74
