The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Lovely. How about some tea? Or would you like something else? Cider?’ She cleared some magazines and newspapers off the fake maple coffee table.

  ‘Can I take you out for tea somewhere? What about this park you mentioned? Do they have tea rooms?’

  ‘Waterlow?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I thought we could go for a walk in the woods instead. You’ll find it quite different. Wilder.’ She straightened and smoothed down her jeans.

  ‘Wild would be nice.’

  ‘No tea rooms there, so have it now?’

  ‘OK.’

  While she filled the kettle, Sunny checked out the bookshelf by the armchair. Thomas Hardy seemed to have more than his fair share of space.

  ‘Hardy fan?’ He asked as she came back in with two Disney mugs.

  ‘Those? No. They are my flatmate’s. She’s a teacher.’

  ‘Out today?’

  ‘Half term. She’s gone to her folks.’

  ‘Liverpool?’

  ‘Birmingham.’ She placed the mugs on the table. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  The conversation was not sparking the way he had hoped it would. There was too much he wanted to say. He couldn’t quite focus on her, but he could see her ears were pushed forward by her hair. Closer. An inner ridge of her right lobe shone. It was a sign that she was ready to hear him out. He couldn’t stay silent. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’ It came out in a whisper.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Marriage,’ he blurted out.

  ‘Pardon?’

  He took a quick sip of scalding tea, hoping his tongue would be burnt off. ‘I wanted to know what you thought about marriage because there’s this person – friend . . .’

  ‘You want to marry someone?’ She looked amused.

  ‘No, no. I was talking, thinking I mean. What do you think about marriage? As an institution, I mean.’ This was no good. Outdated. There was no way of retrieving the situation. There was no way of finding his balance now. He sounded like a fusty Victorian.

  ‘These days, Sunny, I’m not sure if marriage has much meaning.’ A loop of her hair swung down in front of her as she bent to pick up a magazine. She tucked it back behind her ear. ‘Just a piece of paper, isn’t it?’

  Sunny was on a raft in a river, being taken in a completely different direction from where he had wanted to go, downstream to white water and sharp rocks. He watched her fingers straighten and her hand cup as she brushed some crumbs to the edge of the table. He reached out to help her.

  The telephone rang. She strode over to the desk and answered it.

  Sunny sank back into his chair.

  ‘Robby? Hi.’ She smiled exquisitely. ‘Sunny’s here,’ she pressed the receiver close. She told Robby that they were going to Queen’s Wood and could meet him by the old paddling pool.

  When she put the phone down, she turned to Sunny with a happy smile. ‘He’s got a free afternoon. Isn’t that great? I was hoping we could all meet up.’ Her face was full of light.

  ‘Me too. Who knows, Ranil might be paddling in this pool of yours as well.’

  She laughed. ‘Top up?’

  They walked to the tube station and through it into a road of tall Edwardian houses and then a small slipway down to the woods. The ground was completely covered with leaves. The tarred path, the broken wall, the iron railings at the edge didn’t alter the sense that this was the habitat of birds, squirrels, foxes and phantasmagoria. The sun gleamed lighting small spots, circles and shafts between the trees. Clara put her arm through Sunny’s and snuggled up for warmth. She pointed out the allotments with their gremlin sheds and plots of autumn vegetables, a spade stuck into a mound of black earth by the gate.

  ‘This way. Come on, let’s find Robby.’

  ‘Do we have to?’

  That stopped her. She looked genuinely puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing. Just joking. Let’s go.’

  Robby was sitting on the low rim of the pond in his beret, gloves and scarf. He had a parcel for her. ‘Wicked silk strings, our latest range.’ He laughed. ‘Going like hot cakes in Crouch End.’

  In December that year, Ranil told Sunny that he had a message for him from Tifus. ‘He really wants you to come for Christmas. He is expecting a visitor he wants you to meet.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He says a friend of his whom you know from the Philippines is coming.’

  ‘To Birkenhead?’

  He had, of course, aged. His hair had thinned and whitened, making his face seem a little darker. Or perhaps it was the effect of northern light. He hoisted himself out of Tifus’s recliner. ‘Ah, the prodigal son.’

  Sunny shook his hand. ‘I never expected to see you here.’

  Hector kept Sunny’s hand in his as he spoke. ‘You young fellows never look back. You forget everyone, everything. I thought it was high time you were reminded.’

  ‘But what are you doing here?’

  ‘Seeing old friends, Sunny. Old friends. You do that as you get on. You have to refresh the memory, Sunny, otherwise it all shrivels up. You know, the last time I saw young Tifus here, he was trying to learn his arithmetic.’

  ‘A fine teacher, this Hector.’ Tifus beamed. ‘Coached me through the exams, opened the world for me, you see? Arithmetic, English, everything. Tcha, if only he was here to help me when I got to the university.’

  Hector’s face fell. He let go of Sunny’s hand and rubbed the bottom of his jaw. ‘I’m sorry, Tifus. Perhaps this name of yours didn’t help in medical school. But you know, you have found your own vocation.’

  Tifus tapped his head. ‘Yes. Ho, ho. Yes. I can count them in and count them out. Haven’t lost a single one so far . . .’

  ‘Tell me,’ Hector interrupted him, as though he were still a teacher, controlling the conversation in the classroom. ‘Tell me, Sunny. How about you? How are you? I hear you are also a bean counter?’

  ‘Not by choice.’ Sunny realized the excuse sounded a little weak after all these years. ‘I too did a diversion.’

  ‘You know, your father misses you. He’d like to see you.’

  Sunny ignored the comment. He wasn’t ready to get into all of that. Instead he asked Hector how long he was staying in England.

  Hector didn’t press the point. He was a gentleman. ‘This is my pre-retirement cruise. Next year, 30th of September 1981, I shall come to the end of my time with the bank. So I am looking around to see what I might do next. I’ve never been to England before.’

  ‘Liverpool is your first stop?’

  ‘No. I was invited to Manchester. An odd conglomeration there – academics, consultants – have caught the whiff of a truffle or two at the bottom of our little Asian institution and hope I might lead them there. I might be a guide after I retire.’ He smiled.

  ‘Guide, mentor, tutor.’ Tifus shook his head in admiration.

  ‘Guide, philosopher, friend.’ Hector corrected him.

  Hector had taken up residence at the nearby Bowler Hat Hotel. He told Sunny he very much wanted to talk to him and find out what he had been up to in London.

  ‘You never wrote, my boy, except for a postcard.’ The disapproval was mild.

  ‘Writing was my father’s job.’

  Later he relaxed a little and told Hector how Robby had turned up in London.

  ‘The wicketkeeper who made the winning run? How is the young fellow?’

  ‘In the rag trade.’

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me. Always very dapper, wasn’t he?’

  By the time Hector was ready to go back to his hotel that evening, he and Tifus had got through the best part of a bottle of Teacher’s. Hector said that he couldn’t eat; he was fasting that day. ‘No solids, only liquids.’ Delora had made what she called her special sardine sarnies so that Hector wouldn’t be tempted by a hot meal.

  That night Sunny found it hard to sleep. Although the heating had shut down, he was sweating. He kicked away the blanket and the candlewick bedspread. He
kept seeing Hector and his father drinking; his mother with her wrists slit. How could she have done that?

  The next day Tifus offered to take Hector for a drive. ‘Sunny, you come with us too.’ He wanted to show his mentor the country lanes, the grand houses of Hoylake and West Kirby, the view of the sea, the river Dee and the dappled outline of distant Welsh hills; the northern world he had inadvertently exchanged for his south coast Ceylon village. Tifus had a route mapped out, like an old sailor, full of tales of shipwrecks, tragedy and sudden exits. He’d veer to the left to bring them near the gate of a famous skipper who had sailed the herring seas without mishap but died inflating a lover’s dinghy at the sailing club; then up a hill to show the garden of a mansion in which a professor of physics had tried to fly, da Vinci-style, for his paramour and failed spectacularly; next down a lane to a gothic manor in which a retired QC had expired in flagrante.

  ‘You have certainly seen it all, Tifus. I’d never have thought so much happened in these quiet cul-de-sacs.’

  ‘Our last moments are full of surprises, my friend, teacher and guide – except I’m the guide now, eh? I tell you, you’d be amazed at the number of clients I have had who conked out on the job. You’d think there’s more to life than popping one’s cork, eh, Hector?’

  ‘Clients?’

  ‘I try not to be the first to think of them as completely gone. I am not a doctor, Hector, as you well know. I just was not cut out for that business. The name was not the problem. You see, the medical profession is used to discriminating a disease from a person. I just had no heart for it. I am more of a tailor. Sometimes I think actually maybe I am only a valet.’ He made a point of pronouncing the T with a gleeful grin.

  When they reached West Kirby, Tifus parked down a small side street. ‘Would you like a little stroll? While I’m here I’d like to drop in and see Mrs Woodhouse. Have to keep her spirits up, but the three of us, I am afraid, might be a little much for the old thing. There is a nice little tea room at the corner. You can go in and have a cuppa, if you like.’

  ‘Yes. Let us have tea, Sunny, and not frighten his old flame.’

  The two of them set off down a lane. For a while they didn’t say anything.

  ‘So, how is Dad?’ Sunny finally asked.

  Hector took in a sharp breath of cold air. ‘He misses you.’

  ‘We each have our own lives.’ The truth of this was obvious to him.

  ‘Do we?’ Hector paused. He looked at Sunny, as he used to, challenging him as an equal despite the gap in their age. ‘Your father is not a happy man.’

  Sunny stiffened. ‘And my mother? Does he . . .’

  ‘Your mother’s death was hard for you, I know. But it was hard for him too, you know. She was a very special woman. He loved her.’

  ‘He neglected her. Frustrated her. He let her die. He killed her, didn’t he?’

  Hector stopped. ‘It was not like that, Sunny. Your mother was a wonderful, talented woman. Your father is a good man. He is not a weak man. He tried to find his balance. But the two together . . . Something didn’t work. Love needs something more.’

  Sunny found Hector’s words hard to take, here in the cold sunshine of a rocky town perched on the tip of a peninsula so far from the heart of their two lives, their three or four lives.

  ‘What does it need then?’ Sunny asked. ‘This love?’

  Hector stopped. They were in front of the tea shop. The glass door had a wrinkled lace curtain pinned to it. There was no one inside. ‘The right time. The right place. Luck.’ He pushed open the door. ‘I am a little cold. Let’s have something to warm us up.’

  A timid blonde girl guided them nervously to a table by the window.

  ‘Perhaps we could be nearer the heater?’ Hector asked.

  She was nonplussed. Hector repeated his request and she pretended to understand.

  He smiled and chose a place by the radiator. He sat down and took off his hat. ‘Two cream teas, my dear. And I’d like some of those round little bready things.’

  ‘I don’t think they have cream teas here. That’s Devon.’

  The young waitress was completely lost. She began to twist her apron with both hands. Hector picked up a small handwritten card from the table. Right in the centre was the speciality: cream teas with scones. He pointed to it and indicated two with a small smile of triumph.

  When she had gone, Hector resumed. ‘Lester is now a senior vice-president in the corporation. He has done well.’

  ‘As a corrupt crony capitalist?’

  ‘No, Sunny.’

  ‘I thought these days everybody over there is.’

  ‘Not him. It is a legitimate company which does some very good things in a difficult world. Promotions for all kinds of social welfare programmes. You should go and see him. See what he does, talk to him. Show him you are still his son. He would love to see you.’

  The tea came. Two scones each on separate plates with a disc of heart-stopping cream and a saucer of arterial jam. Hector looked at the presentation with a critical eye, but did not say anything to frighten the waitress.

  ‘He never told the truth.’ Sunny couldn’t explain what he wanted from him, or from Hector. He couldn’t see beyond the apparent deceit to what had been before. The fog wouldn’t clear. ‘The point of his profession was to tell the truth, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what a reporter has to do. Otherwise what’s the point? Why did he move into PR?’

  ‘It hasn’t been easy for him. She was not an easy lady, your mother. After you came along . . . their lives changed.’ He sipped his tea and seemed to sink into a torpor. When he next spoke, he was barely audible. ‘Sometimes unrequited love is all we have.’

  Sunny didn’t answer. Hector was not the right man to talk about love. He had never married; he had never come close to it. There was never anybody else in his life. He seemed to be someone who wanted to be either completely alone or in the company of a great very many, involved in a collective spirit. Sunny remembered the happiness he’d exuded in the Señora’s house in Quezon City, communing. He could be an uncle, but not a father.

  ‘Do you still go over to the house, like before? Walk around the same block in Urdaneta?’

  Hector smiled. ‘Yes, but a little slower. I drop in for a drink most Fridays, if he is there. Lester is, I suppose, the busier man.’

  It all came back to Sunny then. The hot nights and the tungsten light of the street lamps. The basketball courts, the soft footfalls and his father trying desperately to keep up with his teenage son – a new life growing too fast out of his hands. Meeting Robby again hadn’t brought his memories back in this way. Robby had come with too many new connections, his new world had rinsed out the old.

  ‘There’s Tifus.’ The café door opened. ‘Tifus, come and have one of these scones. We have cream and some very red jam.’

  Tifus pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘No cream, Hector. It’s a killer.’ He picked up the top half of a scone. ‘Is this not stale?’

  ‘Have the jam, Tifus.’

  ‘Not strawberry.’ Tifus sighed. ‘I don’t like this commercial jam. I’m a marmalade man myself.’ He pulled out a little jar from his pocket. ‘Home-made, you see?’

  ‘Good God, man. You carry a jar of marmalade with you?’ Hector’s eyes bulged.

  Tifus’s skittering laugh bounced off the walls and rattled the china behind the counter at the back of the café.

  ‘Hector, you are a funny man. Very funny. Mrs Woodhouse always gives me home-made marmalade. She has an inexhaustible supply. Come, shall we go? I want to show you our beach.’

  On the winter beach, by the red rocks, in the car and back in the guest room of the house, Sunny thought about Manila. About his father, his childhood and his adolescence, a past that had slipped away like so much loose change. He didn’t know how it had happened.

  The next day Ranil said that he’d arranged to meet his friend Drayton at a wine bar across the water. ‘Come with us. Clara can show you the wigwam afterwards –
the Cathedral. It is very special.’

  The wine bar was empty. Ranil waxed lyrical about the wigwam, the Philharmonic pub, the Everyman theatre and the multitude of visitor attractions of this most famous seaport of the British Empire until eventually Drayton arrived.

  He was lean and hard, with a whole history of substance abuse chronicled in small dry gutters down his face. His long matted hair was tangled into the knotted mane of his ancient Afghan coat. ‘All right there? Ranil, man.’ A wrecked grin wrestled with his serial addictions as he flopped into a chair. ‘Hey, Clara, wow.’

  He turned to Sunny. ‘Gorra ciggie?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Unfazed, he pulled out a pouch of Golden Virginia and grappled with a roll-up. He licked the Rizla paper carefully, as if it might have been a razor, then lit the cigarette. He inhaled and spoke with the smoke trickling out of his mouth, as though he was a minor god of sacrifice. ‘So, you all live in London, den?’

  ‘Sunny is in Earls Court. I live near Hammersmith and Clara lives in North London.’ Then something snapped in Ranil’s head. ‘But when we get married, Clara and I might move back here.’

  ‘What?’ Clara’s empty glass dropped and bounced off the table.

  Sunny caught the glass – that innate talent for fielding finally flowering.

  Ranil’s face had shrunk. ‘Won’t we?’

  Clara’s had turned livid: a colour never seen before, even in the skies of Liverpool where the wind and the petroleum burn. ‘Ranil, are you off your head?’

  ‘Hey, wot? Liverpool’s ace, you know. Load of right-wing crap . . .’ Drayton’s roll-up had gone out.

  ‘Marry? Ranil. No way, never. Wherever did you get such a daft bloody idea?’

  Not only Ranil’s face, but the whole of him seemed to shrink.

  ‘Clara?’ He uttered her name as though it could right the world.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve been thinking, Ranil, but we’ve only ever been friends. Right? That’s all. Good friends. Not marriage potential.’

  He was watching her but he seemed unable to hear. Great puddles collected in his eyes.

  Drayton picked a few strands of stray tobacco and loose hair off the table. ‘Look guys, there’s some stuff here you’ve gorra sort, and there’s some stuff I gorra sort too. I have to meet a guy at O’Connors. Just back from Marrakesh. Maybe I’ll see you later, right? Tar-ra fer now.’ He got up and did namaste with his scarred hands to Sunny before making a rapid exit.