by Jo Bannister
Larry had too much self-command to hit him again. But he crowded him until Will stepped backwards. His voice was thick with fury. ‘You pygmy! I let her die? I’d have put my hand in the fire for Cathy Beacham. For five years, everything I did was designed to improve her chances, to get her to the top. You’d have done anything for her? Well, I did it. Everything in my life that wasn’t helping Cathy I gave up. For five years she was my purpose for living.
‘I let her die?’ Again the threatening advance, the powerful body looming, before which Will had no choice but retreat. ‘I loved that girl in a way you can’t begin to comprehend. I understood her and felt for her. I knew what she was going through, and I knew where she was going to. I was closer to her than anyone she ever knew. How dare you say I let her die?’
Their slow two-step had taken them to the edge of the room. Larry reached for Will’s shoulders. Will flinched, Richard started forward, but physical violence was not his intention. Larry turned the smaller man to the window, pressed his face against the glass. All the city spread below them, far down where the buses were like tiny preoccupied insects and the people were too small to see at all.
‘See that?’ Larry hissed in his ear. ‘That’s the view of eagles. That’s how athletes see the world – from halfway to the sun. And it scares you shitless, doesn’t it?’
Behind them the room stirred with indignation. But Larry ignored the angry remonstrance and held Will against the glass forty storeys above the street while his protests grew feeble and incoherent, his face went from pale to ashy and his eyes began to roll.
‘Excuse me,’ said Tariq, moving Miriam aside. He fisted one big hand in the neck of Larry’s track suit and yanked.
Chapter Twelve
‘If we start pecking at one another,’ Tariq said levelly, ‘there’s going to be blood and feathers everywhere. We’re likely to be here two more days and three nights. By then we’ll be sick of the sight of each other. If we don’t exercise a bit of restraint somebody’s going to get hurt. That’s the big danger – not what Cathy’s father might do to us but what we might do to one another. Violence is a self-indulgence we can’t afford.’
‘Violence!’ snorted Larry; but his derision somehow lacked conviction. He’d been as shocked as anyone at what he’d done. He was a physical man, a gladiator, and he didn’t like to be reminded how close these manly virtues approached to vices. He wasn’t a thug but he’d behaved like one and he was ashamed. He blamed the stress they were under. He blamed Will for provoking him. He blamed Cathy Beacham’s father for bringing them here and the carelessness of the British workman for making them stay.
Will recovered his composure quicker than his colour. Once away from the window he had fewer qualms about looking at Larry than Larry had about looking at him. There was a glint of wry humour in his intelligent eyes. ‘We should also try to avoid blaming each other. What I said was unfair. We’re all pretty shocked – it’s no wonder we’re saying and doing stupid things. But we should remember we’re not enemies. Our quarrel isn’t with one another.’
‘No.’ Larry returned to the earlier theme with the relief of a man floundering out of a bog. He nodded at the psychologist. ‘It’s with her.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Will. He regarded Miriam coolly. ‘Have you told us everything this time?’
She thought for a moment. ‘Pretty well.’
‘What are you expecting from us?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It doesn’t matter to you that as soon as the lift comes on we’re all going to leave?’
‘Will, as soon as the lift comes on I’m going to leave. This hasn’t exactly been a triumph for me, you know. I thought I could manage it better. It’s true, I was using you, but I thought I could give you something in return. Self-knowledge, reconciliation, something. And then, you’re not the people I was expecting. My friend—’
‘Cathy’s father.’
She acquiesced. ‘Cathy’s father has a rather jaundiced view of you. Naturally enough. He doesn’t know you personally – all he knew was from Cathy and when things started going wrong she too was looking for people to blame. He saw you as callous exploitive people who’d taken his daughter for all she was worth then dumped her. I shouldn’t have accepted that at face value. Maybe you could have done better but that’s life, isn’t it? – handling things badly and having regrets afterwards. As I’m doing now.
‘So I suggest we tolerate one another till Monday, then part and hope not to meet again. Anyone who’s out of pocket will of course be reimbursed. You have my apologies. You have my assurance that when I get him alone my friend will have some explaining to do. There’s not much more I can say. As to how we spend the next sixty hours, I’m in your hands.’
The same idea came into everybody’s head, and after a minute’s resistance – it seemed crazy to do from choice what they’d been shanghaied into doing – Sheelagh voiced it. ‘I’d like to hear more about Cathy. We were good friends once, I wish we’d kept in touch. You all knew her after I did – can you, I don’t know, fill in the gaps? What happened to her? What went wrong?’
None of them was proud of their role in the short, brilliant, ultimately tragic career of Cathy Beacham. In other circumstances they would have avoided discussing it. But there was a lot of time to kill and no television, no radio, not even a pack of cards. And they all wondered what had gone wrong. None of them knew the dead woman throughout her career; Richard had known her for less than half an hour and hadn’t exchanged an intelligible sentence with her in that time. Yet for these few days she would dominate all their lives. They wondered about her, what sort of a girl she had been, how her glittering career had turned to ashes. How she made the leap from tennis star to suicide.
‘All right,’ Larry said slowly, ‘I’ll start. I met her when she came to London. In the early eighties I was sidelined with injury. I did some coaching at the Fairfax School. I wasn’t there long – I was twenty-six, at the top of my game between injuries – but long enough to see she had real promise. I knew I’d be seeing more of her.’
They’d sat down again, the neat ring of chairs relaxing into a more casual grouping. Larry crossed one leg over the other with the precision that marked his every act. ‘I was right. Actually I didn’t see a lot of her – unless you’re playing mixed doubles you tend to hang out with the men you play with rather than the women – but she was always there, improving her placings with every tournament.
‘Then I began losing ground. I couldn’t stay fit long enough to keep my ranking. Finally I did my hamstring and never got back to match fitness.’ The pain of that – not the physical injury but the more profound hurt – was still visible in the scar-deep creases around his eyes and audible in his voice.
‘I fooled around at a less demanding level for a year or two but there was no satisfaction in it. Not when I’d thought, I’d really thought, I could win Wimbledon. So I started coaching. If I couldn’t be a winner maybe I could create winners. And I was good. I’d been there, and not so long before that I’d forgotten how it felt. I had some good players come to me. Cathy was one.’
He looked across the circle to Tariq. ‘By then you knew her, didn’t you?’ He sniffed. ‘She told me she had an agent as if I was meant to be impressed.’
The big man smiled. ‘She told me her new coach ate barrow boys for breakfast.’
Larry laughed out loud. ‘I remember saying that! I thought I was going to get advice on training as a form of earnings enhancement. I told her we’d get on fine as long as you never showed your face round the court.’
Tariq shrugged. ‘I didn’t need to see her play. I know nothing about tennis: my game is selling.
‘We met at a party. She was only eighteen but already making her mark. The party was mostly sportsmen, artists, media people, and the conversation got on to sponsorship. I think I may have been holding forth, rather – at twenty years old I was a major pain in the bum. This tall black girl in a red dress came over afterwards
and told me who she was. She said, If I was as good at selling as I thought I was, would I try selling her?’
He chuckled fondly. ‘It was the sort of offer a cocky kid who thought the sun shone out of his own navel could hardly refuse. That was the start of a seven-year relationship.’
Sheelagh had an advantage over the others. She’d discussed this particular relationship with him before. ‘How many of them were good ones?’
His eyes dipped an acknowledgement. ‘Six. The last was a nightmare. She wasn’t playing. Her private life was falling apart. She was strained, distracted, careless with her appearance, and when I did manage to get her an interview there was a good chance she wouldn’t turn up. In the end I had to say, Look, Cathy, there’s nothing more I can do for you. Sports stars don’t go on being marketable too long after they stop playing – I don’t think there’s any mileage left in this.’
‘What did she say?’
Tariq smiled and wiggled a false front tooth. ‘She hit me.’
‘What?!!’ Cathy Beacham had been a tall, strong woman. But Tariq was a big man, and the idea of him being socked in the jaw by a girl in tennis whites was as engaging as it was improbable.
Will wasn’t amused. He said stiffly, ‘I find that hard to believe.’
Tariq tried to explain without adding to his hurt. So much of this was new to the man who’d loved her: he hadn’t even known how she died. ‘She changed, Will. After you parted. She was a different person. She used to be a nice kid – pushy but nice. Then one summer the niceness sort of dried up and blew away. She got – tough. Not tough, I don’t mean that – she had to be tough to do the job. But that last year she got hard, mean. She’d do anything to get what she wanted. She was impossible to work with. I didn’t know what to expect from one day to the next, almost from one hour to the next. I couldn’t rely on her. And it wasn’t just me she let down, it was clients and that reflected on my whole business. You reach a point where sentiment costs too much. When the stars cleared I told her we were finished.
‘I wished her well – with blood dripping down my chin I genuinely wished her well. If she’d found someone else to represent her, cleaned up her act and made a packet just to spite me I’d have been delighted. But I didn’t think it would happen and it didn’t. The last I heard was about three months before her death, when she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly outside a Soho nightclub.’
Chapter Thirteen
Will said, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and his voice trembled.
Sheelagh reached over to touch his hand where it clenched the arm of his chair hard enough to blanch his knuckles. Unexpectedly gentle, she said, ‘Will, it’s true. It was about that time that she came to my office. I was shocked at the state of her.
‘She wasn’t there to gossip. She wanted a job. I’d have liked to help, because we were good friends once and she needed a friend. But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t have her meeting my clients – it was only midday but already she smelled of drink. I should have had the guts to tell her the truth, but it was easier to say I’d think about it, ask around, give her a call if anything came up. I took her number but I never meant to ring. If I couldn’t use her I couldn’t recommend her to anyone I knew.
‘So I made an excuse and got rid of her. I told you I meant to keep in touch but that’s not true. I hoped to God she wouldn’t come back.’ She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them. Of the sharpness of word and manner that was her defining characteristic nothing remained. ‘She didn’t. And now I wish to God she had.’
The silence was broken at length by someone clearing a throat. It was the first contribution Tessa had made since things started getting serious. ‘This is a medical opinion – though none of you are my patients so feel free to ignore it. But I’m not happy about what’s going on here. You’re flaying yourselves for failing to prevent something that was inevitable. If the girl’s father can’t accept that, maybe he needs a shrink, but I don’t think the rest of you do. All this soul-searching – there’s a price to be paid. Keep scratching a sore spot and you’re going to bleed. If you want the damage to heal, stop playing with it.’
‘I take it,’ Miriam said softly, ‘I’m not going to get unqualified approval from your journal.’
Tessa stared at her in frank astonishment. ‘You expected to?’
Joe glared at them from under bushy eyebrows. ‘Is this the best you two can do?’ he demanded roughly, heavy head swinging from side to side like a bull’s. ‘For a poor dead girl and the people who cared about her? Bickering over who’s got the best letters after her name? There are people here sweating blood trying to make sense of what happened, risking anger and ridicule and worse, and they could use a bit of help from the so-called experts.’
Having little to contribute to the process the former printer had seemed not much more than part of the furniture. Now the younger men and women who’d felt sorry for him and then forgotten about him eyed him with a respect that made the blood flush in his jowls. He backed off in embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, I know I’m less involved than some of you, but I want to know what happened too. I remember her as a bright girl in pigtails, a kid with all the world in front of her. How could someone like that, someone you all agree had talent to burn, end up killing herself? It can’t just have been losing tennis matches. The world’s full of people who can’t play tennis – they don’t all end up in the river.’
‘When did she start losing?’ asked Miriam quietly. She half-expected them to ignore her. But the thing had regained its momentum and now they were doing freely what Cathy’s father had invested time and effort and money and deceit in: discussing the doomed girl who was the only link between them. In their various ways they had all cared for Cathy Beacham. They all wanted to know what went wrong.
So Larry answered the question, accepting his share of their joint obligation, to the dead girl and to one another. ‘You always lose matches. You can even hit a losing streak without it being the end of everything. But she started becoming a loser maybe eighteen months before her death.
‘I became her personal coach when she was nineteen. She’d had a coach before, a good one, and she’d had some good results. But they both realized that if Cathy was to go as far as she could she needed something more – discipline, and technique, and someone stronger than herself not allowing her to fail. So she came to me.’ Nothing that had happened since entirely destroyed his pride in that.
‘For five years it was like training Pegasus for the Grand National. We could hardly lose. It didn’t matter what the opposition was: if I got Cathy to the line sound in mind and limb she’d be the outstanding player. She didn’t win every tournament she entered, but she won a lot of them and when she didn’t win she fought like fury before she let anyone past her. If she got beaten she put us both through hell until she was back on form.
‘I always knew she was good. The first time I saw her at Fairfax I knew, but I only realized how good when we started working together. At her best she made me think I’d never seen real talent before. She had the potential to be the best player in the world. For five years she got better and better.’
His eyes rolled to the ceiling. Tessa, who was closest, glimpsed tears. ‘Then in the space of one season it fell apart. I don’t know what went wrong. She’d never been stronger or looked better, and it wasn’t her commitment that faltered. Some girls, once they reach their twenties, start wondering if the success is worth everything they’ve given up, but not Cathy. She wanted it more than ever. Some days I thought she’d kill for it. But all the time she was losing control. At first I thought it was mental strain – she’d been in hard training since her mid-teens – but it wasn’t. She could keep going all day.
‘But something was badly wrong. All the ways that mattered she was going backwards. Her concentration started to slip and she got moody. Hell, it wasn’t moods, it was instability. It got so if anything went wrong whoever was nearest got an earful. It was me, u
sually. Well, I could live with that, it was what she paid me for. It was harder to deal with when she started on other players and match officials.’ His drawn face pinched tighter at the memory. The misery of watching her destroy herself in the one place he was helpless to protect her still stabbed like thorns. With all his imperfections he was a courageous man, and helplessness is worse for the brave.
‘Then her coordination started to go. More than any other sport, coordination is what tennis is all about. Yes, you have to be able to cover the ground, and yes, you have to be able to power the racket, but if you can’t hit that ball pretty well exactly where you want it you’re wasting your time out there. Long before she had any technique to speak of she had superb hand-eye coordination. But it disappeared even as I watched. And there was no reason for it. She was in perfect physical shape: she was just playing crap tennis and losing her grip on her life.’
Sheelagh murmured, ‘I suppose you considered drugs.’
He cast her a venomous look, but the anger faded almost before it reached her. He sighed. ‘Of course. It’s the first thing you think of, isn’t it? I asked her; she denied it. I got rid of her on some pretext and searched her flat. I found nothing. She took urine tests from time to time like everyone else but nothing showed. Besides, I didn’t see how she could be taking drugs. Feeding a habit is a time-consuming business and most of her time was spent with me. And steroids is a specialist area – I’d have heard if she was getting a supply through the usual channels.’
‘What did you think was happening?’
Larry shrugged. Even this long afterwards there was an echo in his face of the agony of watching someone he was devoted to slide into the abyss. He’d seen himself as her rock, her strong foundations, but in the end she fell and he couldn’t save her. He said softly, ‘I didn’t know. I took her to the doctor – under protest but by now I was desperate. I thought maybe she had a brain tumour or something. There was nothing on the scan. So I looked at the other possibilities. Maybe it was my fault: I was pushing her too hard. Maybe her boyfriend had been right and she needed more in her life than tennis.’
