‘I don’t know if you should either,’ said Debbie.
She thought of the gossip and rumours swirling about the tennis club. Joy and Stan’s marriage had become public property. Everyone had an opinion to give. Some people said they’d never seen a happier partnership, on or off the court. People were in awe of the way the Delaneys silently communicated when they played doubles, switching spots without a word; it was like they had a telepathic connection. You never heard the anguished cries of other married couples: ‘Yours!’ ‘No, yours!’ ‘I said I had it!’ When they won, which they invariably bloody did, Stan would lift Joy up like she was a child, spin her around and kiss her smack-bang on the lips.
Others were eager to explain that it was all a front. People were sharing the subtle signs they’d witnessed over the years of marriage difficulties, violence, unhappiness, infidelity and financial trouble. Late last year Joy had begun coming to Monday night tennis on her own. It was supposedly because of Stan’s latest knee injury, but still, and then Joy herself had stopped coming sometime around Christmas. It felt like an awful invasion of privacy to hear people discussing the Delaney marriage. It was as if people were rummaging through Joy and Stan’s bedroom, and in fact, everyone knew how Barb McMahon had found Joy’s phone under the marital bed. It made Debbie feel obscurely angry and she knew it had something to do with all the opinions people now had about her life and choices. When Dennis was alive she was part of a solid, respectable, unassailable unit: Mr and Mrs Christos. But the moment he died she was untethered. An elderly lady living alone. She was vulnerable, said her son. She must be so lonely, said her daughter. It all came from a place of love but sometimes she wanted to scream.
Thank God for Sulin, who still treated her like a person.
‘We’ll play hard tonight,’ said Sulin. ‘For Joy. Distract ourselves.’
‘Yes,’ said Debbie. She saw the old folksy Delaneys sign with the smiling tennis ball on the skyline. Everyone still called the courts and clubhouse ‘Delaneys’ even though Joy and Stan had sold the tennis school over a year ago. It was not as if the Delaneys had ever owned the courts, they leased them from the local council, but it was true that Joy and Stan had been the ones who led the way in lobbying the council to build them in the first place.
Debbie and Dennis had been there at that first meeting with the council. Joy did most of the talking. They were all four founding members of the tennis club. They’d been so young, with no idea of their youth or beauty.
For many years, Stan was president and Dennis was treasurer and Joy and Debbie made sandwiches. This seemed outrageous now. Joy should have been president, and Debbie should have been treasurer （she was a bookkeeper!） but they hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.
Dennis’s death had made those years of their early marriage so much fresher in her mind. Was it just the slideshow her daughter had made for the funeral? There had been a photo of the four of them at a party at the clubhouse, where they all got quite drunk on Joy’s homemade Hawaiian punch. It had been so strange sitting in the chilly church, seventy-four years old in stockings, seeing herself up on the screen in her orange miniskirt. She could literally taste the sickly sweet punch and feel the fabric of that miniskirt against her thighs. It felt like it was all still there, that time of their lives, somewhere metaphysical, accessible through some magical means other than memory.
Joy had been smiling sideways at Dennis over her glass of punch in that photo, while Dennis, with a huge handlebar moustache, looked back at her suggestively, and Debbie and Stan smiled unsuspectingly at the camera. Debbie had forgotten what a bombshell Joy used to be. （Wasn’t that the word Dennis once used for Joy? The Delaney Bombshell?）
Debbie’s daughter hadn’t noticed that she’d chosen a photo for her father’s memorial slideshow of him flirting with another woman. （She’d been more intrigued by the 1970s refreshments: cheese and pickled onions on toothpicks stuck in oranges so they looked like hedgehogs. ‘Oh my God, Mum, what are those things?’）
Had Debbie been the only one at that funeral to see that photo flash by and wonder if anything had ever gone on between Dennis and Joy?
It was very possible.
Dennis was no angel. Debbie had been a bit wild herself. They’d both had ‘flings’ in the early years of their marriage, before the children were born. Nothing important. She wouldn’t have used the word ‘affairs’。 Just a bit of fun. No feelings were hurt, or not that badly hurt. They’d even been to a key party once. ‘How did we find the energy?’ they marvelled once they reached their fifties. They’d never told their children. Young people today were strangely puritanical about sex even as they pouted their lips and flaunted their bottoms online.