“The return match is very much overdue.”
They walked between the fruit trees to the far end of the garden, past the shorn rectangle of tennis court, marked out with white paint.
“Who laid this out?” Jean wondered aloud. “Not Aunt Edie, surely?”
“She has an admirer in the village called Wally Noakes. He’s about eighty but he does various manly jobs like pumping up her bicycle tires and mowing the lawn now and then, in exchange for . . . I don’t know what.”
“I do like her,” said Jean. “She’s very determined and spirited. She doesn’t play the dotty old woman.”
“I’m glad you like her. She’s the only blood relative I’ve got.”
“What will happen when she’s too old to manage by herself? Will you have her to live with you?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that would be up to Gretchen.”
Howard had clearly never considered the matter. Care of the elderly was a woman’s business, thought Jean, and not something men allowed to clutter their minds.
“Perhaps she’ll get some kind of nurse to live in. Or maybe she really does have a pistol hidden among her corsets.”
Beyond the tennis court at the farthest boundary of the garden was a stone bench, freckled with lichen, beneath a wooden arbor. An elderly wisteria gripped one of the weathered uprights in its coils and formed a canopy of leafy fronds, offering a pool of shade. Howard produced a clean handkerchief from his pocket and seemed about to lay it out on the bench for Jean’s benefit, but she shook her head; her trousers were already scuffed with grass and bark, her shirt torn and grubby.
The bench was narrow; even when they sat at opposite ends the gap between them was barely a hand’s span. Less, Jean thought, than the gap between two single beds. Howard offered her one of his cigarettes, lit with a match rasped along the rough stone, and they smoked in silence for a few moments.
Jean felt something dangerously close to happiness stealing over her; a realization that there was nowhere else she would rather be, and nothing she wanted that she didn’t already have. But the moment of perfect contentment was no sooner acknowledged than it began to recede; already she was outside the moment, chasing it into the past. The silence continued, well beyond the point where it was comfortable.
“Gretchen and I were discussing you the other night,” Howard said at last.
“Oh, really?” said Jean, blinking at him through the smoke.
“We agreed that you were a good thing.”
She laughed. “Why thank you. I’m not sure about being a thing, but I’m glad I’m a good one.”
“You’ve stirred us out of our routine.”
“I have? I thought it was the other way about.”
“Surely not. Your job must be infinitely various.”
“No—it’s remarkably repetitive. The same pages to be filled each week. It wasn’t really interesting at all, until Gretchen.”
“Well anyway. Our paths crossed and we’re the better for it.”
“Yes.”
For a minute Jean allowed herself to contemplate an alternative reality in which they had never met and her life consisted of no more than the Echo, Mother, house, garden for all eternity. Considering the thousands of insignificant chances and choices and paths not taken that had led to their meeting, it was nothing less than a miracle.
“It’s been a lovely day,” she said, inadequately.
“It’s not over yet. There’s a game of tennis to be played first.”
Jean had cooled down somewhat and was in any case happy to fall in with anything Howard suggested.
“I suppose you’re going to pretend you haven’t played since school,” he said as they warmed up with a few gentle ground strokes.
“It’s quite true,” Jean replied as the ball glanced off the edge of her racket and away into the long grass. “But what I lack in practice I make up for in competitiveness.”
“You would never tactically lose out of politeness?” he inquired, lobbing another ball gently into her half.
“Never,” she replied. “I wouldn’t think it polite to hand someone a victory they didn’t deserve.”
“Even a child, like Margaret, who might need the encouragement of a victory?”
“Children are a special case. But I’d rather teach her well so that she’d soon be good enough to win fair and square.”
“Well then, let’s play and give each other no quarter.”