The Last Evening

Mara had put a bowl of plums on the table and forgotten to buy anything else for dessert. She looked at the bowl when I arrived, looked at me and said, “This is what happens when I plan an evening without a plan.”

“We have plums.”

“And potatoes.”

“An extravagance.”

She had made a pie with lentils and onions. The potatoes were for the top. I helped mash them while she read the recipe from a card with flour on one corner. We disagreed about how much mustard it meant by a spoonful and used half of either estimate. The pie came out too brown at the edges and good in the middle. We ate the brown edges first, by choice.

I had arrived with a question about how often to call from Northmere. I kept putting it aside because asking sounded like trying to make a schedule for the part of my life I could not control. Mara let me talk about the train instead. She asked whether I had remembered the charger for my laptop. I told her I had packed two, because my habits were less romantic than she hoped.

After dinner she showed me a thin notebook of pencil drawings, one page for each place she had been able to sit without being recognised during a tournament. A wall behind a laundrette in one town. A public garden no bigger than a court in another. A bench from which you could see a river but not the sporting centre above it. Some drawings took an hour; some were three lines made while she waited for a bus.

“I didn’t know you drew,” I said.

“I don’t do it well.”

“I asked if you did it.”

“Then yes.”

The lines were spare and sure. She had used the same attention she gave a court to find where a person could be alone without being hidden. I liked the book because it held a version of her no camera at Southmere had seen.

“You can look at it while I’m away,” she said.

“You don’t have to lend it to make me stay interested.”

“I wasn’t. I thought you might like the Northmere page.”

She turned to a drawing of a narrow stair down to a riverside path. I knew the river from a map I had studied for my trip. The stair was behind the building where I’d be working.

“You were there?”

“Two seasons ago. The garden at the other end has a gate that stays open until six. If you go, send me a picture so I can see whether I got the railing wrong.”

“You’ll judge your own work from a photograph I take?”

“I’ll judge the railing. You can be as bad a photographer as you like.”

I closed the notebook and set it down. “I wanted to ask how we’re doing this while we travel.”

“I thought you did.”

“Then why didn’t you ask first?”

“Because I was enjoying the potatoes.”

That was true of me too. We moved to the sofa with the bowl of plums between us. One was hard and one was so ripe it had split. I picked the split one; Mara took the hard one and held it in her hand until it warmed.

“I don’t want us reporting in every night to prove we’ve remembered each other,” I said. “I also don’t want to disappear into work and let you guess.”

“Then we call when we have something to say, and we answer when we can. If one of us needs a conversation, we say that plainly.”

“That sounds easy.”

“It will be harder when one of us loses a match and the other is too tired to find the right words.”

“You sound as if you’ve practised this.”

Mara laid the plum on the table. “I’ve practised making the plan for someone else. That didn’t work.”

She told me about her last partner without making the woman a villain. At the beginning, the woman had liked Mara’s certainty. It let her use her own eye for the ball instead of deciding who covered which gap. By the end of their second season, Mara was calling patterns before they discussed them, booking extra practice after losses and answering questions in interviews as if a pair had one voice. Her partner told her privately twice to stop. Mara said she had heard it as frustration about losing and answered with more preparation.

“The third time she said it in front of Ivo,” Mara said. “By then she needed a witness before I’d believe she meant it.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her I was trying to help. It was the least helpful thing I could say.”

“Why did you keep doing it?”

“If I made us good enough, she would want to stay. I didn’t know how to ask her whether she wanted to stay when we lost.”

She said the last sentence looking at the plum, not at me. I had watched her choose words carefully for weeks, but this was the first time I had heard the fear beneath them without a match to explain it.

“She left,” I said.

“She had a right to. I was angry because she told other people before she told me. That wasn’t true. She told me twice.”

I put my hand over hers. I didn’t offer to prove that I would be different, because the promise would have been about a season I hadn’t lived. I could tell her what I knew about this one.

“I hid my leg because I thought you’d want the player who could finish the match,” I said. “You had already shown me you wanted more than that. I still made you guess.”

“You told me in time to stop the next one.”

“It should have been sooner.”

“Yes.”

Her agreement was a kindness. I leaned against her shoulder and she settled her arm along the back of the sofa, leaving me free to stay or move.

We ate the second plum in thin pieces because it was too hard to bite. I told her about the first year I played doubles, when I kept treating my partner’s call as a challenge and won points that left her stranded for the next one. Mara told me about a wall she had drawn in Antwerp and had accidentally given a door that did not exist. We laughed at the thought of somebody trying to use her notebook as a guide and walking straight into brick.

“Can I tell Jules about us?” she asked when the laughter had ended. “She hasn’t asked. She notices more than she lets on. We’re travelling together, and I’d rather she hear it from me than from a person at a venue.”

I had told Mum. That had been mine to do. Jules was Mara’s professional partner and had never asked to be made part of our story. Still, if she found out in a hallway while I was away, Mara would have left her to manage an uncomfortable fact alone.

“You can tell her we’re seeing each other,” I said. “I don’t want her getting a report of my injury or our arguments along with it.”

“She won’t.”

“And if someone asks whether you and I will enter together again?”

“I’ll say I don’t know. Because I don’t.”

“You could say we haven’t decided.”

“That sounds as if we’ve already made an agreement about who gets to decide. We haven’t even got a return date.”

I almost argued for the softer answer. It would let strangers imagine a future that I still wanted but wasn’t ready to claim. Mara let me think about it. She had been a partner people called difficult; she was going into three events with a woman whose trust she needed on court. Telling Jules the truth in a sentence would cost her less than keeping it secret and then asking Jules to act surprised.

“Tell her,” I said. “Tell me afterwards only if there’s something I need to know. You don’t have to ask my permission each time you speak my name.”

“I know. I asked about the part that belongs to both of us.”

She took the last piece of plum, bitter near the stone, and made a face. I laughed. We had handled a small public part of our relationship while sitting with sticky fingers and an empty bowl. No formal announcement would have made the decision more real. The cost lay in having said what was true before somebody else could name it for us.

By the time the pie dish was washed, my question about phone calls had become a smaller one. We had agreed to ask when we needed each other and not to turn absence into a test. It would take more than an evening to learn to do it. I was looking forward to finding out what the practice felt like.

At the door I kissed her and felt her fingers close around mine. She asked whether I wanted to stay. I did. I also wanted to sleep in my own bed before the early train and wake without rushing through a goodbye.

“Tomorrow I’ll go,” I said. “Tonight I want to go home and pack the things I actually need.”

“Then I’ll walk you to the bus.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

The last bus took the long road past the Vale. We stood at its stop with the notebook under my arm. Mara had given it to me to borrow, not as a promise that I must come back with a photograph. I would find the stair at Northmere because I wanted to know which line of the drawing she had loved enough to keep.

When the bus came, she did not give me an instruction about the train. She kissed me once, stepped back and said, “Tell me when you arrive. I’d like to know.”

“I will.”

I took a seat on the upper deck and watched her become smaller through the rear window. I did not need her to stand there until the bus turned, but she did. For a moment I wanted to get off at the next stop and run back. I stayed on the bus. The work at Northmere was mine, and I was going to it without having to leave her behind in any larger sense.