Opposite Ends

We won our opening match at Northmere in two sets. Anika served the last point and I took the return out of the air before it could make either of us nervous. On the other court Mara and Jules had already finished. They were sitting at the far end of the stand when we came off, too distant for a greeting that would look like anything other than one team studying another.

I had wanted to earn the match with them. Having earned it, I spent the evening trying to be a person who could eat dinner.

Anika found me looking at film on my phone in the hotel corridor. “You know her,” she said. “That isn’t a weakness unless you decide it is.”

“She knows me too.”

“Good. We won’t have to waste time introducing ourselves.”

She wanted to go over our own patterns once, not watch every point Mara had played in the last month. I put the phone away and went with her. We discussed where I would stand for Jules’s serve and who would take the middle if Mara crossed. Anika had seen a space behind Jules in the earlier match. I had not. She was my partner; I wanted her eye on the court, not a copy of mine.

Mara texted later: I hope you liked the first round. I did.

I replied: I liked it. Tomorrow you may like me less.

That would be a useful change of pace, she wrote.

I slept badly. In the morning I told Anika. She said she had slept well enough for both of us and handed me a ball to warm my fingers while we waited. Ivo watched from behind the fence without offering a plan. He had coached three of the four players and would make no one a gift of information they hadn’t earned.

Mara came out with Jules. Her hair was tied differently for a match, tight enough that there were no loose strands to push back between points. I knew the old impulse that made her check the court lines before she looked at her opponent. When she did look at me, she smiled once and then put the smile away. I felt no desire to make her less serious.

We played the first games without a break. Jules served well; Anika returned better than she had in practice. Mara came to the net on my serve and waited for the crosscourt ball I usually chose when I was protecting the calf. I saw her wait. I went down the middle instead, and Anika finished the lifted return.

“You knew she’d be there,” Anika said at the changeover.

“I knew she’d think I would.”

“Then do it again when it matters.”

Mara took her next return early and put it at the space my foot had just left. I ran for it, got a racquet on it and sent up a ball Jules could finish. Mara had used what she knew about me as cleanly as I had used what I knew about her. The point was theirs. I was angry because I wanted it back, not because she had taken it.

At four-all, Anika and I broke serve. She called a ball mine before I had decided I could reach it, and I went. The old fear—if I couldn’t move, Mara would choose another partner—rose and passed. I made the shot and turned to find Anika covering the space behind me. The point belonged to us in a language we had made that week.

We took the first set. Mara and Jules changed their formation in the second. Jules stepped back, Mara moved to the centre and there was no soft place for me to send a return. They broke me early. Anika saved two more games with serves I barely had to touch; we lost the set six-three.

On the bench between sets I drank water and looked up at the stand. Mum was there with the blue scarf folded over her knees. She held both hands still. She had seen me happy beside Mara and was watching me try to beat her. I wished I could tell her that these things made sense together.

Anika was looking at the far baseline. “They’ve moved because they’re afraid of what we did in the first set.”

“I know. Jules is covering the line I used.”

“Then take the high middle once. She’ll move forward. I can use the space behind her.”

“Once?”

“Once. Don’t build a religion around it.”

We used it on the first point of the deciding tiebreak. Jules moved as Anika had said she would. Anika sent the next ball deep behind her. It was a good point, not a revelation. We needed more of them.

At five-all Mara served to my body. I returned low and she came in, showing the same half step before crossing that I had found in the film room. I had told her about it when we were partners. She had worked to hide it. Today it was there because she was tired. I aimed into the space before she could close it. The ball clipped the line.

She looked at me across the net. She knew exactly what I had seen. I had not stolen a confidence; I had used an observation she had invited me to make, against a player trying as hard to win as I was.

On our match point Jules returned Anika’s serve short. I moved forward, felt the court under my left foot and called mine. Anika stayed. I put the ball where neither woman could reach it. The umpire called the match. For one second the sound was only a sound. Then Anika caught my shoulders and we were laughing, both of us too tired to decide who had earned which part.

Across the net Jules shook our hands and told Anika her change of formation had beaten them. Mara took my hand last.

“You saw it again,” she said.

“You gave me time.”

“I meant to take it away.”

“I know.”

Her grip was firm. She let go because there were other people waiting, and I wanted the result to belong to Anika as well as to me. I went to her first. We had another match ahead, and she was the person who would play it beside me.

Anika had already begun talking about the final. I wanted to stay in the point we’d just won, but she was looking at the pair on the adjacent court and asking what I’d seen of their second serve. I told her I needed two minutes before I could give her an answer that belonged to tomorrow’s match rather than this one. She nodded, took our bags and went to find water.

I sat on the low wall where I’d watched Mara play with Jules weeks before. I had left early then because their good tennis made me feel as though the space beside Mara had closed. Today I’d beaten them with a partner who had her own eye for a match and no interest in borrowing mine. It would have been easy to turn that into a lesson about how every fear had been foolish. The fear had been real. The answer to it had not been a single win. I had told Anika when I wasn’t ready, and she’d given me two minutes without leaving.

When she came back I took one bottle and told her what I’d seen. Their second server liked to look at the sideline before serving down the middle. Anika had noticed the opposite from a different angle. We walked to the practice court to check the film together. She was already arguing with me, and I was glad of it. Whatever Mara and I might choose after her three events, I had made a team here that was more than a route back to an older one.

We lost the final the following afternoon. Anika and I had spent ourselves getting there, and the pair across from us made fewer mistakes. I was disappointed. I was also able to tell the clinician, when she called that evening as arranged, that the calf had held through every match and that I had recorded the work honestly. She gave me a plan for the next stage. She did not call a final loss a medical result.

Mara waited until Anika and I had finished our post-match discussion before she came over. Jules had already gone to her train. Mara had promised her three events and played all three; there was no unfinished professional obligation hidden between us.

“You wanted to win the final,” she said.

“I did.”

“I hated losing to you yesterday. I wanted to see you play today anyway.”

“I wanted you to watch. I didn’t want to be pleased you were out.”

She took my hand away from the other players’ bags, where no one had to make a story of it. I told her how Anika had found the high middle and how I had finally trusted my leg at match point. She told me Jules had seen the second change coming and hadn’t been able to stop it. We gave the other woman her due before we talked about ourselves.

“Next week,” Mara said, “I have nothing entered. I don’t want to ask because we just played against each other and you’re tired. I do want to ask.”

“Ask.”

“Would you practise with me when you’re ready? No entry in my pocket. Just a court and a question about whether we still know how to call the middle.”

“Yes. I have an appointment before I decide on another match. I can tell you when it is.”

“Good.”

We walked back through the Northmere garden to the stair in her drawing. The railing had five uprights. She counted them, looked at the notebook she had brought for the trip and added the missing line. The light between the bars was different in the evening. She tried to catch that too.

I stood beside her without asking what we would enter next. We had each played the match in front of us. Neither had made the other less free by wanting to win it.