The Interview

By Monday the pull in my calf had gone. I had made another appointment because the clinician at the Vale had told me to if it did not settle, and cancelling it felt like making a decision for my body that I was not qualified to make. The clinician checked me again, gave me work to do between sessions and told me to stop if the tightness came back. I wrote the last instruction in the notes on my phone. Writing it was easier than imagining when I might use it.

On Tuesday Mara and I travelled to Southmere. Ivo Mercer, who coached at the Vale and pretended not to be proud of anything he had taught us, drove the van. He discussed our first-round opponents for twenty minutes and then refused to predict a score. Mara slept in the front seat. I sat behind her, watching a strip of sunlight move across the side of her face as the van passed under trees.

I had learnt the slope of her serve from video. I had not known she went to sleep with her hands open.

At the venue she woke when Ivo turned off the engine. She sat up, looked at the three of us reflected in the windscreen and asked, “How long?”

“Twelve minutes,” I said.

“That’s precise.”

“I counted the motorway signs.”

“You could have watched a film.”

“I did. Nothing happened.”

She turned far enough to see my face. I opened the door before I had to decide whether she understood.

Southmere’s courts sat behind a brick swimming hall that had been turned into a reception building. The walls kept the morning cool even after the sun found the benches. It was a small event with enough working players to make our entry worth the trip, a modest crowd and a local reporter who photographed every pair beside the same painted sign.

Our opponents had played together for a year. They did not waste words during the warm-up. Ivo told us to be louder than we thought necessary because the roof above court two held sound in the wrong places. Mara tested it with a call from the baseline. I could hear her. I called back, and she said it reached her as a murmur.

“We’re going to look foolish,” I said.

“We can look foolish and know where the other one is.”

“You always give me an attractive choice.”

“I thought you liked choices.”

I did. It had taken me two practices and a loss to realise how much she noticed about the way I made them.

The first set began badly. Our opponents returned deep to my feet and kept Mara away from the middle. I had the time to see every gap and no room to use one. At two-four I tried to force a low ball past the woman at the net. She put it behind me, untouched.

“Two taps,” Mara said before the next point, making the motion against her frame where I could see it.

“I know. I keep going down the line.”

“Because you think I can’t reach the middle from there.”

“Can you?”

“If you give me one higher ball. Not forever. Once.”

We tried it. The return rose safely through the centre instead of flashing past a sideline, and Mara crossed behind it. We won the point. On the next return our opponents were waiting for her, so I took the open line. By the time they had worked out which of us would move, we had reached five-all.

The crowd liked Mara’s winners. They sounded clean and final. Mine often left somebody else one more shot to make. That didn’t change the work they did. When I put a return at the receiver’s body and made her lift it, Mara could finish; when I took the high ball early, Mara did not have to run backward to rescue us. We won the set seven-five. We lost the second.

In the deciding tiebreak, I planted hard on my left leg to reach a short ball. The tightness came back, not sharply, but with enough insistence that I shortened the next step. Ivo was at the fence, watching my feet. I looked away before he could ask.

Mara came across to the middle for the next point and I almost failed to leave it to her. She called while the serve was still travelling. I stayed. The ball flew down the centre, and we won the point. It would have been easy afterwards to tell myself that because I could stand where I needed to, the calf did not matter. The note on my phone had not said anything about standing.

We won by two. I was happy for perhaps twenty seconds, wholly and without examination, until Ivo came through the gate and asked how the leg had held up.

“Fine,” I said.

It had been fine at the beginning. I let the word carry the whole match.

Mara had gone to collect the ball that had rolled under the advertising board. She returned in time to hear Ivo ask whether I wanted to cool down with the physio. I said I’d do my usual routine. He did not argue in front of the other players. I could see that he intended to speak to me later.

The reporter caught us on the way to the changing rooms. He had watched part of the second set and all of the last. He asked Mara whether it was a relief to have enough room to play her own game after the trouble with her last partner.

“We won because Saskia changed where they had to return,” she said.

He smiled, waiting for the sentence that would make her answer easier to print. “But you put the last ball away.”

“I could because she made them lift it. You were there.”

The camera was on. He lowered it. There was nothing unkind in her voice, only the refusal to let a neat account take the place of what had happened. The reporter tried another question about the match. She answered it and we went inside.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said in the corridor.

“I was asked what happened.”

“He was asking about you.”

“He was asking whether I got free of somebody.”

“You know how that will sound when he cuts it.”

“I know.”

I had read old accounts of Mara’s partnership, enough to understand why Ivo had warned me she could be controlling. I had also spent nine days beside her, being asked which ball I wanted rather than being told. The two accounts did not fit together. One of them was incomplete.

In the changing room, I did the calf exercises from Monday while the shower ran behind the partition. I could feel the place that had tightened in the tiebreak. It eased when I worked through the movement slowly. I told myself that was what recovery looked like. Then I put on jeans, pulled my socks high enough to hide where I had been pressing the muscle and went to find Mara.

She was outside by the brick wall with two cups of tea. She held one out. The small paper cups at Southmere had a rim that came loose if you held it too hard. She had doubled mine so I wouldn’t spill it.

“He wanted an easier story,” I said.

“Most people do.”

“You gave him a worse one for yourself.”

“I gave him a sentence about your return.”

“Mara.”

She looked at me over her cup. There were faint marks across her thumb from the grip of her racquet. I had seen them on Tuesday morning in the van, her hand open in sleep, and now they were so close I could have covered them with mine.

“I like playing with you,” she said. “Even when you make me explain a cone. I’d rather say that than let him decide I’m carrying you.”

The brick behind me held the day’s heat. She was close enough to notice if I shifted away and still far enough that I could choose not to.

“I like it too,” I said.

She waited, as though the sentence might have another half. It did. I could not say it without also telling her about the calf, because she would hear the rest as a promise about our next match.

I drank my tea. The rim softened against my mouth. Mara glanced down at my left leg, then back at my face.

“You moved differently near the end,” she said.

“The court was catching me on the turn.”

“The court wasn’t doing it to me.”

“You weren’t at the back as much.”

She did not make me produce another explanation. I wished she had. If she had pressed, I could have been angry and told the truth as a weapon. Instead she finished her tea and said that Ivo had arranged our next match for the following morning. She asked whether I wanted to go over the return pattern after dinner.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

At the hotel we found a table in the corner of the dining room and opened the clips on my laptop. Ivo had already gone upstairs. The cook was clearing the last bowls, so we ordered whatever was left and watched the tiebreak without sound. On the screen my left foot was late after the short ball. I paused the film before Mara could see me watching myself.

“That return pattern won’t work tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll have seen us change at five-all.”

Mara leaned closer to the screen. Her sleeve touched mine and stayed there while she studied the next point. “You kept the receiver looking at the middle,” she said. “We can use the same start and change the end.”

She drew an arrow on my notebook, then crossed it out because I had made a face. There was no authority in the mark. She was offering a thought and letting it be refused. I took the pen and put a different arrow beside hers. For a minute we forgot the match result and argued with the pleasure of people who could imagine the same court in two ways.

The food came. Mara closed the laptop and tried a mouthful of the stew. “That needs salt,” she said.

“You’ll say that about any food a person didn’t make for you.”

“I said your sandwich on Saturday was good.”

“It was wrapped by a shop.”

“They took care with it.”

I passed her the salt. She put in too much and ate the stew anyway. Watching her lose a small argument without repairing it made me want to tell her about the calf more, not less. She would hear me. She would also remember what I’d hidden when she asked. I could see both possibilities while the space between us was only the width of a laptop.

She nodded when I said we’d review the next return after dinner. I had answered a question she had actually asked. The one she was waiting to ask remained between us all the way to our rooms.