The Withdrawal

I woke before the alarm because I couldn’t turn over without feeling my left calf.

For a minute I stayed still. There was a difference between the tightness after Saturday’s exhibition and what I felt now: Saturday I had noticed it after moving. This morning it was waiting for me. I put my feet on the hotel carpet and stood. Three steps to the bathroom were enough to tell me I could not ask the leg to run across a court in two hours.

I rang Ivo. Then I rang the event’s medical desk. I did both before Mara could come to my room with the notes from our match, because if I spoke to her first I might let how much I wanted to see her change what I said about the leg.

The sports clinician examined me in a small room behind the reception hall. She asked when it had begun, what had happened after the exhibition and whether I had played yesterday. I gave her the order of things without trimming it. Ivo was outside the room. Mara was at the practice courts; I had sent her a message saying where I was and that I would tell her what the clinician said.

The clinician didn’t give me the quick name for the problem that I wanted. She told me not to play that morning, to arrange follow-up care, and to return for reassessment before I made another competitive plan. When I asked whether I could at least walk onto the court to tell our opponents myself, she said walking was my choice and playing was not a good one. I took the paper she gave me and went to find Mara.

She was sitting beside our bags with my notebook open on her knees. She closed it when she saw me. The page held diagrams of returns from Tuesday; she had been looking at the arrows I had never intended to show anyone.

“I should have asked before opening it,” she said.

“I left it in our bag.”

“It’s your notebook.”

I sat down. “They’ve told me not to play.”

She looked at the paper in my hand, then at me. “Do you want me to come to the desk?”

I had rehearsed what it would sound like to ask her to let me make the withdrawal. I had not rehearsed her asking what I wanted before I could protect the decision.

“Yes,” I said. “But I need to tell them.”

“All right.”

I told her about the first pull at the exhibition, the second during our consolation match, the appointment on Monday and the return of tightness in yesterday’s tiebreak. I included what I had told Ivo after the match.

“You said it was fine,” she said.

“It was when we started.”

“You knew that wasn’t what he asked.”

“I did.”

She ran her thumb along the closed edge of my notebook. “I asked too.”

“I lied to you.”

“You gave me an answer that made it easy to stop asking.”

There was no comfort in her precision. I was glad of it anyway. If she had shouted, I could have thought only about the volume. This was something I had done to the person who had trusted me on court.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought if you knew, you’d spend the next match watching me instead of the ball.”

“I would have asked whether we should play it.”

“I should have let you.”

She waited for whatever defence I had been saving. I didn’t have one I believed.

At the event desk, I gave our names and said we were withdrawing the team before our next match. The supervisor took the details, checked the schedule and told us when the updated order of play would be posted. The conversation lasted less than two minutes. I had spent the whole night afraid of a moment that fitted inside two minutes.

Our opponents were warming up on the far court. I wanted to apologise to them, but doing that would make them responsible for making me feel better about a decision they couldn’t change. Ivo said he would make sure they were told. I gave him the clinician’s note; he asked whether I had arranged the follow-up. I showed him the appointment request on my phone.

Mara carried her own bag. I carried mine. We went out through the courtyard where the painted sign stood for photographs. Yesterday I had been pleased to see both our names printed on a small card at the gate. Today the card was gone, because somebody had already made a new order of play. We stood on the path while people walked around us.

“You don’t have to stay here with me,” I said.

“I know.”

“I can get the train.”

“I heard you.”

I hated how much I wanted her to contradict me. I had made a career out of getting myself home. It would have been a small, ridiculous use of her to make her argue for the privilege of sitting beside me on a train.

“I’m asking whether you want to go together,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll go together.”

I laughed once, with no pleasure in it. “You make the simplest questions sound hard because I keep trying to answer a different one.”

“I know which one you’re answering.”

She didn’t tell me her answer. We took the train home in a carriage full of people coming back from an afternoon they had been able to finish. I slept for part of it. When I woke, my head had rested against the window and Mara was reading the event programme without looking at her phone. She had put my notebook on the seat between us, within reach of my hand.

On the train I wrote a message to Mum and deleted it twice. In the first version I said the leg had been bad all along. That wasn’t true. In the second I said the clinician had made me withdraw. That let me disappear from the decision I had finally made. I called her when we came out of the station.

“We stopped before the next match,” I told her. “I should have told Ivo yesterday that the calf tightened. I didn’t. I told them this morning.”

She was quiet. I could hear a tap running in her kitchen. “Is somebody looking after it?”

“A clinician saw me. There’s a follow-up.”

“And the partner?”

I looked at Mara walking ahead with her own bag, slowing whenever the pavement narrowed so I could come beside her again. “She knows I lied. She walked me home anyway.”

“That doesn’t make the lie all right.”

“I know.”

“It also doesn’t mean she owns the next thing you do.”

Mum had spent years reaching for the ball she couldn’t catch from a stand. I had expected an instruction now that she could give one. Instead she had left the decision with me, just when I was most tempted to hand it to Mara and resent whatever she did with it.

At the Vale, Ivo went ahead to unload the equipment. Mara and I stopped by the service door. It was the short way to the changing rooms. I did not want to hear it laugh at me today, so we walked round to the front entrance.

Her phone lit in her hand. She read the message and held the screen where I could see it. Jules Armitage needed a partner for a separate event the following week. She and Mara had played together twice before. She needed an answer in time for their sign-in, several days away.

“You don’t have to show me,” I said.

“I want you to know what I’m deciding.”

“You should play.”

“Perhaps.”

“She’s good. You could have a whole week that doesn’t begin with somebody’s leg going wrong.”

“Saskia.”

“I’m not asking you to wait for me.”

“You’ve said that.”

I folded the clinician’s paper into quarters. The crease went through her printed instructions. Mara took her phone back and put it away without answering Jules.

“I need you to hear the part I’m trying not to say,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

There were people going in and out of the front doors, each with a reason to be there that had nothing to do with us. I could leave and tell her later. I could let the partnership end tidily, call the ache professional disappointment and see whether time made it true. Neither choice would let her know what I had risked by staying quiet.

“I wanted you to stay after tennis,” I said. “Even if we had a terrible season. I didn’t tell you because I thought the only reason you wanted me there was what I could do on a court.”

Mara moved one step nearer. Not enough to touch. Enough that she had to look directly at me.

“That isn’t the only reason,” she said.

The words changed the air between us and settled nothing. She had not said what other reason she had, or what she was willing to do with it. I might have asked. Instead I gave her a sentence with enough space in it for a real answer.

“Play with Jules if you want to. I mean that. When you decide what you want from me, tell me that too. Don’t decide it because my leg hurts.”

“I won’t,” she said.

“You can say no.”

“So can you.”

She looked towards the gate where Ivo was taking the last basket inside. The answer to Jules could wait until sign-in; the answer to me could not be borrowed from a match result. Mara had spent a week saying the true thing quickly. For once she needed time to find it.

“I’ll tell you before I sign in,” she said. “Whatever I decide.”

I had asked for the choice to be hers. I could not ask her to make it faster without taking that back. I nodded, and we went inside by the front door.