The Entry Desk

Mara had promised to tell me before she signed in. On Wednesday morning I arrived at the Vale with twenty minutes until my appointment and found her at the entry desk, a pen in her hand and Jules Armitage beside the door.

The desk had been moved into the corridor for the invitational. A woman ahead of Mara was asking about practice-court times. I could have gone upstairs without being seen. Mara looked up while I was deciding and saw me in the dark glass of the reception window.

She set the pen down.

“You have an appointment,” she said when she reached me.

“In twenty minutes. I wasn’t going to interrupt your sign-in.”

“I haven’t done it yet.”

“I can see that.”

Jules gave us a brief nod from the far end of the corridor, then went out to take a call. I had watched her play. She made high balls look deliberate and never appeared to hurry when everybody else on court did. There was no reason to dislike her. The relief of finding none annoyed me.

“I asked you to choose,” I said. “You don’t need me standing here for it.”

“I’m not using you to make the choice. I said I’d tell you before I signed.”

The woman at the desk finished and walked away. Mara’s name remained on the sheet where the official had written it in pencil. There was room beside it for another. Mara could have gone back, picked up the pen and let me learn her answer from the sheet. She had waited instead, not for permission but because she had promised to speak.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Jules thought I was coming over to ask your permission.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Then why leave the desk?”

“Because I promised you I’d speak first. If you find out from a sheet on the wall, I make it about you while pretending it’s only an entry.”

I could hear the official explaining the next form to somebody behind us. There was still time for Mara to turn away and sign, and still time for me to go upstairs before my appointment. I had told her I wanted a free choice; I was finding out that freedom did not spare me the sight of it being made.

“I meant what I said outside Southmere,” I told her. “You can work with somebody else. I won’t use what I admitted to make you feel disloyal.”

“I know you meant it.”

“I may still be upset.”

“I know that too.”

She looked past my shoulder at the door to the courts, then turned her attention back to me. Whatever she said next would change the shape of the coming week. It would not change what I had admitted at Southmere, and for the first time I could bear those two things being separate.

“I’m playing this event with Jules,” she said. “She needs a partner, and I want to play. I told her it is this event, not a season.”

It was an answer I had told her she could give. The fact that I had meant it did not keep the loss from arriving.

“Good,” I said, with too much effort.

“You don’t have to make it good for me.”

“I know. I’m trying to make it bearable for me.”

Mara’s hand came to rest on the low wooden rail between us. Mine was on the other side. Neither of us reached across it.

“I also want to have dinner with you on Friday,” she said. “No film, no plan for a match. I want to go because I wanted you there on Tuesday when we were finished, and because I missed you on the train before you had even got off it.”

I looked at her. There was no version of that sentence in which she was managing my injured leg.

“That’s more than you said outside Southmere,” I told her.

“I needed to think about whether I could say it without promising what I couldn’t give. I can’t tell you when we’ll play again.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“You weren’t at the gate either. But you thought if I took another partner, it would answer the other question.”

“I did.”

“It doesn’t.”

The official called Mara’s name. She glanced towards the desk. I had twenty minutes and she had an entry to confirm; the corridor wasn’t going to become an intimate room because we wanted it to.

“Go and sign,” I said. “I’ll be upstairs.”

“Friday?”

“Friday.”

I left before she could see how long I stood at the stairwell listening to the scrape of the pen. The sound was small. I had given it months of meaning in less than a week.

Jules was coming back from her call as I reached the stairs. She had a sports bag in one hand and a paper cup in the other. I had watched her move for years without imagining what we might say to each other in a corridor on a Wednesday morning.

“You don’t have to explain,” she said. “Mara told me she needed to speak to you first. That’s between the two of you.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you for an explanation either.”

She looked down at her cup. “That would be a first. People have been asking me why I wanted her as a partner since yesterday. Because she’s good at tennis seemed too simple for them.”

I laughed, though my throat felt tight. “It’s a good reason.”

“She’s good when she listens. I’ve played with her before, so I know she can.” Jules shifted her bag. “I hope your leg settles. I’d rather play you than hear about what you might have done from a commentator.”

“I would rather play you too.”

She stepped aside to let another player through and went to sign in. She had a match to prepare for. I had an appointment. The two facts occupied the same building without one being an insult to the other. On the stairs I stopped long enough to feel the loss of a court I couldn’t enter this week, then kept climbing. I had asked Mara to make an honest choice and had got one. I could let it hurt without needing Jules to be a villain.

The clinician asked what the calf had done since Southmere. I told her about the train, the stairs, the mornings when the first step was tight. I did not tell her I was in love, or close enough to it that the distinction had become a technicality. She wasn’t treating that part of me. She examined the leg, adjusted the work I’d been given and asked me to come back before I trained at speed. There was no date on which she could promise I would be ready for a tournament. I was disappointed by her honesty and glad of it.

Afterwards I sat in the empty film room with my laptop. I had brought it because there were three matches from Southmere to review and I had nowhere I needed to be until Ivo could give me a lift. I opened the clip of Mara’s serve at two-all. With Jules at the net she would have a new pattern to learn. I saw a place where an opponent had been guessing left before Mara threw the ball.

I wrote two sentences to Mara about it. Then I deleted them.

For nine days we had been allowed to discuss anything if it looked like tennis. She had asked me to dinner without needing an analysis, and I was about to send one to prove I still had a place in her work. She knew I could see a return. I did not have to purchase Friday with it.

I closed the clip and wrote to Ivo instead: The clinician wants to see me before speed work. Could we move Friday’s court booking to next week?

He replied before I could regret asking. Already moved it. You can tell me when you have a new plan.

He had not asked permission because it was his booking to move. The difference between that and moving my life for me was becoming easier to see. I sent back a thank-you, then found the clinician’s exercises on my phone and did the first set on the clear patch of floor by the projector.

The film room door opened while I was standing on one leg. Mara came in carrying two cups of tea.

“Ivo said you’d be here,” she said.

“He has a gift for finding people doing exactly what they were told.”

She set the tea on the table. “I can leave them.”

“Stay. I’m almost done.”

She took the chair behind the projector and waited while I finished. She did not comment on the exercises, count for me or take over the room with a conversation meant to be encouraging. When I sat down she pushed a cup towards me with one finger.

“Jules and I play Friday morning,” she said. “Then dinner. Do you want me to tell you about the match?”

“Yes,” I said, then thought about the answer. “But I don’t want our whole evening to become a report.”

“Neither do I.”

“I may watch.”

“You can. Or not.”

“I know.”

She picked up her tea. Our hands came close over the table; I could have crossed the last few inches. I didn’t. She had given me two answers I had thought could not fit in the same week, and I needed time to feel both of them without turning one into an apology for the other.

“There is one thing,” she said. “I meant what I said on Wednesday about the notebook. I shouldn’t have opened it.”

“And I shouldn’t have told you the court made me move differently.”

“Those aren’t the same thing.”

“No. But both of us will have to ask before we take.”

She smiled, barely. “That sounds like a rule.”

“For now. We can change it when we know what we’re doing.”

“Do you know what we’re doing Friday?”

“I’m having dinner with a woman who signed to play with someone else.”

“That’s true,” she said. “And?”

“And she came upstairs to find me afterwards.”

Mara held my gaze. The projector fan came on behind us, though nobody had touched the switch, and we both laughed at the same thin, mechanical noise. It sounded nothing like the service door. It felt like ours anyway.