Games People Play (22 page)

‘No, Mama, I don’t have time,’ he says with exasperation.

‘Darling, I want to chat to you for a bit! Surely that is not too much to ask for?’

‘Sorry. I have to go. Rach, it’s OK, come back and finish your coffee. I’m off.’

He is impossible! I pat at my hair, to try and disguise my irritation. ‘If you must,’ I say, crossing the room and brushing some lint off his sleeve with my palm, like a slow-motion slap. ‘But you know I will catch up with you soon, don’t you?’

He grunts, and Rachel wheels herself back in again, looking awkward. It is odd seeing her face at chest level instead of above me, as if she has shrunk.

‘Bye, Rach, have a good time.’ Ivan moves a little way towards her, as if he wants to hug her, but she squares her shoulders against him and looks out of the window.

‘Yeah. Thanks. Bye, Dad. Thanks for the lift.’

I put my hands on my hips. ‘And now what is going on with you two? You are not speaking!’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ Rachel mouths at me.

Ivan ignores me altogether, picking his keys off the table where he had briefly placed them, and stuffing his hands in the pockets of the jacket he hasn’t even bothered to take off inside the house.

‘Don’t worry, Mama, I’ll see myself out.’ He sneezes explosively, making everyone jump. ‘Sorry. Getting a cold.’

‘Take echinacea and vitamin C, darling, and it’ll be gone in no time,’ I counsel as he pulls a large handkerchief from the depths of a pocket. A red envelope falls out on to the floor.

‘You dropped something,’ I say, picking it up at the same time that Ivan lunges for it. It is addressed to Rachel. ‘Oh, Rachel, it’s for you.’ I hand it across to her, and she takes it, examining the writing.

‘What’s this?’

‘Almost forgot,’ Ivan says in gruff voice, stopping in the doorway and not meeting her eyes. ‘I – er – think it’s a get-well card.’

‘Oh,’ says Rachel with surprise. ‘Who from?’

Ivan continues to look at the spot on the floor where the card has fallen, so intently that I follow his gaze, thinking that he must have seen something which Adele has overlooked in her daily washings, a sticky patch of spilled orange juice or a small dustball; but it is perfectly clean.

‘It’s ...it’s from Natasha Horvath.’ He clears his throat noisily.

I look at him sharply. I know that name. Rachel does too – it is the girl Rachel was playing in Zurich.

‘That’s kind of her,’ I say as Rachel rips open the envelope, pulls out the card and opens it. The card itself isn’t very nice. It’s a cheap, shiny one, with a podgy cartoon teddy bear with his leg in a bandage.

Inside, in small, curly and recognizably East European handwriting – it’s as easy to identify as American cursive, we all had to learn it at school – Natasha has written: ‘Sorry about your accident. I hope you will recover soon. With good wishes, Natasha Horvath’.

‘I’ll be off then,’ says Ivan awkwardly.

‘Wait a second,’ Rachel says. ‘How come you’ve got this?’

‘What do you mean?’ Ivan sounds aggressive.

‘What I said: why is she sending me a card? And how did she give it to you to give to me?’

Ivan rubs his little balding patch and shrugs his shoulders. He is so tense that they don’t shrug very far; as if there is somebody pressing down on them. I must know what he and Rachel were having the cross words about.

‘It’s no big deal, Rachel. I think it’s very nice of her. She was at the club yesterday. One of her friends has been training with me for six months. Anyway, people were, you know, talking about your accident.’ He laughs nervously. ‘She gave it to me soon after that. Must have gone to the newsagents and got it straight away.’

‘Oh. Right. Yeah, that was nice of her. But I’m just surprised that she’d send me a card. She seemed to hate me so much.’

‘Of course she didn’t bloody hate you, Rachel, that’s just your paranoia,’ snaps Ivan, looking at his watch again. ‘Anyway, take it easy. Rest your knee, keep on with the painkillers when you need them. I really must go now.’

With a quick kiss for Rachel’s cheek, then one for mine, he is gone. Rachel looks at me, frowning. She is so like Ivan when she frowns. She has inherited all his wrinkle patterns – or crinkles as she called them when she was a little girl. ‘Look, Daddy, I can play guitar on your crinkles,’ she once said, strumming at his forehead with her finger. He was not pleased. And then for a long time I was confused and thought that the actual word in English
was
‘crinkles’. The lady at the Clarins counter laughed at me when I went in and asked for anti-crinkle cream.

‘What are you frowning about?’ I ask her.

‘It’s just a bit weird, Dad mentioning he’s been coaching someone for six months. When I talked to Kerry this morning she said that she hadn’t seen him at the club for ages; and if he was coaching again, he ought to be there every day.’

I do not think this is so weird. ‘Well, yesterday he was there. Kerry is not there all the time either, is she? I think she just has not seen him.’

I smile to myself as I pick up the dirty coffee cups, remembering Rachel’s little fingers on Ivan’s crinkles. It only seems like last year. Time rushes too fast.

Susie

‘Susie, are you sure you don’t want a nap or something? You look wrecked.’

Corinna lit another cigarette, although the last one was still smouldering in the ashtray. In the old Lawrence days, her nicotine habit had always given me a good excuse for time away from Ivan – he couldn’t bear her constant smoking, and so had never made a fuss about coming too when I said I was going to visit her. Although he used to complain when I came back reeking of smoke ...but then, six months into our relationship, he’d found fault with pretty much everything about me.

‘No, I’m fine. We only came in from Italy, it’s not like I’m jetlagged anymore,’ I said, even though I felt totally jetlagged. I leaned back in Corinna’s red leather armchair and yawned wearily. The chair was too slippery to be comfortable, and the back of it so steep that my neck felt ricked, but I was so tired I felt I could have slept on a runway.

Rach and I had got back that morning, and Ivan picked Rachel up at Heathrow. We were to meet again tomorrow at Gordana’s in Surrey, and she would spend the next few weeks there convalescing. I wasn’t sure how long I’d stay – perhaps a week. It had been ages since I’d seen them, and although I really wanted to confide in Gordana, I didn’t wish to outstay my welcome.

I couldn’t even face seeing Ivan at the airport, so I’d kissed Rachel goodbye in the Blue Channel of Customs, before the electric doors into Arrivals, and had loitered behind while she wheeled herself through, a porter carrying her suitcase, waiting a discreet amount of time until I was sure they’d be gone. I was dreading bumping into him at Gordana’s.

Somewhere deep inside the tight coil of stress in my body, it felt as if there was a vacuum, a dull empty throb at the realization that although I wasn’t even all that keen on going to Gordana’s, I had no choice. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I didn’t want to go back to Lawrence yet. I wasn’t sure I could ever be there again without Billy. Perhaps I would ask Corinna if I could come back and stay with her for a bit longer.

Two large cardboard boxes sat on the polished leather floor in front of Corinna and me, boxes of junk I’d asked her to keep for me when Ivan and I first split up back in ’95. I’d stayed at Corinna’s then too, for a couple of weeks, whilst I’d made the arrangements for my new life back in Lawrence; and she’d agreed to keep the boxes for me until I got settled over there, when I’d send for them. Of course I never had.

At first I kept putting it off, then I realized I couldn’t even remember what the boxes contained, which meant that more than likely I’d be able to live without them in my house in Kansas. Plus, Corinna hadn’t wanted the hassle of shipping them to me. It had been much easier to store them, unseen, in her loft, while she went about the business of transforming the dingy flowery-wallpapered cottage she’d just bought into the design masterpiece in which she currently resided.

Now, though, I was vaguely curious to see what was in the boxes, and I’d asked Corinna to look them out on my arrival...once I mustered sufficient energy to open them, that was.

I felt totally drained. Although I’d only been out on the ski slopes that one disastrous time, all my muscles ached as if I’d been in a car crash. I would have loved to take up Corinna’s offer of a nap – ideally, go to bed and sleep for a week, but it was only three in the afternoon, and it seemed rude when I hadn’t seen her for so long.

‘It’s just that this is the first chance I’ve had to draw breath, really, since all the dramas of the accident, and the hassle of getting Rachel back from Italy. She’s been so nice about it, but I can’t help feeling that it was my fault she got injured. I can’t stop thinking about it: what if she can’t play tennis ever again, professionally, I mean? And it’s my fault? God, Corinna,’ I said, the words beginning to pour out once I had someone to confide in, ‘I knew I was a crap mother, but now this?

First time I see my daughter in years, and I cause her leg to be totalled, possibly at the loss of her career. The one thing she really had going for her . . .’

Corinna blew out a long, thoughtful cloud of smoke, like a jetstream.

‘You aren’t a crap mother. You just had a crap husband, that’s all. If it wasn’t for Ivan the Terrible, you’d never have left Rachel, would you?’

She and Ivan had always disliked one other. He used to refer to her as Peroxide Monkey-Girl, although a few times I’d caught him staring at her, surreptitiously and lustfully. The nickname was harsh, I thought, since she’d actually been very pretty back then. She hadn’t aged all that well, in the intervening years since she’d been my spiky-haired, slim room-mate in Lawrence.

Corinna was a freelance journalist now, but she seemed to spend most of her time improving her small North London terraced house. Its interior was like something out of a design magazine, all sharp angles, interesting textures and subtle shades. I wondered if this was somehow to compensate for the way her own angles had blurred into plump curves and deep wrinkles. Her designer wall lights appeared to stay up by themselves, but her breasts were distinctly gravity challenged. Her hair, once so crisp and spiky, was limp and somehow colourless, and her eyes reflected a loneliness that she never admitted to.

Since her first serious relationship at twenty-one, with Calvin, the Rasta she’d met at the party where Ivan and I first crossed paths, she had had a string of unsuitable lovers: the married, the commitment-phobic, the alcoholic, the sex-addict ...Her emails to me from London to Lawrence detailing her latest catastrophically unsuccessful affairs were always entertaining, but tinged with a deep sadness that even the austerity of the medium of email couldn’t disguise.

It was good to see her again. I felt awkward about feeling sorry for her, although she probably felt the same about me.

‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ she said. ‘It was an accident. Everyone knows skiing’s risky. Some might say she should never have gone. I can’t believe Ivan was happy about her going – and who knows, if she can’t play again, maybe it’s the best thing that could happen to her? You were always saying how depressed she’d get that she would soon have to retire, without hitting the big time.’

‘Yeah, but it ought to be her decision. Not because her crap mother caused a pile-up on a ski slope.’

Corinna shrugged. ‘Whatever. Shit happens. We deal with it. I mean, it wasn’t your decision that Billy went and shacked up with another woman, was it? And
you’re
dealing with it. Well, in a manner of speaking you are . . .’

Her directness made me wince, but I could see what she meant.

‘I still haven’t told Rachel about that.’

Corinna gazed at me in astonishment, smoke leaching out of her mouth and nose. ‘You’ve been with your daughter for over a week and she hasn’t even asked what’s going on? Why does she think you’re going to be staying away from your man for so long?’

I chewed the inside of my lip, an old habit. ‘Because of her injury, I guess. She knows him well enough to know he’d never want to go skiing, so she didn’t think it was weird that I went without him. I didn’t want to worry her.’

‘And she hasn’t guessed that you’re not OK?’

‘I
am
OK.’

‘No you aren’t. You’re totally down on yourself, full of self-pity and self-hatred, which isn’t like you ...In fact, you’re in a complete state.’

‘I’m just stressed from Rachel’s accident, that’s all, and feeling guilty about it,’ I protested.

‘Guilt,’ said Corinna contemptuously. ‘It’s the most redundant, unconstructive, damaging emotion there is.’

‘Oh great,’ I replied, ripping brown tape off the flaps of the box nearest me. It had long ago lost its adhesiveness, and seemed to float away from the cardboard it had once bonded to. ‘Now I feel guilty for feeling guilty. Thanks, Corinna.’

She laughed. ‘What’s in the box, then? Anything you can’t live without, or are we taking a trip to Oxfam before you leave tomorrow?’

I peered inside. It was full of books: damp, yellowing, dog-eared paperbacks, mostly set texts for my degree, plus a few tennis-related ones of Ivan’s which I must have absent-mindedly stuck in there by mistake in the course of my hasty packing. I lifted out an armful:
Collected Short Stories from the South Pacific
;
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys;
Ways of Seeing
by John Berger;
The History and Theory of Art
.

‘Oxfam, I think,’ I said, digging in again. The books smelled musty; almost pulpy and decomposing. I could so clearly remember buying them from the campus bookstore at KU, an impressively smart and well-laid-out basement shop in which I used to spend a lot of time – not least because I often saw the town’s most famous resident, William Burroughs, browsing hunch-shouldered in an over-large overcoat amongst the tables near me. The books had been crisp and new then, and their spines ramrod straight and unbroken, full of promises of what they’d teach me in their closely guarded pages.

It was strange, how different my two spells of living in Kansas had been. The first time I’d been a student, an insecure pretty girl with an overbearing boyfriend and too many papers to write, nothing deeper to worry about than Jean Arp’s navels, which band were playing that night at the Emporium, or whether Ivan really did love me.

The second time, I felt like a completely new person. I’d thrown off the shackles of Ivan’s self-centredness and I was free: free to choose not only the person I wanted to be with, but the person I wanted to become. I had gone back there because it seemed like home – and then I’d become Billy’s fiancée, and it felt even more right.

‘If Oxfam will even take them. Maybe we should just chuck ’em away,’ I said briskly, my eyes watering annoyingly.

‘I’ll have that one, it’s a classic,’ said Corinna, reaching out and picking up
Ways of Seeing
.

‘These tennis ones can definitely go.’ I scooped up four or five hardbacks with titles such as
Topspin!
,
Tennis: It’s All in the Mind
; and
The Story of Rod
Laver
.

Something fell out from between the pages of the Rod Laver autobiography, a large black and white photograph. It had evidently been in there for some time, because it was dry and brittle, and the edges were slightly yellowing.

I picked it up and studied it. It was an official press shot of a very young blonde female player, standing on tiptoes on court, beaming and holding aloft a small trophy. Ivan was in the photograph next to her, beaming equally widely. He was clapping, and something in his expression conveyed utter pride. More than pride; admiration. Lust, possibly, too.

I examined Ivan’s apparel (a shellsuit, ugh) and his facial hair (sideburns), and decided the photo was probably taken some time during the mid-nineties – Ivan hung on to those ridiculous sideburns for years, until after we split up. He only cultivated them after he began to go bald, in a somewhat futile attempt at proving he could still grow hair, even if not in the preferred location. So the photo couldn’t be more than about ten years old, although it looked older. He’d had a full head of hair throughout the Eighties.

I flipped it over to see if there was a date on it. There was, in faint grey print at the top: ‘02/06/95’, but it was the handwritten message underneath which made my voice catch in my throat as I tried to speak.

‘What is it?’ said Corinna, alarmed at the sight of me.

I cleared my throat, too loudly. ‘It’s ...probably nothing.’

June 1995, the summer he was coaching at that academy in Hungary, with Rachel. I looked at the photo again, as if somehow I had mistaken this skinny blonde for my tall, dark daughter, who, even at thirteen, was ten stone of pure muscle. No. Definitely not Rachel. And she certainly would never have written what was on the back of the photo ...

‘What?’

‘Um ...what do you make of this? “
Dearest Ivan, to the best coach ever in the world. You teach me so much things and not just about tennis
.” Five, no six exclamation marks ...“
Nobody tell me it could be so great. All my love, Tasha
”. Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss, all in capitals.’

Corinna stared at the message. ‘It might be innocent,’ she said doubtfully.

I snorted. ‘Sure.’

‘Look at her, she’s only a kid. Perhaps she had a crush on him. Must happen all the time.’

‘Yeah. But looking at Ivan’s face in this photo, I’d say it was him who had the crush on her ...And it was when we were still married . . .’

Outrage drained out of me as I felt suddenly overwhelmed by betrayal: the revelation that Billy was probably not the first partner who had cheated on me.

From where I was kneeling in front of the boxes, I slowly bent forwards until my forehead touched the floor, wrapping my arms around my head. I hated Ivan more than I’d ever hated him, so why did it hurt so much? It shouldn’t make any difference, what Ivan had got up to when we were married – and if Billy and I had still been happy together, I couldn’t have cared less. But Billy was gone, and I didn’t even have the comfort of complaining to him about Ivan’s betrayal, because Billy’s own betrayal was ten times worse. I’d loved Billy, and trusted him. Ivan, I had always half expected it of. But not Billy.

Corinna tentatively rubbed my prone back. ‘You don’t know for sure,’ she said again. ‘Surely he wouldn’t have kept the photo if he thought it would incriminate him.’ She didn’t sound as if she was even remotely convincing herself.

‘He’d hidden it in that book,’ I said, with a muffled voice. My nose was pressed against the weird leather floor, and it smelled like a big new shoe.

She sighed. ‘Maybe you’re right. I’m not sure if I should tell you this,’ she continued, and I unwrapped my arms from around my head – despite not being sure if she should tell me, either. ‘Do you remember the Harmonic Convergence, that summer in Lawrence, a couple of weeks before I flew home? Some hippy thing, meant to herald the start of a New Age, or some such nonsense. We all got up at five in the morning and sat on Calvin’s balcony to watch the dawn break.