Games People Play (43 page)

‘Definitely,’ she said with total conviction. It was lovely.

Guests arrive: most of the members of the tennis club, past and present. It’s hard to recognize women with their hair loose around their shoulders, in party dresses and makeup rather than tennis gear and blotchy, sweaty skin. Everyone looks so much more attractive, and younger. The barbeque smell intensifies: a heavy, smoky scent of summer and of party; and people sit down outside on benches and grassy banks, attacking burgers and potato salad with insufficiently sturdy plastic cutlery. All Gordana’s Midweek friends are here now, and Ted’s golfing buddies and their wives, whom Ted is greeting with backslaps and kissed cheeks. A few fellow cancer sufferers turn up: people Gordana met during her treatments at the Marsden; and her Cancerkin Volunteer Visitor, a lovely red-haired lady called Christine who supported Gordana and Ted through Gordana’s illness with great practical efficiency and compassion. We are all really fond of her (especially Jackson, because she always brought him doggy treats).

Dad and Tasha turn up just as the band – four-piece, jazz, average age sixty – clamber with difficulty on to the small stage for their first set. It is still light outside, and children are playing Giant Jenga and Connect 4 on the red shale tennis courts, but inside people are already dancing as if it’s midnight in a jazz club, rather than nine-thirty on a balmy summer’s evening.

Gordana instructed everyone to dance, and dance they do.

I rush over and kiss them both as Karl goes off to buy more drinks. ‘Hi! It’s lovely to see you.’ And it is. It’s lovely to see Dad looking so smart in the clothes which Tasha has – very evidently – bought for him: trendy chinos and a Paul Smith shirt. It’s lovely too, to see the pride with which he gazes at Natasha. He’s only coaching her now, and they are inseparable. I haven’t seen him on court with her, though. I wonder if he slaps her legs when she misses a shot? Bet he doesn’t. She’d deck him. She’s almost as tall as him, and looks as if she could swing a hefty punch.

‘I can’t believe you’ve got Dad into those great clothes,’ I say admiringly, and she laughs.

‘Oh, it was easy. He does whatever I say, don’t you, Ivan?’

Dad, the erstwhile belligerent, sullen, self-contained power freak, does something which approximates a simper.

‘We can all change,’ says Tasha in her precise English. ‘Even men, but it takes them longer. We women are much better at adapting to circumstance, though, don’t you think?’

I think of Mum, and Gordana, and me, and of all the circumstances of the past year. ‘Yes. We are,’ I say, and my throat tightens again.

The door opens and a new group of people arrives: the younger, team players – fashionably late, of course.

José is in the midst of them, talking to Kerry, who sees me and waves wildly in my direction. Miracle of miracles, it even looks as if she’s brushed her hair and put on some mascara. Behind her are my other old squad members, including Sally-Anne – and Mark, holding her hand. Sally-Anne’s long blonde hair has been sprayed so much that it looks as if it’s been moulded out of plastic. When she moves, to kiss Mark’s cheek, the hair stays still.

I notice that Mark doesn’t turn into her kiss; his eyes continue to rove around the room, sizing up any woman under the age of fifty. Funny how, when we were together, I never noticed how predatory he was.

But then again, it doesn’t really surprise me. I feel like I was an innocent back then, in all ways.

I turn to watch Karl fighting his way to the bar, his broad shoulders dominating the crush. I seem to have a thing for large men. Perhaps it’s true what they say about women always going for partners who look like their fathers. Karl isn’t nearly as conventionally gorgeous as Mark, but seeing Mark now, his arrogant eyes and his artfully tousled hair, probably as carefully styled as Sally-Anne’s, I am left cold. Karl turns and waves a cheery beer bottle at me from across the room and, conversely, something melts in me. The best thing to come out of my relationship with Mark is currently tied up on the porch outside, whining disconsolately.

Kerry is just rushing over to talk to me and Karl when Ted steps hesitantly up to an unused microphone, centre stage. The band has stopped for a little sit-down in between numbers, and they lean aside to let him in. He taps the microphone and clears his throat, and suddenly the silence is louder than the music.

Someone notices through the window that a speech is in the offing, and sends the word around amongst all the people still outside. They hastily put down their paper plates on to the long trestle table next to the barbeque and start making their way into the pavilion, much to the delight of Timmy the cat, who jumps up and curls around the leftovers, in heaven, licking at bits of kebab and pulling at chicken wings. I can see his dusky shape weaving unchecked through the debris. It’s driving poor Jackson mad, from his helpless bondage by the wooden steps, watching Timmy tucking in.

It’s finally getting dark now, and one set of floodlights wavers into life, illuminating the partygoers as more and more squeeze into the clubhouse.

Inside, the whirling disco lights are stilled, leaving Ted standing uncertainly in a lone spotlight on the stage. His face, lit from above, is a series of the crags and soft hollows of age, until he shades his eyes with a hand to peer out at us all. Light bounces off his bald head. I am unbearably fond of him.

His eyes are watery, but his gaze is firm as he looks around the room as if looking for Gordana; waiting for her to emerge in her long gloves and her sparkly blue dress, still with the shape of a thirty-year-old, smiling and taking the stage for her big number. She’d rehearsed for it for weeks, in the bath, in the kitchen, in the garden, secateurs in hand, wrestling with roses as prickly as her son, and with bindweed as tough as her beloved husband and as tenacious as their love for one another. She rehearsed until she had no energy left to breathe in enough air to sing out again, and until she was too ill even to lift her head off the pillow.

‘I won’t talk for long,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to thank you all for coming tonight. We all know why we’re here. Forty years ago today, I married the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I have loved every minute of being married to Gordana, all the ups and downs – of which there have been many, this past year...’

He looks in our direction, and Dad scratches his chin and looks at the floor. Karl hugs me on one side; Kerry on the other.

‘This party was her idea, right down to the last detail. We’ve been planning it for months. It kept Dana occupied through all those last awful treatments she had to endure. She never complained. She just kept planning….’

His voice breaks, and everyone’s eyes fill, instantly. He takes out an enormous handkerchief, and wipes his own eyes.

‘But we’ve all done enough crying in the last three months. Tonight is for celebrating, not crying; Dana made it quite clear that it should be this way. So, before the band comes back, I want to propose a toast: to my family, who mean the world to me. To Rachel, in her new life at art college...’

There is loud clapping and cheering, led by Kerry, Mark, Dad and Karl, and I bury my burning face in Karl’s chest.

‘To Ivan, who has gone through hell, but who came out the other side, and we’re all so pleased that you were cleared, old chap. We all knew you were innocent.’

Even louder cheering, especially from the men’s teams.

‘To the members of this club, for keeping a very old tradition going. Everything changes, including us. It is encumbent upon us to realize this, and to move with the times; to evolve into something better, and stronger, and not to cling to old habits and ways of thinking.’

‘Hear, hear,’ calls Elsie, the biggest opponent of change in history. She still moans about decimalization, for heaven’s sake.

‘But most of all,’ Ted says finally, into total silence – even Jackson has shut up outside, ‘most of all, I want to propose a toast to my beloved wife, Gordana. More than anything, I wanted to dance with her tonight, on our fortieth wedding anniversary. I wanted to hold her in my arms, and gaze at her face the way I did when I first danced with her more than forty years ago. I wanted to show everyone how beautiful she is; boast about her to my friends the way I did then. She wanted to sing tonight, as you know. She held on as long as she could, but really, what she’d been holding on for most was to see her son cleared of his charges. Once that happened, it ...it wasn’t so easy...’

Hang in there, Pops, I silently beg him, tears pouring down my cheeks. He takes a deep breath.

‘Anyway, Gordana being Gordana and never one to miss out on an opportunity to show off’ – subdued laughter – ‘here, by the miracle of technology, is Gordana. If not in the flesh, then at least by courtesy of a digital tape. It’s her goodbye to us all ...so let’s drink to that. Cheers, everyone.’

He raises his glass with a shaking hand, and everyone toasts. Amid the chinking glasses and murmur of voices, a brisk but muted trumpet introduction fills the room, followed by some shuffly drums, and then there it is: Gordana’s voice, as strong and constant as she herself was.

She is singing the old Sandie Shaw classic ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’, and as soon as I realize it’s a Sandie Shaw song, I can’t help smiling. I knew she’d recorded a few numbers before she got too sick – Ted had hired, at great expense, a local recording studio and a sound engineer – but she had kept what she was actually going to sing a big secret. I never asked, because to ask was an admission that I knew she wouldn’t be there to perform in person. We had hoped and prayed she would be, right up to the last day.

But the cancer hit her again, with a vengeance, after Christmas. Perhaps it had always been that bad, and she just hadn’t wanted us to know. She had been waiting for Ivan to be cleared, that much was obvious. I wanted her to fight it, so badly, but it was as if she knew that it was too big for her slender frame to cope with. Once she decided she was going, typically for her, she hadn’t hung around. She wanted to spare us all those torturous long-drawn out months of watching her suffer.

She died a month after Ivan was cleared, back in March, and I still feel as if I could never cry enough tears for her.

Everyone is crying now, despite Gordana’s edict.

Everyone except Ted, it seems. He has stepped down from the stage, and walks over to me, smiling. He pulls out his large hanky again, and tenderly wipes beneath my eyes, as if I am five years old again.

‘She wanted us all to dance tonight,’ he says. ‘And since I can’t dance with her, I’m afraid you’re the next best thing.’

He holds out his hand to me, and together we move into the centre of the pavilion. My grandfather puts one arm around my waist, stretches out the other for me to hold, and we dance. It’s not an easy song to dance to, and I can’t dance nearly as well as Gordana could, but we do our best. Tasha peels Dad away from the wall, where he’s been standing next to the fire extinguisher, scrubbing at his eyes, and they begin to dance next to us. I smile gratefully at her. Then others follow: Elsie and Humphrey; Mark and Sally-Anne; all the old married couples who have been coming here to parties for years. Karl goes over and makes a small, gallant bow to Christine, the Cancerkin lady, and they take the floor together. Everyone is dancing.

Gordana sings four more songs, and after each one, we all clap and stamp and cheer as loudly as possible, in the hope that she might somehow be able to hear, and savour it.

I picture her up on stage, the sequins of her dress jumping and moving in the spotlight, pink spots of life and excitement on her cheeks. She loved sequins – she even had a tracksuit with a row of sequins down the arm and leg seams. She used to wear it with a perfectly crisp white T-shirt, showing off her figure as she moved as gracefully on a tennis court as she would have done on this stage.

‘Can we go outside for a minute?’ I ask Karl. ‘This is all getting a bit much for me.’

‘Of course,’ he replies, taking my hand and leading me off the dance floor. I untie Jackson on my way down the steps, and he grins and pants at me gratefully, clearly thinking he’s finally going to get a shot at the leftovers, but the barbeque has been dampened to embers, and the indefatigable Midweek ladies have cleared up all the paper plates and food remains.

We sit down on the brand-new bench which takes pride of position in the front of the clubhouse. Jackson slumps against my feet and Karl puts his arm around me. We look out across the courts, and I think of the weeks and months I’ve spent on them, in the low blinding sunshine of winter, in lashing rain and freezing fog. Combine that with the time that Gordana and Dad have spent out here too, and it probably runs into years.

But nothing lasts forever. Nothing ever stays the same.

Inside, Gordana’s voice has been replaced by the gruff bass of the band’s lead singer as they start another set, and her moment is over. It feels like the end of an era.

‘I miss her so much,’ I say to Karl.

He hugs me tighter. ‘I know,’ he says. There isn’t really anything else he could say.

The door opens with a blast of heat and noise. Ted comes slowly outside and sits down next to me.

Jackson puts his head in his lap and gazes adoringly at him, and Ted pats him. ‘Good boy,’ he says absently.

‘Great turnout,’ he adds to us. ‘Well, I think that went all right, didn’t it?’

Again, I marvel at his courage.

‘It went really well, Pops. Gordana would have been proud of you.’ Pops nods, once, his arms hanging down between his knees. Jackson licks his fingers.

I twist around and look through the pavilion windows to see Dad and Tasha still dancing, holding each other close, whispering and kissing.

As I turn to hug my grandfather, something shiny at the back of the bench catches my eye.

‘Have you seen this?’ I ask, pulling at his sleeve, as I notice the plaque: ‘
In memory of our friend and fellow
Midweek stalwart, Gordana Anderson. 1942-2005. She
loved this place, and we loved her
.’