A weak crescent moon lightened the darkness as we walked towards Templemairt. The stars were out in force. No car passed us, but even if we’d been aware of headlights behind us I doubt that we’d have bothered to try for a lift. We smoked one cigarette after another, still exhilarated by our triumphant afternoon, and in the circumstances it seemed natural that Hubert should talk about his parents, who had spent a lot of time on racecourses.
‘They were drunk, of course, when they crashed that car.’
It was not difficult to believe they were, but none the less I did not feel that hearty agreement was in order. I nodded briefly. I said:
‘Were you born in England?’
‘I believe in the back row of a cinema.’
I had never heard that before, but there was something about Hubert’s honesty in other matters that prevented me from suspecting invention. The photograph of his grandfather in the hall was precisely as Mr Plunkett had so often been described, down to his eyebrows being almost a single horizontal line, and the celluloid collar of his shirt.
‘When the lights went up she couldn’t move. They had to send for a doctor, but before the ambulance arrived she popped me.’
We entered the house quietly and went to our rooms without further conversation. I had hoped that Pamela might still be up since it wasn’t as late as last night. I had even prepared a scene that I felt could easily take place: Pamela in the hall as we closed the front door behind us, Pamela offering us tea in the kitchen and Hubert declining while I politely accepted.
*
‘Pam, do you want to play tennis?’
She was as astonished as I was to hear this. A startled look came into her face. She stammered slightly when she replied.
‘Three of us?’ she said.
‘We’ll show you how three can play.’
Sunday lunch had already taken place, a somewhat silent occasion because Hubert and I were more than ever out of favour. Mrs Plunkett said quietly, but in the firm tones of one conveying a message as a matter of trust, that her husband had been disappointed because we hadn’t accompanied Pamela and herself to church. I did my best to apologize; Hubert ignored the revelation. ‘We won a fortune at the races,’ he said, which helped matters as little as it would have had the old man been present.
‘Tennis would be lovely,’ Pamela said.
She added that she’d change. Hubert said he’d lend me a pair of tennis shoes.
A remarkable transformation appeared to have overtaken him, and for a moment I thought that the frosty lunchtime and his grandfather’s reported distress had actually stirred his conscience. It then occurred to me that since there was nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, tennis with Pamela was better than being bored. I knew what he meant when he said we’d show her how three could play: on the tennis court Hubert belonged in a class far more exalted than my own, and often at school Ossie Richpatrick and I had together played against him and still not managed to win. It delighted me that Pamela and I were to be partners.
Hubert’s tennis shoes didn’t fit me perfectly, but I succeeded in getting them on to my feet. There was no suggestion that he and I should change our clothes, as Pamela had said she intended to. Hubert offered me a choice of several racquets and when I’d selected one we made our way to the tennis court at the back of the house. We raised the net, measured its height, and knocked up while we waited.
‘I’m afraid we can’t,’ Pamela said.
She was wearing a white dress and tennis shoes and socks of the same pristine freshness. There was a white band in her hair and she was wearing sunglasses. She wasn’t carrying her tennis racquet.
‘Can’t what?’ Hubert said, stroking a ball over the net. ‘Can’t what, Pam?’
‘We’re not allowed to play tennis.’
‘Who says we’re not allowed to? What d’you mean, allowed?’
‘Grandmother says we mustn’t play tennis.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because it’s Sunday, because you haven’t been to church.’
‘Oh, don’t be so bloody silly.’
‘He asked her what we were doing. She had to tell him.’
‘The idiotic old brute.’
‘I don’t want to play, Hubert.’
Hubert stalked away. I wound the net down. I was glad he hadn’t insisted that he and I should play on our own.
‘Don’t be upset by it.’ I spoke apologetically. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘There won’t be a quarrel,’ she reassured me, and in fact there wasn’t. The raised voices of Hubert and his grandmother, which I thought we’d hear coming from the house, didn’t materialize. Pamela went to change her dress. I took off Hubert’s tennis shoes. In the drawing-room at teatime Mrs Plunkett said:
‘Hubert’s turned his face to the wall, has he?’
‘Shall I call him?’ Pamela offered.
‘Hubert knows the hour of Sunday tea, my dear.’
Lily brought more hot water. She, too, seemed affected by what had occurred, her mouth tightly clamped. But I received the impression that the atmosphere in the drawing-room was one she was familiar with.
‘A pity to turn one’s face to the wall on such a lovely day,’ Mrs Plunkett remarked.
Silence took over then and was not broken until Mrs Plunkett rose and left the room. Strauss began on the piano, tinkling faintly through the wall. Lily came in to collect the tea things.
‘Perhaps we should go for a walk,’ Pamela said.
We descended the stepped path between the rockeries and strolled past Hanrahan’s yard. We turned into the sandy lane that led to the dunes and made our way on to the strand. We didn’t refer to what had occurred.
‘Are you still at school?’ I asked.
‘I left in July.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I’m hoping to study botany.’
She was shyer than I’d thought. Her voice was reticent when she said she hoped to study botany, as if the vaunting of this ambition constituted a presumption.
‘What are you going to do?’
I told her. I envied Hubert going to Africa, I said, becoming garrulous in case she was bored by silence. I mentioned the cultivation of groundnuts.
‘Africa?’ she said. When she stopped she took me unawares and I had to walk back a pace or two. Too late, I realized I had inadvertently disclosed a confidence.
‘It’s just an idea he has.’
I tried to change the subject, but she didn’t seem to hear, or wasn’t interested. I watched while she drew a pattern on the sand with the toe of her shoe. More slowly than before, she walked on again.
‘I don’t know why,’ I said, ‘we don’t have a bathe.’
She didn’t reply. Children were running into and out of the sea. Two men were paddling, with their trousers rolled up to their knees. A girl was sunbathing on a li-lo, both hands in the water, resisting the tide that would have carried her away from the shore.
‘My bathing-dress is in the house,’ Pamela said at last. ‘I could get it if you like.’
‘Would you like?’
She shrugged. Perhaps not, she said, and I wondered if she was thinking that bathing, as much as tennis, might be frowned upon as a breach of the Sabbath.
‘I don’t think, actually,’ she said, ‘that Hubert will ever go to Africa.’
Lily stood beside my deck-chair, a bunch of mint she’d picked in one hand. I hadn’t known what else to do, since Hubert had not come out of his room, so I’d wandered about the garden and had eventually found the deck-chair on a triangle of grass in a corner. ‘I’m going to read for a while,’ Pamela had said when we returned from our walk.
‘It’s understandable they never had to be so severe with Pamela,’ Lily said. ‘On account of her mother being sensible in her life. Different from Hubert’s father.’