August Saturday
‘You don’t remember me,’ the man said.
His tone suggested a statement, not a question, but Grania did remember him. She had recognized him immediately, his face smiling above the glass he held. He was a man she had believed she would never see again. For sixteen years – since the summer of 1972 – she had tried not to think about him, and for the most part had succeeded.
‘Yes, I do remember you,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
A slice of lemon floated on the surface of what she guessed was gin and tonic; there were cubes of ice and the little bubbles that came from tonic when it was freshly poured. It wouldn’t be tonic on its own; it hadn’t been the other time. ‘I’ve drunk a bit too much,’ he’d said.
‘I used to wonder,’ he went on now, ‘if ever we’d meet again. The kind of thing you wonder when you can’t sleep.’
‘I didn’t think we would.’
‘I know. But it doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘Of course not.’
She wondered why he had come back. She wondered how long he intended to stay. He’d be staying with the Prendergasts, she supposed, as he had been before. For sixteen years she had avoided the road on which the avenue that led to the Prendergasts’ house was, the curve of the green iron railings on either side of the open gates, the unoccupied gate-lodge.
‘You weren’t aware that Hetty Prendergast died?’ he said.
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Well, she did. Two days ago.’
The conversation took place in the bar of the Tara Hotel, where Grania and her husband, Desmond, dined once a month with other couples from the tennis club – an arrangement devised by the husbands so that the wives, just for a change, wouldn’t have to cook.
‘You don’t mind my talking to you?’ the man said. ‘I’m on my own again.’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘When I was told about the death I came on over. I’ve just come in from the house to have a meal with the Quiltys.’
‘Tonight, you mean?’
‘When they turn up.’
Quilty was a solicitor. He and his wife, Helen, belonged to the tennis club and were usually present at the monthly dinners in the Rhett Butler Room of the Tara Hotel. The death of old Hetty Prendergast had clearly caught them unawares, and Crania could imagine Helen Quilty sulkily refusing to cancel a long-booked babysitter in order to remain at home to cook a meal for the stranger who had arrived from England, with whom her husband presumably had business to discuss. ‘We’ll take him with us,’ Quilty would have said in his soothing voice, and Helen would have calmed down, as she always did when she got her way.
‘Still playing tennis, Grania?’
‘Pretty badly.’
‘You’ve hardly aged, you know.’
This was so patently a lie that it wasn’t worth protesting about. After the funeral of the old woman he would go away. He hadn’t arrived for the other funeral, that of Mr Prendergast, which had taken place nearly ten years ago, and there wouldn’t be another one because there was no other Prendergast left to die. She wondered what would happen to the house and to the couple who had looked after the old woman, driving in every Friday to shop for her. She didn’t ask. She said:
‘A group of us have dinner here now and again, the Quiltys too. I don’t know if they told you that.’
‘You mean tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, that wasn’t said.’
He smiled at her. He sipped a little gin. He had a long face, high cheekbones, greying hair brushed straight back from a sallow forehead. His blue-green eyes were steady, almost staring because he didn’t blink much. She remembered the eyes particularly, now that she was again being scrutinized by them. She remembered asking who he was and being told a sort of nephew of the Prendergasts, an Englishman.
‘I’ve often wondered about the tennis club, Grania.’
‘It hasn’t changed. Except that we’ve become the older generation.’
Desmond came up then and she introduced her companion, reminding Desmond that he’d met him before. She stumbled when she had to give him a name because she’d never known what it was. ‘Prendergast,’ she mumbled vaguely, not sure if he was called Prendergast or not. She’d never known that.
‘Hetty died, I hear,’ Desmond said.
‘So I’ve been telling your wife. I’ve come over to do my stuff.’
‘Well, of course.’
‘The Quiltys have invited me to your dinner do.’
‘You’re very welcome.’
Desmond had a squashed pink face and receding hair that had years ago been sandy. As soon as he put his clothes on they became crumpled, no matter how carefully Grania ironed them. He was a man who never lost his temper, slow-moving except on a tennis court, where he was surprisingly subtle and cunning, quite unlike the person he otherwise was.
Grania moved away. Mavis Duddy insisted she owed her a drink from last time and led her to the bar, where she ordered two more Martinis, ‘Who was that?’ she asked, and Grania replied that the grey-haired man was someone from England, related to the Prendergasts, she wasn’t entirely certain about his name. He’d come to the tennis club once, she said, an occasion when Mavis hadn’t been there. ‘Over for old Hetty’s funeral, is he?’ Mavis said and, accepting the drink, Grania agreed that was so.
They were a set in the small town; since the time they’d been teenagers the tennis club had been the pivot of their social lives. In winter some of them played bridge or golf, others chose not to. But all of them on summer afternoons and evenings looked in at the tennis club even if, like Francie MacGuinness and the Haddons, they didn’t play much any more. They shared memories, and likes and dislikes, that had to do with the tennis club; there were photographs that once in a blue moon were sentimentally mulled over; friendships had grown closer or apart. Billy MacGuinness had always been the same, determinedly a winner at fourteen and determinedly a winner at forty-five. Francie, who’d married him when it had seemed that he might marry Trish, was a winner also: Trish had made do with Tom Crosbie. There’d been quarrels at the tennis club: a great row in 1961 when Desmond’s father had wanted to raise money for a hard court and resigned in a huff when no one agreed; and nearly ten years later there had been the quarrel between Laverty and Dr Timothy Sweeney which had resulted in both their resignations, all to do with a dispute about a roller. There were jealousies and gossip, occasionally both envy and resentment. The years had been less kind to some while favouring others; the children born to the couples of the tennis club were often compared, though rarely openly, in terms of achievement or promise. Tea was taken, supplied by the wives, on Saturday afternoons from May to September. The men supplied drinks on that one day of the week also, and even washed up the glasses. The children of the tennis club tasted their first cocktails there, Billy MacGuinness’s White Ladies and Sidecars.
A handful of the tennis-club wives were best friends, and had been since their convent days: Grania and Mavis, Francie, Helen, Trish. They trusted one another, doing so more easily now than they had when they’d been at the convent together or in the days when each of them might possibly have married one of the others’ husbands. They told one another most things, confessing their errors and their blunders; they comforted and were a solace, jollying away feelings of inadequacy or guilt. Trish had worried at the convent because her breasts wouldn’t grow, Helen because her face was scrawny and her lips too thin. Francie had almost died when a lorry had knocked her off her bicycle. Mavis had agonized for months before she said yes to Martin Duddy. As girls, they had united in their criticism of girls outside their circle; as wives they had not changed.