The Tennis Player from Bermuda (8 page)

When he did, I walked out with my basket, and he said, “Fiona, you’re a beautiful girl.”

I was startled; no one other than my parents and grandparents had ever said anything remotely like this to me. I didn’t get compliments often, or really even at all. My figure was athletic and boyish, and even at age 18 my breasts were small. My parents liked me to keep my hair long. It was straight and light brown, and since I was a small girl it had hung down to the small of my back.

I loved hearing him say that I was beautiful. I said, “I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes to stop talking nonsense like that.” He laughed.

It was a perfect Bermuda morning after yesterday’s rain, and Mark had the hood on the MG down. We drove along Middle Road and pulled alongside the road near Gibbs Hill.

“Let’s take the basket and leave it at the foot of the lighthouse,” I said. “We’ll climb the stairs to the top and then have lunch.”

As a girl, I must have climbed to the top of the lighthouse dozens of times – 185 steps up each time. As we went up the steep, narrow staircase, Mark said from behind me, “Now I know how you came to be so fit, if this is your idea of a pleasant way to spend a morning.”

I laughed. “When I’m here by myself, I usually run up the stairs.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

The view from the top was terrific. We could see most of the island, and the Atlantic on three sides of the island. It was such a clear morning that we could pick out on the horizon the tiny fishing boats that sailed out of St. George’s.

“When was this built?” Mark asked.

“Every school child in Bermuda knows that the lighthouse gave its first light the night of May 1, 1846. The iron column of the lighthouse was made in England and then bolted together here.”

Later, we walked to the edge of the tiny lawn below the lighthouse to a spot where there was a bit of shade. I spread out the sheet on the grass, sat down on it, smoothed out my skirt, and began pulling food from the basket. Mark sat down across from me. We ate and talked. We finished the chowder and sandwiches, and I poured him a cup of coffee.

“I hope you don’t take milk. I entirely forgot milk. I never drank coffee until I got to Smith, but tea isn’t easy to find in the States, so I started drinking coffee.”

We talked for a long time, and then he leaned toward me and drew his finger across my left cheek. I just looked at him, with my hands on my skirt in my lap. I was totally naïve, but even I realized what was about to happen.

I had been kissed only once. That had been after a mixer at Smith – a ‘mixer’ being a chaperoned party with boys imported from nearby colleges. I liked that boy well enough, but he had not the slightest idea of what he was about. I had the sense that Mark was going to be different, and he was.

He put his hand under my chin, lifted my face up slightly, and kissed me. I didn’t kiss him back, but only because I was so clueless that I didn’t know I was supposed to respond to him. He pulled back and shifted himself on the sheet so that he was sitting beside me. He picked up my hands and put my arms around his neck.

“It’s customary,” he said, “for a girl to show some sign she likes being kissed. If she does.”

I laughed. “What sign would you like?”

He kissed me again, and finally I tumbled to the idea that this activity demanded joint participation. But I said, “This is crazy. We’re out in the open. A taxi full of tourists could show up anytime.” He smiled and kissed me again. The potential for the arrival of tourists bothered him not a wit.

Then he put his hand gently under my breast. I immediately jerked back and brushed his hand away. Nothing like that had ever happened to me.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. You startled me, that’s all.”

He put his arms around my shoulders and pulled me to him. I put my face against his chest. I liked being there. After a moment, he lifted my face and kissed me, and then he put his hand back on my breast. I clamped my hand around his, but I didn’t move his hand away.

“Mark, I like that, but it makes me uncomfortable.”

I was sending mixed messages here, since I kept my hand on his, but I was new at all this. He slowly moved his hand away but not before squeezing me, gently. I had never felt anything like that before. It was amazing. I buried my face in his chest again, with my arms still around him, where I was prepared to remain as long as possible. Tourists or no tourists.

He drove me home. It was late afternoon. We stood beside the MG, talking and holding hands, for so long that Mother finally came along walking home from the clinic, in her long, white lab coat.

I dropped Mark’s hand.

Mother said, “Hello, Mr Thakeham. What have you young people been doing this afternoon?”

I answered quickly to avoid the possibility that Mark might say something not appropriate. “I took Mark to see Gibbs Hill, and we had a picnic lunch at the lighthouse. He’s just brought me home.”

Mother looked up at the sky to see where the sun was over the horizon toward Dockyard. I could tell she was thinking that our picnic seemed to have lasted quite a long time, but she didn’t raise the issue.

Instead, she invited Mark to come for tea the next afternoon, said goodbye to him, and went inside to begin making tea for Father.

When I walked into Midpoint, I went to the kitchen to help Mother. For a minute or so, she was silent.

Finally, she said, “I thought you didn’t care for Mark Thakeham.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

M
ARCH
1962
S
PRING
H
OLIDAY FROM
S
MITH
‘T
EMPEST
’
T
UCKER’S
T
OWN
, B
ERMUDA

Mark and I played three hard sets on the grass court at Tempest, then we changed into our swimsuits and dived into the salt water pool. His aunt was shopping in Hamilton and the housekeeper was off, so we had everything to ourselves.

I was sitting beside the pool with my legs in the water when Mark came up for air just in front of me. He folded his arms over my knees, and I leaned over and kissed the top of his head. He looked up at me and suggested that we go inside the house, to his room, and become lovers.

A week before I had not even known he existed, and now instead of slapping him, which is what I ought to have done, I found myself thinking that he had come up with a thrilling, fascinating, and frightening idea.

But good judgment got the better of me.

“We’re going to do no such thing. Put it out of your mind.” With that, I placed my hand on top of his head, pushed him off my knees, and played at holding him under water for a second or so before releasing him.

He came up for air, then pulled himself up on the side of the pool and sat beside me. “I can’t get it out of my mind, and I don’t think you can either.”

He was right about my part of that, at least.

“What’s in my mind is my business. I have a question for you: have you ever slept with a girl?’

“That’s certainly a personal question.”

“Mark, you just asked me to sleep with you in the same tone of voice you might use to ask if I take milk in my tea. I think I’m entitled to ask a personal question.”

He smiled ruefully. “Well, yes, I have slept with a girl before.”

“More than one? How many?”

“Another personal question.”

“Answer it honestly, and I’ll leave off personal questions, at least for awhile.”

“Two or three, I suppose.”

I didn’t think he was exaggerating. If anything, I thought he was minimizing the truth to make himself look less of a philanderer in my eyes. I took ‘two or three, I suppose’ to mean ‘four or five.’

“I’m not adding myself to your list. But I do think we need to get you and your English complexion out of the Bermuda sun.”

I stood up, reached down to take his hands and helped him stand. Then I led him over to a chaise longue on the grass that was in the shade of a large tree. We stretched out beside one another, and he put his arm around me.

After a few minutes, he reached up and pulled down the shoulder strap of my bathing suit and uncovered one of my breasts. I held my breath for a moment. He took my breast in his hand and then kissed me there, and the feeling was so wonderful that it frightened me. I put my hand on the back of his head and wove my fingers through his hair. We stayed like that for a minute or so, then I pulled my strap back up onto my shoulder. He didn’t resist; he just reached over and playfully tugged at my ponytail.

We didn’t talk while we were on the longue together; we may have even dozed for a bit. But Mark and I were expected at Midpoint for tea, so finally we got up and went to change into our clothes – separately.

After tea, Mother and I washed the dishes while Father and Mark went into the living room. There Father poured a Black Seal rum for himself, plus one for Mark. This was unusual; my parents normally didn’t drink alcohol because of the risk that one of them might be called to hospital unexpectedly. But now Father and Mark, who were both Cambridge men, sat down with their rum and began seriously debating the Tories versus Labour.

“Macmillan is fundamentally sound,” Father said.

“If Gaitskell steps down, though,” Mark replied, “and Labour is led by Wilson, then Macmillan will have a tussle on his hands.”

Mother and I, in the kitchen, laughed softly to ourselves while listening to them. Neither of them had a clue about politics. Mother leaned over to me and whispered, “Where
do
we find these silly men?”

It was thrilling for me to have her treat me, almost, as an equal.

M
ARCH
1962
S
PRING
H
OLIDAY FROM
S
MITH
A
MERICAN
G
RANDMOTHER

The day before Mark left Bermuda for England, English Grandmother gave a formal ladies’ lunch in my honor at her home, which was less than 20 meters or so from Midpoint. The two houses had shared a garden for – well, for longer than anyone in Bermuda could remember.

English Grandmother’s lunch was the reason I wasn’t having a goodbye lunch somewhere else with Mark.

American Grandmother’s idea of a formal ladies’ lunch in my honor would have been to walk with me down to Hamilton Harbour and buy a freshly grilled fish, wrapped in newspaper, from one of the fishermen. Then she and I would sit down on the seawall around the harbour and dangle our feet in the water while we picked the fish apart with our fingers and ate it.

To American Grandmother, when I was young, this would be an opportunity to teach me the names of the bones in the foot, or the muscles in the hand, or how to take my pulse. Aside from her family, American Grandmother was interested only in medicine: she didn’t garden, she sewed and mended only when essential, her house looked as though a hurricane had just passed through, and she was a truly terrible cook.

But she was an extraordinary physician.

When she was a girl in Massachusetts, she told me, somehow she had heard about Mary Elizabeth Garrett of Baltimore, who, in the early 1890s, had given a large share of the money needed to start the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In doing so, Garrett had extracted the painful promise from the Hopkins trustees (all male, of course) that women would be admitted to the medical school ‘on the same terms as men.’ American Grandmother couldn’t recall how or when she had heard Garrett’s story, but she had instantly decided to become a doctor.

I gather her parents (my great-grandparents) were at first amused that young Fiona wanted to attend medical school. When American Grandmother excelled at chemistry at Smith, they were less amused, and in 1912, when she was accepted at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, they were horrified – which bothered American Grandmother not the slightest.

American Grandmother became one of the first researchers to explore the biochemical basis of the menstrual cycle. In 1915, in her third year of medical school, she published a groundbreaking paper in
The Boston Medical & Surgical Journal
– then, as now, one of the leading medical journals, although today it is known as
The New England Journal of Medicine
.

For a woman medical student in 1915, life didn’t get better than that.

I have an old, yellowed reprint of her paper: ‘Ovulation and the Luteinizing Factor. Ashburton FA. From the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.’ In the paper, she explained how she had drawn a blood sample from a “human female volunteer” each day of the volunteer’s cycle.

“How did you find a volunteer?” I asked.

“It was me!” she laughed. “By the third week, my left arm looked like a pincushion from all the needle sticks!”

No doubt she had a great future in medical research ahead of her at Hopkins, but she happened to visit Bermuda on holiday, where, by chance, she met a young doctor, who would become my grandfather. Apparently without a backward glance, American Grandmother chucked her career at Hopkins to marry him and practice general medicine on Point Finger Road in Bermuda. (Good for me, since otherwise I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story.)