Authors: Rachel Cusk
After a while I begin to discern Jim’s method. He does not have strength or speed: what he has is an unerring eye. Never does he hit the ball out; never does he send it flailing into the net. No matter what he does, the ball invariably falls on the right side of the line. It is a kind of absolute, like a law of physics; and like a law of physics it bends the surface of reality into an arc of conformity with itself. A ball lands near Jim: with both hands on his racket he bats it high up into the air. We run around underneath it, looking up, trying to see where it has gone. Finally it comes rushing out of the sky like a meteorite and lands with a thud on the back line. One way or another we get it back. It lands near Jim again, because in all our struggle to find it and retrieve it a kind of reflexive politeness was left to determine the manner of its return. He bats it into the air a second time, higher, forty or fifty feet up, so that the ball is a black grain swimming in the distant fires of the sun. Our eyes are blinded: we run directionlessly, round and round like chickens in a farmyard. Eventually it thuds down in the outermost corner of the tram-lines, and somehow, again, we get it back. We roam the back line, haunting our asphalt wilderness, rattled with expectation. Jim hits the ball with a spastic gesture, a movement almost private in its incoherence, like a grimace or a madman’s twitch. From far down at the other end we watch its progress, rooted to the spot with disbelief. Slowly, stricken, the ball makes its way to the net, lumbering and low-flying, and when it has limped over it tumbles directly to earth and lies there amidst the black mesh skirts.
Afterwards Amanda is pleased. A light of satisfaction burns faintly in the distances of her pale blue eyes. Her face is smoothed out, as though some interior pain had been temporarily numbed. She offers us drinks on a terrace beneath a pergola. The little dog picks its way carefully after her over the grass and curls itself like a wisp of smoke at her feet. She tells
us that she is forty, that she has run the hotel for more than a decade and brought up her three children here. Increasingly, in the holidays, they go to stay with relatives in England. They don’t want to be here, with the constant comings and goings of guests. When they were younger they liked it but now they find the motion sapping, the building up and dashing down of temporary intimacies. But the hotel is very successful, a success guaranteed by the xenophobia of the English, who flock to this little principality with its values of the homeland: every summer they are booked out from May to October. Amanda herself grew up in Italy, but she has grown disillusioned with it over time. And now that the children too want to be elsewhere she wonders what the future holds.
One of the guests sits down at our table with her baby. She is plain and perky, with a secretarial manner and spectacles on her nose. She puts the baby in a high chair and ties a plastic bib around its neck. Then she proceeds to feed it from a bowl with a plastic spoon, addressing remarks sometimes to Amanda and sometimes to the baby. Amanda replies in her gentle, abstracted manner. She lights a cigarette and returns to our conversation, but the woman taps her on the shoulder. Excuse me, the woman says, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke around the baby. Amanda apologises and instantly mashes her cigarette into the ashtray, where it continues to smoulder, its blue ribbon of smoke curling thoughtfully upwards through the vines of the pergola towards the early evening sky. The woman casts her exasperated looks. Finally, with an expression of distaste, she leans forward and takes the cigarette between the tips of her fingers, and firmly extinguishes it herself.
*
Jim calls. Amanda enjoyed her tennis. In fact, he hasn’t seen her enjoy something so much for years. She wants to play again, to see us broiled once more in the sun and served up as victims at her feet. To expedite her wish she has made us an offer: swimming for the children in the hotel pool, and supper at the communal table.
When we arrive, a small boy is waiting alone in the courtyard. According to the children, this is Amanda’s son. He has been standing there all afternoon, apparently, waiting for them to come. As soon as they arrive he tries to lead them away but they hesitate, a little shy. Their opposition confounds him: his white face is frozen, baulked. He has been waiting for them to come, and now they are here, yet events are refusing to unfold. There is an obstruction, a blockage. It is not clear to him what the blockage is. He tries again to lead them away; again, they do not comply. His sturdy body stiffens. He has been objectified: in the face of their whims and desires he is as helpless and inflexible as a figure made of wood. Then, at last, they come, sprinting past him towards the tree-swing while he runs gladly, heavily behind.
Today the courtyard is empty: it is very hot, a new kind of heat, white and dominating. Until now, people have sought the sun: today they seek the shade. There are no men with sunglasses and video cameras, no women with plastic feeding bowls, no tottering babies measuring out the parameters of their holiday with faltering steps. Where are they all? It seems they have been driven out of the open spaces, driven back by the white glare which has suddenly asserted itself, erasing the human dimension at a single stroke. In the distance we can see the swimming pool, just down the hill. It lies against the deserted green, a length of turquoise foaming with activity, like a strange human fish-tank. There are so many people in it that I imagine them stacked in writhing layers all the way to the bottom. The whole community, it seems, has been displaced into this sky-coloured rectangle. It teems with bodies, with inflatable rafts and rubber rings: a huge blow-up crocodile noses through the churning water. People dive in, or cannonball off the side, or haul themselves out slick and wet, like the first humans emerging from the primordial swamp. The sun bores indifferently into their wet, white backs. All around the fields lie motionless, stunned with heat.
This time Amanda is waiting for us on the tennis court. She
stands at the perimeter fence, smoking and looking out at the valley. Her dog lies beside a bush, curled in its rim of shade. The court seems larger in the heat, as big and blasted as a prairie. We take our places and begin to play. For a while it is impossible to kindle a game on this featureless surface. We are too separate, too slow: there is nothing to get a purchase on. The ball is trivial and minute, coming out of the hot blankness. It is an effort, to move, to stir, to hit. Each stroke is like a reflex jerk to catch something that is falling. There is a momentary panic, a surge of adrenalin, then a slump while the ball buzzes away again. The sky pulses silently overhead. The sun presses, bears down, as though it would drive us into the earth. Amanda and Jim move indistinctly at the other end of the court. They seem tiny and remote. They win two games, but there is no succulence to their victory, no bite. We win a game, then they win another. There is a long, labouring game that goes back to deuce again and again. It is as though lassitude itself is winning. We probe blindly, like a thread probing at the eye of a needle, but the precision of success eludes us all. It is out of this formlessness, this lump of strategic clay, that the game suddenly begins to shape itself. The dull, hammering repetition of deuce begins to fashion something, a form, an entity. It attracts our notice: suddenly there is an object in our midst. We vie for possession of it, a little nonchalantly at first, for it is still featureless: it is a mere embryo, a seed. But its presence has a strange effect on Jim: he decides to leave two balls in a row for Amanda, and twice she sends them into the net. The fifth game is ours; the fight is on.
For more than an hour we play, while the hillside faintly reverberates with the cries and splashes from the swimming pool and the sound of tractors passing in the valley below, dredging the fields with dust. We are not conscious of these noises, though we hear them; nor are we crippled by heat, for we have given ourselves over to it: we have passed through its white-hot refinery, been purified, been smelted down and remade. Now we are as lithe and liberated as the leaping figures
on a Grecian urn. We are as durable as clay idols fired in a kiln. Our adversaries confer, regroup, exchange wordless signs. The ball goes back and forth, charged with esoteric significance. At last Amanda and Jim defeat us, but there is sweat on their brows and a new hard light in their eyes. Their victory has been less immediately satisfying to them, but it has revealed a larger possibility of triumph, a greater conception of combat. Climbing the steps back up to the house, we agree to play again the next day at the same time.
There is someone sitting at the table under the pergola: it is Roger. He regards us with a satirical expression. When we are introduced he assumes a look of surprise that is more satirical still, as though he had met us many times before and did not expect to have to shake hands with us again now. The sun has set: the guests are back in the courtyard. They wander through the blue light; they hover and hang around, or gather in small murmuring groups, like the survivors of something. They seem intensely aware of themselves as a species. Yet their purpose seems fragile, seems vague and insubstantial, as they make their little circuits in the dusk, as though looking for something to which they can attach the thread of life and spin from it the web of an experience. From a distance their little civilisation appears doomed by a lack of conviction. Unoccupied as they are, their power to superimpose intricacy on emptiness is faintly unsettling. I can imagine them turning on one another, creating gods and victims, like the children in
The Lord of the Flies
.
Amanda tells us of bizarre and comic incidents she has witnessed in her twelve years here, all of them so strange as to be scarcely believable: she herself, she says, can’t believe that some of these things occurred, and yet they did. I attribute her tired, abstracted manner in part to these freakish tales, for it is hard to have faith in life when you have seen its credibility strained too often. Roger, however, does not like such stories: he wants to talk of successes, of high achievers who come back every year, of celebrity guests whom he numbers among his personal friends.
The children come. They have been swimming with Amanda’s son and with his nanny, an Italian girl with long black hair and a melancholic face who strokes their heads distractedly with her painted fingernails. The boy sits on Amanda’s lap. He looks contented and gnome-like, with his quizzical little face and round body. From the maternal throne he rattles away at his nanny in Italian. In English he is halting and tongue-tied, but his Italian self trills and chatters like a bird. He is like a creature in a fairy tale, a hybrid, a composition. In him the randomness of adult fortunes is distilled into permanence. Amanda repeats her invitation to partake of the communal supper. Absolutely, says Roger, after a finely judged hesitation. His face and neck are red and rigid: he looks as though he might suddenly, violently explode. Feel free, he says, waving his hand around to take in the hotel, the grounds, the whole enterprise. Just help yourselves.
Jim helps himself too. He is reticent: he eats little. I have the sense that he accepts the food not as a tax or perk, but as a favour, to whom I do not know.
*
For a week we play nearly every day. It is as though we have been waiting for our life in Italy to drift off its preordained course. We are tired of creating the world for ourselves. It seems we are ready to be diverted, to err, to be blown wherever the wind takes us.
The heatwave continues: we arrive with our rackets in the furnace of afternoon, and go silently out on to the court like gladiators striding out into the glare of the amphitheatre. The hotel guests have returned to England, and another set have taken their place. We no longer notice them. It is the forms of our adversaries, of Jim and Amanda standing in the asphalt distances, that preoccupy us. Jim has been quiet on the subject of our new pastime. He turns up in his tennis whites, diffident and jocular. He never pleads a prior engagement, nor examines our commitment to this new course of events. His life is built on a basis of endlessly
renewing transience, of people found and then lost, of habits easily formed and as easily broken. When the game is finished he waits for someone else to suggest another meeting, and he is pleased, acquiescent, when they do.
Within the matrix of the game itself, however, it is another matter. Jim is cunning, adversarial. As I am the weakest member of the group he constructs his path to victory through my side of the court. Every ball he hits, he hits to me. He harries me until it feels like a perverse form of attention. He does not trouble himself with gentlemanly thoughts of honour: for him, a point is not more decently scored because it has been won entirely through his own efforts. The easiest way to win a point is to encourage me to make a mistake, and so that is what he does. I quickly become enraged by this strategy. It is unclear to me why the rules of a game should be so distinct from the norms of social conduct. Why should tennis consider itself outside the obligation to be polite, to be fair? In life it is unethical to profit systematically from another person’s disadvantage. But profit Jim does, and the more he does it the more enraged I become.
Then, after a while, I cease to care quite so much. I feel a delusion loosening its grip on me, the mistaken belief that a person is upright and good simply because he does not comport himself like a criminal. As Jim sends one ball after another into my domain I realise that people are by nature exploitative. It is merely that I have never been sufficiently the victim of their exploitation to know it. Now, it seems that I have a choice: to perish in the upholding of my own values, or to defend myself by any means possible. I am made to hit so many balls that the question is posed anew with unrelenting frequency. My ambivalence is exposed to a finer and finer degree, dissected and known to the last particle. Out of this flayed knowledge must I create something new; out of this final distinction between a ball that is returned and a ball that is not must the materials for survival be found.