Recently, too, he had felt a vague dissastisfaction with his life. There had been trouble about his knocking off another player’s wife, a Mexican beauty, whose insanely jealous husband had rumbled them. The reason Nicky was playing in Pikely this week rather than Hamburg was in the hope that the whole thing might blow over. Then last week an offer of an advertising commercial which would have brought him in several thousand a year had suddenly gone instead to another British player, who, although less glamorous than Nicky, had reached the finals of the big tournaments more often than Nicky had the preceding year. Finally, the night before he’d driven up to Pikely, his Coach had taken him out to dinner.
‘What are you playing at, Nicky boy?’ he had asked after the second bottle, with his usual mixture of bluntness and concern. ‘You’ve got everything going for you, but you’re not getting any younger, and you’ll never make it really big unless you cut out the birds and the booze and the late nights. Haven’t you ever thought of settling down?’
Nicky had replied that he had too much trouble settling up in life to think of any permanent commitment. His debts were crippling at the moment, he said, and they had both laughed. But the Coach’s remarks had stung and Nicky had not forgotten them.
As the crowd clapped approvingly at the end of the set, Mr Brocklehurst dragged his protesting daughters away, saying they mustn’t be late for the whist drive. Nicky had looked so sensational on court that Imogen could hardly believe their tête-à-tête in the tea tent had ever taken place, but as she left he had waved his racket at her, so it must be true.
As they drove home to the vicarage with Juliet’s bike perched precariously on the roof rack, they passed a school friend of Juliet’s riding home from a gymkhana festooned with rosettes, who gave them a lordly wave with her whip.
‘Just showing off, silly bitch,’ muttered Juliet.
‘10p in the swear box,’ reproached the vicar, but mildly, because he doted on his younger daughter.
As he crossed the River Darrow and took the road up to the moors, he, too, felt a faint dissatisfaction with life. Watching Beresford today had reminded him of his youth on the rugger field. He had been good looking too, and had experienced the same adulation from women and hero-worship from men.
‘Having achieved the ultimate glory of playing rugger for England,’ said an unkind fellow clergyman, ‘Steve Brocklehurst spent the rest of his life in exhausted mediocrity.’
Mr Brocklehurst was also only too aware that another great athlete, David Shepherd, had made bishop. But no such promotion had come his way. No doubt he would be left to moulder away the rest of his life in Pikely, where the adoration of the spinsters of the parish was no substitute for the stands rising at Twickenham. In his more gloomy moments the vicar thought there was a great deal to be said for an athlete dying young, cut off in his prime, rather than growing paunchy and rheumaticky.
Life, however, had its compensations. He was well respected in the district; no local committee was complete without him; he loved his garden and his games of golf, and his vague, charming wife, probably in that order. His two sons, both at boarding school and costing the earth, were shaping up as excellent athletes. Michael was already in the fifteen. Juliet, adorable, insouciant, the baby of the family, could twist him round her little finger.
But as a man of God, it had always nagged his conscience, like a bit of apple core wedged in one’s teeth, that his elder daughter, Imogen, got on his nerves. In the beginning he’d resented her not being a boy; as she grew up he was irritated by her clumsiness, her dreaminess, her slowness, her tender heart (how easily he could reduce her to tears), her inability to stand up to him, and her complete lack of athleticism. He still remembered a humiliating gym display at her school a few years ago, when Imogen had been the only one in her class who totally failed to get over any of the apparatus. He had also been deeply ashamed of her lumpiness, but at least she’d slimmed down a bit lately, and she’d kept her job in the library, which helped out with the housekeeping. (Money was very tight, with three children still at school.) But why did she have to agree with everything he said, like one of those nodding doggies in the back of cars?
There was no doubt, though, that young Beresford seemed taken with her, and needed keeping an eye on. The vicar might not love his elder daughter, but he wouldn’t let her come to any harm. He had been a bit of a lad himself in his day and, like most reformed rakes, he veered towards repressive puritanism where his daughters were concerned. He was only too aware of the lusts of young players after too much beer.
Next moment he caught sight of his curate on his shiny new red racing bicycle, with its drop handlebars which the vicar thought both undignified and far too young for him. He waited until they were only a few yards behind the curate, then sounded his horn loudly, which made the poor young man nearly ride into the ditch.
The vicar chuckled to himself and turned up the drive. The vicarage was one of those draughty Victorian houses, made only slightly less forbidding by the creepers and rambler roses surging up its dark grey walls, and the wallflowers and purple irises in the front flower beds. At the back of the house was a lawn long enough for a cricket pitch, where Imogen bowled endlessly to her younger brothers when they were home. On either side were herbaceous borders, and at the end long grass and bluebells growing round the trunks of an ancient orchard.
As they opened the front door, Homer, the golden retriever, his eyes screwed up from sleep, greeted them, singing with pleasure, looking frantically round for something to bring them and settling for a pair of socks lying on the floor.
Going through the hall, with its old coats hanging on a row of pegs and a pile of parish magazines waiting to be delivered, Imogen found her mother in the drawing-room, looking rather pious and virtuously sewing buttons on one of her father’s shirts. She knew perfectly well that her mother had been reading a novel and had shoved it under the shirt the moment she heard wheels on the gravel.
‘Hullo, darling,’ she said vaguely. ‘Had a nice time at the tennis?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Imogen, kissing her. She knew there was no point in saying any more; her mother wouldn’t listen to the answer.
‘I suppose we ought to get changed for the whist drive,’ said Mrs Brocklehurst with a sigh. ‘What time does it begin?’
‘Eight o’clock,’ said the vicar, coming through the door. ‘Hullo, darling. Just time for me to plant out my antirrhinums.’
‘Well, of all the blooming cheats,’ said Juliet to his departing back, as he went out of the french windows. ‘We could have stayed and watched the last set after all. I hope his rotten snapdragons never come up.’
The whist drive seemed to last an eternity, but eventually the final chair had been stacked in the church hall, and the last vol-au-vent crumb swept away.
‘Don’t you sometimes wish Daddy had been an engineer?’ said Juliet, as she and Imogen trailed home.
‘Yes,’ said Imogen, listening to the lambs bleating in the field behind the house, and praying that Nicky wasn’t enjoying his party too much. ‘I say, Juliet,’ she felt herself blushing, ‘it did happen, didn’t it? This afternoon I mean.’