This took place on court. First the club chairman spoke. His name, according to Jude’s ever-helpful guide, Piers Targett, was Sir Donald Budgen and he had retired a few years back after a long career in the Foreign Office which had ended up with his achieving the status of one of Her Majesty’s ambassadors. A tall thin man with greying hair, he wore a suit and tie that gave the impression he never ‘dressed down’. The existence of a pair of jeans in Sir Donald Budgen’s wardrobe somehow seemed an impossible incongruity.
The chairman said what a jolly occasion the weekend tournament had been, and how much the thanks for that were due to George Hazlitt and his junior pro, Ned Jackson. He then added thanks to all the people who had helped with the catering and other organization, finishing up with an accolade to all of the players who had ensured that ‘the occasion lived up to the fine traditions of good sportsmanship which is so much part of the ethos of real tennis.’
After that he handed over to his wife to make the presentation. With a perfectly judged couple of sentences Felicity Budgen congratulated the winners and handed across the Sec’s Cup. The successful pair were loudly applauded from the dedans, and after the clapping had died down, their male opponents were subjected to a good deal of raucous ribbing and congratulation. The voices calling out were interestingly mixed. Jude heard a good few her next-door neighbour Carole Seddon would have described as ‘common’.
Jude, full of Chardonnay and delicious curry, had enjoyed her first encounter with real tennis. Still clueless for most of the time about what the hell was going on, she had liked the company.
And she had liked being with Piers.
In the flat that evening their love-making was as beautiful as ever. No rush, just slow, continuing appreciation of each other’s bodies. Not for the first time, Jude reckoned that there was a lot to be said for post-menopausal sex.
As they lay, infinitely relaxed in each other’s arms, she murmured to Piers, ‘You still haven’t explained why it is that the players change ends.’
‘Oh, it’s very simple,’ he said. ‘It’s all done by laying chases, and when two chases have been laid then you change ends. Unless one player’s got to forty – in other words, game point – and then you change if there’s only one chase. Now I did tell you about chases, didn’t I? The chase is laid where the ball bounces for the second time, so if that second bounce is on, let’s say, second gallery . . .’
Never failed. Within two minutes Jude was asleep.
She was woken in the middle of the night. Probably a taxi door slamming. Bayswater was noisy after the rural quiet of Fethering. Light from a street lamp slivered through a gap in the curtains and illuminated Piers Targett’s face. Even in sleep he looked very handsome. Within Jude there was a helpless stirring that she hadn’t felt for a long time. Almost definitely love.
She thought back to how they had met, only a couple of weeks before. Jude had been attending a weekend conference of healers and other alternative therapists and staying with a kinesiologist friend in Notting Hill Gate. (The reason that a kinesiologist could afford such an address was that her husband worked as a banker in the City.)
On the Saturday night Jude’s hosts had given a dinner party, at which Piers Targett had been one of the guests. Sensing the immediate mutual attraction, Jude and he had exchanged phone numbers and Piers had been quick off the mark, phoning her on the Sunday morning and inviting her to delay her return home to Fethering and have dinner with him. They’d had a wonderful meal at Joe Allen in Exeter Street (though neither of them could remember what they’d eaten) and ended the evening in Piers Targett’s flat. From that moment they had hardly been out of each other’s sight, and Jude’s return to Fethering continued to be delayed.
She knew – of course she knew – that their romance couldn’t continue for ever in this one-on-one exclusivity. Today had been a step, her becoming involved with his tennis-playing friends at Lockleigh House. If they were going to stay together, though, normal life had to continue at some level. At some point – and quite soon – Jude would have to get back to Fethering and Woodside Cottage.
Preoccupied with Piers Targett, she had been neglecting other areas of her life, her clients, her friends. She knew she had been neglecting one friend in particular. A friend who didn’t take kindly to neglect. Carole Seddon.
THREE
High Tor was looking cleaner than ever. Gulliver, its owner’s Labrador, was groomed to within an inch of his life, his biscuit-coloured coat sullenly glowing. Carole Seddon’s bad moods frequently found expression in manic bursts of tidiness.
She wouldn’t admit to herself the cause of her disquiet. In fact she wouldn’t admit there was any disquiet. Carole had been brought up to believe that introspection was mere self-indulgence, that there was only one way to treat the inconvenience of gloom, and that was to ‘snap out of it’. She had no mental problems. On the contrary, she had an obsessive belief in her own normality.
The furthest she would go would be to admit to feeling slightly ‘grumpy’. And there was nothing wrong with that – she had plenty to be grumpy about. She was in her fifties, retired from the Home Office, divorced and stuck in the Sussex backwater of Fethering with only Gulliver for company. If that lot didn’t justify feeling grumpy, then what did?
And she didn’t even have access at that time to the one person who could still bring an unfailing smile to her wan lips, her granddaughter, Lily. Carole’s son Stephen and his wife Gaby, claiming that ‘we should do these things before we get caught up in schools and term times’, had taken their daughter off for a month’s holiday in California. Orange County to be precise. Anaheim in Orange County to be even more precise (and if there was one thing Carole Seddon liked, it was precision). Apparently, according to Stephen and Gaby, the appeal of that destination was its proximity to various theme parks, most of which seemed to be prefaced by the word ‘Disney’.
Now Carole couldn’t help herself, but she thought anything to do with Disney was vulgar. The prejudice came from her parents who had assured her that comics were vulgar and only existed for children who couldn’t handle ‘proper books’. Animated films came under the same blanket condemnation. Cartoons were for common people. The idea of whole theme parks dedicated to the propagation of the Disney oeuvre Carole’s parents would have found appalling. And their daughter shared that view.
Apart from anything else, Lily was far too young to enjoy a theme park. Though her own had been relatively miserable, Carole Seddon wanted her granddaughter to have what she thought of as a ‘proper childhood’ . . . In other words, one without excessive entertainment . . . or electronic toys . . . or computer games . . . or theme parks.
But Stephen and Gaby had not asked for her views on the subject. They had simply announced that they were taking Lily away for a month in Anaheim, Orange County, California, USA. That, thought Carole, was an entirely legitimate reason for her to feel a little grumpy.
She would never have admitted the real cause for her unease. The fact that she was missing her next-door neighbour, Jude, who had announced a couple of weeks before that she was going to some healers’ conference (or, as Carole would have called it, ‘some kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo’) in London and not been heard from since.