There are people around, mostly men, lying on white plastic loungers in the courtyard. Some of them are reading paperbacks or magazines. Their sunglasses give their faces a blank, annihilating expression. Yet they seem quite harmless, lying there in their baggy shorts and polo shirts and thick sandals. Most of them are middle-aged, fleshy and white-skinned, with hair that is a little threadbare on top. It is immediately obvious that they are not Italians: they are English. Only the English have those womanish, fleshy bodies which wear their masculinity like an ill-fitting suit. Nearby, a woman stands pushing a child on a swing. She is striking-looking, tall and very slim, with long hair and a long gypsy skirt and enormous gold hoops in her ears. She pushes the child back and forth ecstatically, leaping on the upswing so that her skirt swirls around her ankles. She tosses and strokes her own hair while she waits for the swing to return, and then leaps again, trilling and exclaiming, as though she were the child and the impassive creature in the swing were her toy.
Jim is wearing tennis whites, and carries a Fred Perry holdall with two rackets inside. The hotel’s clientele are a nice bunch, he says, families mostly. Some of them come back year after year. They pay a flat rate for the week that includes all their food and drink. They socialize together, and eat their meals at a communal table. Most of them never leave the precincts of the hotel.
Presently Amanda emerges from the dark interior. She moves slowly out into the light. She is wearing tracksuit bottoms and holds a tennis racket in her hand, but these accessories seem more symbolic than practical, like the objects that gods carry to represent their own attributes. Amanda could be a goddess of self-sacrifice, using the racket as a household implement. Immediately she is besieged from all sides, by women holding babies and men brandishing plastic beakers, by people with special dietary requirements and people with malfunctioning gadgets, by complaints and requests and urgent, intransigent needs, all of which she attends to, moving slowly through the crowd in her sunglasses, with her absent, goddess-like weariness, turning gently from side to side to scatter her wisdom upon the masses. The crowd moves along with her halfway across the courtyard and then they stop, like a herd that has reached a fence. She goes on alone, traversing the courtyard to where we stand waiting. A slender little dog with a narrow, sagacious face walks beside her. But even when she reaches us she doesn’t halt: she merely gathers us into her train as she passes. Automatically we follow, a procession steadily making its way out of the courtyard and down a flight of stone steps, down amid lawns and trees, past children who call out greetings, past little arbors where men and women sit, past rockeries and shady benches, following the soft, slow form of Amanda, as though we were disciples who must follow our guru to the ends of the earth.
At the tennis court she finally stops. She removes her sunglasses. Her blue eyes have a sort of fractured, antique appearance, as though they had been broken into tiny pieces and carefully glued back together again. She lights a cigarette. She shakes our hands and ties the little dog by his lead. She passes her eye professionally over the children and questions them briefly. Their answers appear to satisfy her: they are close in age to her own son. He will show them the treehouse, the rope swing, the sandpit. She will send someone to find him. He will be pleased to have the company of English children: most of the guests’ children are babies. Paul has a nanny who keeps an eye on him. The children will be quite safe with her.
The tennis court lies exposed to the sun, on a shelf of land above the valley. We can see our house, the village on its mound, the far-off purple hills. The court, so big and bare, so open to the sky, reminds me of the sacred spaces of the ancient world, the vast raised altars of the Aztecs, the stone plinths of the Greeks. Amanda grinds her cigarette out on the asphalt. She is the goddess, the chief, come to the altar to accept her sacrifices, her offerings; and Jim is the priest who will eviscerate them and deliver them up. At first I am not cowed by Jim. He doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard: he doesn’t fly around the court, he doesn’t grunt or smash or spin. He barely seems to move at all, and Amanda only bestirs herself when the ball is laid directly at her feet. Yet game after game falls to them: they rake them in unimpeded, like a croupier soundlessly raking in the chips across the smooth baize gaming board. It only takes fifteen minutes for them to win the first set. They are slow, easy, abstracted. We are red-faced and hot and heaving for breath. The sun chisels into the tops of our heads. Tongues of fire lick our bare skin. We strive and struggle but we are as powerless as those victims lashed to the altar in the glaring heat, from whom the satisfaction of supremacy must be exacted.
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 tramlines, 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 amid the black mesh skirts.
Afterward 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.