The Last Weekend (16 page)

Archie’s return was too pacy for me. Love—thirty. Then Ollie caught the net tape and the ball dropped on our side.

The courts were in the Municipal Country Park, behind high walls, in what had once been Frissingfold Hall. There were three of them, laid end to end, but no one was playing on the other two.

Archie sliced a backhand down the middle. Milo politely left it for me and I left it for Milo. Game to them.

Ollie had had the foresight to bring water and we stood swigging it at the edge of the court.

‘Shall I take the forehand side this set?’ Milo said.

‘Sure,’ I said.

My backhand is no better than my forehand, but I didn’t like losing so comprehensively and anything was worth a try.

The switch had an immediate effect. Milo passed Ollie with a forehand return from Archie’s serve, Ollie netted my lob, and though we missed the first break point at 15—40, a wayward volley from Ollie gave us the game. Encouraged, I went up to the net on Milo’s serve and put away a couple of smashes — we won that game too. Ollie had seemed to welcome us drawing level but he was cross at falling behind. His mood darkened on his own service game, which he lost to love, with Milo punishing two weak serves and Archie wildly misjudging two topspin drives. Father and son exchanged looks at that point. In truth Archie wasn’t playing badly, especially for someone who looked as if he’d spent the past year in bed, and Milo kept shouting ‘Well done’ in encouragement. But that wasn’t the same as his father saying it. If nothing else, a bit of praise beforehand might have made Archie readier to ignore Ollie’s reaction when his attempted lob sailed high over the fence into the next court and put them 3—1 down. It was only a look, a rolling of the eye, but still.

‘What did you say?’ Archie said.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Ollie said.

‘Yeah, well, piss off, you’re not so fucking brilliant yourself.’

‘Go and fetch the ball, will you?’ Ollie said.

‘No one’s going to steal it, Dad. We’ve plenty more.’

It was my turn to serve, and I used the moment to defuse the situation, pretending I hadn’t heard the exchange.

‘Ready?’ I shouted from the baseline. ‘Or do you want to concede now?’

Like me, Ollie had doubtless assumed that Milo would be a hopeless tennis player, on the grounds that no artist can be good at sport. But now his eye was in, Milo hit some decent shots. Might he and I have gone on to win the set? Probably not — my own contribution was erratic, and all it needed was
for Ollie and Archie to regain their composure. But in the event we didn’t find out.

It happened with the score at 15—30. My serve fell short, asking to be hit, and Archie, moving in, drove a topspin deep to my backhand. I did well to reach it, stumbling as I made contact and scraping my knees and left palm on the ground as I fell. If the high lob I clawed back was more luck than judgement, I enjoyed the sight of our opponents — both up at the net, waiting for the kill — coming to terms with the fact that the ball would land behind them. They dithered a moment, unsure whose task it was to retrieve it, till Ollie, with an impatient huff, turned back and ran to mid-court, where the ball was coming down. I’d hoisted it so high that he still had time to get behind it, let it drop, wait, steady himself and hammer it back. But he was thrown by having to play it at all and, rushing, tried to smash it at the height of its bounce. It wasn’t that he failed to connect — no shot that afternoon was hit with more venom. But instead of hitting it short to Milo’s left, where I was marooned behind the baseline, on my bum, and effectively out of the game, he belted it to Milo’s right. Which would have been fine, and have made a spectacular winner, but for the fact that Archie was standing at the net. He turned to see where the ball had got to (its flight and bounce having taken an eternity) and discovered the answer as it slammed into his temple just above the right eye.

His shock on impact made me think of the dead tree at Badingley, limbs and tendrils arrested in all directions. Then he went down like a giant redwood, and lay there on the asphalt, felled and concussed. Ollie had smacked the ball with pace, but I did wonder, even in that instant, whether Archie would have collapsed quite so dramatically if the ball had been hit by anyone but his father. Milo, up at the net, was first to
reach him. And despite my own little injury, slivers of blood seeping up through my shredded palm, I was soon there, too. Only Ollie was slow to react: he stood, mid-court, in bewilderment, as though still following the line of the ball and calculating where it would land (a perfect winner just inside the baseline had his son not interrupted its flight).

‘Are you OK?’ Milo asked, leaning down.

Archie was prostrate but breathing.

‘My fucking head hurts,’ he said.

‘Where?’ I said.

He was rubbing the side of his head but when he took his hand away I could see no sign of swelling. His iris and pupil looked OK.

Milo fetched some water, sloshed it in Archie’s face and made him drink. He was shaky and in pain but — with Milo taking one arm and me the other — strong enough to stand up. Ollie had been keeping his distance but now he bent to retrieve Archie’s racket from the court.

‘All right?’ he said.

‘No thanks to you,’ Archie said.

‘I’ve told you before — when your partner’s behind you, you have to be ready to duck.’

‘So it’s my fault, Dad?’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘You’ve not said sorry, either.’

‘You were in the wrong position. The shot was on target.’

‘The shot hit me in the face. Apologise, Dad.’

‘People apologise when they’ve done something wrong. I’m sorry if you were hurt —’

‘If.
Do you think I’m putting it on?’

‘Of course not. But you’re over the worst. And we’ve a match to finish. Thirty—all and 3—1. It’s getting interesting.’

He put the racket in Archie’s hand.

‘Is that all you care about,’ Archie said, ‘finishing the match?’

Archie wasn’t so much holding the racket as balancing it in his palm, as if the way it tipped would tell him what to do next.

‘Let’s sit down and rest a while,’ Milo said. ‘We could all do with a break.’

‘Resting’s not allowed when Dad plays,’ Archie said, ‘even when someone’s nearly been killed.’

For a moment it seemed that might be enough for Archie — that his tantrum had passed and he would resume. But then he gripped the racket, took a step back and hurled it across the court.

‘Fuck your match.’ As he moved away, he turned to Milo and me. ‘No disrespect to you two, but Dad’s a prick.’

Milo made a grab for him but he was too fast.

‘Leave him,’ Ollie said, a superfluous command since Archie was already through the gate in the corner of the court and striding away. A teenager in high dudgeon — what could we do? ‘Don’t worry,’ Ollie added, ‘he’ll be back.’

‘I hate to see him upset,’ Milo said.

‘Of course. But it wasn’t so bad an injury, was it, Ian?’

‘No,’ I said.

I too hated seeing Archie upset. But I suspected him of exaggerating his injuries in order to get at his father. And though Ollie’s parenting left much to be desired, he was right not to be soft. Toughness and discipline are essential with kids. If Archie had been my son, I’d have drilled that into him earlier, when he was small.

I can’t say I enjoyed the knock-up that followed, two onto one, with Milo and me (playing to a singles court) against Ollie (playing to the doubles). Eventually I sat it out and let the two of them play a match. If Milo’s tennis style was annoying (all fancy dinks and poofy drop shots), his brown-nosing was worse. I lost count of how many
times he cried, ‘Cracking shot, Ollie.’ Not that the contest was uneven. And not that Ollie seemed to notice how desperate Milo was to ingratiate himself. On the contrary, Ollie was enjoying the match and said as much, loudly, when, with the score 4—3 in his favour, they changed ends. ‘An impressive opponent, eh, Ian?’ I did my best to smile. Tennis isn’t my strong suit, but he didn’t need to stick the knife in like that. And there was no call for him to be so fulsome when Milo levelled the set at 4—4. ‘Well played.’

At 5—4 Ollie had a break point but his topspin drive landed out. Just.

The next two games went to deuce and could have gone either way.

At 6—6, I suggested they call it quits. Ollie was geared up for a tiebreak, naturally enough. But it was now past six, we’d had the court for over two hours, and Archie hadn’t returned.

‘Ian’s right,’ Milo said. ‘We ought to look for Archie.’

‘Good on you, Milo,’ I said. ‘Thank God one of you can see sense.’

As Milo wandered off to gather up the balls, I raised my eyebrows at Ollie and mouthed, ‘Wuss.’ It was fine for me, as a spectator, to urge them to quit. But for Milo to capitulate was pathetic.

We did our best to find Archie, trawling Frissingfold’s main street, bus station and cafes. We also looked in all five pubs, resisting a drink till we got to the last of them. By that point Milo was fretting about returning and putting his daughters to bed — if we were staying he would find a taxi, he said. To me that seemed a sensible suggestion: why should Ollie and I be made to rush our beers? But Ollie wouldn’t hear of it and crammed us back in the MGB. I half expected that we’d come across Archie, thumb out in search of a lift. But there was no sign.

There were no road signs, either. Once off the main road they disappeared, as if the only people who travelled this way, on the B-nought-nought-something-or-other, were people who lived locally and didn’t need to be reminded of their bearings.

‘They removed all road signs during the war and never put them back,’ Ollie said. Luckily he knew the way. I wondered if Archie did.

‘He’s gone off like this before,’ Ollie said. ‘He always turns up.’

I didn’t feel as sanguine as Ollie. Nor as sanguine as Daisy, who, when the three of us walked into the living room, failed to ask why Archie wasn’t with us. Strangely Em didn’t question his absence, either. It was only when Ollie finally admitted we’d mislaid him that the truth emerged.

‘Archie didn’t mention a row,’ Daisy said.

‘He’s here?’

‘He was here.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘On his way to some music festival at Snipham. He said he’d stopped playing tennis because he was tired. Then while he was walking round Frissingfold he ran into some people he knew from school, who were off to this gig. You just missed him: he stopped off to get his sleeping bag. He won’t be back till morning.’

‘Did he seem all right?’ Milo said.

‘Perfectly.’

In the general relief that Archie was all right I hardly noticed the implausibility of the story. Surely the odds of him coming across school friends in Frissingfold were remote.

Who’d be a father? Over the next hour I realised why I had chosen not to have children. Perhaps ‘chosen’ is too strong: officially it’s still open to us to have them. But lately there’s
been something half-hearted about our efforts, the reluctant half, the heartless half, being me. I might have children for Em’s sake; I might have them for my own sake, insofar as their absence has begun to affect our marriage. But children per se, for themselves, I can do without. My colleagues at school make envious remarks around four o’clock as they head home to theirs: ‘It’s all right for you, Ian: you can forget about kids till tomorrow morning.’ It’s true I don’t have to deal with their mess, their demands, their unreason and self-absorption. But forgetting is another matter, since at home I still have Em: an evening when she doesn’t get onto the subject is rare. There are compensations. You can’t have kids without sex, so we have an active sex life. Actually you can have kids without sex, thanks to fertility clinics. But masturbation into a sample jar isn’t my idea of fun. I once asked Em: do you see me as a breeding machine? Of course not, she said, children will be the expression of our love for each other. But suppose the children don’t happen, I said, where will that leave the love? She didn’t reply. My fear is that if we can’t have kids, Em won’t want sex any more, since it doesn’t do the job. And that if we do have kids, she won’t want sex either, since the job will have been done.

It’s a tricky area. And a subject I don’t like to discuss. All I’m saying is that I hated having Natalie and Bethany around that evening.

At first they were upstairs, having a bath, which wasn’t so bad. Indeed, with Milo supervising, Em assisting and Daisy busy in the kitchen, it gave me the opportunity for a tête-à-tête with Ollie. We had not been alone all day. And I had promised Em that I would tackle him.

We sat on the terrace watching the sun descend.

‘What do you make of Milo?’ I said, approaching the subject in a roundabout way.

‘Yes, nice chap,’ he said.

‘Nice-ish anyway.’

‘Why the ish?’