The Players (22 page)

He found a quiet spot on a bench along one wall and sat down. He took the old racket Fred Olney had given him from the pocket on the carryall and laid it across his lap. He fiddled with the strings, hoping it looked like he knew what he was doing.

The gabble of many languages filled the room, punctuated by laughter that was a little too loud to be spontaneous. The place smelled of sweat and rubbing alcohol.

As the players drifted out to their assigned courts Mike got up and wandered around. The dressing room at Wimbledon was unique in the sports world. Just beyond the locker area were six private tub rooms. There the players could go after their matches and luxuriate in victory or soak away the pain of defeat. The tubs were large enough for even the tallest players to stretch out, and were provided with long-handled back brushes and sponges the size of footballs. In each tub room there was a mirror and a shelf of grooming equipment to help the player prepare himself to reenter the outside world.

Five trainer-masseurs were on duty in the dressing room at all times. As Mike walked past their tables all five were busy working on aching muscles and sore psyches. He sat back down on the bench and scribbled a few notes.

“Awright, Penny, you’re due on Court Nine. Let’s hop it!”

Mike started at the voice, and looked up to see Fred Olney grinning like a monkey.

“You look quite authentic in your new togs,” the Aussie said, “except for one little detail.”

“What’s that?”

“A sportswriter couldn’t be expected to know this, but the jock goes
inside
the shorts.”

“Very funny. I thought you went out to watch Denny.”

“I couldn’t stand it any more. The bloody fool’s winning again. He’ll probably drag it out the full five sets and have nothing left for our doubles match. We’re supposed to play those two brothers from Nepal or someplace like that.”

“That’s tough,” Mike said, grinning. Despite Fred’s complaining, he could see the little Aussie’s pride in his friend’s showing in the singles.

“Did you have any trouble getting in?”

“It went smooth as butter.”

“Where’d you get the spectacles?”

“They’re mine.”

“I’ve never seen you wearing them before.”

“I only need them for seeing.”

“They make you look a little like Clark Kent. A slightly overweight Clark Kent. In his underwear.”

“You’re just being kind.”

“All the same, I’ll bet there’s been precious few unauthorized blokes got into this room. Security’s even tighter for the women’s locker. In a hundred years only two men have ever got in there. One was a blind masseur, and the other was the old French player, Jean Borotra. That was in 1925. Borotra lost his championship the same year. Don’t know if there was any connection.”

Fred changed into his tennis clothes and headed out to check the condition of the court he and Denny would play their doubles match on. Looking after him, Mike saw that going out that way there were two directions a player could take. Off to the right a wide portal led to the outer courts. To the left were the frosted glass doors to Centre Court. On an arch over the doors was carved a quotation from Kipling: “I
F
Y
OU
C
AN
M
EET
W
ITH
T
RIUMPH
A
ND
D
ISASTER
A
ND
T
REAT
T
HOSE
Two I
MPOSTORS
J
UST
T
HE
S
AME
.”

Mike went back and sat down, and after a while the players began drifting back in. The losers, generally, were in a hurry to get dressed and get out. The winners reacted differently, according to their personalities.

Milo Vasquez stormed in looking as angry as ever, and passed up the massage tables and tub rooms for a quick shower. He spoke to no one and left in a hurry, looking for all the world like a loser. However, Mike learned from the conversations around him that Milo had won again by playing a game of deadly precision most unlike his old blow-’em-off-the-court style. Mike wondered what devils were driving the Mexican on after his skills had eroded.

Tim Barrett came in looking exhausted after squeaking through in another tough, close match. As Tim headed for the tubs Mike recognized the telltale smudges under the boy’s eyes showing lack of sleep.

A Russian player named Kugarin seemed ill at ease in here without the two bulky “trainers” who accompanied him everywhere outside. He smiled thinly to acknowledge congratulations on his victory, but spoke no more than he had to.

Big Denny Urso had won his fourth straight match, and seemed as surprised as anybody else as he endured the good-natured needling of Fred Olney and the other Aussies.

Brian White, the handsome “gentleman player,” was calm and gracious in victory, praising his opponent generously.

Yuri Zenger, as was his custom, came into the locker room as though he owned it. In case anyone had failed to get the news, Yuri described with gestures how thoroughly he had beaten down today’s opponent, and how this was nothing compared to what he would do to whoever was unlucky enough to face him in the quarter-finals on Tuesday.

As Yuri well knew, his quarter-final opponent would be young Jean-Pierre Leduc, who had delighted the teenyboppers by winning again today. Jean-Pierre merely smiled at the Hungarian’s bombast, possibly because he understood very little of what was being said.

Alan Doughty, whose match had started later than some of the others, came in looking strangely subdued for a man who had just won his way into the quarter-finals. He spent a short time in one of the tubs, then dressed and went quietly away.

Mike left the locker room before it emptied out enough for him to be conspicuous. He still had a few minutes before it would be time to meet Paula, so he sought out the court where the doubles team of Olney and Urso was playing. A glance at the scoreboard told him the Aussies were having little trouble with the brothers from Nepal or wherever. Mike caught Freddie’s eye and winked. Fred answered with a broad pantomime of downing a mug of beer, and Mike walked away chuckling.

Paula was waiting for him when he arrived at their meeting place.

“How did you do, champ?” she said, cocking her head at the tennis racket he still carried.

“Won in straight sets, of course,” he said with a bad attempt at a British accent. “Surely you didn’t expect less?”

“My hero!”

“We’d better go see about something to eat,” he said. “I’ve got to buy beer for the male population of Australia tonight, and it promises to be a wet evening.”

Paula took his hand, and together they swung off along the path toward the parking lot.

Sunday morning arrived in Mike Wilder’s world uninvited. His head throbbed and his mouth tasted like it belonged to somebody else. Several seconds ticked by before he remembered where he was. In Paula Teal’s flat in Chelsea. In her bed. Alone in her bed. He groaned aloud and his head felt worse.

From the direction of the kitchen came sounds of someone moving around. A radio played softìy out there, and a woman was humming along with the orchestra.

Mike lurched to his feet and stumbled into the bathroom. He brushed his teeth, rinsed his mouth, and ducked his head under the faucet to let the cold water spill over it When he felt he could risk a look in the mirror he winced at the bleary reflection and turned quickly away. When he went back into the bedroom Paula was standing at the foot of the bed wearing a neat quilted robe.

“What’ll you give me if I refrain from commenting on the way you look?” she said.

“Name your price.”

“Are you ready for coffee?”

“Not yet. That was a helluva party last night. How come you look so healthy?”

“I didn’t try to match the Australians beer for beer.”

Mike eased down to a sitting position on the bed. “That was a bad mistake on my part,” he agreed.

“You kept telling everybody how you used to put it away at the old Phi Sig house.”

“I forgot how many years ago that was.”

“Here, I brought you something that might help.” She held out a glass of red-orange liquid.

“What is it?”

“Something my father used to take when he’d had a few too many at the local. Drink it down like a good lad.”

Mike accepted the glass and did as he was told. The concoction seemed to be mostly vegetable juices with some suspicious semi-solids that he preferred not to think about.

“It tastes awful,” he said.

“That’s all right it’ll make you feel better.”

After a few seconds Mike said, “By God, I think you’re right. Could it be working already?”

“My father used to barely get the glass set down before he was ready for another party.”

“I’m not quite up to that, but I’m beginning to think I may live.”

“Glad to hear it. I wonder how the Australians are feeling today. Never in my life have I seen people drink so much beer so fast.”

“If I know the Aussies, they’re already making plans for opening time at the pubs. There must be something in their diet—kangaroo maybe—that makes them immune to hangovers. They’re probably feeling a lot better than some of the other players this morning, judging from my impressions in the locker room.”

“Who, for instance?”

“Tim Barrett, for one. He looks like he’s not getting enough sleep.”

“That’s not too surprising. Nobody who fools around with Christy Noone is going to do much sleeping.”

“I suppose not. Then there’s Milo Vasquez.”

“The angry-looking Mexican chap?”

“Yeah. Something’s really eating at him. I’d like to do a column on him, but he won’t talk to the press or anybody else.”

“My, there’s certainly more going on at Wimbledon than one sees from the stands.”

“That’s a fact. And maybe the strangest story of all is Alan Doughty. He’s about to go into the quarter-finals—the best he’s ever done at Wimbledon—the whole country’s behind him, and he acts like he’s on his way to an execution. I wonder how he feels this morning.”

• • •

Across the Thames in his Lambeth flat Alan Doughty came fully awake with a start. Hazel was not beside him in the bed. He pulled the covers back, stepped into his slippers, and went out to the kitchen. Hazel stood at the sink scouring out a pot.

“What’s the trouble, love?” he said.

“Nothing. I woke up early and didn’t want to disturb you, so I came out here.”

“Turn around and let’s have a look at you.”

Hazel put down the pot and turned to face him.

“You’ve been crying,” he said.

“I can’t help it, Alan.”

“I thought we had this business all settled.”

“When I saw you fall on the court the other day I couldn’t think of anything but Aubrey Cooper falling that day at Southampton. He never got up again.”

“Hazel, you’ve seen me take a hundred tumbles on the court. Everybody falls now and again.”

“But everybody doesn’t have … what you have.”

Alan pulled thoughtfully at his long jaw. After a moment he said, “I want you to come for a ride with me today.”

“A ride? Where are we going?”

“To Craddock.”

“That’s the village where your brothers live.”

“Yes, and the village where I was born, and where my mum and dad both died.”

“Are we going to visit your brothers?”

“Not this time. There’s something there I want you to see. Something that may help you understand why I must play the game to the finish at Wimbledon.”

Hazel studied her husband’s face for a moment, then dried her hands and went to change into something for the road.

An hour later they were driving north through the gently rolling country of the English Midlands. Unlike most of his countrymen, Alan kept the Rover at the new fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit while the few other cars there were on the road passed him doing sixty-five or seventy. A drizzle began, and worsened steadily the farther they got from London.

Alan spoke very little as he drove. Hazel stared out the window on her side. The monotonous countryside was relieved occasionally by the ruins of a stone chapel, marking the spot where some eighteenth-century village had died. Several times they passed a gypsy caravan parked beside the road with a pile of rusted automobile parts waiting to be sold as scrap.

When they reached a point halfway between Sheffield and Leeds, some 180 miles from London, Alan turned off the motorway onto the decaying secondary road that led into Craddock. The first signs of the village were crumbling and abandoned cottages with weeds choking the little patches of ground that had once been gardens.

“When I was a lad people still lived out this far,” Alan said. “All the mines were going then, everybody working. After the war ended, most of the mines around Craddock were closed down. It would have cost more than it was worth to dig out what little coal was left. People died and people went away, and the village moved in on itself. There can’t be more than three hundred left here now.”

They drove past more dead cottages and the angular skeletons of mine structures. The ground was scarred and scabrous where the coal had been ripped from the earth, and where nothing now would grow. In the gray steady rain the country looked drained of color and life.

Alan turned onto a gravel drive that ran for a hundred yards alongside a chain link fence. Behind the fence were a number of gray, faceless buildings. A path led between the buildings and beyond to where several tunnel mouths gaped in the hillside. Alan stopped the car at a locked gate with a wooden shed at one side. A painted metal sign over the gate read: “Sheffield-Midlands Colliery.”

A man stepped from the gatehouse, and Alan got out of the car and walked over to talk to him.

“The mine’s closed today,” said the gateman.

“I know,” Alan said. “I wonder if we might walk in and look around a bit?”

The gateman eyed him suspiciously. “Now what would you be wantin’ to do that for?”

“I used to work here. My wife’s never seen a coal mine.”

The face of the gateman opened suddenly in recognition. “Why, you’re Alan Doughty, ain’t you. I know your brothers well, I do. We’re all pullin’ for you to win the Wimbledon.”

“Thank you,” Alan said. “That’s good to know.”

The man opened up a smaller gate set inside the large one. He said, “You’re welcome to go in and look around all you like, Mr. Doughty, but if you don’t mind my sayin’ so, it’s a queer place to be takin’ your missus.’.’

Alan smiled his thanks. “We shouldn’t be too long.”

He went back to the car for Hazel. With the collars of their raincoats turned up, and a scarf to protect her hair, they walked through the gate. No live thing grew inside the fence. Everything—buildings, trucks, the path they walked on—wore a gritty film of coal dust

“This is the last mine still operating in Craddock,” Alan said. “They say it’s good for two more years at the most.”

They walked past the buildings and headed up the hill to where the tunnels were. “When my brothers climb this path every morning it’s six o’clock and still dark,” Alan said. “They stop for a cup of hot tea there in the canteen, then put away their clean clothes in a locker and put on their dirty clothes to go into the pits.”

They came to the first and largest of the tunnels. A double-deck lift cage stood empty over a shaft that plunged down into darkness.

“Here’s where they go down into the earth. I can’t take you there, but I can tell you a little about how it is. At seven o’clock you get into that cage and it drops you down two thousand feet below where we stand. They have to pump air down there, and it’s cold. A lot of the boys come down with pneumonia, if the black lung doesn’t get ’em first. Once you’re down you walk maybe half a mile to the coal face where you’re workin’. Sometimes the seam you’re diggin’ at narrows down to three feet or so. Then you crawl on your hands and knees, and you stay that way all day.”

Hazel said nothing, but hunched deeper into her raincoat and stayed close to Alan as they walked along the hillside. Some of the smaller tunnels they passed were boarded over with rotting lumber. Others were choked with rocks.

“This was always a good mine,” Alan said, “so it’s usually dry down below. In some others the men have to work in water to their shoe-tops.

“At ten-forty you knock off for lunch. There’s no time to leave, so you eat your sandwiches right there where you work. And since there’s no place to wash up, you eat a lot of coal dust too.

“At two o’clock you come up from the pit and shower for twenty or thirty minutes to get as much of the coal as you can off your skin and out of your hair. It gets in all the openings of your body. Then you put on your clean clothes and go home.”

Alan started back down the hill and Hazel followed.

“It’s a terrible life, isn’t it?” she said.

Alan spoke without looking back. “If it’s the only thing you’ve ever known it’s tolerable. But once you’ve got away, the thought of goin’ back is worse than dyin’.”

The rain had slackened now to a chill gray mist. Alan talked briefly with the gateman, thanking the man for letting them in, and walked Hazel back to the car.

“You’ve seen my brothers and their families,” he said, “so you know about the people who live here. The men have a, cough, and there’s black in their wrinkles and around their nails that will never come out. The women are pale and always look tired. Their faces are pinched together. The children are quieter than children should be.”

Alan said no more. He wheeled the Rover out of the gravel drive and headed away from Craddock. It was like leaving a house where someone was dying.

For nearly an hour they drove in silence. Then Hazel said, “Alan, I’m so very sorry for the way I’ve acted. I never really understood before why playing at Wimbledon this time meant so much to you.”

Alan let his left hand rest on her knee. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for. No one can really know the mines who’s not lived and worked in them. The way you’ve acted has been out of love for me, and for that I count myself a lucky man.”

Hazel shivered although the heater was going and it was warm inside the car. After a while she said, “Tell me something, Alan.”

“Yes?”

“Who do you think you’ll be playing in the finals come Saturday?”

Alan looked over at his wife in surprise, then a grin spread across his face. “Oho, you’ve already got me past the Russian on Tuesday and whoever it may be in the semis on Thursday, have you?”

“Of course. Don’t you think I know a winner when I see one?”

Alan relaxed and began to talk easily about the tournament and how he would play against each of his possible opponents. His eyes shone with the old excitement that had been missing the past few days.

Hazel sat back with a soft smile and watched her husband talk. The dark shadow of fear was not gone, but she had put it away in a closed-off part of her mind.