The Tennis Player from Bermuda (18 page)

She dropped her gloves on a side table and left me without another word.

Mark came home from his hospital rotation that evening after eight o’clock, and I raised the issue of my missing dinner with him in the front hallway as he was taking off his short medical student’s lab coat.

He was silent for a moment and then said coldly, “Fiona, you should do as you think best. It makes no difference to me, and I doubt anyone at dinner would notice your absence.”

He started up the staircase. I put my hand on his arm to stop him. “Mark. That’s mean, and I think it’s unfair.”

He gently removed my hand from his arm. “I have to dress for dinner. Excuse me.”

He went up the stairs.

I waited a moment and then went up to my own room. I didn’t go to the Savoy for dinner.

Later, there was a sharp rap on my door. It was Miss Hanson. “You’re reduced to sharing dinner with me in the kitchen. I’ve put out cold steak and kidney pie. Come along, you can’t play tennis on an empty stomach.”

We talked for a long time at the kitchen table over the cold pie, and we began calling one another by our Christian names. She asked me all about my plans for medical school and wanted to know how my mother and grandmothers had become physicians. I told Myrtle American Grandmother’s story about Mary Elizabeth Garrett and the admission of women to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine ‘on the same terms as men.’ She seemed fascinated.

I had the impression that Myrtle might have become a physician herself if this had been even remotely thinkable for her as an English working class girl in the late 1930s. But it wasn’t, and so she became first the nursery nurse and then the manager and counselor for a great Dutch-English family.

T
HURSDAY
M
ORNING
, 21 J
UNE
1962
S
ECOND
R
OUND
L
ADIES
’ Q
UALIFYING
M
ATCH
R
OEHAMPTON

I was alone when I walked out on the court at Roehampton for the second round. No spectators, no boyfriend, no chair umpire, and no Charlotte Johnson. There were no benches to sit on, so I simply stood beside the court holding my pocketbook and rackets. At least it was a beautiful day; I bent down and put the back of my hand on the grass. Not dry, but just damp. In a half an hour or so, it would be dry.

Finally the chair umpire arrived. He had brought the tennis balls for our match, but he wouldn’t let me practice my serve until my opponent arrived. I hadn’t hit a tennis ball since Tuesday afternoon. The umpire seemed unconcerned that Johnson wasn’t on the court.

After 10 minutes had passed, I asked him, “Does my opponent plan to appear, do you think?”

The umpire shrugged and didn’t answer.

Finally, Charlotte Johnson arrived with her parents. She was dressed in a Teddy Tinling creation, a white dress with a pale red belt at the waist. The hem of the dress was quite short in order to show her knickers, which had alternating stripes of different shades of white and beige. I felt out of place in my plain tennis dress from Trimingham’s on Front Street with the small Bermuda flag I had inexpertly sewn onto the breast.

Johnson not only didn’t speak to me, she ignored me completely.

I said to her, “I’m Fiona Hodgkin.”

Johnson didn’t reply.

“I heard that Teach Tennant is your coach.”

No reply.

“I ask, you know, only because I’ve heard so much about Teach, and if she’s here with you, I’d like to meet her.”

This time, at least, I got a reply. “Miss Tennant no longer travels to tennis tournaments.”

“Oh.”

I regret to say I never met Teach. Father and Rachel knew her and, while I doubt either of them liked Teach, they respected her as a tennis coach.

We started to knock up, but the umpire stopped us. Johnson’s parents were standing beside the umpire’s chair, where they apparently planned to watch the match. The grass courts at Roehampton are directly next to one another, with no room for spectators. The umpire advised them to walk back to the grassy bank and watch the match from there. They weren’t happy about this.

Once we began play, I could tell that Johnson wasn’t a contender for qualifying. Don’t get me wrong – all the players at Roehampton were world-class amateurs. And Johnson was in the second round, after all. But still – in the first point, on her serve, she hit a perfect, hard backhand from her baseline. She finished with her right arm straight, racket face just past perpendicular to the net, butt of the racket straight down toward the grass, weight balanced on her right foot, head held steady, topspin on the ball – all exactly correct.

Then she looked up and, surprised, saw me a meter behind the net, just in the middle of my ad service court. Whatever was I doing there? Her backhand came straight to me. The shock of it hitting my racket twisted my chest almost halfway around, but in doing so all the kinetic energy of her shot drained away. I dropped the ball into her deuce service court. She wasn’t anywhere near it.

Her other strokes were as beautiful as her backhand, but she couldn’t knit her strokes together. It was over in 50 minutes. Straight sets, 6-4, 6-2. At the net, Johnson didn’t exactly refuse my offered handshake, but she just barely touched my hand. She didn’t acknowledge the umpire at all but trudged off toward her parents. I reached up to shake the umpire’s hand; we looked at one another; we both shrugged.

I knew what Rachel would have done if she’d seen Johnson’s incredible strokes. Rachel would have found a way to use them to win tennis games. If Johnson had spent two years – maybe just one year – with Rachel, that backhand wouldn’t have landed conveniently in my racket. Johnson wouldn’t have been surprised to see me at the net, and her backhand would have drilled a small, precise hole in the air just under my right arm. I would have stood there watching the ball go past me.

There were lots of differences between Johnson and me – thank heaven! – but the important difference was that I had Rachel.

I was one match away from Wimbledon.

T
HURSDAY
A
FTERNOON
, 21 J
UNE
1962
T
HIRD
R
OUND
L
ADIES
’ Q
UALIFYING
M
ATCH
R
OEHAMPTON

My opponent for the third round had been decided in another morning match, so I didn’t have to wait to know whom I would play. The problem was finding an open court. Mr Soames told me that there was no chance we would have a court before three o’clock, so I left Roehampton, walked up Priory Lane, and ate lunch in a pub on Upper Richmond Street.

My opponent was going to be Martha Fellows. I had met her in the dressing room the first day of Roehampton, and she had surprised me by saying that Claire had mentioned me to her. Martha was about Claire’s age, and they had played one another many times, including a match at Wimbledon – “Claire thrashed me!” Martha laughed. Martha was married – Claire had been one of her bridesmaids – and had a young son. She hadn’t played tennis in international competition for several years. But now she was back.

If Martha wasn’t enough of a problem, there was Rebecca Hurst’s tea at five o’clock. My hope was that I could win my third round match in time to allow me to get to Hyde Park Gate, make myself presentable, and attend the tea. A three o’clock start held a shadow of a possibility that I could get to the tea. Three o’clock, unfortunately, came and went, with still no open court. The wait was nothing to Martha; she had waited for tennis courts many times before.

She brought her son – he was almost three – into the dressing room to show him off to the girls. Martha had him wearing a British sailor’s suit, and each of us wanted to hold him, which was fine with him; he wasn’t the least shy.

It was past five o’clock when Martha and I walked out onto the court where we would play our third round match. So much for tea at Rebecca Hurst’s. I thought about placing a telephone call to Lady Thakeham to apologize, but I decided against it. It would probably just make everything worse rather than better.

Martha won the toss and her first service game. I dug in my heels and held my service. And so it went – each of us held her service more or less easily, and we traded games until, finally, on Martha’s serve, with the games at 6 all, I got ahead in the count, 15-30. Then Martha, of all things, double-faulted, and I went ahead, 15-40. Unbelievably, though, I dropped the next two points; we went to deuce; and Martha pulled the game out of the fire. How could I have let her do that?

To make matters worse, she broke my service in the next game and took the first set, 8-6.

Wimbledon was slipping away from me. No – I had
thrown
Wimbledon away by not breaking her serve when I had the chance. I was furious with myself.

But at the first changeover in the second set, a remarkable thing happened: Martha got to the water tank before me, and she poured water into a paper cup. Then she handed it to me. She said, so quietly the umpire couldn’t hear, “Calm down. The first set isn’t the match. The first set is over. Focus on this set.” Then she walked to her baseline.

I stood there, watching her back with amazement. But I calmed down.

I had to make my volleys work against her – which they hadn’t in the first set. Unless I hit a pure winner, which usually I didn’t, Martha would simply put up a lob. Her lobs weren’t perfect, and most of the time I could send them back, but then I’d be right where I started – or worse, I’d be smack in No Man’s Land between the baseline and the service line.

Now I started punching my volleys harder, and deeper, and Martha began to wobble, just a bit. When she would serve wide, to keep me off the court, I started taking her serve on its rise from my service court and then rushing the net. Slowly, my game started to work better for me.

There was only one court between the court we were on and the grassy bank where spectators could sit. The match on the court closest to the bank had ended, and now the spectators were following our match.

At the changeovers, I could tell Martha was breathing hard. On her serve, I got ahead in the count, but she took the game to deuce. We were at deuce three times. Then, on my ad, Martha took my backhand volley on the rim of her racket, and the ball spun off the court.

I had broken her. The second set was basically over. In a few minutes, the sets were one all.

Martha got her second wind in the third set, and it took me extra games to beat her. But I did. We shook hands at the net, and she said, “Well played. Congratulations.”

“Martha, thank you for calming me down at that changeover. I’ll never forget it.”

“Make it up by winning Wimbledon for me.”

I laughed. “Well, that’s not going to happen, not this year at least.”

We were walking along opposite sides of the net to acknowledge the umpire. But Martha put her hand on my arm and stopped me. She looked at me seriously for a moment. Then she said softly, “I’m not so sure. You might go all the way.”

F
RIDAY
M
ORNING
, 22 J
UNE
1962
16 H
YDE
P
ARK
G
ATE

When Harold came into the breakfast room with
The Times
, I practically snatched the newspaper out of his hands. I rifled through the pages searching for the ladies’ draw at Wimbledon. I found the men’s draw; I had almost forgotten that the other sex also played at Wimbledon. Then, the next page carried the headline:

T
HE
L
ADIES
’ S
INGLES
C
HAMPIONSHIP
D
RAW
H
OLDER
: M
RS
R
ICHARD
K
ERSHAW

Just under the headline, in the first line of the draw I saw, in bold type:

M
ISS
M
ARGARET
S
MITH
(A
USTRALIA
) N
O
. 1 S
EED

This wasn’t a surprise; Claire had known since she had lost the Australian Championship to Margaret Smith that probably Smith would be the top seed at Wimbledon. I looked down at the bottom of the page and found Claire’s name:

M
RS
R
ICHARD
K
ERSHAW
(G
REAT
B
RITAIN
) N
O
. 2 S
EED

I ran my finger up the players above Claire’s name – I wasn’t there. I was frantic; had there been a mistake? Without thinking, and for no reason, I simply assumed that I would be in Claire’s bracket of the draw.