The young couple are beautiful. Like something from an ad for jeans shown after 9 p.m. on Channel 4 or any time on MTV. But the big question is: will they fit into this village? Of course not; the whole idea is fucking ridiculous. But what does Bryony do about it? What can Bryony do about it? Of course, she wants to sell this house because she wants, and sort of needs, the commission. What she does not want is for a house to be under offer to two people who no doubt have no mortgage arranged and are going to end up as the weak link in a chain now probably also containing PEOPLE FROM MARGATE and at least one mobile home parked somewhere in the White Cliffs Holiday Park.
It’s 12.15. Bryony has had, so far today, three espressos and two and a half croissants from Allotment, the cute little organic shop that has just opened virtually next to her office. She has the remains of a latte in her car, and the remains of a breath mint in her mouth, and she is due to meet her business partner Emmy, to whom she hasn’t properly spoken for days despite their offices being next to each other, in the Black Douglas at 12.30, and she should really text her to say she’s going to be late, but if these two would just hurry up and realise that this village is full of white Daily Mail readers who are over seventy and they would not possibly ever fit in here then she might just . . .
‘Oh, babe. A real Aga.’
FFS. Bryony takes out her phone.
For the price of this house, a four-bedroom detached with a paddock and orchard in Worth, this couple could buy a fifteen-bedroomed house complete with ground-floor Chinese restaurant if only they would look in Margate or Ramsgate or Herne Bay. But no. Bryony realises that the girl/woman half of the couple is wearing an actual Barbour and not the version you can get from Dorothy Perkins. This is serious. She texts Emmy.
Bryony met Emmy roughly ten years ago, when she and James were considering putting their house on the market and moving somewhere far away and rural so that James could write a different book from the one he is writing now. Or maybe it was sort of the same one. It was before he got the Natural Dad column, anyway, and before women started giving him That Look in the street and sometimes even writing to him to tell him how perfect he is and offering to take him off Bryony’s hands. On more than one occasion he has been asked to send women pictures of his biceps. His biceps! James has no biceps. Well, not real ones. Not like Ollie’s. Perhaps James should send women pictures of Ollie’s biceps. Or perhaps Ollie should just send . . . OK. One too many espressos. And that dream last night . . .
By the time Bryony gets to the Black Douglas it’s gone one. Given that it’s Friday, and given all the stress of just having to live through Monday to Thursday with staff appraisals and a broken photocopier, they get a bottle of Sancerre as a special treat. But after two glasses Bryony still looks sort of serious, and a bit . . .
‘God, babes, what’s up? You look tired.’
Bryony sips her wine. ‘Family problems.’
‘Really? Not with lovely James?’
‘Well . . .’
‘But you two are soulmates. I mean . . .’
What utter bollocks. When Emmy is pissed – in fact, she does not even have to be pissed – and within a five-mile radius of James she seeks him out and flirts with him so outrageously that people who have not seen it before tend to sit there open-mouthed – literally – and sometimes even say something. Last time Emmy came round for supper Fleur was there, and Clem and Ollie actually, and even Ollie noticed Emmy nudging James and winking at him and announcing to the table, ‘We’ve got so much in common, me and James,’ and, ‘I adore poetry. James loves poetry too, don’t you, James?’ In fact, wasn’t that the night . . . ? Yes, that must have been the night when Emmy was in full flow, reminiscing about the time she and James first met, and how romantic it was, and of course it was just because she was really pissed – and yes, OK, she does obviously fancy James, but that’s flattering, right? – and so Bryony smiled and opened another two bottles of wine and let it all go until Ollie said, ‘Are you just going to let her fuck your husband then or are you going to do something about it?’ and then Clem got embarrassed and they left. Is that what happened? Did Bryony maybe dream it? No one tells you that once you pass thirty – or, say, your 3,000th bottle of wine – you begin to forget even important things like what music you had at your wedding and the date of your youngest child’s birthday, let alone what happened at a dinner party two years ago. Anyway, Emmy doesn’t mean it.
‘He just . . . I just . . .’ But how do you explain to a single person the intricate tiny fuck-ups in a married life? And how would she even begin on all the stuff with Holly? Like for example when James was pouring his homemade lemonade yesterday – and this is something Holly will actually drink, possibly because it tastes sour and faintly medicinal – he gave Ash almost twice the amount he gave Holly. Why on earth all the men in Holly’s life are conspiring to starve her is a bloody mystery in any case, and . . .
‘Are you fucking regularly? That’s the main thing.’
‘Regularly as in once a year?’
Big eyes. Huge eyes. ‘Nooooo? You’re not serious?’
‘No. It’s not quite that bad. But . . .’
‘Maybe you need new underwear? Trip to Fenwick’s?’
‘Selfridges, darling.’
This is why people have affairs. Yeah, Bryony could buy new underwear. But if she does it’ll be another one or two hundred quid that could have been spent on the children, or put aside for repairing the dishwasher, or put towards the fucking forest fund, which still somehow exists even though Clem, Bryony and Charlie have decided not to sell the house on Jura this year. Why encourage your actual wife to buy new underwear when you could just install her in a forest and then go out and get a whole new person with a whole new wardrobe full of clothes you have never seen before, that you do not resent in any way because none of them were bought at your expense, and none of them cost twice what you get for your column and in any case if they did it would be exciting, not threatening, and . . . But James won’t have an affair. He’d be too scared.
‘A man goes to the doctor. “Well,” says the doctor, looking grave. “I’m afraid this is serious. The best thing you can do for your health is to give up smoking, drinking and fatty food, and to take up some exercise.” The man looks concerned. “I hear you, doc,” he says. “So what’s the second best thing?”
‘That one is almost funny, Uncle Charlie.’
‘You are very hard work sometimes.’
‘Are we there yet?’
A plane comes in to land overhead. ‘Yep. We must be close.’
‘Are we lost?’
‘Of course not. I know London like . . .’
‘Yes, I know, like the back of your hand.’
‘Actually, I’ve got something else that Oleander said to me when I was feeling guilty once.’
‘Go on.’
‘OK, so it wasn’t long after my mother disappeared, and I’d taken on loads of jobs at Namaste House to make sure that I was indispensable and wouldn’t get thrown out. Anyway, one of the things I thought of as my “job” was feeding the birds. Silly really, because I’m not sure Oleander even noticed the birds. But I definitely felt that having a garden full of real birdsong would be extra relaxing for the clients and just, well, beautiful. I wanted to make everything beautiful then.’
‘You still do.’
‘Mmm. I suppose so. Anyway, at the start I didn’t really think about the birds or know anything about them. I was just feeding them for my own reasons. And they did pretty well out of it. So we were all happy. And they sang and sang, and I carried on feeding them, for several years. But then I started forming relationships with individual birds, particularly a robin – he still comes, actually. Anyway, feeding the birds gradually began to feel like an obligation. One week, I suppose a couple of years ago now, I went to London on business – ooh, maybe even to see you! – and didn’t feed the birds at all and when I came back I felt so guilty. I didn’t see the robin for a couple of days
and I was so scared he’d starved to death. I shared these fears with Oleander. This is what she said to me: “How do you know what the birds want?” I looked at her, a bit bemused. I said something about how all animals want to survive and how in the winter the birds need quite a lot of food, and then she just cut in, looked me right in the eyes and said, “How do you know the birds wouldn’t rather be dead?”
‘That should definitely go in the book.’
Holly is windscreen-wipering the ball with her Wilson Steam 25 racquet. Her opponent, who is called either Alice or Grace, does not know how to windscreen-wiper the ball, which means her shots are weak and flat and pathetic and often kind of slicey in a bad way. Her opponent also stands in no man’s land pretty much all the time, which means that all Holly has to do is land the ball at her feet and with all that topspin of course she can’t hit it and the whole thing is totally predictable – 15–0 and 30–0 and 40–0 – and actually also really embarrassing, and on the first day here, when Holly didn’t let her opponent get at least one game, the other girls at the David Lloyd Tennis Centre called her a lesbian and a fucktard and didn’t tell her you needed to change out of your tennis clothes for dinner, which meant she was the only spaz at dinner still in her whites.
Holly windscreen-wipers the ball really hard into the net on purpose.
Forty–fifteen. She serves and the other girl stumbles. It’s an unintentional ace.
Holly runs up and touches the net before taking her place back on the baseline to receive serve. This is a way of burning around two more calories every point, which is quite a lot over the course of a match, especially if you intentionally do not win all the points. Another thing is to do squats. Three if you win a point and four if you lose it. In any match, the coach told them today, more points are lost than are won. It’s just a fact. This is one of the profoundest things Holly has ever heard.
The David Lloyd Tennis Centre smells of the rubber inside tennis balls. It is full of echoey, squeaky sounds, like tennis shoes changing direction on the acrylic courts: rubber against rubber. One of Holly’s teachers at school is known for giving a punishment that requires pupils to write about the inside of a tennis ball (it may have been a ping-pong ball, but whatever), as if that was the most boring thing in the world. But the week Holly has already spent here, and the week to come, are basically that: being trapped inside a tennis ball. And obviously it is brilliant, and it costs LOADS, and Uncle Charlie was very generous to give it to Holly as her birthday present. You get to play tennis for about eight hours EVERY DAY. And the coaches teach strategy as well as just hitting. For example you can move someone back behind the baseline and then drop-shot them. You can actually choose to do that, and not just do it by accident. And you also have to wait for the short ball before going to the net. And play the percentages, although Holly still isn’t quite sure what that means. And you can serve and volley, except apparently you also have to be a complete lesbian to do something as bold and aggressive as that.
In the breaks between sessions all the kids are allowed to go to the bar and order snacks and drinks. Charlie has given Holly ten pounds for each day, which is generous. The other kids all get Cokes, which cost £1.89, and are full of sugar, caffeine and empty calories. For lunch they all get huge baguettes with crisps and a chocolate bar. Holly gets a glass of skimmed milk for only 79p. And she never buys crisps, which, as well as being expensive, are basically bits of old potato dunked in boiling hair grease, but instead gets two apples: one for her snack and one for her lunch. If she wins every single match she plays in the little championships they have each day then she allows herself a Freddo bar, which is a whopping ninety-five calories but OK as a reward every so often. Sometimes Holly throws a game on purpose so that she doesn’t have to eat the Freddo bar. There’s something about Freddo bars that means that if you do have to eat one, you should do it as quickly as possible.
So far Holly has saved over fifty pounds! Uncle Charlie has told her that he will double whatever she can save from her daily ten pounds and then she can spend it on something nice from the David Lloyd Tennis Shop, which is the kind of place kids are not really allowed in on their own, and which also smells of rubber, but in an expensive, frightening kind of way. Holly has no idea what she will buy in there, but imagine, just imagine, having around £200 to spend on anything . . . Probably another new racquet. Having two racquets means that if you play in a tournament and one of your strings breaks, you just get out your spare racquet rather than forfeiting the match. But you should not use a crappy old racquet for this: all your racquets should be amazing. Perhaps Holly’s second new racquet will be a Babolat, which is what the Angel plays with. If Holly could never eat again in order to save the money to be twenty per cent of what the Angel is then she would. She would do anything.
The Angel is actually called Melissa, but that is the wrong name for her really. She is too perfect to have a human name. She is quite old, maybe seventeen, and is the best tennis player Holly has ever, ever seen. She turns up for her coaching sessions in very short shorts, which are strangely silky looking, like footballers’ shorts, and an old pink sweatshirt over a tight white T-shirt that shows she has basically no fat. But it’s not even that. She is very strong and when she hits the ball she seems to be flying through the air like a warrior from one of Uncle Charlie’s martial arts films. Not that Holly likes those films. They are very, very lame and boring and unrealistic. But when Melissa flies through the air, that’s different. Melissa is the captain of the U18 Middlesex county tennis team. Middlesex is where the David Lloyd Tennis Centre is, even though it’s really in London. Holly knows she would pass out if Melissa ever said anything to her. Melissa is going to play at Wimbledon next year.
When Holly defeats what turns out to be Alice, not Grace, one of the coaches says something to one of the other coaches and looks at her and sort of nods. There are three games going on simultaneously, and on the far court Melissa is flying through the air and making only a little grunt – nothing like the ghostly wail of some current tennis stars. Melissa’s grunt sounds like an angel sighing. She’s hammering the male coach she’s playing: really annihilating him. What is it about seeing a thin girlish girl with long blonde hair like in a fairy tale hitting the ball like that? And beating a man? It’s so, so deeply ace. Holly loves beating Uncle Charlie, but she also loves beating the boys here, which is really, really easy. But the girls are so . . .
‘Watch out,’ says fat Stephanie, walking into Holly and shoving her.
A ball hits the back of Holly’s knee from where someone has thrown it ‘at the basket’ which is about three metres away. Yesterday Holly didn’t just drop a game to Stephanie, she actually gave her the match. It was quite an odd feeling, like being God or something – not in a weird spazzy way – but Holly knew exactly where Stephanie was going to hit the ball every single time she hit it. For most of the points Holly just kept getting the ball back, but that was a risky strategy because Stephanie would make a mistake fairly quickly usually, going for the winner when she should be just hitting middle and deep. On the other hand, long rallies mean more calories burned. And if you give your opponent the chance to run you around the court, then . . . but Stephanie is not very good at running people around the court. She certainly doesn’t like running herself. There is nothing she can do, no shot she can play, that Holly can’t retrieve. When Holly wants to lose a point her favourite method is hitting it in the net because at least that’s controllable. And sometimes she does what Uncle Charlie would call taking the piss. She will get 40–0 up in a service game by playing normally, and then serve the most outrageous double faults for the next two points and hit it into the net for deuce.
Occasionally, though, when she tries to serve a fault, she actually serves an ace, which is really, really weird but might have something to do with the Inner Game of Tennis, which is a book that Fleur got Holly for her birthday and says that instead of telling your body to do things you should let it do what it w
ants because it knows how to play the right shot and if you keep telling it what to do you are only interfering.
The big question now is what to do about the next match with Stephanie. Holly would like to beat Stephanie this time, especially as losing to her does not seem to have stopped her bumping into her and saying horrible things to her at lunchtime and in the drinks breaks. Yesterday there was this long conversation about deodorant that Holly didn’t understand but seemed to be aimed at her. On the other hand it would be nice not to have to have a Freddo bar. The idea of a Freddo bar seems quite exhausting at this moment. The Good Holly who lives in Holly’s mind frowns at her for a moment, shakes her head, and then turns her back and goes to sit down for a nice roast dinner with a blurry family that may or may not be Holly’s real family. Anyway, the Holly that exists in the world is different from her. What if she ate two Freddos? Which is ridiculous, when she doesn’t even want one! Or five? Where is this coming from? Who, apart from a real fatso like Stephanie, would eat five Freddos?
‘Actually, Holly . . . Holly?’
The nicest coach, Dave, who is a Geordie, is talking to her.
‘Yes, you, flower,’ he says. ‘Can you get over to court 4?’
Court 4 is where Melissa is playing. How can she possibly . . . ?
‘And hit with Melissa for a bit?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Hurry up! Don’t keep her waiting.’
‘OK.’
Over on court 4, Melissa is drinking something from a silver bottle. She raises an eyebrow at Holly and then sort of half smiles before getting up, only slightly tightening her by now very loose, long blonde ponytail. On court, she nods at Holly to feed the ball in. Of course Holly hits it straight into the net – and not even on purpose. Maybe she is doomed from all those other times. ‘Sorry,’ she says. But after that the hitting is great. Melissa windscreen-wipers the ball much more than Holly does and her balls fly over the net like spinning meteorites in a slightly stronger gravitational zone than Earth’s. Holly is fast. She can get to Melissa’s wider balls, but only just. Every so often, when Holly hits short and weak, Melissa kills the ball breathtakingly hard, just like she probably does in real matches, and then grins at Holly. But most of the time she just hits it back hard but straight, and the two of them dance a faraway waltz with one another, and with the ball, sidestepping, pointing and windscreen-wipering, and soon Holly finds she is making a little grunt just like Melissa’s and hitting the ball harder and deeper than she thought she could. And it’s as if the ball will never go out, will never fade, become bald or die . . .