The Quality of Mercy

29



The morning of the handball match was clear and sunny and practically windless, a cause for general rejoicing as it meant that the game could be played in the open, allowing a much greater number of spectators than did the covered court.

It was a day of heavy responsibility for Michael Bordon. The hopes of the village were centered on him; there was a good deal of money—hard-earned money—resting on the result. Lord Spenton himself had shaken him by the hand that morning and wished him success. Two days before, Elsie had told him she had cause to believe herself pregnant, and he had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes.

So as he waited with his opponent in the shed behind the court while the spectators took their places, it was with a sense that much depended on him and a determination to do his best not to disappoint. He was matched with Charlie Dickson, the man who had won the year before, three years older than himself, stocky but very light on his feet—he was a notable dancer in his village. The two spoke little as they waited, cultivating a certain hostility in the silence.

There was seating for twelve persons only in the area immediately facing the wall of the court, and these were reserved for people of rank. Colonel and Mrs. Pemberton were among them, and Roland Bourne, but Kemp, seated beside his host, noted that Lady Spenton had not made an appearance. Behind this row of seats the court opened widely and sloped upward, so that the ranks of spectators, standing close together, were able to get a clear view.

While these ranks were forming, Spenton explained something of the game to his guest. “This court was constructed in my grandfather’s time,” he said. “It is the Irish game we play here.” His face wore the same expression of lively interest it had worn when he was explaining the mechanism by which the water nymph was hoisted and lowered.

“Why is that?”

“There was an influx of migrant workers from Ireland at the turn of the century. They came to look for work in the mines here. They brought the game with them, and it caught on with the Durham men. At first they would play against any wall, on a clay floor. We have tiled the floor and marked out the lines, but it is still played by the same rules and with the same type of ball, very hard, a wooden core covered with strips of rubber. They don’t wear gloves, you know—they can bandage their hands if they like, but usually they don’t choose to. The ball has to be struck, catching and throwing are against the rules, but the feet can be used. The ball must always be struck directly against the wall and taken on the rebound.”

Kemp listened with an interest at first assumed, then growing genuine as his host’s enthusiasm was communicated to him and the sounds from the people assembling behind them grew in intensity. Spenton had to raise his voice as he pointed out the zones of play, the serving area, the short line that divided the court in two, the sidelines and the long line at the back. Points gained by the server were added to his score; a fault in serving or a failure to return the ball meant that the service would pass to the other with the score unaltered. There were three strokes only, apart from the kick: the underhand service stroke, the overhand for balls that bounced high and the sidearm. One player could not block another from playing the ball; if he did, the ball was judged dead and had to be served again. The first man to reach twenty points won the game. Five games were played; the winner was he who had the best of the five.

“But who is it that does the judging?” Kemp asked. “There must be someone, surely. Otherwise the time would be consumed in dispute and quarrels.”

“There is a man chosen to be the arbiter, one who knows the rules and is accepted by both sides. He must not come from either colliery—the man we have today is from a colliery north of the Wear.”

“He is there in the midst of the court, then? He will need to be quick on his feet to keep clear of the ball and the players.”

“He keeps to the sidelines,” Spenton said. “He will come in with the players … Here they are now.”

There was a sudden shouting from the packed ranks behind them as the three men appeared and made their way onto the court. The arbiter was dressed in suit and cap, clearly his best; the players were bareheaded, in shirtsleeves, their trousers tied round at the ankles with twine. The shouting was followed by an absorbed silence as the two began some minutes of warming up, taking turns to serve.

“That is our man, Bordon, the slightly taller one,” Spenton said.

Kemp, who had seen the putters at work some days previously, found it hard to imagine how anyone could emerge from such heavy labor in such cramped conditions and move with the lightness and speed both men were showing now as they circled round the court. He could see nothing in either that might be taken as a determining advantage. Bordon had an inch or two of height and perhaps a wider reach, but the other was thicker in the shoulder and altogether stronger-looking in build, and he seemed to move no less quickly for this.

The arbiter spoke to the two men and they came together in the center of the court to toss a coin and determine who should serve first. It came down in Michael’s favor. The minutes of practice had warmed him, but he was still nervous and tense, as always at the beginning of any contest in which he was involved. He had not found the coolness of mind that might already have given him some clues as to his opponent’s style of play. For this first serve he stood well forward in the service area, as close as possible to the shortline that marked the division of the court. He dropped the ball, struck it on the first bounce with the palm of his hand. It came high off the wall, and Dickson, who had stayed well back, was able to leap and strike it with great force. The rebound was very fast and very high—too fast and too high for Michael, who had stayed too near to the wall to get his hand to it. With this he lost the advantage of the service.

Dickson won the next six points in a row, then lost the service through a fault, setting one foot outside the service line as he dropped the ball. Michael meanwhile had understood that he could not hit the ball with the same force as his opponent and that he would lose the match if he allowed it to become a trial of striking power. He was being obliged to stay at the back of the court, a position which deprived him of initiative. Dickson seemed to be assuming now that the contest would take this form, remaining in midcourt where he could use the sidearm stroke to slam the ball hard against the wall.

Only a short bounce was any defense against this tactic, and Michael served from as far back as possible, almost a lob. It struck the wall rather low, obliging Dickson to move forward very quickly. So near the wall as this, with the ball dropping, there was little he could do but strike underhand at it and so present Michael with a perfect passing shot.

This exchange in the first game set the pattern for the next two. Dickson gained most of his points with a slamming forearm stroke, delivered across court to widen the angle of the bounce; Michael lured his opponent forward and then passed him with shots that were out of his reach.

Three games had been played and Dickson had won two of them before Michael realized another crucial difference in their styles of play. Dickson had so much force in his rig ht arm and was so quick on his feet that he based his whole game on these strengths, counting always on getting across the court fast enough to deliver the sidearm blow. Michael knew that he lacked the other man’s power in driving the ball, but he was a two-handed player, and his returns on the left were hardly weaker than those on the right. In the fourth game he adopted the strategy—which involved high risks, especially as he was a game behind, and behind on points in this one—of striking the ball straight forward instead of aiming at angled shots, using his left hand whenever possible, hitting the ball as low and as hard as he could. By these means he was able to achieve a number of what were known as kill shots—shots that came off the wall so low as to be virtually impossible to return—and he won the game by a margin of two points.

Dickson’s play in the fifth and final game was as aggressive as ever, but Michael sensed a certain wildness in it and thought he knew why: his opponent had made the mistake of counting victory as assured, as a foregone conclusion. He had been winning by two games to one and well in the lead in the fourth game; a win here would have given him the match. Now, by a change in the other’s tactics that he had not been flexible enough to respond to, he had seen this lead melt away and the two of them return to an equal footing.

The decisive point in the fifth game came when the score stood at fifteen to twelve in Michael’s favor. Dickson served strongly across the court, bringing the ball rebounding at a sharp angle and very low, no more than a foot from the ground on Michael’s left side. There was only one stroke possible if the ball was to be kept in play. He struck upward with clenched fist in a kind of blow that was half hook, half uppercut, felt a sharp pain in his knuckles, saw the ball come off the wall, saw it spin and bounce short, saw Dickson lunge at it and miss, deceived by the bounce.

With this it was all over. The serve passed to Michael, and he closed the game with a series of five wins over a now demoralized opponent.

A great storm of shouted applause came from the ranks of the Thorpe men. The two opponents shook hands with an appearance of good grace. Spenton, beaming with delight, got up from his seat and advanced into the court to shake Michael’s hand; Colonel Pemberton followed suit, having first, however, congratulated his own champion on a hard-fought match.

Michael was making to leave the court, but he had not gone far when an exuberant group of his fellow miners surrounded him, hoisted him to their shoulders and bore him up the slope of the yard and along in the direction of the alehouse, followed by a good number behind, all singing his praises. He had upheld the honor of the colliery, and there were those who had won some shillings that day.

Kemp had risen with those beside him at the culminating moment of victory, as the arbiter held up Michael’s hand. He had seen the winner hoisted up and borne away, but it was only after this that he looked behind him, and then only to follow the course of the victorious cavalcade as it mounted the slope of the yard. He, like the others who had been seated there, was obliged to wait until the mass of spectators had departed before making his way out. But as he glanced up to follow the hero’s progress, he saw a face he thought he knew, one different from the others, not only because of this half recognition but from its ruddier coloring, as if the man had been more in the sun. The hair, which was long and very dark, was tied behind with a ribbon, not the common way among the miners, who wore their hair close-cropped because of the dust that got into it from the coal and slate. The face passed in profile across his line of vision and in a second or two was gone, lost in the crowd that was following behind the champion.

He stood still for some moments as the voices retreated, struggling with a wild sense of improbability. It was as if the sounds of jubilation had not faded through distance but were somehow muted out of deference to this struggle of his, as he was carried back in mind to the quarterdeck of the ship that had borne them away from Florida, the people of the settlement, black and white, there in chains below him, the pain from the brass button, which he had been gripping so tightly that it had scored marks in his hand. Before this, the vague and beautiful eyes of the fiddler, his tears, his insolence …

He could not believe it still. But as the crowd thinned away, as some moments later he followed Spenton to the carriage that waited to take them back to Wingfield, he thought he heard sounds of fiddle music carried to him on the air.

“Is that the sound of a fiddle?” he said to the coachman, who was hovering nearby, ready to assist him in climbing up.

“Yes, sir,” the man said, “there is a fiddler come to Thorpe, the first that was ever here. He plays for them at the tavern.”

Kemp sat up late with Spenton, who was in festive mood. Between them they disposed of three bottles of champagne, and though Spenton drank much the most of this, Kemp, abstemious by nature and wary of indiscretion in his dealings with business associates—for this was all that Spenton was to him—felt his head clouded and confused as he made his way to bed, the ghost of the Irish fiddler still with him.

The phantasmic impression of resemblance came back to him in the moments before the fog of sleep descended, stronger, more distinct than before, bearing with it a conviction that owed its power to the superstition of his nature, grown more definite since his meeting with Jane Ashton, a sense of forces and currents that guided human destiny, controls that were arbitrary, accountable to nothing and no one … But if it had really been Sullivan, would he not have fled at once? Faced with the renewed threat of the hangman, would he have gone blithely on to the tavern to celebrate the occasion with his music? In the last moments of wakefulness the explanation came to him: the man could not have seen him; he had stood up only at the last moment; Sullivan, if it was he, had already gone past by then; before that, with the people standing packed together and the yard sloping only just enough to allow a view over the court, the people sitting below would probably not have been visible at all to any but those in the front rank.

The question was in his mind, throbbing at his temples along with the effects of the wine, when he rose next morning. It demanded an answer. Spenton, who seemed none the worse for wear, was intending to spend most of the morning closeted with his steward. This left Kemp free for some hours. He was intending to return to the mine to inspect the pumping equipment for use in the event of flooding, and after this—more important now to his mind—to ride over the fields that ran alongside the Dene and examine the lie of the land at the far end, where it opened out toward the sea.

But before he did anything else, he was resolved to pay a visit to the alehouse and have a look at this newly arrived fiddler.