The Forever Girl

20



They welcomed Amanda at the tennis club as if her absence had been three months rather than three years. Although there was a floating population of expatriates – those who came for a few years before going on somewhere else, or returning to the place they had come from – there were others who stayed for years, for the greater part of a lifetime in some cases. These people might spend much of their time elsewhere but seemed drawn back to the sheltering skirts of the place that having asked so little from them in terms of tax, then made no demands of them other than that they pay their bills and refrain from challenging corrupt politicians or well-connected developers. If they had the bad taste to be rich, then they might at least have the good taste to keep a low profile politically, and certainly not give others their advice.

With money, there came an ability to escape the normal constraints of geography. Most people did not have much choice about where they lived, and they stayed there year upon year. By contrast, the wealthy could move about as they wished, following the tides of whim and fashion. But too much absence could be a bad thing: being off island meant that you were away, but would probably return when you had had enough of the grind of existence in London or New York or wherever it was that you had gone to.


So the secretary of the tennis club merely added Amanda’s name to the club competition ladder and sent her the bill for a renewed membership even without asking her whether she still wanted to play tennis.

“I heard you were back,” she said when Amanda first visited the club. “I took the liberty of adding you to the doubles ladder: we needed another woman for the mixed doubles and I thought of you.”

Amanda had not objected. “My tennis is rusty,” she said. “I joined a club in Edinburgh but you know how it is in Scotland. They have all-weather courts but that doesn’t really help all that much if there’s wind.”

“You can book the pro.”

“I will.”

Clover went with her mother for her first lesson, and watched as Amanda returned serve after serve and responded to shouted instructions.

“He shouldn’t shout at you like that,” she muttered at the end of the lesson. “You’re paying him, aren’t you?”

“That’s the whole point, darling. This island is full of people …” – she almost said rich people, but stopped herself – “who pay others to shout at them. Personal trainers, and so on. There are hundreds of them.”

Clover did not come to watch the second lesson, which took place the next afternoon, in that crucial hour before evening fell when the temperature was right for activities that involved exertion. The coach was impressed with the progress they had made and shouted less; her backhand, he said, was improving and would obviously get stronger with practice. At the end of the lesson, she made arrangements for the next session and then went into the club house for a shower. She did not intend to stay, as David would be back for dinner in an hour or so and she had nothing prepared, but she stopped by the noticeboard to look at the latest postings. The ladder was there – she saw her name in the mixed doubles section – and there was a poster advertising an exhibition match between the top-ranked player in Florida and a finalist from the Australian Open. It was to be on Boxing Day and there would be a dinner afterwards in aid of club funds. There was an appeal for a lost racquet – “of purely sentimental value” – removed accidentally, of course, from a car. No questions would be asked if the racquet were to be returned.

There was a voice behind her – so close that it startled her.

“See – there is a crime wave, whatever the Commissioner of Police may say.”

She turned round to see George Collins. He was dressed for work, in a smart white shirt with buttoned-down collar and a red tie with a worked-in motif – a rod of Asclepius, the snake twirled round the physician’s staff. In the confusion of the moment, her eye was drawn to the tie; he noticed, and smiled.

“People sometimes misunderstand this,” he said. “One of my patients even asked if I was a snake-handler. I think she was disappointed when I explained that it all just had to do with an old Greek god.”

She looked up at him, and she felt a sudden emptiness in her stomach. She had imagined that she would meet him on this trip; the island was too small for people to avoid one another. That could be done, of course, at the cost of some effort; two warring grandes dames who had left Palm Beach precisely to avoid contact with each other and had, by coincidence, both chosen Grand Cayman as their refuge, had been obliged to work out an unspoken rota that allowed them to frequent the same parties, but at different times; one came early and left early; the other arrived once the coast was clear.

She had thought it would be at a party, when she would have time to prepare herself. She had rehearsed in her mind how she would behave; how she would appear unfazed by the meeting; how she would indicate by a casual, friendly demeanour that she bore no resentment or disappointment; that whatever had happened was a long time ago – three years was sufficient for people to get over most things, she felt, except, perhaps, sexual involvement: that was more difficult – the memory of intimacy was always there in the background, no matter how casually treated; the other had been admitted to the personal realm as others, acquaintances, friends, colleagues, had not.

But none of the scripts she had prepared came to her in this setting, before the tennis club noticeboard, where the opening remark had been about crime and a missing tennis racquet.

Banality came to her rescue. “Sometimes I wish somebody would steal my racquet,” she said. “My game might improve with a new one.”

He laughed. “I saw that you were having a lesson. I’m beyond all professional help, I’m afraid.”

He looked at her, as if expecting her to comment on his tennis – she had never seen him play – but she said nothing. He waited, before continuing: “I thought you were never going to return.”

She looked askance. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“I just made the assumption.”

“Well, you were wrong. Here I am.”

He nodded. “You have the kids with you – so I assume it won’t be for long.”

She confirmed it would be for the duration of the school holidays and then she would return to Scotland, but only for a short while. “I’m coming back more permanently. Billy’s going back to the Prep.”

She saw that he seemed pleased to hear this news, and she became guarded. “I don’t think that we should …”

He interrupted her. “Should what? Talk to one another?”

“I didn’t say that. But I don’t think it would be wise, after what happened, for us to be seen together too often.”

Again he queried her. “What counts as too often in this place? Once a month? Once a year?”

She spelled it out. “Too often means ever. I suppose I’d say that we shouldn’t really see one another at all.”

He raised his voice in protest, causing her to glance anxiously down the veranda; they were still by themselves. There was a note of frustration in his voice now. “I don’t see what harm there is in two friends occasionally seeing one another.”

“George,” she said, “there’s such a thing as disingenuousness. We can’t pretend that we didn’t, well, fall for one another.”

He looked away, as if it was painful to be reminded.

“We can’t pretend,” she went on, “that people don’t know that our marriages suffered as a result: you know what this place is like for gossip. We happen to live in a village of married couples. There are the keepers, with all their money, and the kept – and I’m one of the kept – and there are lots of us; it’s just the way it is.”

He interrupted her. “I’ve never heard it described that way …”

She ignored the interruption. “My marriage more or less came to an end and now I’m rekindling it. I don’t want to go through a separation again – or, worse still, a divorce.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got a mind. You’re not one of these women with nothing in their heads but thoughts of their next cocktail party or shopping trip to Miami. You’re not that at all.”

“Maybe not, but the reality of the situation is that I have no career. David and I can get on. We have children, and one of them is still quite young.”

He looked at her with a mixture of disappointment and pity. “So you’ve made your bed and you’re going to lie in it.”

“You could put it that way. I’m being realistic.”


He stared at her mutely.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was very anxious about meeting you again. And now I’ve upset you.”

He looked away. “You’re right, though. We can’t, can we?”

“Not really.”

“It would have been …”

“It would have been good for both of us, yes, but I don’t think we can.”

He took a step away, and lowered his voice. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “For the last three years, there has not been a day – not a single day – in which I haven’t thought about you. Not necessarily for long periods, but even just for a few seconds – a fleeting thought, you’d call it – in which you have been there, in my mind, and I have let you in, so to speak.”

She wanted to say: me too, me too. But she remained silent. Do not tell your love.

“Sometimes,” he went on, “when I’ve been driving to work in the car, doing something as mundane as that, I’ve thought of you and I’ve whispered your name, or called it out, even, as if in agony. Why should I do this? Why should you have got under my skin to such an extent that I behave in a way that my psychiatric colleagues would find interesting? In fact – and this may amuse you – I mentioned this – disguising details, of course – to a psychiatrist friend and he said to me, ‘Oh, that’s not all that unusual; that’s how agony is released, by shouting out the name of the person or the thing that haunts the mind.’ And he said, too, that it was a way in which we tempt Fate to bring down upon us the thing that we dread could happen – the disclosure of our secret. Shout it out and control it that way. That’s how he explained it.

“But I didn’t really care about the explanation; what moved me was the fact that I had found something that I didn’t think could exist. And that thing – the thing that I found – was very simple. Most people know all about it and have never really doubted it because their lives have been such as to give them a glimpse of this thing that they were not sure about, which is love, of course: the sheer fact of feeling love for another, of finding the one person – the only person, it seems – who makes the world make sense. It’s like discovering the map that you’ve been looking for all your life and have never been able to find – the map that makes sense of the journey.”

“George …”

“No, I don’t expect you to love me back, because that doesn’t always happen, does it? So I accept that this is the way it is to be.”

“Can’t we just somehow get over this? I wanted …”

He brushed this aside; it seemed that he was determined to finish what he wanted to say. “I shall continue to do what I’m doing, which is to be a doctor sorting out people’s minor medical problems most of the time and every so often, I suppose, being able to do something more important for them. And I shall do this in a place that I don’t really like – a place that I think has a tainted notion at its heart – that money should be able to be stashed away without doing anything for the people who actually do the work to produce it. I’m stuck with all that because even in places like this there are poor people and people who are treated badly and who need help with their varicose veins and digestive problems and their conjunctivitis and, yes, their deaths. And I’ll do that because I’m the one who happens to be around to do it. I’m not being Albert Schweitzer or anything like that, I’m just doing a job that I happen to do. And I won’t mind too much that I can’t talk to anybody about this – other than you – because I can’t find the words with which to open up to them. So, fine, I give you your freedom from this thing that happened to us and I promise you I’ll respect what you have to do, which is what you’ve told me.”

He stopped, and she reached out to him instinctively. “George …”

She withdrew her hand. A man and two women had appeared at the end of the veranda and had tossed their racquets down on a table. One of the women had looked in their direction and had seen her reach out to George. She was sure of that.