‘Tamara and the little girls are already in Berne! Natasha too! I’d have thought they’d all be together!’
‘Me too.’
But his disappointment is of a lesser order than hers.
Napoleon’s band is very loud. Whole regiments could march to it and never return.
‘He’s very keen to play tennis with you again, poor man!’ Doolittle shouts.
‘I’ve noticed!’ Big nods and smiles from Milton.
‘Have you got time tomorrow?’
‘Absolutely not. Too many dates,’ Milton replies, with an adamant shake of his head.
‘That’s what I feared. Tricky.’
‘Very,’ Milton agrees.
Are they just being children, or has the fear of God crept into them? Carrying his hand to her lips, Gail kisses it then keeps it against her cheek because, quite unconsciously, he has moved her nearly to tears:
Of all the days in his life that he should be free to enjoy, and isn’t! To watch Federer in the Final of the French Open is for Perry like watching Nijinsky in
‘I really want you to enjoy today!’ she shouts into his ear like a final message. ‘Just put everything else out of your mind. I love you: I said I
She conducts an innocent survey of the spectators next to them. Whose are they? Dima’s? Dima’s enemies? Hector’s?
To her left, an iron-jawed blonde woman with a Swiss national cross on her paper hat and another on her ample blouse.
To her right, a middle-aged pessimist in a rainproof hat and cape, sheltering from the rain everybody else is pretending not to notice.
In the row behind them, a Frenchwoman leads her children in a lusty singing of ‘La Marseillaise’, perhaps under the mistaken impression that Federer is French.
With the same insouciance Gail scans the crowd on the open terraces opposite them.
‘See anyone special?’ Perry yells into her ear.
‘Not really. I thought
‘One of our silks!’
She is talking nonsense. There is a silk called Barry in her Chambers but he loathes tennis and loathes the French. She’s hungry. Not only did they leave their coffees behind in the Rodin Museum. They actually forgot lunch. The realization prompts memories of a Beryl Bainbridge novel in which the hostess of a difficult dinner party forgets where she has put the pudding. She shouts to Perry, needing to share the joke:
‘How long is it since you and I actually
But for once Perry doesn’t get the literary reference. He’s staring at a row of picture windows halfway up the stands on the other side of the court. White tablecloths and hovering waiters are discernible through the smoked glass, and he’s wondering which window belongs to Dima’s hospitality box. She feels the pressure of Dima’s arms round her again, and his crotch pressing against her thigh with childlike unawareness. Were the fumes of vodka last night’s, or this morning’s? She asks Perry.
‘He was just getting himself up to par,’ Perry replies.
Napoleon’s troops have fled the battlefield. A prickly quiet descends. An overhead camera glides on cables across an ugly black sky.
Don’t.
The stadium is erupting. First Robin Soderling, then Roger Federer looking as becomingly modest and self- assured as only God can. Perry is craning forward, lips pressed tensely together. He’s in the presence.
Warm-up time. Federer mis-hits a couple of backhands; Soderling’s forehand returns are a little too waspish for a friendly exchange. Federer practises a couple of serves, alone. Soderling does the same, alone. Practice over. Their jackets fall off them like sheaths from swords. In the pale blue corner, Federer, with a flash of red inside his collar and a matching red tick on his headband. In the white corner, Soderling, with phosphorescent yellow flashes on his sleeves and shorts.
Perry’s gaze strays back to the smoked windows, so Gail’s does too. Is that a cream-coloured blazer she sees with a gold anchor on the pocket, floating in the brown mist behind the glass? If ever there was a man not to get into the back of a taxi with, it’s Signor Emilio dell Oro, she wants to tell Perry.
But quiet: the match has begun and to the joy of the crowd, but too suddenly for Gail, Federer has broken Soderling’s serve and won his own. Now it’s Soderling to serve again. A pretty blonde ballgirl with a ponytail hands him a ball, drops a bob, and canters off again. The linesman howls as if he’s been stung. The rain’s coming on again. Soderling has double-faulted; Federer’s triumphal march to victory has begun. Perry’s face is lit with simple awe and Gail discovers she is loving him all over again from scratch: his unaffected courage, his determination to do the right thing even if it’s wrong, his need to be loyal and his refusal to be sorry for himself. She’s his sister, friend, protector.
A similar feeling must have overtaken Perry, for he grasps her hand and keeps it. Soderling is going for the French Open. Federer is going for history, and Perry is going with him. Federer has won the first set 6–1. It took him just under half an hour.
The manners of the French crowd are truly beautiful, Gail decides. Federer is their hero as well as Perry’s. But they are meticulous in awarding praise to Soderling wherever praise is due. And Soderling is grateful, and shows it. He’s taking risks, which means he is also forcing errors and Federer has just committed one. To make up for it he delivers a lethal drop shot from ten feet behind the baseline.
When Perry watches great tennis, he enters a higher, purer register. After a couple of strokes he can tell you where a rally is heading and who’s controlling it. Gail isn’t like that. She’s a ground-shot girl: wallop and see what happens, is her motto. At the level she plays, it works a treat.
But suddenly Perry isn’t watching the game any more. He isn’t watching the smoked windows either. He has leaped to his feet and barged in front of her, apparently to shield her, and he’s yelling: ‘
Rising with him, which isn’t easy because now everyone is standing too and yelling ‘what the hell’ in French, Swiss German, English or whatever language comes naturally to them, her first expectation is that she is about to see a brace of dead pheasant at Roger Federer’s feet: a left and a right. This is because she confuses the clatter of everybody leaping up with the din of panicked birds clambering into the air like out-of-date aeroplanes, to be shot down by her brother and his rich friends. Her second equally wild thought is that it is Dima who has been shot, probably by Niki, and tossed out of the smoked-glass windows.
But the spindly man who has appeared like a ragged red bird at Federer’s end of the tennis court is not Dima, and he is anything but dead. He wears the red hat favoured by Madame Guillotine and long, blood-red socks. He has a blood-red robe draped over his shoulders and he’s standing chatting to Federer just behind the baseline that Federer has been serving from.
Federer is a bit perplexed about what to say – they clearly haven’t met before – but he preserves his on-court
