The Stars’ Tennis Balls

there. It seems to be trying to be there. And that, surely, is the saddest thing of all.

Americans don’t have this trouble do they? With names and the implications of names. The one Ashley, in fact, who might be said to have had a touch of class was American. Ashley in Gone With the Wind. So classy that they called him Eshley. In the film, Leslie Howard never even tried to give him an American accent. Leslie and Howard. Two disgusting names for the price of one. But then Leslie Howard wasn’t English. He was Hungarian and to him no doubt, fresh off the boat, Leslie and Howard seemed posh.

The word ‘posh’ is right out. Unsayable.

But seemed. Seemed posh. There’s the rub. What people think is smart is so far from what actually, Ashley, is. You might think silver fish knives would be pretty bloody pukka, but fish knives of any kind are an absolute no. You might as well put doilies round them and abandon all hope of social pretension.

But it isn’t about social pretension. It’s about the ache.

Look, some males grow up with a feeling that they’re in the wrong body, don’t they? A woman trapped inside a man.

Isn’t it possible then that some people might grow up, as it were patricians imprisoned within plebeian bodies? Knowing, just knowing that they have been born into the wrong class?

But it isn’t about class. It’s about the hunger.

Oh but Ashley, you poor sap, can you actually believe that you’re supposed to be of their world? Don’t you know that it’s a world you can only be born into?

But that’s so unfair. If he wanted, a man can become American. He can become Jewish. He can, like Leslie Howard, make himself not just English but a symbol of all that England ever stood for. He can become a Londoner, a Muslim, a woman, a man or a Russian. But he can’t become a … a … nearly said gentleman there, didn’t you, but what is the word? An aristo, a nob, a public school toff… a one of them. You can’t become one of them, even if you feel yourself to be one of them in the deepest pit of you, even if you know in your innermost knowing self that it is your right, your destiny, your need and your duty. Even if you know that you could do it better. And that’s the truth. You would carry it off with so much more style. Carry off the ease that belies any sense of anything at all having to be carried off, if that isn’t too baroque. Carry off that natural, effortless taking-it-all-for-granted air. But the opportunity has been denied you because of the terrible mistake of your birth.

The Move North, that was another nail in the coffin. Another element of the Terrible Mistake. Your dad died and Mum got a job teaching at a deaf school in Manchester. Dad had been an officer. In the RAF, it grieves you to admit, not in a smart army regiment. He never flew, so there was no romance to him. But at least he had been an officer. Be honest now, he was compelled to enter the service as a humble Aircraftsman. He wasn’t ever officer class. He had to work his way up through the ranks and Lord that burns you up, doesn’t it? Then he died of complications from diabetes, a rather bourgeois, not to say proletarian disease, and you, your mum and your sister Carina moved north. (Carina! Carina, for God’s sake! What kind of name is that? All very well to say that the Duke of Norfolk has a daughter called Carina. There’s a world of difference between saying, ‘Have you met the Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard?’ and ‘This is Carina Garland.’) You moved away from Old Harrow and the proximity of them, their tail-coats, top-hats, blazers and boaters. You were twelve years old. Slowly you have become infected by a northern accent. Not obvious, just a trace, but to your sensitive, highly attuned ears as glaring as a cleft palate. You began to pronounce ‘One’ and ‘None’ to rhyme with ‘Shone’ and ‘Gone’ instead of ‘Shun’ and ‘Gun’, you gently sounded the g’s in ‘Ringing’ and

‘Singing’. At school you even rhyme ‘Mud’ with ‘Good’ and ‘Grass’ with ‘Lass’. Fair enough, you would be beaten up as a southern poof otherwise, but you have trailed some of that linguistic mud into the house with you. Not that your mum noticed.

And then this afternoon happened.

She brought some of her deaf kids home for tea this afternoon. After they had gone you said that good God, they even signed in a Mancunian accent. You thought it a good joke. Mum bridled and called you a snob. That was the first time the word was ever said openly. It hung in the air like a fart in a teashop. I pretended not to hear, but we knew that something deep was up because we both blushed and swallowed. I made a fuss of doing up my shoe-laces, she became fascinated by the teapot lid.

And I came up and started to write this and… ah. I’ve gone into the first person. I have said ‘I’.

Never mind, all this will be past history soon. Watch out, I am about to join them. I am on my way in. And there’s nothing they can do to stop me. I’m smarter than they are and braver and better too. I am prepared for every paper and they will not be able to refuse me.

But I must be prepared for the wider scholarship. The scholarship that counts. The scholarship of life, if I may be so sententious. I shall add my mother’s maiden name of Barson. Why not? They have been doing it for years. I shall be Barson-Garland. It has a ring, I think. Damn it, I could triple-barrel myself. Barson-Barson-Garland, how would that be? A little too much, I think. But Barson-Garland I like. It palliates the Ashley, makes it almost tolerable.

But firstly, there must come the accent. When I arrive, the accent will be in place and they will never know. I have my exercises all written out:

Don’t say good, say gid.

Don’t say post, say paste

Don’t say real, say rail

Don’t say go, say gay

Don’t say –

The outer door to the biology room banged and Ned looked up to see the top of Ashley’s head in the window of the inner door. He slammed the diary shut, pushed it hurriedly back into the bag and hunched himself quickly over his Advanced Cell Biology, both fists pressed hard against his cheeks, hair flopping down like a thick silk curtain.

He was in this attitude of intense study when Barson-Garland resumed his place next to him. Ned looked up and smiled. He hoped that the pressure from his fists would explain any heightened flush.

‘What was all that about?’ he whispered.

‘Nothing of great interest,’ said Barson-Garland. ‘The headmaster wants me to make the Speech Day Oration.’

‘Bloody hell, Ash! That’s completely brilliant.’

‘It’s nothing… nothing.’

Barson-Garland had rhymed the first ‘nothing’ with ‘frothing’ and then quickly corrected himself. Ned tried hard to look as if he hadn’t noticed. Half an hour ago he wouldn’t have noticed. His hand moved to Ashley’s shoulder in a sudden surge of warmth and friendship.

‘Bloody proud of you, Ash. Always knew you were a genius.’

Dr Sewell’s high croak intruded. ‘If you have absorbed all that information and have nothing better to do than gossip, Maddstone, then no doubt you will be able to come forward to the blackboard and label this chloroplast for me.’

‘Righto, sir.’ Ned sighed cheerfully and sent Barson-Garland a rueful smile over his shoulder as he went up.

Barson-Garland was not smiling. He was staring at a dried, pressed four-leaf clover on Ned Maddstone’s stool. The same four-leafed clover that had lain undisturbed between the pages of his private journal for three years.

A heavy knock came on the door of Rufus Cade’s study. After twenty seconds of oath and panic, Cade hurled himself into his armchair, gave a frenzied look about the room and, satisfied that all was clear, shouted a ‘Come in!’ that he hoped mingled relaxedness with boredom.

The sardonic face of Ashley Barson-Garland appeared around the door.

‘Oh, it’s you.

‘None other.’ Ashley sat himself down and watched with amused disdain as Cade thrust half his body out of the window and spat mints from his mouth like a passenger heaving over the side of a ferry.

‘A charming lavender fragrance seems to be pervading the room,’ said Ashley, picking up an aerosol room spray from the desk and inspecting it with benevolent amusement.

Cade, still leaning over the sill, had started to scrabble at the flower-bed beneath his window. ‘You might have said it was you.

‘And deny myself the pleasure of this pantomime?’

‘Very fucking funny…’ Cade straightened himself up holding a battered but expertly rolled joint, from which he began gently to flick away fragments of leaf- mould.

Ashley watched with pleasure. ‘So delicate. Like an archaeologist brushing soil from a freshly unearthed Etruscan vase.

‘I’ve got a bottle of Gordon’s too,’ said Cade. ‘Maddstone paid back the five quid he owed me, would you believe?’

‘Yes I would believe. I happened to see his proud daddy slipping him a tenner just before the match this afternoon.’

Cade took a Zippo from his pocket. ‘What, reward for being made Head Pig next term?’

‘Such, I would imagine, is the case. Reward too for being captain of cricket and for breaking the school batting record. For being winsome and good and sweet and kind. For being –'

‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Cade drew in a huge lungful of smoke and offered the joint to Ashley.

‘Thank you. It is my belief that you don’t like him either, Rufus.’

‘Yeah. Well, you’re right. I don’t.’

‘Nothing to do with the fact that he didn’t select you for the first eleven?’

‘Fuck that,’ said Cade. ‘Couldn’t give a toss about that. He’s just … he’s a prick, that’s all. Thinks he’s God almighty. Arrogant.’

‘So few would agree with you there. I fancy it is the general view of the school that our Nedlet is unflaggingly and endearingly modest.’

‘Yeah. Well. He doesn’t fool me. He acts like he’s got everything.’

‘Which he has.’