had left her bed. After a few days, she began to leave her room as well. When she moved around indoors, she still preferred to count steps and feel for the furniture with outstretched arms, her hands floating, fingers undulating like seaweed, radiating openness to touch. But when she ventured outside, she used her cane. Its pittering sound, like the tick of a nervous watch, seemed to comfort her.
‘It’s certainly got her out of bed, hasn’t it, hmm,’ George said to Carolyn, smugly drawing his lips to one side.
Carolyn smiled and pushed his lips back to the middle of his face with a gentle finger. She knew, as every woman in the household knew, that it wasn’t the cane but Agnes’s monthlies that had finally prompted her to leave the dismal swamp of her bed.
* * *
The first task Agnes learned after her diagnosis, apart from getting food into and out of her body, was how to use a sanitary belt by feel. Mrs Wainscroft, the cook, whose manner was as forthright as her menu, assisted while Carolyn quivered outside the loo, making patchy suggestions:
‘You might…with the…is everything?’
Agnes growled for silence.
‘Such a complinckated garment,’ came Mrs Wainscroft’s high voice. ‘Toss a towel in the girdle and be done with it, I say.’ Then clapping hands and a raucous laugh – ‘Righty-o, go on now. That’ll keep you from staining another skirt all chocolatey!’
Most of Agnes’s clothes were white, a habit from her tennis days, though she rarely wore her gear now – the collared short-sleeved shirts, the pleated skirts with their deep pockets. Some days, she would sit on the floor of her closet, enveloped in sartorial history. She would reach up and run her fingers over the garments and sniff up at the whispering polyester, the wooden hangers clucking with pity. Other days, she would take out her rackets and pull wanly at the strings like a piano tuner. To be so young, on the edge of greatness, only to suffer a fate as ancient and weighty as blindness! No end to the slings and arrows, and they were all aimed at Agnes.
But even misery gets boring after a while. Her parents were soon accustomed to her condition. George, a local MP, was busy being re-elected and Carolyn was busy worrying about it. When spring came, Agnes found herself itching to play again. She longed for the looping relay, that back-and-forth of human relation. The maids were too skittish, and she daren’t ask Mrs Wainscroft: with those biceps and Agnes’s blind eyes, a concussion on one side or the other seemed likely.
So, one day, Agnes clambered out of bed, put on a musty tennis suit, grabbed a racket and a bag of balls, and made her way to the old lawn by herself. She walked its periphery – more of a lozenge than a rectangle – trampling the overgrown grass, then felt along the net in its centre, wincing as she fingered the new holes in it. She took ten steps away and turned to face it. She pulled a ball from the bag and served. It was gratifying to feel the racket make contact until she heard the ball fwip weakly against the low stone wall on the other side. She gritted her teeth and served again. Fwap! Much better.
* * *
Ronald was a student of engineering at the University of London’s Institute of Education. He was being sponsored for his degree by Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, who took an interest in any young man who had done exceptionally well at the school on his Rhodesian estate. Gore-Browne still kept in close touch with family and friends in England and had sent brusque but effective letters of introduction ahead for Ronald, who now rotated from estate to estate from one term holiday to the next. His fifth holiday had landed him at George and Carolyn’s home in Surrey.
Ronald pitched up at the train station in late spring, besuited and carrying a clutch with two changes of clothes and his textbooks. Ignoring the chauffeur’s sly-eyed sneer, he slid into the back seat of the Silver Cloud, admiring its wood panels and stitched leather and chrome fittings. The Rolls coasted around tarmac roads – small bright sedans swimming around this slow-moving shark – for nearly an hour before turning off onto a gravel drive whose stones gurgled affably under the wheels. The drive into the estate itself was cosseted in a lush, leafy canopy and twice interrupted by tall iron