and leaned and swung with a grunt. The yellow ball flew like a comet through the air, hit the short wall again, bounce-bounce-bounced and stammered to a stop.
Ronald closed his book and watched for a while. He considered the uses of blind play as a training technique. It would attune the player to her body, and hone her instincts so that sight was not the sole arbiter of when to strike. He grew puzzled again when the girl walked to the other side to gather the balls. The way she moved around on her knees, the way she patted the blank spaces between balls – oh, she couldn’t see at all! This was not the blindness he knew from home, eyelids bulging or welded shut with pus, begging hands outstretched. Nor was it the kind he knew from the London Underground, people walking into him as if he were a pole that had popped up in the middle of the moving stairs.
The blind girl started to serve again, from his side of the net now. It was a relief to watch someone, himself unwatched. Her legs were exquisite, long and thick and white like the trunks of the silver birches on the eastern edge of the garden. Her face, collecting droplets of sweat like a cold glass of water, was not beautiful, but solid and cool. Her mouth never curved or opened. Her brow never clenched. As she grew warmer, flush dusted her cheeks with pink and yellow like the magnolia blossoms he’d seen in Kew Gardens.
Ronald sometimes had the impression that he saw eyes in her skin – or rather, felt them there like a watchful presence. She seemed both weak and imperious, helpless yet haughty. In a word: British. Right before she swung the racket, when she arched, raised up on her toes and leaned back, he would feel an urge to run to her, to encircle her waist and catch her before – but, of course, she never fell. He still wanted to hold her there, though, to lower her slowly, letting her bend like a bow until her long ponytail grazed the grass…
* * *
Every morning, after a strained and greasy breakfast with Carolyn and George, Ronald would take a stroll in the gardens, sniffing the flowers most foreign to him – honeysuckles and poppies still drooling with dew – then walk through the bluebell-infested forest to the stable to visit the horses, shiny as polished wood, their long heads as elegant as those of the lechwe at Shiwa. In the fields beyond, sullen cows sometimes approached, not to attack him, he learned from Carolyn, but expecting to be milked.
He visited the dairy only once. Encouraged by the grinning farmhand there, who mimed instructions as if not quite believing that a guest so exotic spoke English, Ronald stuck his pinkie into a newborn calf’s mouth. He enjoyed the sucking caress until he remembered that his new tic of chewing his cuticles essentially made them open wounds. For days, Ronald obsessed about infection and henceforth avoided all farm life at the estate. He had not travelled so far in distance, years and education only to subject himself to diseases of the hand, mouth and foot.
After he first caught sight of the blind girl playing tennis, Ronald figured out which bedroom window belonged to her and began to pause outside it after his morning walks. Hiding behind a manicured hedge, he’d furtively pluck its leaves to make an aperture to see her through. This soon became the goal towards which his day was pitched: spying on the sleeping beauty until, weather permitting, she sat up and searched with nimble toes for the shoes beneath her bed. Then he would hurry to the tennis lawn, avoiding the maid blinkingly shaking a rug or casting out slops behind the kitchen, and sit on his bench with his textbook on his lap.
He felt smitten with pity and a kind of fear as he watched this pale, mad girl serve to no one, then rummage on her knees for the balls she had scattershotted, collecting them in her skirt and tumbling them into a canvas bag that, like the sky, slowly greyed as autumn approached. One day, it simply became unbearable to see her crawling around with those bright fuzzy spheres eluding her, drifting off at the touch of a finger. So Ronald stood up and went to her and gave her what she was grasping for.
* * *
It took a