week of Agnes serving tennis balls and Ronald collecting them before they managed a proper interaction. They couldn’t play – he didn’t know how and she could no longer teach – so they exchanged words squatting on the lawn, tennis balls bumping between their ankles. At first there wasn’t too much to say: he was a student, she was Agnes; he was Ronald, she used to play tennis really, really well. After a few days of empty chat, she gave in to a desire she had never confessed, not even to herself. She wanted someone to describe the world she could no longer see. She would never think of asking anyone in the house. They were all dreadfully inarticulate in one way or another, which had become clearer to her now that she relied so much on voices.
But Ronald spoke a straightforward, mellifluous English, lapsing only occasionally into malapropisms and odd idioms. Agnes could ascribe these to neither class nor region. Her parents had offered only the vaguest words about their guest’s background: ‘his sort’, her father said; ‘such innocent people’, her mother said; ‘substandard culture’, her father said; ‘in his nature’, her mother said. Too bemused to enquire further, Agnes took any strangeness in Ronald’s manner of speaking as a sign of personality or fashion – what did she know of hip lingo, isolated as she was from swinging London? She relished the lack of clutter in his sentences. None of those bloody ers and ums.
‘Would you describe…the sky for me?’ she asked one day, a little hesitantly.
‘I would say partly cloudy with a chance of rain, Madam.’
‘There’s always a chance of rain here,’ she snorted. ‘And don’t call me Madam! Unless you want me to call you Mister!’ She paused. ‘I suppose you could call me Mad – short for Madam. And I’ll call you Miss – short for Mister!’ Her laughter died alone. Had she just insulted them both in a single drollery? She willed her voice to be softer, coyed it.
‘And these clouds you mention. Are they white? Or grey?’ she asked in a way that presaged a witty remark about variously coloured clouds.
‘Oh? I am sorry, it was a lie. There are no clouds today.’
Agnes thought he was being facetious and felt a little daunted.
‘Fine then,’ she said, smiling bravely. ‘Is the sky blue? Or is it blueblue?’
‘It’s blueblue. Like your eyes.’
‘Oh dear, are they open? I try to keep them closed, but…’
After an awkward pause, she asked him if he liked it here.
‘Ah, it is very fine. Merrie England.’
She’d meant Surrey but now he was asking her if she liked it, and they were off again, talking about what they liked and what they hated: at school, at dinner, in cities and outside of them. She explained to him the rules of tennis, which he found baffling.
‘Why do you call it love when you have zero points?’ he asked.
Surely this was just an excuse to talk about romance. He sounded earnest, though.
‘It comes from the French word for egg, l’oeuf. Because a zero is the shape of an egg.’
‘Oh-oh?’ he chuckled. ‘But I thought the English hated the French.’
‘Oh, we do, but we steal from them mercilessly. It’s sort of our thing.’
* * *
A few weeks later, Agnes was feasting on honeytoast and tea in the kitchen. Mrs Wainscroft was with her, offering backhanded admiration:
‘A blessing, Miss Agnes, to have such lovely pale skin…pallid skin, I’ve heard ’em call it, must be nice!’ Mrs Wainscroft often pretended to greater illiteracy in order to make her point. It was her version of irony. ‘So fascinating to see it against that Mr Ronald, you know, with his.’
‘Hmm?’ Agnes murmured through a mouthful of tea-soggy toast. She was feeling her knees under the table, wondering if they looked as rough as they felt.
‘Never saw nothing like it. A chessboard or somethink.’
The week after that, they were discussing how Agnes would fare in London, whether she was ready for a shopping trip. Could she cross the streets on her own at the lights and at the—
‘Why is it, d’you think, they call it a zebra crossing?’ asked Mrs Wainscroft.
‘The stripes, obviously,’ said Agnes, her head in the closet as she felt along the seams of her old clothes, trying to discern by hand what textures she preferred.
‘But where does zebra come from? Are they black with white lines, or white with black?’
‘Doesn’t matter, dear Crofty,’ said Agnes. ‘I can’t make out lines anyway.’
Her voice was strained with patience.