evening, with a pardonable sense of self-satisfaction, I wish goodnight to the Haven and set course for the Athleticus and my long-delayed badminton encounter with Edward Stanley Shannon, researcher.
5
According to my engagements diary, which has never in its life contained information I would not be prepared to leave on a bus or at home, Ed and I played in all fifteen games of badminton at the Athleticus, mainly but not always on Mondays, and sometimes twice weekly, fourteen before the Fall, one after it. My use of Fall is arbitrary. It has nothing to do with the autumn season or Adam and Eve. I’m not sure the word covers the case but I have looked in vain for a better.
If I am approaching the Athleticus from the north, it is my pleasure to cover the last lap with a crisp walk across Battersea Park. If I am coming directly from my house, I have only a five-hundred-yard walk. The Athleticus has been my unlikely club and away-from-it-all for a large chunk of my adult life. Prue calls it my playpen. When I was abroad I kept my membership going and used my spells of home leave to stay on the ladder. Whenever the Office hauled me back for an operational meeting, I’d find time to grab a game. In the Athleticus I’m Nat to the world and its brother, nobody gives a hoot what I or anyone else does for a living and nobody asks. Chinese and other Asian members outnumber us Caucasians three to one. Steff has refused to play ever since she learned to say ‘no’, but there was a time when I’d cart her along for an ice cream and a swim. Prue as a good sport will turn to if asked, but only on sufferance and latterly, what with her pro bono work and the class actions her partnership gets embroiled in, not at all.
We have an ageless insomniac Swatownese barman called Fred. We do a junior membership that is wildly uneconomic, but only until age twenty-two. After that it’s two hundred and fifty smackers a year and a hefty joining fee. And we’d have had to put up shop or raise the ante still higher if a Chinese member named Arthur hadn’t made an anonymous donation of a hundred thousand euros out of the blue, and thereby hangs a tale. As Hon. Club Secretary I was one of the few who were allowed to thank Arthur for his generosity. One evening I was told he was sitting in the bar. He was my age but already white-haired, wearing a smart suit and tie and staring ahead of him. No drink.
‘Arthur,’ I say, sitting down beside him, ‘we don’t know how to thank you.’
I wait for him to turn his head, but his gaze stays fixed on the middle distance.
‘It’s for my boy,’ he replies after an age.
‘So is your boy with us here tonight?’ I ask, observing a group of Chinese kids hanging round the pool.
‘No more,’ he replies, still without turning his head.
No more? What did that mean?
I mount a discreet search. Chinese names are tricky. There was a junior member who seemed to have the same surname as our donor, but his annual membership was six months overdue and he’d ignored the usual string of reminders. It took Alice to make the connection. Kim, she remembered. That eager, skinny little lad. Sweet as pie, gave his age as sixteen but looked sixty. A Chinese woman, she came along with him, very polite, could have been his mother, or maybe nurse. Bought a six-lesson start-up course for cash outright but that boy, he couldn’t connect with the shuttle, not even dolly shots. The coach now, he suggested he give it a try at home, just hand–eye, shuttle on racquet, and come back like in a few weeks. That boy, he never did. The nurse neither. We guessed he’d given up or gone home to China. Oh dear Jesus, don’t say it. Well, God bless that poor Kim.
I’m not sure why I recount this episode in such detail except that I love the place and what it has been to me over the years, and it’s the place where I played my fifteen games with Ed and enjoyed all but the last one.
*
Our first appointed Monday did not exactly get off to the rollicking start the record suggests. I am a punctual man – Steff says anally so. For our date, made a full three