41-Love Read online

  “It’ll be knockout, probably,” she says.

  “So there’ll be like a draw, and seeds, and—”

  “And a consolation draw,” she says. “So everyone who comes can play at least two games. I mean, otherwise it’s unfair on someone who draws the top seed in the first round.”

  But what if that was me? How badly would the top seed in a Level 4 tournament beat me? Would it be bagels? Or would I—could I—beat her? What if one day I was her? Or am I supposed to just accept that now, at forty-one, I am never going to be a top seed, nor beat one? At this stage I have literally no concept of what a good player actually is. My life experience of sport so far has been scattered and inconsistent and largely free of any experience leading to hard knocks leading to actual knowledge. All I have are vague memories of my mother telling me I was good enough for Wimbledon. Being proud of those few points I took off Couze. The Middlesex thing. Oh, God, the Middlesex thing. And still, in this already aging millennium, still this feeling of if you want something badly enough and if you train for it and pray for it and, yes, pay for it, then it can be yours—anything, anything you want so long as you want it badly enough—and as yet I have absolutely no idea, no fucking idea that every single tennis parent and middle-aged wannabe in the whole country feels exactly the same way.

  •

  I was fourteen when I gave up tennis. It was 1986.

  I’d gone to boarding school, which was where it happened. How to tell this story, which in itself is sort of like my whole life story? It was my dad who sent me to boarding school, but only after my other dad had gone to America to marry an heiress and begin the heroin habit that would slowly kill him. I’d only known who my “real” father was for a couple of years. Mum had had an affair, romantic and beautiful and tragic, with this tousle-haired, Gauloise-smoking, blue-eyed, Serge Gainsbourg look-alike back in the early 1970s. I was the result, in 1972. He was called Gordian, like the knot. He had a complicated, rich, Jewish mother, who’d escaped Hitler by riding a bicycle from Luxembourg to France. He had a beautiful, cool, tap-dancing sister. Mum’s then husband Steve agreed to bring me up as his own, but Gordian came to visit every week, when he wasn’t in the midst of a cocaine overdose or Valium meltdown or anxiety attack. Ten years or so later Mum had another affair, this time with her university lecturer, Couze, and one day we went to live with him and everything changed. It wasn’t long after that when I played tennis for the first time.

  But for now, let’s skip to the last time.

  I was good. Good enough that I’d been asked to play for Middlesex, or maybe train with them, or maybe just try out for them, back in 1984, during my first tennis holiday at the David Lloyd Centre in Hounslow. I couldn’t do it, of course, because we lived miles away, but still. In 1986 I was just back from another solo holiday, this time all the way to Mexico to stay with my new grandmother, Ruth, who wore caftans, made tuna mousse in smoked-glass bowls, and was obsessed with a flamboyant gay man named Patricio.

  Say what you like about the posh European half of my gene pool, but they know how to do things properly. When the trip was being planned, I was asked what activities I did. Horse-riding (which Gordian had rediscovered in the ’80s rather as I have resumed tennis now) and, of course, tennis. So I had to take a riding hat and a racquet. There was to be some horse-riding with local children and—joy—tennis coaching several afternoons a week. The coaching was amazing. Hot, dripping hot, with fresh orange juice afterward, and sometimes spicy Mexican food. And I was good, hitting hard back and forth with the coach for a whole sun-drenched hour. Crosscourt forehands. Crosscourt backhands. Forehands down the line. Backhands down the line. Serving. Volleying. Points. I remember the coach commenting on my ability, perhaps asking me what club or team I played for back at home. Was I a player nationale, or regionale? But at home there was no national, regional, or even local club or team, never had been.

  Why? I still don’t know.

  Back at home the miners had finished striking, but Nelson Mandela was yet to be released. In 1987 a lot of our family energy would go into trying to get Neil Kinnock elected prime minister. We were always doing things to try to undermine Thatcher, like watching Spitting Image and going on demonstrations against whatever she was doing, whether it was closing pits, canceling free milk for schoolchildren, or inventing the new poll tax. Home was about trying to fit in at my local school, where girls my age were into horses and boys and no one played tennis. No one played any sport, not really, apart from football perhaps, but this was before the Premier League, when it was still muddy and real and sort of for thickos. Otherwise, sport was clean and healthy and airy but clearly for simple people who did not care that the world was gray and hard and full of poverty and racism and fascism and about to be nuked anyway.

  And there was nowhere to play tennis most of the time. The grass courts near our house in Chelmsford had weeds growing on them year-round. The concrete courts were better, but some council official took the nets away in October and didn’t put them up again until April. I dreaded Wimbledon; at that time all it meant to me was that the tennis courts—my tennis courts—would be full for two weeks while people tried out their McEnroe moves or in some way tried to emulate whoever they’d just been watching on their tiny, possibly still black-and-white TVs. And playing tennis was expensive, perhaps £1.50 an hour. Although Couze and I always tried to dodge the inspector, we had to pay up if he did come round. It was also a treat, of course, and treats needed to be rationed, and I had homework to do and my brother to look after and given that the world was surely going to end when the US bombed the USSR . . . The only indoor tennis center I knew was in Hounslow, a good couple of hours away on the other side of London. The only coaches I knew were there too. Too far. Too hard. Too posh. Too exclusive. Not for the likes of us.

  Tennis was my first love. Every other sport I ever played was with my eyes closed and the duvet stuffed in my mouth so I didn’t shout out its name, the name of my real passion, my soulmate.

  Tennis.

  Which I let go so easily. Which I just dropped. Why?

  Here is what I remember. The Troellers—Grandmother Ruth and Gordian—decided to send me to boarding school. Or maybe my mother decided I should go to a private school and got them to pay for it. But that’s unlikely, since we were such devoted lefties who were, of course, quite against private education. So let’s say the Troellers decided. It was just after I came back from Mexico, after all. Ruth had found me common, as well as uncouth and unsophisticated and weird, with my Walkman, my Madonna hair, my turquoise espadrilles. She would talk seriously about my coming out, not as a lesbian but as a debutante, and she assumed my family owned a fax machine and that I would apply to study philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford or law at Cambridge. She was so elitist and stuck-up and posh! In a world where all good people were striving for equality and justice, she threw cocktail parties and insisted on reading Class by Jilly Cooper, not just to herself but out loud to me. I mean, it was funny, of course, but totally wrong. Gordian thought my school friends were common. They were! So was I, a bit. Or I wanted to be. At that time, I actually did want to be named Sharon or Tracey and live on a council estate and eat chips every night and drink Nesquik.

  So they sent me to boarding school.

  And that was where it happened. Again, my memory is hazy. I remember a hard outdoor tennis court and possibly some weak autumn sunshine. Was it the first time I’d played on these courts? Possibly. Why were we playing tennis in autumn? Who knows? Maybe it didn’t happen until the spring term, or even the summer term. I was having trouble fitting into my new school, full of mini Grandmother Ruths who assumed everyone voted Conservative and who talked of “plebs” and—worse—village boys, also known as VBs. The big thing at my boarding school was lacrosse, known as “lax.” The most popular girl in the form, Kate, and her sidekick Danielle, regularly played in the school’s second XI. Given that they both smoked, and were only in the fourth form, this was a big achievement. Kate was sometimes bumped up to the First Team. It was unspeakably glamorous.

  Again, no one played tennis. Was that the problem? Or was it rather that everyone played tennis? Half of them probably had courts in their gardens at home and found the whole thing a big yawn, maybe something to do lazily with a brother or cousin on a summer’s afternoon. But here’s the dreadful thing: They were good at it. Good enough for me not to seem like a child prodigy, not to shine, not to dazzle. Especially since, on that afternoon, my first time playing tennis at this school, I was playing so badly.

  What was the teacher doing? Perhaps something I found patronizing. Perhaps something I just thought was wrong. Perhaps we were doing lame, babyish forehand drills. Perhaps she had told me to grip my racquet differently, assuming I was a mere mortal, a simple child who hadn’t played much before. I hate being told what to do and always think I know best. This was true even when I was a fourteen-year-old outsider at a new school. Still, I now don’t remember exactly what was wrong with the lesson. What I do remember is that I choked. I froze. I got the Elbow. Just like Eugenie Bouchard in the first set of the Australian Open semifinal in 2014. Of course in that case the commentators knew what it was. She needed to settle down, breathe, relax into the match, they said. And by the time I watched that match I knew all about choking too, or thought I did, and had half a dozen books that addressed the subject and offered remedies for it. Not that any of them ever really worked.

  But back in 1986 I didn’t know what was happening to me. I had no idea that this was a phenomenon, a thing that happens when you are nervous, when you desperately want to play well or win or show someone how good you are. I played one of the other girls, I can’t remember who, but I’m pretty sure she was not any kind of tennis prodigy. And she beat me. I didn’t even have to give her any points. I’m fairly sure that’s what happened, although I have no real memory of it, just the feeling of choking and being beaten and not being at all special.

  And I gave up tennis. Whatever actually happened, I remember being there on those courts and feeling that I’d been wrong all along. Out there in the world of plebs? Yes, perhaps there I was good at tennis, but here everything was different. In this new world, this new life, for which I had even renamed myself Victoria—my middle name—because I was sick of having to explain Scarlett, I was not good at tennis. I was just average. My dream, such as it was, was over. When it came to choosing extracurricular activities I picked ballet and horse-riding. And for the rest of the time I threw myself into learning lacrosse, and how to smoke, and how to be good at dieting.

  •

  2014. It’s a murky January day and I’m having lunch on the seafront with David Flusfeder. The day before, my picture appeared in the local newspaper. In the picture I’m holding both my tennis trophies from the Christmas Tournament—the one they let me take home and the one that stays in the tennis center—and I look really, genuinely happy. I tell him that I have only won one trophy in my life before, a blocky, Lucite Elle Style Award for my novel Going Out. I remember feeling how random that all was and how winning was all down to the whims of the judges. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the ceremony because I didn’t have anything to wear and I vaguely disapproved of anything A-listy, so I made my long-suffering agent Simon go instead. I was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008 but couldn’t do anything to get myself onto the shortlist. With tennis you train and then turn up with your racquets and your bag full of stuff and you win or lose points that everyone agrees on, that exist in the world and not just in someone’s head. I have recently realized that I am prouder of my small, cheap tennis trophy than almost anything else in my life.

  “So I’m really going to go for it this year,” I tell David. “I’m going to totally throw myself into tennis and see how far I can get. I mean, I’m going to enter actual singles tournaments and have massages and stay in hotels and everything.”

  I wonder if he’s going to laugh at me but instead he makes interested, even encouraging noises. I tell him I might even write a book about it, because that’ll give me an excuse to really do it properly—and, in the tradition of all such projects, take semi-stupid risks and embarrass myself in the name of research and “just write down what happens.” I explain that if I lose everything and look stupid then that’ll make quite a funny book, and if I win everything and feel amazing the book won’t be so good but who cares—I’d rather have another trophy than another book anyway. I didn’t realize then that there was a third, awful, option. I had no idea.

  “You’re having coaching?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Have more. Do everything you can to win.”

  “Sadly, I think ‘more’ is sort of frowned on.”

  “Why? By whom?”

  “The other people who go to the tennis center. People believe that you shouldn’t buy success. They’re always saying to me things like, ‘Wow, you’re really coming on. Dan must be an amazing coach.’ It’s like he’s the one who’s done it, not me, and anyone rich and stupid enough to fork out £25 a week on coaching would become as good as me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know. I mean it is, but also I think it’s because I’m basically a middle-aged woman, and what kind of middle-aged woman invests time and money in sport for herself and not for her son or daughter or whatever? I mean, what kind of woman seriously takes up a sport again at forty-one and then expects to actually go somewhere with it? I do worry that people are basically laughing at me.”

  “Forget what these people think. Stop worrying about people judging you. You’ve got to go all-out to win and just don’t think about it. Get more coaching. Get as much coaching as you can possibly afford.”

  •

  Princess Helena College, 1987. We are not allowed to watch TV during the week, and can only watch a limited amount during the weekend where we have to sit around together—the whole fifth form, except for Claire Bolton, who will be practicing playing Chopin somewhere else—and watch something approved by the teachers. Mostly it is videos, and my fifth form is a blur of Footloose and Flashdance and other PG-13 films about finding yourself through dance and convincing the establishment that being young and taking risks is better than being old and boring and conservative.

  My very favorite of all the films we watch is Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey’s character, known as Baby but actually named Frances, is going with her parents and sister to a holiday camp where rich chicks pay for dance lessons with hot young dudes. Desperate to be authentic and accepted, one night Baby makes her way to the staff quarters and sees them doing their real dancing—dirty dancing—not nice dancing, the inauthentic crap they have to do with the wrinkled, loaded, old women who have to pay to be looked at, touched, taken seriously. Jennifer Grey is thin, so thin. She is beautiful and misunderstood and intelligent. The hottest guy in the whole thing, dance instructor Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze, is a working-class hero with a sassy, seen-it-all dance partner, Penny. They do the major shows together for the lamest tourists with the biggest bucks, but then it turns out that Penny is pregnant, and idealistic Baby wants to help—even though in the real world sometimes you can’t help—and gets her doctor father to save Penny after a botched abortion almost kills her. Now Patrick Swayze has no dance partner for a big show and no one can fill in for Penny because they all work, remember, unlike the lazy, rich holidaymakers. (It wasn’t Johnny who got Penny pregnant, by the way. We learn to be very suspicious about the easy assumptions the idiotic rich make about the noble poor.)

  But the thing is, Baby does it.

  She learns to dance, from scratch, so she can fill in for Penny.

  I have only recently realized that I probably ended up basing my life on this film. I’ve always loved stories of hard work and miracles and anything being possible if you only try. As a kid, one of my favorite books was Tony’s Hard Work Day, which tells of a four-year-old boy who is not allowed to help repair his family’s new house because he is too small. What does Tony do? He goes off on his own and builds a whole new house! In a day! It’s such a good house that his family immediately abandons their old house and moves straight in.

  But Dirty Dancing wasn’t just about Baby overcoming the odds to become a professional-standard dancer in just a few days. It was about her being chosen to do it, singled out, made special. OK, we are supposed to believe that she has no ability and that all she really has in her favor is time, because she is on holiday. At fifteen I just took it for granted that she was hot and young and thin. I was too, and so were my friends. All we needed was to find ourselves in a situation like that.

  One scene shows Baby discovering that Johnny Castle doesn’t just teach dancing to the withered, alcoholic, over-made-up old crones at the holiday camp. He does extras too. Baby freaks out, of course, only to be told to grow up, because this is the real world. When I first watched this scene, surrounded by my rich, beautiful schoolfriends, all I saw was Baby, her lack of worldliness, her desire to be grown up. I saw myself in her. I’d never had a job, had only just started experimenting with black eyeliner, was still (just) a virgin. I simply did not notice the older women in the film, let alone imagine I could ever become them. Perhaps you’re not supposed to. As well as the crone who has to pay to be fucked, there’s the wife who doesn’t really understand the husband, and of course the many other recipients of Johnny Castle’s dance lessons, and they are all old and disgusting and they play it safe and don’t take risks and would never, ever be asked to fill in as anyone’s dance partner.

  •

  It’s a rainy Thursday in October 2013, and I turn up for my coaching session in even more strapping than usual. My knees are both so sore that I have ordered a new knee brace so I can wear two at once. I can hardly walk down the stairs. What the fuck am I doing playing tennis? But I’ve had three ibuprofen. I’m sure when they kick in I’ll be fine. Dan is at the reception desk when I arrive, joking around with the staff. Everyone is giggling, happy. Dan has this effect on people.