Stephen Fry - The Stars’ Tennis Balls

Sympathy. Ashley’s whole body tightened. He wanted to bite Ned’s throat open. Wanted to pull the veins and nerves out with his teeth and spit them over the floor. No, that was wrong. That wasn’t it at all. He didn’t want that. That was a scenario that only ended in Ned’s martyrdom. Ashley wanted something far more perfect. He was feeling a new anger that he had some difficulty in identifying at first. It was hatred.

Cade had finished up the gin. ‘You’re not really going to have dinner with his parents are you?’ he asked.

‘Going? Certainly I am going,’ said Ashley sweetly.

‘Don’t think he wanted to invite me,’ said Cade. ‘Cunt.’ He banged a fist into the arm of his chair, sending up a puff of dust. ‘I mean, what the fuck did I stand up for? Like he’s a master or something. He acts so fucking straight. What a typocritical turd.’

‘Typocritical?’ said Ashley. ‘I like that. Typocritical. You surprise me sometimes, Rufus.’

‘Another toke?’ Cade proffered a half inch of joint. ‘I meant hypocritical.’

‘No, you didn’t. You may think you did, but your brain knew better. You can’t have failed to read The Psychopathology of Everyday Speech, surely?’

‘Bollocks,’ said Cade.

Ashley rose. ‘Well, I had better be going up to change. What a joy to get out of this confining nonsense.

This was a lie. Ashley rarely felt more joy than when dressed in the Sunday uniform of striped trousers, tailcoat and top hat.

‘Arsehole,’ said Cade. ‘Fucking fucking arsehole.’

‘Why thank you, dear.’

‘No, not you. Maddstone. Who the fuck does he think he is?’

‘Quite,’ said Ashley, leaving. ‘Sweet dreams.’

‘Mind you,’ Rufus Cade rumbled to himself, leaning back in his armchair as the door closed. ‘You’re an arsehole too, Ashley Bastard-Garland. let’s face it, we’re all arseholes. Ow!’ He had burnt his bottom lip on the last thin quarter inch of joint. ‘All arseholes, except Ned fucking Maddstone. Which makes him,’ he reasoned to himself, ‘the biggest arsehole of all.’

Pete and Hillary were wearing the insufferably smug look they always assumed when they had made love the previous night. Portia tried to cancel out its atmosphere by moving around the kitchen with extra noise and impatience, banging drawers so loudly that the cutlery inside resonated and jingled like a gamalan. Fierce Tuscan sunlight streamed through the window and lit the big central table where Pete was slitting large batons of bread.

‘This morning,’ he said, ‘we shall feast on prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella. There’s cherry jam, there’s apricot jam and Hills is brewing up some coffee.’

‘We have feasted on exactly the same things every morning since we got here,’ said Portia sitting herself down with a glass of orange juice.

‘I know. Isn’t it wonderful? Hills and I were up early this morning and we went into the village for fresh bread. Smell that. Go on. No, go on.’

‘Pete!’ Portia pushed the proffered loaf away.

‘Someone got out of bed the wrong side this morning –'

Portia looked at her father. He wore an unbuttoned batique shirt, an elephant hair bracelet, wooden sandals and, she saw with a shudder, tight maroon swimming trunks that emphasised every bulge and curve of his genitals.

‘For God’s sake – ‘ she began, but was interrupted by the sleepy, shuffling entrance of her cousin.

‘Aha!’ said Pete cheerfully. ‘It’s awake. It’s awake and needs feeding.’

‘Well hi there!’ said Hillary who had developed the strange habit of going slightly American whenever she spoke to Gordon. This also drove Portia mad.

‘So what’s up?’ Gordon said, moving a shopping bag from the seat next to Portia and sitting down.

‘Well now,’ said Hillary brightly, as she set down a coffee jug between them, ‘Pete and I were thinking of maybe checking out the palio.’

‘Its been and gone, Hillary,’ said Portia with the exasperated air of one addressing a child. ‘We met that family who’d seen it last week, remember? A rider fell off his horse right in front of them and there was a bone sticking out of his leg. Even you can’t have forgotten that.’

‘Ah, but there’s more than one palio in Italy, precious,’ said Pete. ‘Lucca has its very own palio this evening. Not as spectacular or dangerous as Siena, but rather fun they tell me.’

‘Lucca?’ said Gordon through a mouthful of bread. ‘Where’s Lucca?’

‘Not too far,’ Pete replied, pouring coffee into a large bowl to which he added hot milk. Fragments of skin floated to the top. Looking at them made Portia want to retch. ‘I wanted to go there anyway. It’s the olive oil capital of the world, they say. You can watch it being pressed. I thought we might swim and read this morning, then make our way slowly there, driving by the local roads and lunching somewhere in the hills. How’s that for a plan?’ Skin from the coffee clung to his moustache. Portia had never felt so ashamed of him. How Hillary could suffer such a thing on top of her had always been something of a puzzle. Now that she knew there was such a man as Ned in the world, it took on the qualities of an eternal cosmic mystery.

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Gordon. ‘Sound good to you, Porsh?’

‘Completely.’

Portia stopped herself from shrugging moodily. She didn’t mind behaving like a spoiled adolescent in front of her parents, but in front of Gordon she preferred to look more sophisticated. What she really wanted to say was, ‘So we’re going to arrive at Lucca in time to find all the shops and cafés shut, are we? And as usual we’re going to have to wander around a completely empty and deserted town for five hours until everyone else has woken from their siestas. That’s a great plan, Pete.’

Instead she contented herself with remarking, ‘Arnolfini was from Lucca.’

‘How’s that?’ said Gordon.

'There’s a painting by van Eyck,’ said Portia, ‘called The Arnolfini Marriage. Arnolfini, the man in the painting, was from Lucca. He was a merchant.’

‘Yeah? How d’you know something like that?’

‘I don’t know, I must have read it somewhere.’

‘I never studied art history.’

Portia realised that saying ‘Neither did I, you don’t have to “study” something to know about it,’ would sound arrogant, so once again, she curbed her tongue. Really, she was becoming insufferably intolerant these days. And she liked Gordon. She liked his quiet acceptance of the terrible things that had happened to him. He seemed to like her too and it is very easy, she thought, to like someone who likes you. That wasn’t vanity, that was practical common sense.

‘Aha, methinks I hear the musical rattle of a Fiat,’ said Pete, head cocked in the direction of the driveway, ‘bearing, perchance, dispatches from England.’

Portia jumped up. She forgave herself her moodiness.

As a junkie needs a fix, so had she been needing a letter. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I need to practise my Italian on him.’

Hillary called after her. ‘Porsh, you know your results won’t be coming through for at least another week! Besides, Mrs Worrell said she would telephone us here if anything arrived that looked like it might be from the examination board…’

But Portia was already out of the house and stepping into the harsh whiteness of day. Never mind exam results. Never mind anything. A letter from Ned, let there be a letter from Ned.

‘Buongiorno, Signor Postino!’

‘Buongiorno, ragazza mia.'

‘Come va, questo giorno?’

‘Bene, grazie, bene. Ј lei?’

‘Anche molto bene, mule grazie. Um … una lettra per mi?’