Stephen Fry - The Stars’ Tennis Balls

‘Momento, momentino, Signorina. Eccola! Ma solamente una carta. Mi dispiace, cara mia.’

A postcard, only a postcard. She fought back her disappointment and took it with trembling hands. He was sailing, she told herself. A letter would be difficult. Besides, looking at the postcard with a growing sense of delight, she saw that he had covered it in the tiniest script he could manage and even put the address of the villa in bright red ink so that it stood out against the minuscule blue handwriting which wormed around almost every square millimetre of the card. He had even managed to weave narrow threads of words between the lines of the address, she saw. It was better than a letter. To see how much care he had taken. A thousand times better. She was so full of delight and love that she almost broke into sobs.

‘Ciao, bella!’

‘Ciao, Signor Postino!’

She turned the card over and looked at the photograph on the front, shielding her eyes from the reflective dazzle. A small fishing port glittered in a softer sunlight than the one that glared down on her now. ‘The Harbour, Tobermorey’ the caption read in old-fashioned yellow cursive letters. The photograph looked as if it might have been taken in the nineteen-fifties. There was a small Morris Minor van parked on the quayside. Then Portia noticed that amongst the jostling crowd of fishing boats there was a little yacht there, hand drawn in red ink. A nervous smile and eyes had been sketched in on its hull, giving it the frightened look that Thomas the Tank Engine adopted when he was squeezed between the big scowling locomotives. An arrow pointed down to the boat from the sky and across the top was written, ‘The pirate ship “Nedlet” lies pining at anchor.’

‘News from lover boy?’ Gordon had come out into the sunshine with The World According to Carp and a cup of coffee. He sat himself on a lounger in front of the terrace that ran round the front of the villa and looked up at Portia through dark sunglasses.

She nodded, not trying to disguise her happiness. Gordon crossed his right arm over his chest and scratched his left shoulder-blade. The compressed skin in the V of his elbow, cradled in his chin as he scratched, looked tanned almost to black. When he straightened out his arm again the effect was gone.

‘He’s sailing, right?’

‘In Scotland.’

‘I never been on a sailboat.’

‘Nor me. I’m sure I’d be completely sick.’ Portia had started using the word ‘completely’ a lot recently. Ned peppered his letters with it, and she thought of it as his word. Saying it was like wearing an old shirt of his and made her comfortable and proud.

‘Uh-huh,’ Gordon nodded seriously as if she had said a profound and interesting thing. Then he picked up a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil. ‘You want to rub some of this on me?’

‘Okay…

Portia put down the postcard and took the bottle.

‘I’ll turn around here and you can do my back.’

A wave of coconut arose from the palms of her hands as she rubbed them together. She noticed, smoothing oil over his skin, that Gordon had silvery filaments of hair growing in the small of his back, feathered and whorled like a wheat field after a storm, while darker hairs snaked along his shoulders from the base of the neck. She could feel their slight roughness under her hands. His chest was already dense with tight curly black hairs and his beard line heavier than Pete’s who was more than twice his age. She wondered why this might be. It wasn’t an ethnic thing. Pete was no less Jewish than Gordon. Perhaps it was something to do with the English climate. She thought of Ned and how proudly he had announced that he was ‘going to have a bash’ at growing a moustache over the summer.

Portia poured a small puddle of oil into the hollow at the base of Gordon’s back. Ned was strong, but she did not think he had muscles that were packed as hard and tight under the skin as Gordon’s. Every afternoon Gordon had gone into a routine of press-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups in the shade of the paved courtyard behind the villa, to Pete’s apparent amusement and Hillary’s poorly feigned lack of interest. Portia had watched Hillary watching from the kitchen and Pete had watched Portia watch Hillary watching and Portia knew that Pete had been thinking about his own drooping flab and evolving a socio-political explanation that would justify and ennoble it.

In New York Gordon played regularly on his school’s tennis and lacrosse teams. He had been outraged to learn that in England lacrosse was a game played almost exclusively by girls in private schools. ‘He’s quite right,’ Ned had told Portia in a letter. ‘Lacrosse is a very hard, tough and physical game. It would scare me stiff. That’s why I think it is much better left to you girls.’

Portia smiled as she contemplated the future. She pictured the days when she would be able to rub sun tan lotion on Ned’s back on holidays yet to come in places yet to be imagined. It was strange, she thought, that she didn’t yet know his body. She had never seen him in shorts or swimming trunks. She had never seen him naked. Once, when they had kissed, she had felt something push against her thigh. A hot rush of blood spread across her face at this memory and she giggled inside herself as she recalled the naivety with which she had originally supposed him to have had something in his pocket. Perhaps next week, in his father’s flat they would go upstairs together. Perhaps – ‘Where is “The Harbour, Tobermorey”?‘

‘Hey!’ Portia snatched the card from Gordon’s hands. ‘That’s private! Oh no!’

Portia looked down in horror. Her oily thumb had smeared across the card obliterating a whole trail of Ned’s careful writing.

‘No!’ she wailed. ‘It’s ruined! Ruined! How could you! You, you fucker!’

‘Hey, I’m sorry. I was only –‘

Portia ran into the house, tears springing from her eyes. Gordon watched her go, shrugged and rearranged his khaki shorts to alleviate the discomfort of a pressing erection.

Gordon wondered if it was the fact of her being in love that awoke such a flood of desire within him. He considered that he might be just as much in love himself, only where he came from the phrase ‘got the hots for’ was more acceptable. Even most British kids, he had noticed, would rather say ‘I fancy her’ than ‘I love her.

The way Portia confided in him so instantly on his arrival in London had done more to disorient him than the strange food, incomprehensible accents and bewildering geography of the place. He had expected from the British Fendemans more of the chilly reticence and uptight reserve that his father used to talk about when explaining the irrefutable logic of his leaving England for America. Portia’s directness not only confused Gordon, it needled him too. It was as if her emotions were more profound than anyone else’s. Her very ability to describe them so freely and expressively stopped him from being able to say anything open and honest about himself and he hated that. He had feelings too and right now he felt like he wanted to take this virgin, lay her in a bed and fuck her till her eyes popped out.

That was the crazy injustice of it. She had painted him so far into a corner that the only territory left him was that of a predatory animal. It was so totally unfair. He wasn’t like that. He was a good man, a feeling man with a feeling man s heart. He could be charming. He could be romantic. But she gave him no chance to be. Mr Wonderful, Mr Perfect absorbed her whole being. Gordon could see in her eyes that whenever she responded warmly to him she was really responding to Ned. By talking about him so much she had planted the faggoty English goy asshole right inside his head. It was like he was the host to a parasite, and the parasite’s name was Ned Maddstone.