The Safest Place in London by Maggie Joel Read Free Book Online

seen a great deal of in the seven years since they had both left school. Diana, under no illusions about her social worth, had been invited that day on the strength of her backhand, which was unrivalled among her particular set and had won her as many admirers as it had lost her friends. Even so, she had only received the invitation when another friend of Marian’s, a girl called Bunny, had dropped out at the last minute.
    They were a party of eight, four teams of mixed doubles, and strawberries and gin and tonics were served on a silver tray by a man in a spotless white coat. For Diana—who had left a rather average school in Pinner with a handful of minor exam passes and enrolled in a local secretarial college, where she had done moderately well, and now worked in the front office of a local solicitor’s firm—the strawberries and the gin and tonics and the man in the spotless white coat with a silver tray were like aglimpse of some exotic coastline seen from the deck of a ship far out to sea. And yet she was acutely aware of her social worth so that the strawberries, which were better than any strawberries she had ever tasted before, stuck in her throat and turned to ash in her stomach; the gin and tonics, though intoxicating, burned like acid; the man in the white coat looked down his nose at her even as he served her with polished deference. She hated it, she wanted to leave as soon as she had arrived, and yet the thought of returning to the dreary little flat above her parents’ shop seemed like a slow death.
    She was paired that day with a man called Ed whose wife, Phyllis, had been paired with some other man. Whether this deliberate splitting up of couples was strategic or merely a part of the fun Diana was uncertain. Her partner, Ed, a vigorous-looking fellow with very black hair, inspected her through narrowed eyes and remarked, ‘I understand you possess a sound backhand,’ and though his words suggested a compliment they were delivered in such a way that he might have been commenting on an alleged and rather shameful misdemeanour rather than her sporting prowess. A little bewildered by her partner’s tone and rather wishing the man had been paired with his wife, who in turn had been paired with a tall and nice-looking young man with wavy dark hair and very definite eyebrows and a ready smile, she nevertheless acquitted herself admirably and they easily enough won all three of their matches and were set to play another couple in the ‘final’. The wife and her tall, nice-looking partner had proved a fairly hopeless combination and were now sitting out as vocal onlookers, so that Diana wished she was seated next to the nice-looking man, whose ears stuckout, but in an endearing way, she decided. But she was in the final and he was an onlooker—though he appeared more taken up by his gin and tonic and by the wife of the man called Ed than by a girl with a sound backhand who lived above a shop in Pinner. She would try extra hard, Diana resolved. And then she resolved that she would not try at all because she suspected a man found it unattractive if a young lady tried too hard, particularly at physical activity.
    She was aware of the sweat stains under her arms.
    It was not her finest set of tennis. The man called Ed becoming increasingly cross, the wife who made sarcastic calls from the sidelines, the man in the white coat with the silver tray whom she could see always in her peripheral vision walking back and forth across the lawn, the nice-looking man with the eyebrows who clapped and said, ‘Oh bad luck,’ when she sent an easy forehand thundering into the net—all of it put her off.
    She would never be asked back. She had a sound backhand but when the time had come, when the pressure was on, she had buckled. She had been found wanting.
    Their opponents—a couple named Cecily and Johnny who seemed to know Ed and were unconcerned by his increasing irritation and who, by comparison, appeared to be having