Games People Play Read Free

shopkeeper at the end of the road used to call him that, and even though I had been in England for years, I’d never heard that expression before. I thought it was a term of endearment mixed up with the wrong name. I thought it was Sunny Jim, and I remember saying to this shopkeeper, ‘No, his name is not Jim. It is Ivan.’
    But she kept on calling him Sonny Jim. Enormous bosoms, she had, that shopkeeper. They went from her neck to her waist. She could never have played tennis.
    ‘Do you think Rachel and Mark are still seeing each other?’
    ‘No, I don’t. Rachel’s a sensible girl. Zurich’s a huge tournament for her, and she knows she needs to get focused. There’s too much at stake.’
    ‘She needs to have fun too, Ivan. She is starting to look as serious as you do. All she does is play tennis and work out all the time. At least I managed to persuade her to come to the party tomorrow. Are you coming too?’
    Ivan ignores me, just threading the catgut back through another hole. Sometimes he pretends I’m not there when I talk to him. It drives me mad. But I know he will come to the party. He moans about the Midweek and Intermediate sections, all us oldies. If he’d had his own way, he’d have got rid of the whole lot of us when he took over, but I wouldn’t let him. It was our club first, and so I made it a condition of the loan that he wouldn’t change when we could play. It’s a funny mixture here now of young foreign girls bouncing around learning to be pros and the likes of me and my friends who just want a sedate set or two of doubles, and then a nice cup of tea.
    He’ll come to the party, though, I’m sure he will. He loves the attention. It takes his mind off whatever has bothered him for some time now. Years, I think, this particular thing has bothered him. I keep asking him what it is, if I can help, but he just ignores me. I think it is more than just his disappearing hair, or his unsatisfactory career, or the money he owes me and Ted.
    I must confess, I was terribly disappointed when Ivan didn’t succeed as a professional tennis player. He looks so dashing on court, so tall and handsome, and I was so proud of him. I really thought he could be the British Number One. I used to dream of him holding up the Wimbledon trophy and blowing me a kiss from where he’d be standing, next to the Duchess of Kent.
    I’d think of my cousins back in Korčula, in their ill-fitting nylon dresses, drinking their bitter coffees and watching my gorgeous son win Wimbledon on a wall-mounted television in an austere café on the square.
    I had even planned out in my head the letter I’d write to them, alerting them to the fact that the very same Ivan Anderson who was through to the quarter-finals was my own boy: Ivanovic Korolija’s grandson.
    I wouldn’t want to tempt fate, so I wouldn’t post the letter until he got to the quarter-finals, and then I’d have to send it Next Day Delivery, to make sure they didn’t miss the semi or the final. I’d address it to Sabrina Franulovic; from what I heard she was still the town gossip. I’d pretend that I was merely being solicitous, enquiring about the wellbeing of her and her family, then I’d drop in the part about Ivan being through to the quarter-finals, hotly tipped as the winner. I would have to get somebody to check my Croatian though, it’s got very rusty since Mama died.
    I imagine us going back to visit, with Ivan, walking triumphantly into their dreary cafés and their dreary lives, probably unchanged since we were last there, when Ivan was just five years old.
    Mama used to tell me how shocked they all were when she and Papa brought me over to England, and how they sucked their teeth and told each other we’d never survive in this big noisy country with no family around us, but they were wrong. We did. If those cousins could see the house Ted and I live in now, they’d think it was Buckingham Palace.
    I don’t believe this is just because I married