A Handful of Summers Page 19

  ‘Read your sandwich, Torben,’ Roy Emerson instructed with his mouth full. ‘I’ve read mine, and I am now eating the sports page!’

  ‘I am unable to digest many of the world’s latest events,’ replied Torben, typically.

  Sometimes in the warm evenings we sat on the veranda drinking light, sour wine and eating goats’ cheese and figs; or talked one of the lazy taxi drivers into taking us down the mountain to the sea. On the moonlit beach we would eat melons, then swim out into the limpid sea – float weightlessly and dream. One such evening I lay upon a deserted bathers’ raft with Ilsa and Edda Buding, and we decided that the Mediterranean was a good sea for romance. Especially with the moon the way it was that night.

  Nine

  Diary Notes: Hamburg 1962

  Filled with forebodings, I walked moodily through the fading lights of a Hamburg dusk. A thin drizzle had been falling down since dawn. There were pools on the concrete apron, shining coldly under the blue-white glare of the arc-lights. Ahead, emerging from the mist, stood the Pan Am jet, stark and sombre.

  I huddled deeper into my greatcoat, and let my mind return to the events of the previous evening. The note, enclosed in a plain white envelope, had been thrust under the door of my room at the Hauptbahnhof.

  ‘Imperative that I see you. I will wait in the lounge at 8 precisely.’ It was signed, simply, ‘Lister’.

  I met him there. He wasted no time in getting to the point.

  ‘It’s a new assignment for you, old lad,’ he said quietly. ‘America.’ He paused then and waited. In spite of my months of training, I started imperceptibly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with a thin smile. ‘It will be no picnic. We both realise that. But it must be done, and you’re the man to do it.’

  ‘What about Segal?’ I asked in a flat voice.

  ‘We’re afraid he might crack,’ said Lister. ‘Besides, he talks too much. No, Forbes, there’s nothing for it. It must be you and you only.’

  I smiled briefly, and met Lister’s eyes.

  Air Vice-Marshall Sir Claude Lister, now seconded to Intelligence. I’d been through a lot with Lister, but never anything like this. The American mission was suicidal – a desperately slender hundred-to-one long shot. He knew it and I knew it, and he knew I knew it, so there was little doubt in my mind that we both knew it.

  ‘Depend on me, sir,’ I said firmly, with a confidence that I was far from feeling.

  He took my hand warmly then, his fingers trembling imperceptibly in spite of their steely grip. ‘This will be the last one, Forbes.’ he said quietly. ‘Complete this thing and you’re in from the cold. Nice warm desk in Whitehall for you, old lad.’

  I smiled again. Lister, I noticed, had carefully avoided mentioning the alternative. Instead he was talking of the mission. ‘You’ll have Drysdale, of course,’ he said. ‘Not much experience in crisis, but he’ll be there, notwithstanding.’

  ‘Drysdale!’ I laughed inwardly at that. At nineteen he was barely out of diapers. ‘Drysdale!’ Good God! But I said nothing. What, after all, was there to say?

  For five hours Lister briefed me, and then we retired, exhausted, for a few precious hours of sleep. At dawn, America. There could be no turning back.

  I reached the great jet at last, and hurried up the stairway, settling myself into the window seat to which the stewardess directed me.

  America: I shivered slightly, and, ordering a double Scotch on the rocks, I went over my instructions for the umpteenth time.

  I had obviously been reading Alistair MacLean a good deal about that time. Nevertheless, the entry, although tongue-in-cheek, reveals the impact that my first tennis trip to America made upon me.

  You could either play the Middle Eastern circuit in those days or venture across the Atlantic to play the American East Coast tournaments which lead up to the United States National Doubles event in Boston and then the US Open at Forest Hills – the fourth leg of the four major tournaments, known as the ‘Grand Slam’, namely the Australia Open, the French Open and Wimbledon. At that time only one man in the history of tennis had ever won all four of these tournaments in a single year. That man was Donald Budge. Of the other players who had tried, Lew Hoad had come closest in 1956, losing Forest Hills to Rosewall with the other three titles in hand. Other great players might have done it, could have done it, had planned to do it, or had dreamed of doing it. But only Budge had done it. And now, in 1962, with three titles already won, Rod Laver was poised to make his attempt.

  In 1962 I received an invitation from the USLTA to participate in tennis events in the United States. I had never before been to America, for the reason that the USLTA were particularly thrifty with their invitations and I could not afford the cost of a private trip. Such was the state of tennis in those days that, although I was rated in the first twenty players in the world, I rarely saved more than one hundred dollars a week, some of which had to be saved to pay the bills for my little family at home.

  The American invitation offered me travel, accommodation, and two hundred dollars per week for five weeks – good by any standard then, and for America, excellent. I played the German championships at Hamburg and boarded my flight to New York with a certain amount of apprehension. The very thought of America had always diminished me somewhat, and the tales of hordes of huge American college boys with mighty serves on bad grass courts gave me tennis elbow in anticipation, as well as a mild case of the dreaded sinking feeling.

  In addition, I had been playing indifferent singles for some weeks, and for the American stint I had lost my doubles partner, Abe Segal, and was to play with Cliff Drysdale, whom I still regarded as an irresponsible minor, with no idea at all of the gravity of my situation.

  I landed at Idlewild, as it was then called and which name I loved, and by a series of what I could only explain as miracles in that vast place, I found my luggage, cleared customs without a hitch, and suddenly found myself taken by the arm with a voice saying: ‘Mr Forbes! We’ve been expecting you. We have a car ready to drive you to Southampton.’

  I gave a sigh of relief. I am one of those people who worry secretly about being forgotten and left to wander the streets of New York alone, holding my suitcase and tennis racket. We drove down the Long Island peninsula that hot afternoon and the journey became for me one of those moments in life that remain forever in the mind – sharp little nudges of the memory, simultaneously happy and sad.

  The car radio gave frequent weather, temperature and time checks in the best American style, played Errol Garner recordings, a song called It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want to over and over, and suddenly announced that Marilyn Monroe had died, while the endless landscape of roadhouses, gas stations and flashing signs floated by. The driver of the car deposited me and my baggage at the entrance to the Meadow Club. There, on a motley selection of grass courts, were my huge Americans with their enormous services. It was a Monday afternoon, matches were in progress everywhere, and I had the strange feeling that I might at any minute be called upon to play one!

  The whole scene, in fact, looked singularly uninviting. The courts, or most of them, were literally laid out upon a meadow. On the back courts one fully expected domestic animals to be grazing, or at the very least, a few stools of fresh dung into which the huge services might fly on big points. Daisies grew in fair profusion and the grass, though not actually waving, quivered in the breeze. Against this pastoral scene the athletic abilities of the sweaty players, and their American profanity, seemed particularly ominous.

  I presented myself at the players’ desk and they said:

  ‘Gordon Forbes! We sure have been expecting you. Why don’t we just show you to your quarters, where you can freshen up. You have a match at four!’

  A match at four! I felt as though I’d been travelling for days and had the vague idea that for me, with the time change, it was about three in the morning. With enormous r
elief, I saw Fred and Pat Stolle and Cliff Drysdale approaching. Things began to brighten considerably. Fred was the eternal optimist and Cliff, although alarmingly confident at all times, presented a welcome return to a world which I knew. After cheerful greetings, I told them that I was feeling tired and was scheduled to play someone called Roger Werksman in the first round.

  ‘Roger Werksman,’ said Cliff.

  ‘Roger Werksman,’ said Fred.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Roger Werksman.’

  ‘Can’t mess about with Werksman,’ said Fred. ‘Got to get in and play it tight. You’ll beat him, of course, but you’ll have to play it really tight.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll beat Werksman all right,’ said Cliff in a very positive way. Except that he’d said the same thing when I played Lundquist in our Davis Cup match against Sweden, and against Martin Mulligan in Hilversum.

  ‘Only don’t pay any attention to what he says,’ Cliff had continued. ‘He talks a lot.’

  I’d long ago decided that it was useless to ask one’s fellow competitors about players whom you didn’t know, but against whom you found you had to play. Because if one’s fellow competitors did know them, they usually scared you badly by saying ambiguous things like:

  ‘He hits a lot of balls. Boy, does he hit a lot of balls! But you really shouldn’t have any serious trouble!’

  Or: ‘He has a hell of a serve, but if you can get that back, you’re home and dry.’ Then add: ‘Big forehand, though. Must keep away from the forehand. Bloody frightening forehand!’ If they had not heard of them, one found alarming thoughts about ‘dark horses’ flashing through one’s mind.

  There is little fun to be found in the early-round matches in America. The population there is generally of a very athletic bent – and Americans are taught from birth to display an air of terrific confidence at all times. They never hide their lights under bushels. Cliff accompanied me back to the large wooden beach house where we were staying – one of those summer houses for which Southampton is famous. Not as fabulous as Gatsby’s house, but well established, expensive enough, and smelling of holidays, canvas chairs and surfboards. What was more, there was a French maid, whose name, inevitably, turned out to be Françoise. She met us at the front door and carried my racket and coat. She was unbelievably French, with wide-set eyes, wider mouth, still wider hips and strong calves, and possessed the kind of looks which spent their time balanced on the knife edge between ‘very ugly’ and ‘very beautiful’. I could see that Cliff had already summed her up completely. When it came to girls, Cliff was a lightning mover.

  ‘She has a friend,’ he told me in a matter-of-fact way, as I unpacked my gear, ‘also French.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ I said. Two French maids sounded twice as promising as one, and in a distracted sort of way I made a mental note to find out more about her when the time was right. But the four o’clock Werksman encounter loomed large. I was sharply aware that William Clothier had persuaded the United States authorities to issue my invitation, and I didn’t want to let him down. To make matters worse, Cliff told me that our host had backed us to the tune of five hundred dollars as the likely winners of the men’s doubles event.

  The dressing-room, when I entered, seemed to be full of towels. Americans have a thing about towels and aren’t really happy unless there are dozens close at hand. One towel to an American is the same, basically, as one glass of wine to a Frenchman, or one cup of tea to a Briton. Hopelessly inadequate.

  I changed and made my way to the referee’s desk. It was just four o’clock, and Werksman hadn’t arrived. By five past I began to hope fervently that he’d been let down by some form of transport. There are few feelings so good as those evoked by the news that one’s opponent hasn’t arrived for a match which one has been secretly dreading. At four-fifteen, just as the term ‘default’ was being bandied about, Werksman arrived – or, rather, exploded upon the scene.

  My first impression was one of relief – he wasn’t a huge American; in fact, he looked a little weedy. A closer look, however, revealed that he’d definitely played the game before. His racket grips had that well-worn look about them, his shoes were streaked with grass stains which seemed to creep upwards onto his socks and towards his knees, and he carried a tennis racket head cover full of stuff – salt tablets, Glucolin, Elastoplast, sweatlets, a few dollar bills and so forth. He also had the type of short, sturdy legs which should be slow but which are, in fact, as fast as the devil. Besides, he’d just come off a practice court, and stood hopping from one foot to the other and telling a friend that his game had ‘come good just at the right time!’

  We made our way to our allotted court, with Werksman followed by a little knot of supporters. One hears a lot of snippets on the way to one’s court. ‘Great serve and volley,’ someone was saying to Werksman, ‘but a nothing backhand. Can’t break eggs’, referring of course to me. And someone else said, ‘. . . South African. Supposed to be good on grass, but doesn’t really look as though . . .’ And: ‘Forbes and Werksman. This I’ve got to see . . .’ By the time we’d reached the court, I had heard several bits of information about myself which I had not heard before.

  The warm-up was enough to let me know that I had a problem. There is a solid, compact way some smaller players go about their games that spells trouble. It didn’t look to me as though Werksman missed too many balls. I was even less impressed by his service (on which, like most Americans, he took about fifty practices) – one of those low, flat affairs that come off the grass at ankle-height and curl round at you. So I clenched my teeth and set about the business of becoming accustomed to grass again in three minutes, and getting my backhand to break eggs.

  Tennis balls fly off grass faster and lower than off hard surfaces, and the curved balls keep going, never kicking back. I liked to play on grass, especially true grass, as it suited my game and levelled things out to a certain extent. But nonetheless, it took quite a bit of getting used to. And I wasn’t used to having to cope with daisies in the grass.

  We held serve in a conventional sort of way until about five or six-all in the first set, at which stage I broke his service in a way which I considered to be quite conventional – one backhand passing shot aimed crosscourt which went off the wood up the line, and a neat net cord at 30-40. Werksman, however, seemed of the opinion that my efforts had been tinged with a dose of good fortune. He had the habit of muttering things to himself and not quite under his breath, so that one caught snatches of things like: ‘A foreigner! A thin man from Africa! And you’re struggling, Werksman!’ Or: ‘– if you weren’t such a big, deep asshole, Werksman, you’d be towelling off by now, having won!’

  The monologue that took place as we changed ends after that set was far more extensive.

  ‘You are losing,’ he muttered fiercely, ‘to a man who has arms and legs like pretzels! If you weren’t paralysed, you would be able to break them off and serve them with beer! He cannot play, and you can play, and he’s winning and you’re losing – so get your tail out onto the grass and play!’

  I was tired and irritable and not amused, and secretly began to wonder if there was any truth in what my opponent said. I lost the second set after a bitter struggle, but broke his service in the second game of the final set and quickly took a 4-1 lead. At this point he muttered something about my having a head like a pineapple and that he should be chopping it up and serving it with cocktails. He then proceeded to play superbly, restricting his utterances to things like: ‘Now! You’ve got him!’ or ‘One more break and his backhand’s got to fold!’

  I found myself leaving the court having lost 7-5, feeling utterly dejected, but surprised by the many sympathetic remarks from even casual tennis acquaintances. So I drank a beer with Drysdale and Stolle, slept for eighteen hours, then awoke and found myself left only in the men’s doubles, but with a week to get some grass court practice and to investigate the talents of the two French maids.
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  The beaches at Southampton are long and sandy, and the weather that year was particularly warm. Françoise obediently produced her friend, a tall languid girl with a straight sheaf of dark hair which half-obscured an eye and fell to an angular point beneath the line of her chin, like a Vidal Sassoon sketch. Where Françoise was big-boned and happy, Nicci was introspective, had a Semitic profile, a slightly grainy skin, and smiled instead of laughing out loud. She smelled of France – peppery perfume and a hint of garlic – and everything about her was lanky: legs, waist, hands and a throat like a newly born giraffe. Her legs wobbled at the knees. I find girls with long legs that wobble at the knees very attractive in an oblique sort of way. To my surprise, I found that she liked beer.

  And so, on most evenings, we watched television and ate the hamburgers which Françoise created in the kitchen. Afterwards, with a white Long Island moon at full strength, we would walk down to the sea and hit the water with mighty leaps and shouts.

  The beach, the shining sea with its mild waves, and the moonlight, reminded me of the famous love scene played by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity, a film which had left a great impression on me when I had first seen it. With this in mind I tried a long shot, and tentatively told Nicole that she looked like Deborah Kerr. She gave one of her rare chuckles and said, ‘Ah, mon cheri, but no more than you look like Burt Lancastaire!’ Unromantic fare, but nonetheless the seed had been sown. We walked arm-in-arm, wading ankle deep in the surf and talking in whispers. At a suitable spot we fell to our knees with the waves breaking around our thighs. True to form, we finally achieved a horizontal position on the sand, locked in a tender embrace.