Short story · 3 min read ·
The Night Tennis Court at Hesselby
A closed tennis court at the back of the Hesselby sports club is lit every night at eleven, and two players in white take turns serving a ball that never bounces twice, and the umpire in the chair is the club secretary, who died in the first winter the court was built.
The tennis courts behind the Hesselby sports club were built in 1931 on a flat meadow at the edge of the village, with a chain-link fence, a pavilion with a green tin roof and four lanes of new asphalt painted white. The club ran a summer league and a winter knockout. Its members were mostly the doctors and solicitors of the district, and its secretary, Ronald Ellis, was famous for his punctual minutes and his refusal to let anyone play after the court lights went off at ten.
In the winter of the third season, Ronald died of a stroke while closing the gates. The club held a small memorial in the pavilion and planted an oak in his name by the net post on the east court. Then the lights went off, as they always did at ten, and nobody thought about the courts again until the spring.
The court lights came on the first night of March, at eleven, when the village was asleep. A caretaker walking home from the pub saw them from the lane, two white lamps burning above the fence, and went to look. The gates were locked. Through the wire he could see the east court, with its freshly raked clay and its neatly chalked lines, and two figures in white at either baseline, hitting a ball back and forth in a slow, steady rhythm that sounded like a clock.
There was a third figure in the umpire's chair. A tall man in a grey blazer and a straw boater, with a clipboard on his knee and a pencil behind his ear. He called the score in a crisp voice that carried all the way across the lane. "Fifteen all." The ball went back and forth. "Advantage Hartley." The caretaker recognised the blazer. He had seen it every summer for twenty years, in the pavilion, with the minutes book open.
The ball never bounced twice. It hit the clay once, very neatly, then rose into the air above the net, and the players swung at it as it came, and it went over the wire to the other side, where another player was already waiting, in white, with a racket that caught the lamplight like silver. The rallies went on for an hour. Nobody missed a shot. The caretaker stood at the fence and found that his feet had gone numb from standing still, and that he could not look away.
The next morning the club secretary's office received a letter, in an old-fashioned hand, requesting that the court be booked for the following Thursday, from eleven until midnight, in the names of Ronald Ellis and Mr. Hartley. The club had no record of a Mr. Hartley. The name Hartley appeared, however, in the club's minute book for 1934, in the list of members who had died in the winter that year, and beside it, in Ronald Ellis's own neat hand, was a note: *Owes one match.*
The club secretary now is a young woman, Clare Ostler, who does not believe in ghosts and does not play tennis. She has never booked the courts for Thursdays. But she has noticed that the chalk lines are always fresh in the morning, and the clay is raked into neat rows, and the pavilion smells faintly of cut grass and linseed oil. And in the minute book, on the page for each winter since 1931, there is a short note in Ronald's hand, dated for the first Thursday of March, that says only: *Court kept. Game in progress.*