LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 5

      There remained the problem of what to do with my alternate weekends in New York. Rivera decided I should play golf. ‘You look like Ernie Els,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could swing like him too.’ Stepping away from my desk, he made a triangle of his arms and shoulders. He was a small, compact lefty. ‘It’s all about rhythm,’ he explained. ‘Ernie’ – his backswing flew up with the word – ‘Els’: down, for the duration of the syllable, came the downswing. ‘See? Easy does it.’ Rivera, who was shopping for a lob wedge, took me to a golf centre by Union Square. At the practice facility, a graduated row of shiny irons stood on a rack. ‘Hit a ball,’ Rivera said, pushing me into a grotto of netting. A troglodyte, I twice swung and missed.

      But a reminder of sports had been given to me, and one late-April day, while lowering a box of papers into the trunk of a taxicab, I noticed a cricket bat nestled against the casing of the spare tyre. It seemed like a mirage and I stupidly asked the driver, ‘Is that a cricket bat?’ As he drove, the cabbie – my future teammate Umar – told me he played every week for a Staten Island team. His glance entered the rear-view mirror. ‘You interested in playing?’ ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Sure.’ ‘Come along on Saturday,’ Umar said. ‘Maybe we can fix you up with a game.’

      I memorised the time and the place without ever forming the intention of going. Then the first morning of the weekend came. It was a bright, warm day, European in its mildness, and walking past the flowering pear trees on 19th Street I was riddled by a longing for similar summer days in my youth, which were given over, at every opportunity, to cricket.

      For cricket is played in Holland. There are a few thousand Dutch cricketers and they go about their game with the seriousness and organisation that characterises all of Dutch sport. The conservative, slightly stuck-up stratum of society, in which I grew up, especially loves cricket, and the players are ghosts of sorts from an Anglophile past: I am from The Hague, where Dutch bourgeois snobbishness and Dutch cricket are, not unrelatedly, most concentrated. We – that is, my mother and I – lived in a semi-detached house on Tortellaan, a quiet street near Sportlaan. From Houtrust, where the indoor skating rink was located and where I first held a girl’s hand in romantic earnest (not on the ice but in the cafeteria, where kids gathered to spend their pocket money on cones of frites met mayonnaise), Sportlaan led south towards the dunes and seaside hotels of Kijkduin. It also led, if you exercised your imagination, to Paris: one year, the hunched, bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws. On the far side of Sportlaan were woods called the Bosjes van Pex, and in the woods was the home of a venerable football and cricket club, Houdt Braef Standt – HBS. I joined HBS at the age of seven, anxiously attending the membership interview with my mother. I am not sure what these encounters were designed to accomplish, but in any event I had no cause to worry. When the meeting was over the members of the committee gravely shook my hand and said, Welcome to HBS. I was thrilled. I was too young to realise they’d all known my father, who had been a member of the club for nearly forty years, and that it must have given them great pleasure to take his son under their wing. For that’s how these sports clubs functioned: they took on scores of boys almost as hatchlings and bestowed parental care and effort on them for years, even on those who were athletically hopeless. From September through April I played football, proudly wearing the club’s black shirt and black shorts bought at the sporting goods store on Fahrenheitstraat; and from May through August I played cricket. I loved both sports equally; but by my mid-teens, cricket had claimed its first place. We played on coconut matting wickets, and our outfields, used also for winter games, were sluggish; but there any resemblance to American cricket ended.

      What ached me, as I paused on 19th Street two decades later, was the memory of lovely solitary cycle rides, on sunny and tranquil mornings like this one in Chelsea, through the fragmented brilliance of the woods around the HBS grounds, my red Gray-Nicolls bag resting between the handlebars of my bicycle, a lambswool sweater slung over my shoulders. Lacoste polo shirts, bright V-necked sweaters, brogues, diamond-patterned Burlington socks, corduroy trousers: I and men I knew dressed that way, even as teenagers. Then came a second memory, of my mother watching me play. It was her habit to unfold a portable chair by the western sightscreen and to sit there for hours, grading homework and occasionally looking up to follow the game. Although always friendly, she rarely spoke to the other spectators scattered along the boundary’s whitewashed planks, which, laid end to end, distantly encircled the batsman and marked the edge of his innings’ impermanent heaven. Your innings might be over in a second, as a life in eternity. Out, you trudged off miserably, irrevocably dismissed into the nothingness of the non-participant: the amateur cricketer does not enjoy, as the baseballer does, the glimmering prospect of numerous at-bats. You get only one chance, in the blazing middle. When neither fielding nor batting, I and a teammate or two would embark on a rondje – a stroll round the field – smoking cigarettes and acknowledging various parents and interested parties. My mother was known independently to many of the boys at the club because they were current or former pupils of hers.

      ‘Dag, mevrouw van den Broek. Alles goed?’

      ‘Ja, dank je, Willem.’

      We were cordial, somewhat arrogant young men, in accordance with our upbringing.

      My cricket career at HBS dwindled while I studied classics at Leiden University. When my first adult job, with Shell Oil, returned me to The Hague at the age of twenty-four, I had grown away from my club. I would not play cricket again until years later, when I went to London to become an analyst at D——Bank and joined South Bank Cricket Club, whose home, at Turney Road, was near Herne Hill, in the south of the city. On marvellously shorn Surrey village greens – the smell of grass when mown in May provokes in me pangs of emotion that I still dare not dwell on – we battled gently for victory and drank warm beer on the steps of ancient wooden pavilions. Once, after a shaky start to the season, I booked a private net at Lord’s. An elderly coach with the countenance of a butler fed balls into a bowling machine and declared, ‘Good shot, sir,’ each time my bat connected with one of the long hops and half-volleys the machine amiably spat out. All of it was agreeable, English and enchanting; but I quit after a couple of seasons. With my mother no longer watching, cricket was never quite the same again.

      Rachel came to Turney Road once. She approached on foot across the green blankness of the sports ground. My team was fielding, and for an hour she sat by herself on the grass. I could sense her boredom from a hundred yards. Between innings, when the teams drank tea and ate cakes and sandwiches, she and I got together. I brought her a cup of tea and sat down with her, self-consciously detached from the rows of players seated at the main table. ‘Sandwich?’ I said, offering her one of mine, a gluey, cheesy thing that only a starving player could bring himself to eat. She shook her head. ‘How can you bear it?’ she blurted. ‘All that standing around.’ I smiled regretfully. Not wanting to spoil my afternoon, she said, ‘Although you do look nice in that hat.’ It was her only attempt at spectatorship.

      To my surprise, my mother continued attending matches at HBS even when I no longer played. It had not dawned on her son that following his progress might not have been her main purpose. Though comfortable at the club, my mother never discovered the talent for jolliness that animated many of the older characters for whom the place was a home away from home. The clubhouse, with its billiards tables and borreltjes, was not for her. At stumps she would fold up her chair and make her way directly to the car park, smiling at the many familiar faces she saw. Only now do I appreciate how for her, too, there must have been balminess in the sights and sounds and rhythms of a full day’s cricket, in which unhurried time is portioned out by the ticking of ball against bat, and only now do I ask myself about the thoughts occupying her mind as she sat there with a red blanket over her knees, sometimes from eleven in the morning till six or seven in the evening. She was unrevealing about such matters. When she spoke about my father, it would only be to mention a small fact or two – how his job at the air ministry had bored him; how he liked to eat raw herring, slathered in onions and dangled vertically into the mouth, in Scheveningen;

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