A Village Called Sin by Guy Bellamy

Author:Guy Bellamy [Bellamy, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Felix Kirby felt bad even before he went out on the squash court. The row with Harry Grant had upset him more than he had expected. He had handled some fairly heated discussions in the inner sanctum of the bank with an icy control that had demoralized many an excitable customer, but his personal involvement in this latest row made it quite different.

His opponent, as usual, was Tadley, a bigger and younger man who coached newcomers to the game at the sports club and let them buy his drinks afterwards. As the new player improved, he increased the power of his own game so that the learner was continually stretched. Although he was trying to provide encouragement now, Tadley won the first set 9–0. Felix tried to slow the game down with some lobs, but he was moving too slowly to make it a game.

‘Are you okay, Felix?’ he asked. ‘You don’t look too good.’

‘I’m fine.’

But he began to feel terrible. A central pain had gathered across the sternum in his chest: he felt as if a man in large boots was standing on him. Already sweating from his exertions, he began to sweat more.

Tadley’s drives, volleys and drop shots were defeating him so easily that it was becoming embarrassing. He stopped playing.

‘I think I’ll have to go and lie down,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Good idea,’ Tadley said. ‘Take it easy, Felix. You’re not twenty-five any more.’

Felix Kirby left the court and picked up his jacket but felt too ill to put it on. He went out of the club and started to walk across the green to his house but the pressure on his chest was so intense that he had to stop every few yards and wait for it to ease. Then he walked again. Then the pain returned.

He was now seriously frightened. What was happening? Was this a heart attack? But the pain wasn’t where his heart was, or where he had always imagined it to be. If he could get home and lie down, he told himself, the pain would go away. It was just a question of getting across the green.

He walked a few yards and the pain became intolerable. He stopped and waited, and then moved on again. The short walk from the sports club to his house began to seem like a feat of endurance. And the fear was almost as bad as the pain.

There were people out here leading a normal life, doing normal things, all of them unaware of the nightmare journey he was making. Boys played cricket on the green, others fished off the bridge at the bottom. A woman in a blue canvas chair painted a water-colour of the duck pond. A youth cycled up to the post office next to the supermarket and posted a letter. Beneath the tree on the green a couple sat kissing. Nobody noticed his fitful, agonizing progress from one side of the green to the other and, if they had, would probably have been too polite to interfere.

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