He had had affairs by the score — there were endless temptations on the tennis circuit. If you were superbly fit, you didn’t just go to bed and read a book in the evenings. If you won, you wanted to celebrate, if you lost you needed cheering up. But on the whole his heart was more resilient than his self respect. From broken affairs he recovered rapidly without any need of convalescence. They left no scars and no regrets and sometimes he was sorry they didn’t, thinking he was missing out on something other people had and seemed to value, although it caused them anguish at the time.

Recently, too, he had felt a vague dissastisfaction with his life. There had been trouble about his knocking off another player’s wife, a Mexican beauty, whose insanely jealous husband had rumbled them. The reason Nicky was playing in Pikely this week rather than Hamburg was in the hope that the whole thing might blow over. Then last week an offer of an advertising commercial which would have brought him in several thousand a year had suddenly gone instead to another British player, who, although less glamorous than Nicky, had reached the finals of the big tournaments more often than Nicky had the preceding year. Finally, the night before he’d driven up to Pikely, his Coach had taken him out to dinner.

‘What are you playing at, Nicky boy?’ he had asked after the second bottle, with his usual mixture of bluntness and concern. ‘You’ve got everything going for you, but you’re not getting any younger, and you’ll never make it really big unless you cut out the birds and the booze and the late nights. Haven’t you ever thought of settling down?’

Nicky had replied that he had too much trouble settling up in life to think of any permanent commitment. His debts were crippling at the moment, he said, and they had both laughed. But the Coach’s remarks had stung and Nicky had not forgotten them.

As the crowd clapped approvingly at the end of the set, Mr Brocklehurst dragged his protesting daughters away, saying they mustn’t be late for the whist drive. Nicky had looked so sensational on court that Imogen could hardly believe their tête-à-tête in the tea tent had ever taken place, but as she left he had waved his racket at her, so it must be true.