By half-past one the balls were soft and the numbers were still up.
Maren Holt still had the racquet in her left forehoof. The Las Pegasus Return-Court had cleared to staff, one bureau junior, and the pony with the mop. The board read 6-1, 6-2. She had taken the exhibition in forty minutes. Cressida Elm stood on the far baseline with a paper cup. On the service line a pasteboard sign lay under Sable Quill's bucket. The sign said MUTUAL. Quill had needed a dry place for the bucket. He chose the sign.
Holt is seventy. Elm is seventy-one. They have met on the lines sixty-one times since Holt came down from the high passes and Elm was the mare the heartland already paid to see. Elm took the early years. Holt took the long middle and most of the years after that. The Bureau of Applied Lessons has begun to call the record a finished course.
Physicians cleared both mares before the date was announced. Holt spent last winter having a growth taken from the throat and a second from under the coat along the chest. Elm had a growth removed, and removed again when it returned. They spoke most days while the treatments ran. On Thursday they played. Holt won. At the rail she spoke about Elm before she spoke about the numbers. The bureau took the order of those sentences as leave to print.
Four thousand copies of Friendship Report No. 441 had left the printer before the first ball. The score sat on the cover as a pale rectangle. A margin note told the shop to set the word shared once the hugging was done. The hug was booked for the changeover if the first set reached three games apiece. Holt took the first three. A stallion in bureau grey stood at the net with two identical medals and a card that read either order is correct. He stayed through the second set. The medals struck when he shifted. Holt walked around him to the chair.
Linden Marsh, deputy for curriculum, read from the walkway.
"A rival is a friend the lesson has not finished," Marsh said. "Illness taught the embrace the score could not."
The report runs nine pages. It lists the sixty-one matches as practice for reconciliation. Thursday's result appears as a joint outcome delayed by stamina. The recommended audience is late foals. A sentence near the end states that the willingness to lose is the higher form of winning. Page two shows Sunny Mandate, the bureau's cover filly, mouth open and hooves empty.
Holt sat with the racquet across her knees.
"I came to beat her," Holt said. "We talked every day when the growths were in. I was glad she could take three games. That is the remark."
Elm set the cup on Holt's bench.
"She played the corners," Elm said. "Print the corners if the rectangle has room."
Marsh thanked them for their service to the curriculum. The stallion asked if the hug could be staged against a covered board. Quill wrung the mop out. The bucket stayed on the sign.
Quill has kept the Return-Court for nineteen years. He strings racquets when the traveling stringer misses the train. He files the slip that says which numbers the board pony may paint out. Thursday's slip had two boxes. One said result. One said lesson learned, with a blank and a small heart from the spring print run.
He filled the result in blunt pencil. Holt, 6-1, 6-2, forty minutes, surface fast, wind off the strip. On the lesson line he wrote that Holt had asked for a dry towel and the lozenge in the third tin, and that Elm had asked for the far baseline left damp, the way she likes the footing. He signed both lines. The heart stayed blank.
"They said please, and they said it to me," Quill said. "The towel was for Holt. The damp was for Elm."
The bureau cart left at four with the covers stamped SHARED, in a darker ink than the shop had planned. Marsh told Quill the slip would be reconciled in the morning. Quill hung the towels, locked the ball cupboard, and carried the second sheet home in his saddlebag.
At dusk the board over the Return-Court still read 6-1, 6-2. The key that clears it hung on the hook by Quill's door.
