Playing The Field

Her head was dipped forward, her dark hair falling over her face. To the casual observer, the young woman who stood studiously over a red ball, croquet mallet held tight in her hands and swinging gently like a pendulum against her floral print cotton skirt, was thinking about her shot.

She was calculating the approximate weight of the wood, and therefore the velocity with which she would need to strike the hard ball for it to reach the thirty or so feet to the blue ball, which she wished to knock away from the hoop before sending her own ball straight through.

The precise angle was critical to the success of the shot. Too great, and her own ball would overshoot the hoop, leaving her opponent an easy shot to win. Too direct, and she might hit the competing ball through the hoop. The resultant angles would all satisfy the equations for conservation of momentum. It would be an easy calculation for an engineer (which she was, she had recently received a first class degree from Warwick).

She would at some point have looked up to extrapolate the chance of rain or, had she been sufficiently thorough (which a first class degree would suggest) she might have been watching the sky since she woke up earlier that morning, alone, slightly hungover, but with a long and romantic text message. From that, she could have worked out how damp the grass would be, and how much it would slow down her ball.

Certainly, she should have verified the flatness of the green in the way that golfers do, placing her head sideways and low down.

In fact, Eleanor was thinking none of these things. She was thinking about that morning's text from Rob, which had been overlong and had fished for commitment. She was wondering why Ollie hadn't been in touch for two days, even though she had seen his recent Twitter posts that clearly showed he was available. Was it so wrong to call a taxi at 3am? And although Matt was never going to leave his girlfriend, she still enjoyed the time they spent together.

She shook her head gently to exorcise the thoughts, focused on the target, briefly weighed up the shot in her head, and instinctively struck the small red ball. She watched it roll along the rough grass, knock the blue ball out of the way, and inch through the hoop. She enjoyed winning.