If she didn't see another egg mayo sandwich as long as she lived that would be just fine. Helen scooped some of the errant mixture back beneath the bread.
“If you've finished mangling those sandwiches you could pass me the knife and I'll slice the sponge cakes." Helen looked into Margaret's grinning face. Margaret had got her into this.
It had been five years since Helen had last done a cricket tea. She’s stopped after Peter’s death. She had donated his cricket bag to the club and with it had gone, she thought, sunny summer afternoons and cricket teas. One of the two had not been missed. Yet here she was again, slicing sponges and unwrapping pork pies.
Over the years she and Margaret had buttered, and sliced hundreds of sandwiches for hungry men clad in assorted whites, creams and well-washed greys. They wolfed the food in seconds then slurped the tea noisily before returning to the pitch, tea and Helen both forgotten.
“There, if we're finished I’ll return to my deckchair.” Said Helen.
“Oh, we're finished, but you might struggle to get your deckchair back. There's someone sitting in it.” Margaret said, pointing through the pavilion window to where Helen's deckchair, which sagged under the weight of a figure in a panama hat.
“We'll see about that that,” said Helen. The nerve of him, whoever he was, pinching her chair.
The hat was pulled over the eyes of a smartly dressed man in beige trousers and crisp white shirt. Helen cleared her throat loudly. There was no response. She coughed again.
“I should get something for that throat if I were you,” said a voice from beneath the hat. Helen fumed.
“I beg your pardon?” she spluttered.
“Deaf as well? I could recommend a good ENT specialist." Helen tried to say that the deckchair was hers and she would very much like him to get out of it and that, as far as she was concerned, he could go to the devil and take his ENT specialist friend with him. All that she managed to get out was, “deck chair!”
“You'll have to get your own,” he said, “This one is taken.”
“This one is mine!" Helen shouted. The man shot up out of the chair. Helen had never seen anyone climb out of a deckchair with such speed or so little apparent effort. He stood, removed his hat and regarded her with the largest brown eyes she had ever seen.
“I am so sorry,” he said, “I thought it was for anyone watching the cricket.”
“But you weren't watching.” Helen said.
“I know, I don't really understand the game.” Those soft brown eyes looked down into hers and his expression was so sorrowful that he looked rather like a puppy that has disgraced itself on the carpet.
“Well, then, I forgive you,” she said, “Anyone who doesn't like cricket can't be all bad."
“I didn't say I didn't like it. I said I didn't understand it.”
“I can explain it to you, if you like.” What was she saying? She’d never liked cricket. She had put up with the cricket and the teas and the grass stained whites because she loved Peter.
They sat side by side, she in the deckchair and he on the grass, as she patiently explained what the white figures were doing. After a while the figures left the field to enjoy their tea but the couple, deep in conversation, barely noticed.
As they left the church, months later, they walked through an arch of cricket bats. It might have seemed a strange thing to do but they had thought it rather apt. As Helen said, “He never played the game but he certainly bowled me over.”