Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (12 page)

I had intended to say nothing even about that, but as we gathered to walk up the flight of thick, green, carpeted stairs, Mr. Tiko moved over and said, “We are similar of name, are we not, Doctor MacRannoch? But I do not use all of mine. I am also doctor by university degree, but not of medicine: I am doctor of law. Tell me, it is not correct to wear formal dark suit in the evenings?”

We had got to the top of the stairs, where it appeared all the lights had gone out. I then saw it was merely part of the great American myth that everything after 6
p.m.
including eating is more romantic if it is performed in the dark. I have known a fellow doctor actually walk out of a restaurant in New York because I insisted on dissecting my steak with a small pocket flashlight jammed into a candlestick. Here, I merely groped after the Edgecombes, who were each wearing a trouser suit, but not of the kind Mr. Tiko meant; and Wallace Brady, who was wearing a long coral shirt over sharp kidskin trousers. “It doesn’t look like it,” I said.

We progressed through a doorway into an area of still greater darkness and voluminous noise of both the stereo and Bossa Nova variety. It appeared to be a large parquet-floored room crowded with dancing, sitting, or leaning figures against a dim background of rose-geranium drapes. At one end, a large circular bar, seating perhaps twenty on tall bamboo stools, was gently lit from above by a cluster of some fifty vermilion lights in lobster pot cases. The wall behind the bar was tiled in natural bark. A girl with very long blond hair and a transparent white jumper reaching to the adductor brevis floated between us, talking French to a diaphanously clad boy. Lady Edgecombe stepped back and held me by the arm. “Did you see who that is?”

I allowed her to tell me.

“I think,” murmured Mr. Tiko at my side, “I should perhaps go and remove my jacket and tie. More, with the best intentions, I am unable to do. Doctor MacRannoch.” He gave me a small bow and squirmed off.

I liked him. I should have to. Sir Bartholomew said, “Over here,” and we crossed to the noisiest corner of the room, where a great many irrationally dressed people were sitting drinking in black bamboo lattice chairs and beige sofas, in a welter of potted plants. The names meant very little to me, but appeared to illuminate Lady Edgecombe, who became more graciously animated than I had ever known her. The ambience appeared to be stage, screen, TV, with a sprinkling of New York and Philadelphia society. There was even an English drawl here and there. It was difficult to ask them what they did when they all obviously assumed that one knew what they did, so I contented myself with ordering a Yellowberry and listening to a long item of scandal closely connected with a patient I had once operated upon. I had no idea what a Yellowberry was, but my companion, a lusty athlete with golden sideburns and a diamond locket over his suntan, had just ordered one and I hoped he was used to it, and even that it might be responsible for his present splendid condition.

It came, and was indeed yellow, and smelt of rum, banana liqueur and fresh orange juice. Sir Bartholomew, straining out of the gloom, called smiling, “I thought sensible doctors only tippled tomato juice.”

I called back, “I’ve gone off tomato juice,” and felt a little contrition. It might, after all, be quite expensive. There was a cloud of Brut and the diamond locket suddenly swam into my field of vision. “I didn’t catch your name. You’re English?”

“Scottish. Beltanno MacRannoch,” I said, and counted. I can’t help it if it sounds like a war chant. At five he said, “I beg your pardon?” and I said, “Never mind. Miss MacRannoch. It’s a Scots name.”

“Ah.” He looked nonplussed; I wasn’t sure why. Doubts, perhaps, about speaking my language? He said, “I thought from what your friend said that you were maybe a doctor.”

I sat there, quiet as an overstuffed washing machine, and ticked over the options: Say,
no;
get up and move off; say,
yes, but I prefer not to talk business;
say,
what free advice you after, brother
? I pressed the button and slid the disc on the line. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“Say!” His smile really was breathtaking. He looked me up and down. “I’ll say you don’t look it.”

This, note, was a compliment. “You don’t either,” I said.

The brilliant smile gathered hazed overtones. “I’m not,” he said.

“I thought you couldn’t be,” I replied.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, who had not become an ambassador somewhere for nothing, leaned over smiling again and said, “Beltanno is one of the senior medical offiers of the United Commonwealth Hospital at Nassau, Paul. Don’t let her faze you.”

“You are?” Three other faces joined the diamond locket and two other conversations began to break up. A girl in a white satin Tom Mix outfit said, “You mean you’re fully qualified and everything, the same as a man nearly? Isn’t that marvelous?”

“It brings its own sense of wonder,” I said after a moment. I was, after all, Edgecombe’s guest. There was a strangled laugh somewhere behind me which I thought, but was not sure, belonged to Wallace Brady.

“Dedicated,” said the diamond locket called Paul with some reverence. “That’s it, isn’t it, Doctor? Dedicated to suffering mankind? In Britain anyway,” he added, his tone darkening slightly. “In Los Angeles, my God, they’re a heap of loot-grabbing horseshit.”

“Oh,” I said. “In Britain as well. We’re allowed to charge a pretty stiff price for consultations in private. You’d be surprised.”

There was a brief silence, cut short by three voices speaking, and someone asked someone else to dance. The girl with the fringes got up and struggled off into the gloom, bearing her starvation-induced anaemia, I judged, with her. Diamond Locket, who had eased off slightly, leaned back and said casually, “You know, it’s a funny thing about feet.”

It
is
a funny thing. Nine times out of ten, you can count upon it, the trouble is feet. Sir Bartholomew said, “Dance, Beltanno?”

I don’t dance, and he knew I didn’t dance, but I got up and worked my way through to him, and then into the center of the large room where the crowd was so thick that we merely stood face to face with our hands clasped, rocking gently. “Can you forgive me?” he said. “If I hadn’t been such a damned idiot, they’d never have known.”

“Oh, well. It gets around. They would have found out by tomorrow anyway,” I said. “It’s odd. I wouldn’t go up to a stationer and ask him for a free fountain pen.”

“But that is a material possession, and sacred,” said Edgecombe. “Intelligence is fortuitous, and to be distributed as the air.”

“Please?” said someone cutting in. “Is it permitted?”

It was Mr. Tiko. “Of course. If Sir Bartholomew doesn’t mind,” I said.

He was only half a head smaller, and looked less than that with his stiff white collar open. We clasped hands and rocked. “I forget to say something,” he said.

You forgot to say, I thought sadly, that you are the next chief of the MacRannochs after James Ulric, my father.

But he hadn’t found out. “I forget to say,” said Mr. Tiko, “that it is as well you do not use your name Doctor in the clubhouse. I never do this, even I with my law degree. There are some who will not cease to pursue you for free advice.”

I looked warmly upon him. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Tiko, although too late, I’m afraid: they’ve found out. Tell me, what sort of free advice do they ask of a lawyer?”

“Ah, wills,” he said sadly. “Always wills. Is it not funny?”

The rest of the evening is slightly blurred in my recollection, although not sufficiently at the time to make me foreswear Yellowberries, to which I was becoming quite partial. But I did recall with absolute clarity that I had promised to play a round of golf with my fiancé the following morning.

Not that he knew he was my fiancé yet, of course.

NEXT MORNING the housemaid, trained by Denise, brought me in early morning tea and drew the curtains; and Denise herself knocked and came in while I was still drinking it, and before I put on my wig.

“Oh, your poor head,” she said, but without conviction: she was thinking of something else. “Did you sleep well?”

I had. The bed had fine American cotton percale sheets like silk, and all the furniture was white bamboo with blue and green and white floral upholstery and a positive tattoo of drum-lamps. Denise sat on the empty twin bed and said, “I hear you’re playing golf with Mr. Tiko this morning, and I wondered if Wallace Brady and I could join you.”

Poor Bartholomew Edgecombe. I hadn’t thought of her as a golfer. But looking at those calf muscles again, and those sinewy arms, and that brittle, determined jaw, I realized suddenly that of course she was — and most likely a good one. I cannot say I was overjoyed at the prospect of watching Lady Edgecombe and Wallace Brady get to know each other better over eighteen holes in my company, but I could hardly refuse.

At the door she stopped and said, “Oh, by the way: Bart had word from the airport about your suitcase, dear. I’m afraid there’s no sign of it at all. Shall I see if something of mine will fit you this morning?”

I have already spoken of the size difference between us. I need only say that at this moment Lady Edgecombe was wearing a boudoir cap of white frilled lace scattered with rosebuds, and a frilled negligee of white spotted net, and it will be clear why I declined.

“Then perhaps you should look in at the pro’s shop when we go over for breakfast,” Lady Edgecombe suggested. It was not, obviously, of passionate moment to her; she only wanted to make sure that I should not be prevented from playing golf by the exigencies of my attire. I said I would.

Indeed, after she had gone, I got up and padded over the carpet to examine myself in the vanity mirror, which was surrounded by fourteen ormolu make-up lamps with a total burning power of what felt like two thousand watts. My feet sank three inches into the blue and green fitted carpet, of the variety known as deep shag, which wouldn’t show if your dog buried his bone in it, and for all I know he frequently does. My headache had vanished. My face was brown and clean and healthy and, once I had my wig on, looked better than Denise’s.

Outside the veiled window a crane lowered its jib, from which dangled a palm tree. I went over to look. The incline of waste ground was no longer an incline of waste ground but a garden of flowering bushes, interspersed tastefully with groups of live coconut palms. A gang of men were unrolling a carpet of grass. And a boy in a floral shirt and a fancy straw hat had got down from a tanker and was watering it.

The Edgecombes had a garden.

It wouldn’t happen in Scotland.

I went in to shower, singing cautiously, dressed, had a word with the Edgecombes, and borrowing their windowless Fiat, drove off to the Tamboo golf clubhouse.

The pro’s shop was upstairs, near the bar lounge of last night’s exotic encounters. I walked past the glass doors and some satin steel furniture and a selection of metal-reeded chairs like diabolos to the double timber doors of the shop, and I stood for a long time and looked in the windows.

For that time in the morning, it was fairly dazzling. Stacks of cellophaned cashmeres and floodlit rows of hide golf bags in green and yellow and cream. A carousel of slacks in cream and coral and primrose; drawers of suntan oil; shelves of white balls like nest eggs. Around the corner, I knew were tunics and bathing suits and sunsuits, bikinis, pant suits, divided skirts, sandals…

I walked past the cashmeres and stopped in front of the slacks. Then I opened my bag, pushed the revolver out of the way, and took out all Pally Loo-loo’s remarkable dividend.

I have no trouble making decisions. Half an hour later I was back at the club and able to join my host and hostess for breakfast. I had on a culotte dress in green linen with a see-through matching jacket and square-toed green canvas shoes. Lady Edgecombe had sprigged pants and a pink cotton shirt pinned with an Indian brooch at the navel; Sir Bartholomew merely his old Bermudas and a fresh shirt. He grinned, stood up, and gave me a full bow as I came to the table. “Beltanno, I can tell you one thing,” he said. “By this evening, they’ll have stopped bringing over their feet.”

“And started bringing over their wills, perhaps,” I said. I felt remarkably skittish. “I say, that would be something.”

I had fresh orange juice, coffee, a small hot fluffy roll like a bread cake, and an individual packet of corn flakes, served already perforated across the abdomen like a prepared case of peritonitis. Afterward, Sir Bartholomew took me out on the high apron sun deck at the back of the clubhouse and we leaned on the railing and looked at the prognosis for the dream called Tamboo.

Below us stretched the club’s own private patio, edged with tropical flowers and trees and scattered with yellow beach chairs around a swimming pool lined with baby blue tiles, and filled with baby blue water. Built on the same ridge, but divided from us by the steeply undercut road to the marina were the clustered rondettes belonging to the guests of the golf club: smaller timber-clad rondels like Edgecombe’s, still with their feet in scrub and piping and rubble.

But they were complete too and occupied, most of them. Coming to breakfast that morning I had seen Diamond Locket and the French screen star among others crossing the overpass which stretched from the rondettes to the clubhouse and golf course. Below the bridge rumbled the trucks carrying the plant and work gangs and tools to the marina. You could see it there, blue in the distance, marked by the white of the shining new jetty; the squat red and gray shape of the pile driver; the huddle of cranes. Beyond on one side, the walls of the first waterfront townhouse condominium had got up to two stories high in front of the rough green slope of the hill. On the opposite side, I could distinguish the red pantiles of the first house in a Portuguese-style fishing village. Around the corner in the Bay of the Five Pirates a yacht club was scheduled to rise. Elsewhere unborn were Tamboo Village with international shops, roof gardens, and patios. The discotheque in the Lighthouse Pavilion. The tennis courts. The beach club and swimming pool. The private luxury houses for single and multiple families. The Condominium Club. All that in the future; and the future was becoming the present with the speed of Sir Bartholomew’s garden.

Beyond the walls of the swimming pool near the uncleared bushes, where the stagnant swamp lay below, an excavator was working. Tractors crawled by; trucks with gravel; smart cars filled with dark-skinned talking men in caps and bright shirts.

Below the overpass a crane bearing an uprooted tree backed into sight, slowing to allow a mechanical grab to pass, followed by one of the ubiquitous water lorries.

Generators throbbed. The whole island hummed and muttered with the mechanized voice of creation. Swarming, single-minded over each growing point, the builders, the planners, the developers paid no attention to the socialites, the holiday-makers, the investors, bronzed and sunglassed, driving one-handed amongst them, bathing trunks and towel in the back seat, hissing past on the shore in the ski boat, sending buckets of balls down the practice drive with a flick of the wrist.

Sir Bartholomew raised a hand and pointed beyond the marina, to a strip of road on the near horizon. “That’s the way to the native settlement. Bullock’s Harbour,” he said. “We must take you there sometime. It’s not in the development, of course, but most of the men work for the company now. It pays better than fishing.”

It reminded me that I meant to go to Bullock’s Harbour too, but not, thank you, before I’d had my game of golf. Johnson had had no qualms about inducing me to come here. He could therefore accept my services in the order in which I elected to offer them. As it happened, Johnson was unaware where the dead waiter Pentecost came from. Or for that matter that he had three brothers still here. But that was Johnson’s fault for going to Crab Island instead of Great Harbour Cay.

Wallace Brady and Mr. Tiko joined us at that point. We left Sir Bartholomew to return to his house and followed Lady Edgecombe out onto the terrace which swept down through coconut palms to the brilliant green of the No. 1 tee. There was no need to inquire whether or not there were caddies. Here the main route was joined by a path from the clubhouse. And in motionless file on that path, two by two like black-nosed creatures about to descend from the Ark, were three dozen baby blue and white golf carts with white seats and cocked white and blue sunshades.

To one of them Lady Edgecombe’s houseboy was already strapping her olive green hide bag, and to the next my secondhand one glazed with rubbing. Wallace Brady, in pale pink sweater and white slacks, heaved his own bag beside Lady Edgecombe’s. His woods were protected by thick plushy socks. Beside mine he also strapped Mr. Tiko’s bag, the most immaculate of all, with each of four woods and ten irons encased in its own quilted anorak, and his initials on his hide bag in gold. Mr. Tiko, in a blue tunic shirt and blue trousers, had been patronizing the pro’s shop this morning as well.

I gave him a smile based on fellow-feeling and a considerable body of unvoiced good intentions, and said: “It looks as if Mr. Brady is going to drive Lady Edgecombe. Do you know how these things work?”

He was happy to show me. Lady Edgecombe’s houseboy had already paid our ten dollars and the meter key was turned in front of the seat. Mr. Tiko settled beside me, grasped the wheel, and pressed his left foot on the long flat accelerator. The cart moved, and so did Wallace Brady’s beside us. Side by side, at a gentle five miles an hour, the four of us drove down the path and onto the perfect green sward beside the first tee.

To slide the driver out of your bag and stand facing the first of eighteen beautiful fairways, your feet planted apart and the wind in your hair — what satisfaction is there like it in Scotland, with the sandy ground under your spikes, and the sea roaring there on the shingle and the cold trying in vain to penetrate your woolen stockings, your tweed skirt and pullover?

What, then, is it like sleeveless under a warm, cloudless sky, with five hundred yards of green velvet unrolling before your eyes, surrounded by low palmetto brush jungle? When the double bunker ahead is guarded by a coconut palm? We tossed for first drive from the women’s tee. Lady Edgecombe won and hit her first ball without preamble a good third of the distance, nicely placed for a wood shot fairly close to the green and well clear of the white sculptured traps. She had, as I suspected, excellent muscular control.

So had I. I drove off deliberately with the whippy crack which means distance; and meant, incidentally, the devoted practice of nearly every off-duty hour since I came out to Nassau. The sun was in my eyes. But I watched my ball with satisfaction take the straight line Lady Edgecombe had avoided, to fly over the first pair of bunkers and lie safely beyond. She smiled at me with her carefully drawn mouth and said, “Well done, Beltanno!” but she hardly watched Brady or my Japanese namesake drive off. I thought, there are few things she does naturally well, and this is one of them. This is one field in which she is secure. A psychiatrist would suggest that it would be wiser, for her sake, not to trespass on it.

I am not a psychiatrist, and I believe that cures are effected by people being made to confront their own weaknesses. I watched Brady give a competent and Mr. Tiko an excellent opening shot, and then trundled off with my partner to watch Denise play her No. 3 wood. She drove it crooked, almost out of the fairway. Mine brought my ball neatly just below the lift of the green. Par was 5. It seemed very likely I was going to start with a birdie. Brady placed his next shot beyond mine, but on the lip of a trap; Mr. Tiko, with care, sent his ball close beside me. With mutual smiles, we entered our cart and drove off. “You play golf a great deal?” he asked.

“Well. I did my training with six first-class golf courses within half an hour’s drive. But you learned in Japan, Mr. Tiko?”

“I learn to drive, yes. I have a good drive,” he said. “But the rest I learn in America. Lady Edgecombe is good, is she not? But it is a game like chess: one must not allow oneself to be put off.”

“I can’t imagine anything putting you off, Mr. Tiko,” I said, getting out. Denise had failed to get her ball near the green.

He gave a miniature shrug with his miniature shoulders. “An excess of alcohol, perhaps, or too little sleep, were I to be self-indulgent. But little else, I venture to hope. One must discipline the inner self as one would preserve any implement.”

It was a philosophy with which I found myself in perfect agreement. A five iron pitch and run brought me within two yards of the pin. Both the men followed onto the green, but neither remotely so well. I got my birdie.

It was a pleasant moment of success. The sun blazed down; the white fringe of the cart canopy moved to the faintest of sea breezes. Ahead, triangular against the blue sky, was the roof of the airport control tower; behind us, on the ridge, one could just see the twin sloping roofs of the clubhouse. Brady dropped back the yellow flag and we resumed our seats. The two carts side by side set themselves into motion, and crossing Santa Maria Drive, we turned uphill past a low scrubby wood to No. 2 tee.

The condition of the fairway and greens was a joy. Ploughed up from jungle and swamp, the course had been designed and then sown by blowing machine, the sprigs raced here by barge from their seed farms in Georgia. Turk, I knew, had come in the same way, rolled like carpets the way I had seen it, and even the coconut palms, their roots wrapped in polyethylene, had been imported by the bargeload, the tugs dragging them across from the Florida coast. For no coconut palms grew on Great Harbour Cay before the development. Nothing grew. The islanders fished for sponges, and when that failed, for lobster and crawfish. Now, down on the road we saw the trucks going by from the big netted nursery off Royal Palm Drive. Trucks full of potted tropical plants, and bags of horticultural perlite, and Canadian
Sphagnum
peat moss. The grass on the fairways, cut weekly one inch in height, was like the grass on the greens where I used to play near Loch Rannoch; and the grass on the greens, three sixteenths of an inch and shaved daily, in green powderings which lay in small heaps on the roads, was like heavy green suede.