Operation Nassau (16 page)

‘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 forgot 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 forgot 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 forswear Yellow-berries, 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 fiance 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 had 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 drumlamps. 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 case, 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 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. Round the corner, I knew, were tunics and swimsuits and sunsuits, bikinis, pants 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 cornflakes, served ready perforated across the abdomens like a prepared case of peritonitis. Afterwards, 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 roundettes belonging to the guests of the golf-club: smaller timber-clad roundels 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 stair among others crossing the flyover bridge which stretched from the roundettes 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 grey 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 storeys 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. Round the corner in the Bay of the Five Pirates, a yacht-club was scheduled to rise. Elsewhere unborn was 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 homes 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; lorries with gravel; smart cars filled with dark-skinned talking men in caps and bright shirts. Below the flyover bridge 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 some time. 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 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 on to the terrace which swept down through coconut palms to the brilliant green of the first tee. There was no need to inquire whether or no 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 my second-hand one glazed with rubbing. Wallace Brady, in pale pink sweater and white slacks, heaved his own bag on the back ledge of its neighbour. His woods were protected by thick plushy socks. Beside it 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 on to 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 woollen 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 under 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 and 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 a 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 hit it crooked, almost out of the fairway. Mine brought my ball neatly just below the lift of the green. Par was five. 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 learned to drive, yes. I have a good drive,’ he said. ‘But the rest I learned 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.’