This is the Life (18 page)

‘Nothing much happened, Mr Donovan,’ I said. I tersely described the morning’s events.

Mr Donovan said accusingly, ‘You didn’t speak to Arab? Jim, I told you to speak to her.’ Before I had the chance to reply he was off on another tack. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘it can’t be helped now. Jim, how would you feel about a game of golf?’

I said, ‘Golf?’

‘Saturday morning, at Highgate. How about it? I’ve booked a tee,’ he said. ‘Eight-thirty, Saturday morning.’

It had been a long time since I had played, I told him. I doubted very much that I would be any good, I said.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘You just bring a set of clubs and we’ll take it from there. I’ll give you shots,’ he said generously. ‘You can have a shot a hole if you like.’

I did not want to play golf with Mr Donovan. That was the truth.

‘All right, Mr Donovan,’ I said.

The night before the golf game I was attacked by nerves. It was three years since I had last played and, as I tramped around my living-room, I saw with great vividness the disasters that awaited me the following day, and actually tasted the humiliation that would follow: the chagrin and mortification shuddered through me as if I were already on the fairway, not at home, in front of the fire. And there was not just the golf to worry about: Mr Donovan’s company for four hours would be no breeze, either.

Nevertheless, when I began polishing my clubs and when I caught the whiff of boiled sweets from the sweet-tin that contained my tees and markers, I began to grow excited (it is ridiculous, really, this excitability of mine). Kitted out with clean clubs and a newly furled umbrella, I began my mental preparation for the day ahead. I opened a manual –
Play Golf With John Greenan
– and refreshed myself about the essentials of the game, intently studying the photographs of the coach’s famous swing. Inspired and fired-up by this literature, I drew open the curtain in the living-room, took out a nine-iron and began rehearsing my swing, studying all the while my reflection in the window. I stopped almost immediately. I looked terrible. My round, awkward, contorted body looked terrible.

I turned in early, at a child’s bedtime, and like a child I fantasized about all the great shots I would play. In my mind I burned up that course. I did not sleep until half-past two.

The next day, when I had driven slowly past the gates of
Highgate Golf Club and was approaching the clubhouse, the gravel crackling and fizzing under my tyres, I caught sight of a man in shocking tartan trousers taking some practice swings in the net; my playing-partner, Fergus Donovan. I stopped the car and studied him. Even at his age he struck the ball sweetly, and plainly he was a gifted player. What was he doing playing with a duffer like me? He could not have asked me here just to keep him company. He was a foxy old customer and I suspected that, like the law, he did nothing in vain: what did he have up his sleeve?

I drove on. Mr Donovan saw me opening the boot of my car and walked over. ‘Jim good to see you. I’m all set, so why don’t you go on and change and meet me on the first tee. Don’t worry about green fees,’ he said. ‘I’ve sorted it all out.’

It happened then, when I was hanging up my blazer in the locker-room and eavesdropping on the conversation of two members; that was when I saw him. There he was, right in front of me, bending over to tie his shoe-laces.

‘Michael?’ I said out loud.

He continued tying his shoes, as though he had not heard what I had said or had not recognized my voice. Maybe he thought that another Michael was being addressed.

‘Michael,’ I said again. This time he looked up. I had taken him by surprise, that was clear from his face.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘James. Well, well.’

I waited for him to finish speaking as he began tying up his other shoe, the power of his burly shoulders showing through his jumper. A lock of his dark hair fell over his forehead and he emitted a soft grunt. Then I realized he had said his piece. He had nothing to add.

I took off my tie and made some banal locker-room conversation. It was a good day for a round, I suggested. There was not much wind and judging by the car park, there would not be too many people on the course. I hoped that my voice sounded normal. I did not want Donovan to know about the emotions surging around inside me.

Donovan agreed. ‘Yes,’ he said, stamping his feet, ‘you
could well be right.’ Then he said, ‘Well, have a good round,’ smiled and strode off.

Surely he realized that I was going to play with him? Apprehensively I finished changing and shouldered my clubs. When I approached the tee Donovan looked at me and immediately began talking to his father in a whisper. I knew what he was saying: What the hell is he doing here? he was saying. What made you ask
him
along?

Fergus Donovan brazened out the situation. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I was just telling Mikey here that we should play dog-eat-dog. You know dog-eat-dog? You played dog-eat-dog before?’

Donovan probably did not even know that his father and I had met.

‘No,’ I said, almost inaudibly. He would probably kick me off the case. If he found out that I had made revelations about the case – if he thought that I had committed a breach of confidence – then he might even report me to the Law Society.

‘Well, here’s how it goes,’ Mr Donovan said, launching into an explanation of a mystifying scoring system. ‘You got that? If you haven’t, don’t worry. You’ll figure it out as we go along. You’ll see, it’s a great game.’

He teed up and addressed the ball. ‘Now this is a dog-leg to the left,’ he commentated. ‘You want to be just to the right of that willow.’ Thwack! The ball went soaring down the hill, rolling into perfect position. ‘OK Jim, it’s you to play.’

I set myself up and stared at the ball. Then, before I knew it, I found myself at the top of my backswing, thinking, Oh no, this is going all wrong, I’m going to lunge at the ball and end up topping it …

I lunged at the ball, topping it. It ran miserably along the ground for thirty yards.

‘That’ll work,’ Fergus Donovan said encouragingly. ‘That’s safely down the middle.’

Red-faced, I went back to my bag. Donovan smashed his ball to the heart of the fairway.

‘Shot, son,’ Mr Donovan said. ‘That’ll do nicely.’

Father and son went off side by side down the green, birch-shadowed valley, I headed off in the other direction to look for my ball in the rough. We were off.

Donovan’s first shot, his drive at the first hole, was just about the last shot that he hit properly. After that, as sports commentators say, the wheels came off. Almost every shot he aimed, wedges, woods, mid-irons, went terribly wrong. Either he duffed it, flying huge chunks of turf into the air, or, when he did connect, he sent the ball deep into the trees. I could barely watch. A large, strong man like him struggling to swat an immobile white ball; it was, in all honesty, a pathetic spectacle. The situation grew even more embarrassing when, after we had spent ten minutes raking around the undergrowth for Donovan’s ball, Mr Donovan began impatiently coaching his son.

‘Remember, keep your head down,’ he said as Donovan stood over the ball. ‘And for God’s sake, slow on the backswing.’

Donovan looked silently at his father before turning to his ball. He concentrated for a moment and swished. The ball sliced away out of bounds.

‘Slow on the backswing!’ Mr Donovan exclaimed. ‘How many times do I have to tell you! Slow on the backswing! Look at Jim,’ he said, much to my discomfort, ‘look at the way he’s hitting it, nice and easy.
Jesus
,’ Mr Donovan said. Then, at the next hole, when Donovan had fluffed a 4-iron: ‘Hit
through
the ball! You’re hitting
at
it! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, anyone would think you’d never played before in your life!’

What was interesting was Donovan’s reaction to all of this. He seemed completely unmoved. It was as though he was not bothered by his failure at all. This struck me as odd, because to come to grief on a golf course is, to most players, an intense personal disaster. To play like a rabbit, your every gaffe and blunder visible to the whole world, is a crushing experience. That was the reason I had put away my clubs these last years – because the pain of the game was simply too great. Donovan,
though, seemed to have some kind of inbuilt anaesthetic. His mis-hits did not hurt him. He seemed completely unembarrassed about losing to me, an inferior, and to his father, a white-haired man in his seventies. There he was, calm as you like, and even when his father goaded him (‘You couldn’t hit a bull’s ass with a banjo,’ or, after a fresh-air shot in front of a gallery of members, ‘Jesus Christ. That’s it. That’s the last time I’m ringing
you
up for a game.’) he remained unmoved and equable, hardly speaking at all. I could not understand it.

We stopped half-way through our round to sit down on a bench and eat a chocolate bar. Mr Donovan totted up the score and calculated that, at a pound a hole, I had won three pounds and he six. Then there was a silence as we rested. The course was hilly and the steep slopes had tired us. I lit a cigarette.

Then Mr Donovan spoke up. ‘Jim, I’m going to let you into a secret.’

I said nothing. I hunched my shoulders and sucked at my cigarette. Sandwiched between the Donovans, I felt uncomfortable.

‘Women,’ Mr Donovan said, ‘are like golf courses.’

I stole a look at Donovan, who was sitting right next to me. From my acute angle it was hard to tell what he made of his father’s sudden pronouncement. Probably he had heard it before, because he was staring inanimately out at the horizon.

Mr Donovan warmed to his theme. ‘You know what that means, Jim? It means if you want to know what makes a good woman, you look at what makes a good course.’ He laughed and turned to me. ‘You think I’m bullshitting? Well, just give it some thought. Just think about it.’

We swallowed our chocolate bars and took our shots.

‘So, the next question is, what makes a good golf course?’ Mr Donovan asked as we walked down the fairway. ‘I’ll tell you. First and foremost, a good course is demanding – it’s tough. It stretches you, it shows up your limits. Number two – and this is less important – a good course looks good. Not pretty – that’s not necessary – but good. Ballybunion or Troon aren’t pretty, but they’re handsome all the same. Myself,’ Mr
Donovan said, ‘I don’t like your tarted-up courses, the type you get in Spain, with their palm trees and their fancy bunkers. Give me a grizzly links any day of the week, something with real character.’ Mr Donovan pulled his trolley along. He caught me looking at him and laughed and said, ‘Am I right, Jim?’

I smiled weakly, but my unease had by now grown acute. The situation felt all wrong: what was I doing playing golf with Donovan, and what was I doing beating him?

We all reached the green. We took out our putters and stalked around, studying our putts. Meanwhile, Mr Donovan picked up where he had left off. ‘A good golf course is hazardous but fair,’ he said. ‘It rewards you for good shots and doesn’t screw you around.’ He got down on his haunches and peered at his line to the hole through the curves and borrows of the green. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘if you play badly, then it punishes you. Then it kicks your ass.’

He then said suddenly, ‘Jim, my wife, Mikey’s mother, she was, you could say, a major championship course. She was like a Hoylake, or an Augusta or Brookline.’

We putted out and walked up a hill and over a bridge to the next tee. A natural silence descended. There was only the sounds of our steps, the breeze, the motorway behind the trees humming like a sea behind dunes. I looked down at my feet, spiking through scrolled, orangey leaves as I walked. Suddenly and queerly everything had become emotional.

‘Of course,’ Mr Donovan said, ‘you don’t get many women in that bracket. They’re scarcer than hen’s teeth. Arabella,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Arabella is one of them. That’s right, isn’t it, Mikey? She’s one in a million.’

Again I thought: why is it they hold Arabella in such high regard? Apart from being her father’s daughter, she was just an ordinary person as far as I could see. Why, then, the big deal?

Donovan did not say anything and at first I could not see any expression on his face. He stood up on the tee and shaped to hit his drive and I pointed my eyes down at my feet. But
then, when after quite some time I had not heard the swish of the swing, I looked up. Donovan was furiously gripping his club, and his skin had gone red. Then I saw his eye secrete a drop of clear fluid. It ran down his nose and dripped off its tip, like a drop from a tap. I was taken aback. Some kind of lachrymal activity was taking place, that I was sure of, the tear ducts were visibly functioning: but surely Donovan could not be crying? As another drop leaked from his eye, I came to the conclusion that, extraordinary as it might seem, some form of weeping was indeed occurring. I did not jump to this conclusion, most certainly not: I was driven and cornered into it by the facts. There was no wind or sand blowing into Donovan’s face, nor was there any real question of the fluid being sweat or some other exudative. Therefore either he had suddenly developed a leaky eye (a common enough condition, but one I had never witnessed in him), or he was crying. The latter was plainly the more probable.

Michael is crying! I suddenly thought.

He swung at the ball and badly mis-hit it. I shivered with shame and guilt and wished myself back at home, in my bath. I stood still and said nothing. He would hate me for ever for having seen him in his moment of weakness. He brushed his nose with his sleeve and walked quickly after his ball.