Ashes In the Wind (32 page)

After inspecting three dreary B&Bs masquerading as flats on the newsagent’s cards, the fourth, ‘Top floor studio flat, separate entrance, bathroom/kitchen, sea view’, turns out to be more promising, located above the antique shop he passed when he first walked into the town. Over the shop is a sign, ‘Campaign Furniture’;
inside there is a large tent hanging from the ceiling and opening towards the door, showing off a collection of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century military gear, teak chests, canvas chairs, mahogany tables, telescopes on tripods, camp beds, washbasins, everything that a young officer might need before setting out for India or Africa a hundred years ago. He’d need a dozen porters, thinks James.

The shop’s owner introduces himself. George is wearing an un-military outfit of black trousers with an evening stripe down the sides, a green cashmere sweater, a pink woollen scarf and a suspicious expression. He takes James round the back through an arched alleyway and up a wooden external staircase, doubling as a fire escape, to the top of the three-storey building.

The room is fifteen feet square, with wide oak floorboards and bare white walls. There is an iron fireplace in one wall with a surround of blue-and-white Delft tiles. A step up to small glazed double doors, through which the afternoon light is streaming, leads out onto a railed balcony. James looks down on the harbour and sees the floating rubber glove still pointing its orange fingers to the sky.

He inspects the tiny kitchen-bathroom, separated only by a screen from the rest of the room. The bath is an odd shape.

‘It’s a sitz-bath.’

George demonstrates by sitting in the bath on its built-in step, then swivelling round and dropping his bottom into the deep half while resting his calves and feet on the shallow end.

‘You wash in position one, then soak in position two: very green, very economical with the water.’

‘Green is good. But where’s the lavatory?’

George looks uneasy.

‘Outside. But it has a wonderful view.’

James follows George through the double doors outside to the balcony; what was once a small pigeon loft juts out at the far end. ‘WC’
is painted in faded dark blue letters on the door. There is a ledge near the top of the door, above it a dozen large holes, formerly for pigeons, now for ventilation.

‘Not ideal when it’s raining,’ says George, opening the door. ‘But it’s an original 1899 Thomas Crapper double-syphonic-action water closet, mahogany box and seat, floral decorations around the inside of the bowl. And with the door open you overlook the harbour.’

The double-syphonic action and the view clinch it for James. He takes the flat on the spot.

They complete the transaction downstairs. James looks around at the collection, which matches his sense of adventure. He buys a brass-bound teak desk/chest of drawers marked ‘Army and Navy Stores’, a folding campaign chair with leather seat and back that once belonged to Captain Andrews of the 9
th
Lancers, a steel-and-wood architect’s adjustable standard lamp, an umbrella globe that opens to reveal an 1890 world of Imperial red, and a five-foot-wide mahogany bed.

‘Will we ever get the bed up the stairs?’ James asks.

‘Of course. Everything here is demountable; it’s all designed for the back of a mule, a camel or a pack-horse. I’ll throw in a modern mattress; you wouldn’t thank me for the horsehair original.’

A week later James has filled his bookcase with a random collection from the second-hand bookshop – Donne, Hopkins, Eliot, Browning, Nabokov, Mailer, Updike, Tolstoy, Kipling, Trollope, a near-complete set of Gibbon and sixteen volumes of the 1914–1918 edition of
Punch
. There is a Samuel Palmer print,
The Early Ploughman
, above the fireplace, anemones in a Wemyss beehive mug by his bed, a threadbare Persian rug on the floor and a brass eight-day ship’s chronometer with Roman numerals on the wall.

James thinks the room perfect; for the first time for many years he has consulted no one’s taste but his own. He has become, he recognizes with guilty pleasure, a bachelor again.

As a boy James had played golf all over the West of Ireland, at a time when golf courses were neither expensive nor crowded. Kiltimagh, Ardnacross, Derryboy, Carrickmannon – little nine-hole courses with sheep as the green-keepers, where the greens were like English fairways and the fairways like English rough – had taught him to get out of trouble as easily as he had got into it. His cousin Fred had been his golfing companion, gentle, uncompetitive, relaxed as James’s game outstripped his own.

At first they played at the local course halfway between Killowen and Burke’s Fort. This had been carved out of the demesne of a neighbouring estate whose big house had been abandoned during The Troubles. A local builder had bought the estate, cannibalized what was left of the buildings, and built a golf course in anticipation of a demand that never came. He’d run out of money after twelve holes, but the six missing holes didn’t seem to matter. There was no clubhouse. Beside the first tee on a straw bale there was an old Quality Street tin with a slot punched in the lid and a little notice saying ‘2/6d a round’. A pleasant air of melancholy hung over the course and the ruins of the house; an ornamental lake, taken over by rushes and guarded by a pair of swans, acted as a natural water hazard and stored mis-hit golf balls that gleamed in its shallow margins.

Later, when James had inherited his mother’s Ford Prefect, he and Fred spent a week in the summer touring round Galway and Mayo, as much for the new freedom of their motor car as for the golf. Here James discovered the glory of links courses and the wild flowers of the machair for the first time. The sea acted as a clear and limiting boundary for his wayward swing on the outward nine; skipping the clubhouse, if there was one, he and Fred would seek out the bar in the nearest village after a round and each order a glass of stout. These bars were mostly front rooms with a turf fire as the only concession to comfort. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke; there was sawdust on the floor and a fixed corkscrew on the counter. Outside the bar’s name – ‘Byrne’s’, ‘Mullen’s’, ‘O’Grady’s’, ‘McGrath’s Spirit Vaults’ – was painted in fading letters above the door. The Guinness still came in corked bottles; the conversation between the two or three other regulars was quiet, and never made the pretence of including them.

At school, golf was an authorized escape from football and cricket; the Winchester club pro had taken James’s rustic game in hand without destroying his natural swing and had taught him to putt. In the army, James was the officer selected to partner the regiment’s Colonel in-chief, the ex-King of the Belgians, who had turned to golf when his country had turned him out and who demanded a foursome on his regular visits to the regiment. By the time James went up to Oxford he was playing off a 2 handicap.

Oxford golf was altogether different. Every Saturday the university teams visited grand clubs – Rye, St George’s Hill, Walton Heath, Huntercombe, the Berkshire. James had to sharpen up his clothes (on his first appearance for the second team, the Divots, an elderly opponent told him sternly to take his trousers out of his socks); he discovered a competitive streak that brought him within striking distance of a Blue in his first and second years, although each time he failed to make the university team.

He arrived at the beginning of his final year unsure whether to pursue a golf Blue or a good degree. He was clear he couldn’t get both. Although most of last year’s team were up, there were still two places to play for. The question was answered by the arrival of a pair of American Rhodes Scholars, scratch golfers from the University of Miami who had played their way through college. One of them, Roger Tompkins, at Worcester with James, was mildly apologetic when he realized he stood between James and a Blue.

James felt only relief at this clarity. He decided to work, and found a renewed pleasure in English literature that two years in the army and two years of golf had undermined (it was a source of his unease about the game that, with the exception of P. G. Wodehouse, there was no good writing about golf). And by then James had decided on the Civil Service and a decent degree.

From then on he played for the Divots once a fortnight. To his surprise, his golf improved and his pleasure from the game increased. He didn’t lose a singles match all season and was playing close to scratch. Ten days before the Varsity Match James saw a dejected Roger Tompkins at dinner in Hall, his arm in a sling.

‘What have you done?’ he asked, genuinely concerned and yet, at the back of his mind, feeling a little flicker of excitement.

‘Broke my wrist playing touch football in the Parks yesterday. I think they’re going to ask you.’

The following morning James went to Vincent’s for lunch to meet the captain of the OUGC, a solid Yorkshireman with an inbuilt contempt for someone like James from a soft Southern public school. But he needed a player and said to James, ‘I hear you’ve produced some good results for the Divots recently.’

‘I haven’t lost a match, and I’m playing scratch golf, I reckon.’

‘Are you now? I’ve got a problem, as you know. Let’s have a round tomorrow and see if you’re the answer. Cowley, nine o’clock tee-off. OK?’

It was OK. James turned up the next morning with nothing to lose. His driving was long and straight, his approach shots precise, he avoided the bunkers and three-putted only once. He beat the captain two and one.

‘That’s it. You’re our man. You’ll get the card this evening.’

The card duly arrived, followed by the Varsity Match a week later. Oxford triumphed; James won one singles, halved the other, and won his foursomes paired with the other American Rhodes Scholar, whose ‘Pity you don’t take the game seriously’ was high praise.

It was an exhilarating climax to James’s golfing career. Thereafter he played rarely, put off by the game’s aggressive male competitiveness; he recognized some of that in himself and didn’t like it. And later in the Civil Service the suggestion that playing against the army, the judges, the House of Commons, the House of Lords and White’s might be career-enhancing brought out his mildly anti-establishment streak. He gave away his clubs and didn’t think about the game again until Allenmouth.

O
N
THE
FIRST
morning in his new flat, James goes outside to his Thomas Crapper double-syphonic action lavatory, then stands on his balcony, looking out at the harbour, the estuary and the country beyond.

The tide is on the turn, the water choppy and disturbed as the flow of the River Allen meets the incoming North Sea. Beyond the water’s edge there is dark mud, still gleaming, shading into lighter sand rising up to the edge of the dunes. The marram grass anchoring the dunes to the land is bleached blond by the sun; the green of ordinary grass shows through here and there. Beyond the dunes James sees a patchwork of fields, the bright yellow of oilseed rape, the green of spring wheat, the brown of plough. The only building is a long low ruin in the first field beyond the dunes.

On the left a wide sweep of dry sand is exposed by the tide, broken by the occasional rock pool. A double line of large concrete anti-tank blocks, buried where they begin, gradually emerge as they curve towards the water. They look ancient, left by some long-departed tribe. Above them on the shore a round orange life-ring hangs on a white wooden frame, the white paint peeling. The sign on the frame says ‘ANGER’. James shivers as the breeze gets up and goes in.

The next day he has arranged to meet the golf pro; he carries his motley selection of clubs up to the course and buys a dozen golf balls and some wooden tees. Jack Pearson looks doubtfully at his clubs.

‘Have you played much golf before?’

‘Used to play a bit.’

He stretches a little self-consciously on the first of the nine holes, tees up and begins by slicing the ball wildly out to sea. His second drive goes the same way. He is being watched by a gallery of two – Jack Pearson has been joined by a younger woman with striking auburn hair.

He drives a third ball. This time there is that sweet connection between hands, arms, torso, legs and club head that smacks the ball straight down the fairway for two hundred and forty yards. It reminds James why golf used to give him such pleasure. The woman claps. James turns, smiles and sets off down the fairway.

The rest of the round is mixed. He loses three more balls in the rough, slices half his approach shots and misses several short putts. But he discovers the unfamiliar joys of the number four wood, and muscles that have been long unused, and he knows he will play better. The course is a delight, the rough of the dunes alive with cowslips, forget-me-nots, buttercups, pink sea-thrift and the occasional bluebell. Bounded by the sea on one side, and by coppices and farmland on the other, it reminds James of golf in the West of Ireland. He shares the course only with sheep, rabbits and the occasional seagull.

The last hole, a difficult dog-leg par five, he plays well. A long drive followed by two good shots on the fairway with his new friend, the number four wood, puts him on the green twelve feet from the hole. He sinks the putt.

‘Well done,’ says Jack Pearson from the captain’s bench. ‘That looked like par.’

‘It was a birdie. Decent drive, two shots on the fairway and you saw the putt.’

‘Would have been an eagle if you had decent clubs. If you want a partner any day, you know how to find me.’

James makes an immediate date, goes back to his room, lights a fire and spends a happy and luxurious half-hour in the sitz-bath before supper. From then on he plays golf with Jack Pearson every other afternoon.

‘How did you become a professional?’

‘Started out caddying at North Berwick when I was twelve. Got some clubs when I was fourteen – not much better than yours – and started to play. Won the North of England Under-Eighteen, and turned pro.’

‘On the circuit?’ asks James.

‘Not good enough to get a card. Most I ever won in a year was nine thousand pounds, barely enough to cover expenses. I met Anna’s mother, we had Anna in short order, then this job comes up. I fancy the security, Anna’s mother fancies my best friend, who gets his card and makes some money, and she shoves off with him. And here I am.’