The Complete McAuslan (42 page)

I had arranged for the pipe-sergeant to station himself at the ninth green, to give progress reports on the other games, and he was bursting with news.

‘Sir, sir, the Adjutant and Pirie iss in the lead! They’re wan hole up, sir, an’ Pirie playin’ like God’s anointed. The Adjutant iss a shambles, poor soul, and him such a charmin′ dancer, but Pirie is carryin’ the day. His drives iss like thunderbolts, and his putts is droppin’ from wherever. Oh, the elegance of it, and the poor Adjutant broke his driver at the eighth an’ him near greetin’. But they’re wan up, sir.’

‘How about the others?’

‘The majors is square, but failin′ rapidly. I doot Major Fleming’ll be to carry home; the endurance is not in him. Bogle an’ the boy – Mr Macmillan, that is – are two doon, an’ lucky at that, for Bogle’s guts is a fearful handicap. They hinder his swing, ye see, and he’s vexed. But he’s game, for a’ that, an’ wan o’ the Royals he’s playin′ against has ricked his back, so there’s hope yet.’

Ahead in one game, square in one, behind in two; it could have been worse. ‘How about the Padre and the M.O.?’

The pipe-sergeant coughed delicately. ‘Seven doon, sir, and how they contrived to save two holes, God alone knows. It’s deplorable, sir; the M.O. has been nippin’ ahint a bush after every hole for a sook at his flask, and iss as gassed as a Ne‘erday tinker. The poor Padre has gone awa’ into one o’ they wee broon things – ’

‘Into what?’

‘Into a dwalm, sir, a revaree, like a trance, ye ken. He wanders, and keeks intae bunkers, and whistles in the Gaelic. There’s nae sense in either o’ them, sir; they’re lost to ye.’ He said it much as a Marshal of France might have reported the defeat of an army to Napoleon, sad but stem. ‘And yerself, sir? One doon? What iss that to such men as yerself and the Major, see the splendid bearin’ of him! Cheer up, sir, a MacNeill never cried barley; ye had your own boat in the Flood.’

‘That was the MacLeans, pipey,’ I said sadly. The Colonel, I was thinking, wasn’t going to like this; by the same process of logic, he wasn’t going to like his sports officer. Well, if Pirie kept his winning streak, and the two old majors lasted the distance – it was just possible that the R.S.M. and I might achieve something, who knew? But the outlook wasn’t good, and I drove off at the tenth in no high spirits.

And it was at this point that Private McAuslan began to impose his personality on the game. Knowing about McAuslan, you might think that an odd way of putting it – interfere with something, yes; wreck, frustrate or besmirch – all these things he could do. But even with his talent for disaster, he had never been what you could call a controlling influence – until the R.S.M., playing our second shot at the tenth, for once hooked, and landed us deep in tiger country.

We thrashed about in the jungle, searching, but there wasn’t a hope, and with the local five-minute rule in operation we had to forfeit the hole. Personally, if it had been our opponents, I’d have suggested they drop a new ball and forfeit a stroke, but there it was. We were two down, and the R.S.M. for once looked troubled.

‘I’m extremely sorry aboot that, sir,’ he confided to me. ‘Slack play. No excuse. I’m extremely sorry.’

I hastened to reassure him, for I guessed that perhaps to the R.S.M. this match was even more important than to the rest of us. When your life is a well-ordered, immaculate success, as his was, any failure begins to look important. Perfection was his norm; being two down was not perfection, and losing a ball was inexcusable.

Meanwhile, I was aware of voices behind us, and one of them was McAuslan’s. He had been quiet on the outward half, between terror of the R.S.M. and his own inability to distinguish one club from another – for he was illiterate, a rare but not unknown thing in the Army of those days. Perhaps his awe of Mackintosh had diminished slightly – the serf who sees his overlord grunting in a bunker gets a new slant on their relationship, I suppose. Anyway, the fearful novelty of his situation having worn off, he was beginning to take an interest, and McAuslan taking an interest was wont to be garrulous.

‘Hey, Chick,’ I heard him say, addressing my caddy. ‘Whit we no’ finishing this hole fur?’

‘We’ve loast it,’ said McClusky. ‘We loast wir ba’.’

‘So whit? Hiv we no’ got anither yin?’

‘Aye, we’ve got anither yin, but if ye lose a ba′ ye lose the hole. It’s the rules.’

A pause. Then: ‘Ah, —— the rules. It’s no’ fair. Sure it’s no fair, huh, Chick?’

‘Aw, Goad,’ said McClusky, ‘Ah’m tellin’ ye, it’s the rule, ye dope. Same’s at fitba’.’

‘Weel, Ah think it’s daft,’ said McAuslan. ‘Look, at fitba’, if a man kicks the ba’ oot the park – ’

‘All right, McAuslan, pipe down,’ I said. I knew that one of the few abstract ideas ever to settle in that neanderthal mind was a respect for justice – his sense of what was ‘no’ fair’ had once landed him in a court-martial – but this was no time for an address by McAuslan, Q.C. ‘Just keep quiet, and watch the ball. If you’d done it last time we might not have lost the hole.’ Which wasn’t strictly fair, but I was punished for it.

‘Quaiet, please,’ said one of our opponents. ‘No tocking on the tee, if you don’t mind.’ And he added. ‘Thenk-you.’

The crust of it was, he hadn’t even teed up. Suddenly I realised what had been wrong with this game so far – I’d had half my mind on the other matches, half on my own play: I hadn’t really noticed our opponents. And that’s no good. Ask Dr Grace or Casey Stengel or my Highland granny – you’ve
got
to notice the opposition, and abominate them. That totally unnecessary ‘Quaiet, please’ had made it easy.

Our opponents drove off, respectably, and Mackintosh, subconsciously trying to redeem his lost ball, tried a big one, instead of his usual cautious tee-shot. It soared away splendidly, but with slice written all over it; it was going to land well among the whins.

‘Keep your eye on it!’ I shouted, and McAuslan, full of zeal, bauchled masterfully across the tee, dragging his bag, his eyes staring fixedly into the blue, roaring:

‘Ah see it! Ah’ve spotted the b—! Don’t worry, sir! Ah see – ’

Unfortunately it was one of those high plateau tees, with a steep drop to whins and rough grass at the start of the fairway. McAuslan, blind to everything except the soaring ball, marched into the void and descended with a hideous clatter of clubs and body, to which presently he added flowers of invective picked up on the Ibrox terracing. He crawled out of the bushes, blaspheming bitterly, until he realised the R.S.M.’s cold eye was on him; then he rose and limped after the ball.

The opponent who had rebuked me – I think of him as Melville – chuckled.

‘Thet’s a remarkable individual,’ he said to me. ‘Wherever did you get him?′ A fair enough question, from anyone meeting McAuslan for the first time, but with just a hint of patronage, perhaps. ‘You ott to keep an aye on him, before he hurts himself,’ went on Melville jocularly. ‘Aye don’t think he’s doing anything for your partner’s peace of mind, eether.’

It might have been just loud enough for Mackintosh to hear; I may have been wrong, but I think I know gamesmanship when I hear it. Coming on top of the ‘Quaiet, please’, it just settled my hate nicely; from that moment the tension was on, and I squared up to that second shot in the deep rough, determined to hit the green if it killed me. Four shots later we were in a bunker, conceding a hole that was hopelessly lost. Three down and seven to play.

Not a nice position, and McAuslan didn’t help things. Perhaps his fall had rattled him, or more probably his brief sally into the limelight had made him more than normally self-conscious. He accidentally trod in the tee-box at the twelfth, and had to have his foot freed by force (the fact that Melville muttered something about ‘accident-prone’ did nothing for my temper). Then he upended the R.S.M.’s bag, and we had to wait while he retrieved the clubs, scrabbling like a great beast with his shirt coming out. I forced myself to be calm, and managed a fairish drive to the edge of the short twelfth green; Mackintosh chipped on well, and we halved in three.

The thirteenth was one of those weird holes by which games of golf are won and lost. Our position was fairly hopeless – three down and six – and possibly because of that we played it like champions. The R.S.M. drove straight, and for once he was long; I took my old whippy brassie with its wooden shaft, drove from my mind the nameless fear that McAuslan would have an apoplectic fit or shoot me in the back while I was in the act of swinging, and by great good luck hit one of those perfect shots away downhill. It flew, it bounced, it ran, trickling between the bunkers to lie nicely just a yard on to the green.

Melville and Co. were in dire straits. They took three and were still short of the green, and I was counting the hole won when Melville took out his number seven iron and hit the bonniest chip I ever hope to see; of course it was lucky, landing a yard short of the flag with lots of back spin, and then running straight as a die into the cup, but that’s golf. They were down in four, we were on in two, and Mackintosh had a fifteen-yard putt.

He strode ponderously on to the green, looked at the ball as though to ask its name, rank and number, and held out his hand for his putter. McAuslan rummaged fearfully, and then announced tremulously:

‘It’s no’ here, sir.’

And it wasn’t. Sulphurous question and whimpering answer finally narrowed the thing down to the point where we realised it must have fallen out when McAuslan, Daedalus-like, had tried to defy gravity at the eleventh tee. He was driven, with oaths and threats, to fetch it, and we waited in the sunlight, Melville and his friend saying nothing pointedly, until presently McAuslan hove in view again, looking like the last survivor of Fort Zinderneuf staggering home, dying of thirst. But he had the club.

‘Ah’m awfu’ sorry, sir. It must hiv fell oot.’ He wiped his sweating grey nose audibly, and the R.S.M. took the putter without a word, addressed the ball briefly, and sent it across the huge waste of green dead true, undeviating, running like a pup to its dinner, plopping with a beautiful mellow sound into the tin.

(It’s a strange thing, but when I think back to that heroic, colossal putt – or to any other moment in that game, for that matter – I see in my imagination the R.S.M., not clothed in the mufti which I know he must have been wearing, but resplendent in full regimentals, white spats, kilt, dress tunic and broadsword, with a feather bonnet on top. I
know
he wasn’t wearing them, but he should have been.)

And as we cried our admiration, I thought to myself, we’re only two down now. And five holes to go. And I heard again that old golfing maxim: ‘Two up and five never won a match.’ Well, it might come true, given luck.

It certainly began to look like it, for while our drives and approaches were level at the fourteenth, the R.S.M. played one of his canny chips while our opponents barely found the green. Their putt was feebly short, and mine teetered round the hole, took a long look in, and finally went down. One up and four.

The fifteenth was a nightmare hole, a par-three where you played straight out to sea, hoping to find a tiny green perched above the beach, with only a ribbon of fairway through the jungle. This was where Mackintosh’s cautious driving was beyond price; I trundled on a lamentable run-up that missed the guarding bunker by a whisker, and then Melville, panicking, put his approach over the green and, presumably, into the North Sea. All square with three to play.

For the first time I was enjoying myself; I felt we had them on the run, whereupon my Presbyterian soul revolted and slapped me on the wrists, urging me to be calm. So I drove cautiously and straight, the R.S.M. put us within pitching distance, and my chip just stayed on the back of the green. Melville played the like into a bunker, they took three to get pin-high, and the R.S.M.’s putt left me nothing to do but hole a twelve-incher. For the first time we were in front. And only two holes remained.

The seventeenth was the first half of a terribly long haul to the clubhouse. It and the eighteenth were par fives, where our opponents’ longer hitting ought to tell. But Melville’s partner duffed his drive, and while we broke no records in getting to the edge of the green in five, he and his partner undertook a shocking safari into the rough on both sides, and were still off the green in six. I was trembling slightly as I chipped on, and more by luck than judgement I left it within a foot of the cup. Unless they sank their approach, which was unthinkable, we had the match won. I glanced at the R.S.M. His face was wooden, as usual, but as we waited for their shot his fingers were drumming on the shaft of his putter.

Melville’s partner, hand it to him, was ready to die game. ‘This goes in,’ he said, shaping up to his ball, which was on the wrong side of a bunker, fifteen yards from the flag. ‘Pin out, please.’

And Private McAuslan, the nearest caddy, ambled across the green to remove the flag.

I should have known, of course; I should have taken thought. But I’d forgotten McAuslan in the excitement of the game; vaguely I had been aware of his presence, when he sniffed, or grunted, or dropped the clubs, or muttered, ‘Aw, jeez, whit a brammer’ when we hit a good shot, or ‘Ah, ——’, when our opponents did. But he hadn’t broken his leg, or gone absent, or caught beri-beri, or done anything really McAuslan-like. Now he tramped across to the flag, his paw outstretched, and I felt my premonition of disaster too late.

He claimed afterwards it was a wasp, but as the Adjutant said, it must have been a bot-fly, or maybe a vulture: no sane wasp would have gone near him, in his condition. Whatever it was, he suddenly leaped, swatting and cursing, he stumbled, and his great, flat, ugly, doom-laden foot came down on our ball, squashing it into the turf.

I think I actually screamed. Because the law is the law, and if your caddy touches your ball in play, let alone tries to stamp the damned thing through to Australia, you forfeit the hole. Even Melville, I’ll swear, had compassion in his eyes.

‘Dem bed luck,’ he said to me. ‘Aym offly sorry, but thet puts us all square again.’

McAuslan, meanwhile, was gouging our ball out of the green, as a hungry boar might root for truffles. Presently, from the exclamations around, he gathered that somehow he had erred; when he understood that he had cost us the hole, and probably the game, his distress was pitiful to see and disgusting to hear. But what could you say to him? It had all been said before, anyway, to no avail. Poor unwashed blundering soul, it was just the way he was made.