Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  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.’

  It was a philosophy with which I found myself in perfect agreement. A 5-iron, thoughtfully used, brought me within two yards of the pin. Both the men followed on to 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 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 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, par 3,155 yards. Lady Edgecombe drove off.

  Since golf sagas may be as boring as holiday slides, I have no intention of narrating the whole of that game. Enough to say that although I did no better than that, I kept up a good average at every hole; and that Lady Edgecombe found a hard and competitive game which was nevertheless vulnerable to the unexpected. At the third, when I fell by sheer mishandling into the second large trap, she played her best shot yet, a brilliant No. 3-iron which landed straight on the green. But when my next chip shot, by a combination of skill and good luck, actually ran on to the green and within striking distance of the hole, she was again put off, and took three to get the ball down.

  It was irritating, in that a neurotic player is always an unspoken blight; but the men played steadily, if unspectacularly, and were unfailingly pleasant companions. Neither, for example, prattled.

  The great joy, of course, was undoubtedly the condition of the fairway and greens. 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. Turf. 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 polythene, had been imported by the barge-load; 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 plants, and bags of horticultural perlite, and Canadian sphagnum peat moss. And 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.

  We moved round the course in the sun, like children on a toy railway, stopping and starting; pretending to play plastic golf under the perpetual hot sun of childhood. An inlet of seawater ran past the second green, its beaches white, a rocky island of grey and yellow stones in the middle. The third fairway led up to the airport: beyond a banking of white limestone the line of flags showed, and as we played a Dakota flew in slowly from the left, skimmed our heads and landed. You could see the passengers disembark. I watched Lady Edgecombe scanning the numbers, and she played well at that hole. Reminded of her status: reminded that if the company at present did not come up to her expectations, there was more and better elsewhere. Not that she seemed disappointed in Brady. He had good American manners, and he was polite as her rank demanded, although he was unable, I saw, quite to get her measure. I guessed this was one of many attempts on her part to draw him into their circle. I guessed she would get tired of trying, again, as she had, petulantly, at Nassau.

  In the permanent company lodged on the island, there were probably few enough whom she felt might amuse her. And Brady’s style, one had to admit, was engaging enough. He played an even game, without rancour, and cracked one or two mild jokes; then ceased to crack them when Lady Edgecombe leaned on the theme just a little too long. Mr Tiko, ever polite, merely smiled and made congratulatory remarks. To me, in the cart, he talked a little about the game in Japan and put one or two gentle questions about courses in Scotland. He was no trouble.

  For the fourth hole we recrossed Santa Maria Drive: busier now; lorries rumbled round the white dusty corners with their loads of men and machinery. On the fairway, however, it was quiet: the twitter of an unknown bird came from the small wood beside us. A small red service cart with two Negroes sitting relaxed side by side moved almost without sound down the next fairway. Ahead, a spray was working, jets of water rising in pulses as if a small monkey engine were throwing up steam in short bursts. It swung slowly, and left on the slope of the green a long sparkling bloom of pale blue; the beaded grass reflecting the sky. Wallace Brady had shown me the red metal caps, sunk in scores round the tees, greens and fairways, from which emerged the sprinklers at night, set to spray in rotation all through the darkness and keep the turf perfect under a tropical sun. We played down the fifth and crossed Harbour Drive to the sixth hole, and the first set by the sea.

  The Fiat was sitting at the side of the road, and in it Sir Bartholomew, waiting for us. He waved to Denise. ‘It’s all there according to orders when you’re ready. Who’s winning?’

  ‘Dr MacRannoch,’ said his wife brightly. ‘She’s beating us hollow. Lots of Scotch perseverance.’

  I noted I had been demoted from Beltanno again. We played the hole, and then joined Sir Bartholomew on the beach.

  The last thing I want, I suppose, when playing a competitive eighteen holes against unknown opponents is to break off a third of the way round for refreshments. For one thing, it takes quite some effort to collect one’s concentration and rhythm again. I had a feeling that Brady and Mr Tiko, although agreeable as ever, felt much the same. We stepped down to the beach through a thicket of grey-green cactus and water-lily-like mangrove, sprawling over ridged layers of crumbling white rock. Beyond stretched the dazzling white sand with the sea hissing transparent upon it, and changing as it deepened to all the brilliant aniline shades: greenish chrome to pure turquoise to cerulean, to hazy grape-blue on the horizon. Someone had put out long beach chairs and umbrellas just here, and Sir Bartholomew was unpacking a hamper with tins of soft drinks and a big flask of coffee. There were also some biscuits and fruit. Lady Edgecombe unstrapped her golf-bag and drew a neat Thermos from one pocket. ‘And this.’

  Sir Bartholomew looked at it. I said to Mr Tiko, ‘Look. There’s some fan coral.’ The beach was like white silk, weathered into tissue by the unceasing water and mapped with spidery black curves, skeletons of dead waves. Sir Bartholomew said, smiling, ‘Well, for before-lunch, Denise. Don’t let’s put everyone off their superb strokes.’

  She uncorked the flask without listening. ‘I don’t suppose Beltanno has tasted planter’s punch. Don’t be a spoilsport, darling,’ she said. She started to pour. ‘Not for me,’ I said, turning quickly. Lady Edgecombe smiled at me. ‘I dare you,’ she said.

  I looked at Sir Bartholomew. ‘All right,’ I said. Brady and Mr Tiko both held out for coffee, and she didn’t press them. But her husband, I saw, also took planter’s punch. It left less in the flask. But not little enough.

  It was hot now. I was glad of the green linen dress, lying back on my chair, glass in hand, one finger trailing in the glistening sand. It was full of treasures: white sea urchins; transparent shells so small and perfect that I wished I had a microscope and some means to identify them. The sea-rim hissed and withdrew, leaving the sand like satiny porridge patched with sparkling patterns of froth. Seaweed stirred, like grey snippets of ribbon, and a dog bounded by, followed by a splashing group of sunburned young men and women: the visitors, or some of them, who had been at our table last night. They stopped to call greetings and ask after Sir Bartholomew: Denise, drawling and languid, offered a selection of amusing remarks, fanning herself with the tie of her shirt. Diamond locket, in python bathing-trunks, said to me, ‘Are you swimming?’

  ‘Don’t be frivolous, Paul,’ said Lady Edgecombe gravely. ‘Dr MacRannoch is playing an awfully scientific game of golf.’ She managed, with clarity, to the end of the sentence. Wallace Brady stood up. ‘And I think we’d better get on with it,’ he said. ‘Unless anyone’s tired? There might be someone on our heels, don’t you think?’

  Lady Edgecombe shook her head. ‘No one on that plane who plays golf. No. We have the course to ourselves. Finest course in the world. Isn’t it, Bart? Good, clean healthy living. No gambling, no blackjack, no roulette, no casinos. Nothing to do but swim and fish and play tennis, when the tennis-courts have got themselves built, and sail, when the marina is built, and go to the night-club when the night-club is built, and make love . . . when...’

  Sir Bartholomew put a hand on her arm. ‘Look out. Your nice brooch is slipping.’

  It stopped her, and she looked down. Mr Tiko had already moved off, returning the collected glasses to their basket: Wallace Brady was gazing, eyes shaded, at the reefs out to sea. Bart Edgecombe said gently, ‘Take it out and put it in your pocket; then it won’t get lost. Or would you like to call it a day? We could go back and see who’s in the clubhouse.’

  She drew herself up, her brown, middle-aged muscular body throwing off the suggestion. ‘When I’m doing something exciting, I want to finish it. You go and rest. You haven’t been well. We’re doing splendidly. One for all and all for one!’ said Lady Edgecombe, sportingly if rather confusingly, and set off back to the fairway. I caught Wallace Brady’s eyes on me and we exchanged glances; then he went on to take Denise by the arm. Sir Bartholomew passed me on his way to the car without saying anything; as he went by, one of the red service buggies drove up and stopped by the crossed rakes at the edge of the green: before we were out of sight the hole was being manicured back into pristine perfection again. We gathered on the seventh tee and set off again.r />
  I played the rest of that round with a sense of unease, which was not due to Lady Edgecombe’s new and lighthearted approach to the game. It was, I think, because I had forgotten Bart Edgecombe’s danger. Or, seeing him at home, with wife and servants, or among familiars in the clubhouse in an enclosed society, on an island in which every guest, every stranger was known, it seemed the danger must be less than in the unconfined rat-race outside.

  And now, seeing him walk alone to that light open car, and get in alone and drive off alone, I wondered what protection Johnson thought he was offering him from the shelter of Crab Island. Or was I his protection? And what did Johnson suppose I could do if an excavator turned that corner and drove headlong into the Fiat?

  I sliced my drive and Wallace Brady gave a cheer and said, ‘The first crack!’ I grinned back, but I was thinking still. Of all our suspects, only Brady was on Great Harbour Cay, and he was here beside me. But that meant less than nothing. Whatever induced Pentecost to attempt murder in the Bamboo Conch Club could buy exactly the same sort of services here. If Bart Edgecombe was going to be killed, it would be at second hand, by somebody whose employer was very likely not even here on the island. Crab Island, after all, was only twenty minutes away by fast speedboat.

  I lost that hole. Progressing along the course, I was struck not only by its superb condition, its peace and its greenness, but by how much lay near it which could be used by a killer. Here on the seventh the green overlooked a large sandy dip full of blue water: a flock of white egrets with swan necks and spider legs dangling rose as we approached and circled until we had gone: the water looked deep.