by Tom Drury
“I don’t put much stock in it,” said Mike. “Tell him about the flung baby. I find that story more credible than the supernatural corbies.”
“There’s little to choose between the two,” said Catherine. “But I will tell it. A servant girl dropped the heiress into the sea and then jumped herself, and this left the laird so shell-shocked that the Solemnists led by James Harper captured the castle in ten days.”
That night, Paul lay beneath a crocheted bedspread, drinking ale and listening to a BBC radio show on which a host interviewed Rex Compton, who had once fronted a Blackpool band called Rex and the Freemasons, whose main hit had been a song called “Let’s Have a Cigarette.” Rex Compton drove a truck these days, and he told a long story about losing his dog.
“I went all about, you know, calling ‘’Ere, Tuffy . . . ’Ere, Tuffy.’ Finally it occurred to me to look in me mum’s garage.”
“This is still in Blackpool?” said the interviewer quietly.
“No,” said Kex Compton. “This would be many years later, in Mungrisdale.”
“Mungrisdale in Cumbria?”
“Precisely.”
“And, at the end of the day, did you find Tuffy?”
“I did. And very relieved I was to see that little dog.”
In the morning, over a breakfast of tea and fried potatoes, Paul watched out the window of the dining room as the boat he had seen the night before headed back to Northern Ireland, still sailing at a slant, under a blue sky with brush-stroke clouds. Then he drove out to the golf course, which was called Dreighknowe. He knew nothing about golf, but this seemed like a difficult course, with fairways that angled between sand traps and swift-moving streams.
Paul asked after Kim in the clubhouse. “We don’t have any Kim,” said a man with thin black hair combed over his scalp. “Most probably you mean Robin Redding. She is an American. Grew up in Ohio, as the story goes, and won the Akron Invitational at a very young age. Robin came to Scotland to learn the history of her game, and to our good fortune she stayed. We have two pros, Robin and Kyle. We believe it’s important that the apprentice golfer get on with the instructor, and what we like to say is, ‘If you don’t care for Kyle, you’ll care for Robin.’ Is it lessons you’re after?”
“Yes,” said Paul.
“Go down these stairs to my left,” said the man. “It’s thirty-seven pounds for an hour.”
Robin sat on a bench sharpening her cleats with a small rasp. She was an angular woman who wore her ash-blond hair in a ponytail held by red elastic.
“Mostly, the game of golf is a game of balance,” she said. “It’s all about an awareness of your center and what it’s doing.” She stood up and planted her feet wide apart. She wore little white socks rolled once at the ankle. “You want this” — she thumped her sternum with a fist — “to line up with this” — she bent down and touched the floor between the tips of her toes. “When it doesn’t, the golfer develops a lot of anxiety without knowing why. And though I know it sounds simple, it’s really very hard.”
“It doesn’t sound simple,” said Paul.
“Now let’s go out and hit a few”
Paul drove the ball straight off the practice tee but extremely high. His second drive ripped viciously along the ground. His third did the same.
“Where did that go?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Robin. “Have you ever golfed before?”
“No,” said Paul.
“Try relaxing.” She drove the heel of her hand into the middle of his back. “You’ve got a tension thing going on right here. Draw the club slowly. Don’t bend your spine. Let the back of your neck rise as if drawn by a string. You have good arms, but your hands get in the way. They say if you could swing a club without hands, you’d be better off. Put all things from your mind. For now, just grab the club any old way.”
Paul hit the next shot long. A boy gathering golf balls and putting them in a red bucket watched it go by.
“And that is what I’m talking about,” said Robin.
“I came from Connecticut looking for you,” said Paul.
“Well,” said Robin. Her eyes struggled to maintain their bland and friendly gaze. “That’s flattering.”
She showed him the way to hold a club, with the index finger of the left hand hooked around the little finger of the right. He swung the club and missed entirely.
“Was your name ever Kim?”
“Once upon a time,” she said. “But I hated it. It’s so flat, don’t you think?”
“Everyone’s name sounds strange to that person.”
“Kim,” she said. “Kim. It just sits there. What sort of parents would call their child Kim?”
“I don’t really want to learn golf.”
“This is a golf course.”
“I lived in a house on a lake,” said Paul. “This was the house where you were born. I encountered your mother — I guess ‘encounter’ is the word —- and she wanted to know that you were all right.”
Robin sat on a bench next to a ball-washing stand. “You’re not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be.”
“Who are you really? A lawyer? What’s going on?”
Paul sat beside her on the bench. “A journalist.”
“I have no quotes to give you.”
“Don’t want any,” said Paul. “I’ve only come to find out how you are.”
“I’m a golfer,” she said despondently They sat watching the boy wandering from ball to ball with his red bucket. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“And I don’t know what else to ask.”
“Some journalist you are.”
“I’m a bad journalist. One of the very worst.”
“In Ohio the reporters would dog me all over the locker room. ‘I got my ass kicked,’ I would say. ‘My clubs are fucked.’ And they would write, ‘“I took a drubbing,” she said. “My clubs are nonsense.”’ It was crazy. I would never say ‘drubbing’ even if I had taken one.”
“But you won big matches.”
“It’s true,” she said. “My mother? My mother lives in Toledo. And if you mean my mother by birth, she’s dead. She died younger than I am now.”
“I have a letter she wrote you.”
“I’ve already read it,” said Robin. “She was a very messed-up person. I hate to say it, but what happened was probably lucky for me. Really, the whole ugly thing in the long run. I had a beautiful childhood in Toledo. My parents loved me because they couldn’t have kids of their own. I rode horses. We had an in-ground pool. My life was going from course to course, and everyone loved me. I never wondered about my real parents. I never had this anxiety everyone talks about. I loved the sun. I never wanted to go on some journey to find everything out.”
“That’s fair.”
“What do we do now?”
“We could go on with the lesson,” said Paul.
“Take the club.”
He stood at the tee again with his fingers locked over the leather grip. “It’s like I can’t feel it.”
“You’ll get over that,” said Robin. “Imagine a sheet of glass, a picture window, next to the ball. This helps a lot of people. And you want to get the club head as close to the glass as you can without breaking it.”
Paul raised the club and stopped. “I don’t get it,” he said. “If there’s glass in front of the ball, and I swing, how can I help but break it?”
“No,” said Robin. “Beside the ball. Let me show you.” She knelt on the far side of the tee and raised her hands with outstretched fingers. “If you imagine a line connecting your right foot and your left, and pointing in the direction you want the ball to go, the glass runs parallel to that line.”
“Yeah?”
“This is the glass. O.K.? My hands are the g
lass.”
The sailors from Northern Ireland returned to Kirkmadrine three days later. In a pub they invited Paul to join a card game. It had rained all night but now the sunlight came through the windows and across the copper surface of the bar. The sailors’ names were Kern, Leland, and Jerry. Kern wore a flat cap, Leland had a beard, and Jerry was short. The game was closely played and took half the afternoon. Jerry could shuffle cards with either hand. Paul was up twenty-seven pounds when the men invited him on a sail down the Mull of Culloden.
The four of them motored from the dock in an orange Zodiac inflatable. While boarding the sailboat Paul took care not to fall in the water lest he sink. The wind was a concern. There was hardly enough of it. While showing Paul how to use a cam cleat, Leland said he did not remember it being this calm in two fortnights. The cam cleat was a technologically satisfying device made of two toothed and teardrop jaws that secured the jib sheet and the kicking strap and other lines of significance. After seeing how the cam cleat operated, Paul worked his way around the boat looking for stray lines. “Want me to cleat this?” he would say.
The boat glided past the breakwater, and Paul looked back at the round harbor and the ring of houses hugging it. When the boat was farther along, he saw the cliffs and then the castle, with its black spires and grassy windows.
Leland pointed away from the coast, at a low outcropping of land with gnarled trees and white buildings. “Do you know those islands?” he said. “That’s Tulloch and that’s Kail.”
“I see one,” said Paul.
“There are two,” said Kern, who worked the tiller with one hand while bracing the other against the gunnel. “Kail’s behind Tulloch.”
Leland tugged the beard beneath his chin. They were all seated in the cockpit. “Tulloch has a monastery. There’s a healing spring, but for the most part they watch television.”
“Never try to draw a monk away from a televised tennis match,” said Kern. “It’s like trying to take lamb chops from a tiger.”
Jerry produced a tin of chewing tobacco, put some in his mouth, and squinted at the instrument panel on the cabin wall. He tapped one of four glass dials with a knuckle. “We should turn on the engine if this is all we can manage.”
“I don’t like turning on the engine,” said Kern.
“We’ll have trouble in the race,” said Jerry
“And if I wanted to, it’s out of fuel.”
“We’re going to race?” said Paul.
“No, no,” said Leland. “It’s a point, right up there, where currents converge.”
The wind moved drowsily, directionless, and the boat coasted into the rough water at the southern tip of Tulloch. The transition seemed to happen immediately, as if a line had been crossed. The waves churned, the sail luffed, and the boom lifted and fell, making the stays at one moment slack and the next taut to the point of breaking, or so it seemed. Meanwhile, the boat was turning gradually sideways.
Kern laughed and drew in the mainsheet, which threaded through a series of pulleys. “Paul,” he said, “what wind there is, we can’t catch, with the boom flying about.”
“I understand that,” said Paul.
“I want you to go up there.”
“Where’s that?”
“On the boom.”
“Really?” said Paul. “Why?”
“For the weight,” said Kern. “I need Jerry and Leland down here. There’s no great trick involved. You sit with your back to the sail. It’s just like a hammock or a comfortable chair.”
“For how long?” said Paul.
“Until we get going.”
Paul gripped a wooden handrail and climbed on top of the cabin. “Wait,” said Jerry. He tossed a life jacket to Paul. “Don’t forget your waistcoat,” he said.
At the mast, where the foot of the mainsail drew nearest to the bulkhead, Paul placed two hands on the boom, hoisted himself as one would onto a balance beam, turned, and dropped back against the sail.
He looked at Kern, but Kern was staring now at the rocky shore of Tulloch, which seemed to be drawing closer. “Like this?” said Paul.
“What?” he said, looking up. “Move aft! Come back! You’ve no leverage there.”
A sheet of water broke over the bow and rained down. Paul worked his way back along the boom. With the cabin no longer beneath his feet, he rode well above the deck, looking down at the sailors. Jerry gave a silver handle to Leland, who fit it into a winch and began turning.
“What keeps me from swinging over the water?” Paul shouted.
Leland watched the currents. “Will of God,” he said.
“Do you do this all the time?”
“No! Not really!”
Paul considered the situation, taking comfort in the fact that if he were thrown from the boom, it would be an open question whether he would be better off landing in the water or in the boat, where he might strike his head against some fitting.
“Look,” called Jerry. “It’s a monk.” A figure moved among the houses on the island.
“Hello, Father!” yelled Leland.
“Are we getting anywhere?” said Paul.
“Making progress,” said Kern. He stood at the tiller and peered down the length of the boat. “Paul, I think I want you to come down now.”
“Meaning, to the deck?”
“I wouldn’t wait, either.”
Paul slid back toward the mast, and as his sneakers touched the cabin, the boat dropped away from him. By all evidence, they had sailed off the end of the sea. The bow, or perhaps the entire boat, fell for an amazingly long time. Then water slammed the hull and the boom or the mast or the stays or something cracked like a cannon. Paul felt as he sometimes did during the thunderous initial climb of flight: if he must die, then best to go in spectacle, leaving nothing but scraps.
Then he found himself beside the companion hatch and holding the wooden rail. The boat headed in a substantially different direction than it had been going east instead of south, but at least it was still floating, and the wiry trees of the Tulloch coast receded over the rough water.
“I believe we’ll go this way for a while,” said Kern. “Your timing could not have been better, Paul. Any later and you would have been watching Martina Hingis with the monks.”
“You should have warned me,” said Paul.
“I did warn you.”
“Is it something you would have wanted to know?” said Leland.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to know that,” said Jerry.
“And how to phrase it?” said Leland. “‘Say, stranger, the boat is about to be shaken like a stick in the mouth of a huge dog.’”
“It would have alarmed you beyond what is warranted,” said Jerry.
“Still, I take responsibility,” said Kern.
Paul hired Robin to golf with him on the bank holiday in August. He liked carrying clubs, resting his arm on the bag, and judging when to pull the flag from the hole, but beyond these formal matters his play was fundamentally unsound. Robin used left-handed dubs, though she was right-handed, in an effort to make it more of a match. Still, by the time they had reached the fifth tee, she was eleven strokes up.
“Does it demoralize you to be losing to a woman golfing left-handed?” she said.
“It didn’t until you mentioned it.”
She cupped her jaw in her hands. “These wisdom teeth are bugging me,” she said.
The fifth hole was a par three that fell sharply from the tee. Paul kept his head down, stayed mindful of the imaginary glass and the imaginary string and all of the other phantom junk she had planted in his mind, and socked the ball onto the green. Robin duplicated his shot, and they started down the path from the tee. They walked briskly and had already played through two foursomes who got to stand in severe witness of Paul’s unpred
ictable tee shots. Now he hurried along watching as a man on a parallel fairway had the head of his club fly off on the follow-through.
The sporting mismatch seemed to reflect the absurdity of his mission to Kirkmadrine. He had expected to find Linda’s daughter destitute, stick thin, a limping junkie, a morbid clerk with dark rings around her eyes. Instead, she stalked the fairways with strong bronze legs beneath a swinging green skirt, she drove the ball with force and ambidexterity and she regarded her strange origin as a mild curiosity. After the solid tee shot, he four-putted the fifth hole.
“Many rats catch the cat,” said Robin.
“Did you see that guy on the other hole?” said Paul. “His club came apart.”
“Oh, Paul,” she said. “I wouldn’t tell that. In Scotland we don’t repeat such stories.”
25
Robin had two molars pulled by a dental surgeon named McTawse, whose office was in Ochterfail, about ten miles away Paul drove her there and waited in a room with red wallpaper while the surgery took place. He went up to a window in the wall to ask the nurse if there would be plenty of painkillers for Robin when she was done. The nurse said sternly that he needn’t worry, that Dr. McTawse would medicate her according to her needs. Seven diplomas hung on the wall — a defensively high number of diplomas, to Paul’s way of thinking. A shoebox held free tickets to a play called Pain of Youth, and Paul took two. A children’s corner of the waiting room offered the adventure books of the Skelmorlie Twins, Graham and Tana, and a battery-powered ice floe on which plastic penguins climbed an escalator and slid down a curved chute. This was a clever setup, and he watched the penguins tottering along in lock step for some time before switching them off and picking up the Ochterfail Times, the front page of which featured a review of the Lipizzan stallions’ SRO appearance in Oban on Friday last. He wondered how many hundreds of stallions qualified as Lipizzans, or if, in addition to their undeniable jumping talents, which were richly described here, the horses had the ability to be in all places at all times. The story compared their graceful antics to those of the mythical kelpie or river horse — a nice touch that he had not had at his disposal back in Ashland, for he had never heard of kelpies until this moment.