by J M Gregson
‘A one-off, George! A flash in the pan. You know my game well enough!’ said Harrington modestly. But his expression denied the words: the realism which informed his business decisions deserted him as soon as he got hold of a club, so that he thought his finest shots represented his normal game, instead of recognising them as the splendid aberrations they were. In other words, he was a typical golfer. There is no game in which hope so consistently outstrips performance.
Tony Nash produced the longest drive of the four at the seventeenth, as befitted his broad shoulders and tender years: he was a mere forty-two, with hair long and luxuriant enough to provoke heavy-handed jokes about barbers’ estimates around golf clubs, those bastions of sartorial conservatism. He thinned his second shot, but it ran low and straight, bouncing merrily on to the green while he tried not to catch the eye of Sandy Munro. He holed the putt for an unlikely three; an afternoon which had been full of frustration for him suddenly seemed idyllic.
All square. They climbed the eighteenth’s steep elevation to the clubhouse and watched Sandy Munro almost win the match with a curling putt which lipped the hole but refused to drop. A halved match, then. They shook hands, going through a ritual ridiculous in friends who had been together for two days and planned to be so for another three.
Telling each other it was the right result, the four men stood contentedly for a moment beside the clubhouse, able for the first time now to give their full attention to the appealing scene below them. The ground dropped away steeply, so that they could see many of the last nine holes they had just played. Other golfers were visible at various stages of their rounds, but they were too distant for their voices to disturb the serenity of a scene which had changed little for centuries.
A field of oil-seed rape seemed in the evening light an even more vivid yellow; the only moving things visible in the wide panorama on the other side of the river were a highly animated black Labrador and its less energetic master. From a distant cottage, a thin blue line of smoke rose straight as a pole towards the blue above. The river was a central feature in a landscape as balanced as if it had been planned by a painter. From this height, its graceful course could be followed for miles. At its widest bend, the descending sun lit its surface with a golden fire; elsewhere, it was as dark and quiet as if it had been frozen in a photograph.
The Wye Castle Golf and Leisure Complex boasted in its brochure that many of its rooms looked out over the course and the river. In one of these, a striking red-haired woman watched unseen what was happening below her. The window commanded an excellent view of the pastoral English scene, but she had eyes only for the four men on the last green. As they left the course and moved to stow away their trolleys and clubs, she watched them intently.
It was impossible to have any idea which of the four in particular commanded her unblinking gaze. What was unmistakable was the hatred, harsh and undiluted, with which she watched him.
Chapter 2
The building at the centre of the Wye Castle complex was not a castle, of course. The occasional visitor arrived and departed feeling that the Wars of the Roses had probably clashed around these walls and Cromwell’s cannons must surely have been discharged from the valley below, but few were as naïve as that.
It was no more than a pleasant eighteenth-century mansion, distinguished chiefly by the superb position of its escarpment above the river. The nineteenth-century owner, under the influence of the medievalism of the romantic poets and the more questionable suggestions of the Gothic novel, had added the castellations and the random turrets. These not only ruined the original Georgian simplicity of the design but caused expensive problems of maintenance, once the estate ceased to employ its own builders and carpenters and men ceased to be cheaper than horses to maintain.
Floodlit against a starry sky, the ivy-clad elevations of this mongrel building had a brooding menace that suggested Psycho more than Childe Roland. But the interior was cheerful enough. Well-lit and warm behind its velvet curtains, with the ubiquitous musak discreetly low, the bars and dining-room felt welcoming enough, even though in May they were almost empty.
The arrival of Guy Harrington’s party, full of group confidence and determined bonhomie, made the impact of a much larger presence upon this quiet place. It was Harrington, well accustomed to authority, who took control, seeing to the seating of the ladies and discussing the choice of wine with the air of a host. If there was any resentment among his audience, there was no visible sign of it: perhaps they were happy to see someone with much experience of these things taking control on their behalf. Or perhaps, after a full day of physical activity, they were enjoying that delicious lassitude that takes over at the prospect of good food and pleasant company.
The two women felt at least as tired as the four men. Sightseeing can be more exhausting than golf. And when you cannot quite agree what you wish to see, and yet are too polite to go your separate ways, you end up doing too much. They had spent two absorbing hours in the Cathedral at Gloucester, guided round its ancient glories by a well-mounted exhibition of its history. Alison Munro could have spent much longer, but her friend had been impatient to visit the shops, where they had spent most of an afternoon which had begun to seem interminable. She had spent the last hour of it studying a beguiling square of blue sky through the single high window of a fitting room, while Meg Peters tried on a succession of dresses and rejected them all.
Alison was the only wife there. Two of the other men had wives, but they had opted out of the boozy gaiety and interminable golf talk and stayed at home; perhaps they felt that a single wife in attendance was sentry enough to ensure propriety in their men. Alison eased off her elegant high-heeled shoes beneath the table, careful not to play unwitting footsy with any hopeful male. She let her smile glitter freely at some minor witticism from her left. But it was the liberation of her throbbing feet which almost made her grunt with unladylike relief.
From her name, she should have been as Scottish as her husband, but she was pure English for as far back as anyone could trace, which was at least two centuries of Berkshire gentry. Her mother, having to cope with a surname of Browne, which even the additional ‘e’ could scarcely dignify, had merely thought the sound of the name Alison attractive and the three syllables a suitable counterbalance to the surname.
Alison Munro had never needed to rely upon her name for interest. With the type of beauty that used to be characterised as that of an English rose and a seat on a horse as proud as any queen’s, she had turned many a rich head, and even several titled ones. When she had chosen to throw in her lot with the physically undistinguished and conversationally inept young engineer from Perthshire, who had never been inside anything so grand as a drawing-room before he met her, there had been much shaking of heads. But those heads had underestimated both of them.
She flashed a conspiratorial smile at Sandy, two places away from her at the end of the table. Harrington, who had been relishing the gloss of her jet-black hair, sculpted so becomingly round that poised head, and wondering if its lustre could owe anything at all to the artifice of the bottle, intercepted the look and felt his intrusion. How boring goodness was, he thought; how much more interesting and varied were the possibilities of old-fashioned sin.
Whether it was this thought which prompted him to look at the other woman in the party, he was not sure. Meg Peters certainly provided a physical contrast. She was nine years younger than Alison’s forty-three, slim and elegant, conscious of her powers. Her features had not the older woman’s classical regularity. But she had soft green eyes of proven potency; at close quarters they were almost hypnotic when she chose that they should be. Her most remarkable feature from any greater distance was her hair. Long and luxuriant, it was a most remarkable chestnut red, seeming to change its hue and its density as the light caught it at different angles.
She was here with Tony Nash. Both had been married before: she was divorced, he was separated. Nash had had a bad day on the golf course, until his la
te flowering, and there had been male sympathy for him there. As he came into the room with Meg Peters, there was male envy.
Harrington and Goodman had single rooms, but they had met for a Scotch before dinner. Guy had enlarged enviously upon the ‘wall to wall crumpet’ denied to them and supposedly enjoyed by their companions. Goodman had smiled weakly and retired to ring his wife before the meal.
The lighting around the tables was designed to flatter beauty past its first bloom, though these two women scarcely needed its aid. There was just enough illumination through pink shading to supplement the candles the waiter lit as they studied the menu. Soft light glittered on glass and cutlery, adding to the pleasurable anticipation already induced by sharp appetite. With the restaurant so quiet, they accepted George Goodman’s suggestion to avoid the more exotic items unless they were prepared to accept the dubious flavours of the deep freeze. The beef proved good; the claret, if not the finest, was acceptable enough at the price. For a while, the conversation grew sporadic as the knives worked busily and the bottles and vegetable dishes did the rounds.
No one was quite sure afterwards how the row began. There were separate conversations around the table, which perhaps distracted from the conflagration until it had burst into full flame. The first indication that most of them had of trouble was Tony Nash’s melodramatic, ‘Either you take that back immediately or you’ll be sorry!’
It was so much of a cliché that some of them thought at first it was mere parody. It took Nash’s harsh, uneven breathing to convince them that the words were serious. In the sudden, embarrassed silence which fell upon the table, it sounded unnaturally loud, announcing his emotion more clearly than his words.
Harrington’s laugh took a second too long to come. When it did, it sounded as stagey as the younger man’s challenge. Like a chuckle from Mr Punch as he raised his stick, it was aimed at the audience rather than his victim. His smoothly jowled face was florid, almost purple in the rosy light. How much was due to sun and fresh air, how much to wine and emotion, none of them could have said at that moment. He said, ‘Oh, come on, Tony, don’t be stupid! You know perfectly well I was joking.’ His voice was just unsteady enough for his words to lose conviction.
‘I know damn well you weren’t! And so do you!’ Nash’s anger gave the banal words a weight they should not have had. Not a dignity: men brawling in a restaurant can never have that. But his blazing sense of grievance gave him an odd kind of integrity: for the first time that any of his audience could remember, he was speaking to the older man without the awareness of him as an employer.
Meg Peters put her hand softly on top of Nash’s broader one as she saw it quivering with rage. ‘Let it go, Tony,’ she said quietly. So the insult, whatever it had been, had been to her. Alison Munro was assailed by the uncharitable but accurate female reaction that Meg was a woman well able to look after herself. How ridiculous and impractical these men became once they began to strike poses!
Nash shook his lover’s hand aside almost angrily, as if it were an insect disturbing his concentration. For a moment the two men glared at each other angrily, like boys in a school playground. Then the older man shrugged. ‘If you are annoyed, Tony, of course I withdraw my remark. I’m sure the fair Meg understands that no offence was intended.’ He turned upon Ms Peters a smile that was meant to be dazzling but which emerged in its extravagance as merely false.
The others seized on the opportunity to end an embarrassing incident. Soothing words were applied like ointment; within two minutes, the buzz of different conversations was resumed emolliently around the big table. The waiters went back into the kitchen to discuss the tensions of Home Counties emotions with the chef. The two other diners in the room resumed their whispered conversation and pretended they had not even noticed the cabaret in the centre of the room. Only Tony Nash, staring unseeing at his dessert, obstinately preserved the moment the others had banished.
By the time they retired to the adjoining lounge for coffee, the atmosphere was almost restored. Nash, treasuring his grievance in silence, replying with monosyllables to those who sought to divert him, appeared an unlikely, even a slightly ridiculous champion. This was partly because his damsel seemed far too sophisticated to be in any real distress. Watching Meg Peters smiling and unruffled, telling against herself the story of her ridiculous indecision over dresses earlier in the day, it was difficult to see her as vulnerable enough to necessitate the raw passion of Nash’s recent defence.
Later, replete with good food and wine, they sat with liqueurs on the flat roof at the top of the old building. It was a still, velvety night, which they were reluctant to leave. The stars and a slim crescent of moon meant that they could just catch the great curve of the river, silver in the distance as it had been since before the days of man. As if cued by the balmy warmth, a nightingale sang below them in the woods by the river, the remote, ethereal beauty of its notes stilling the sporadic exchanges of the human company above.
When they at last broke up, it was after midnight. Sandy Munro, who had rarely sat still for so long at a stretch, strolled alone through the night down the Wye Castle drive to the distant gates. The drive was almost three-quarters of a mile long; his practical mind diverted itself for a while with the cost of resurfacing it. For much of its length it was flanked by an avenue of two-hundred-year-old limes. Towards the gates, there was some undergrowth beneath these; the myriad scratchings of nocturnal wild life as he approached were unnaturally loud in the prevailing silence.
He strolled over to the nearest green. He had been on thousands of golf greens in the last forty years, but never one by moonlight. The turf was soft as carpet beneath his feet, seeming in this light even more immaculately manicured than by day. The innocent place, so obviously man-made amid the natural features dimly visible all around him, seemed in its artificial rectitude almost threatening: it had the groomed, eerie stillness of a well-kept grave. With the thought, he turned and walked more briskly back towards the dark outlines of the main house and the lower shadows of its newly built accommodation lodges.
As he entered the gravelled courtyard which was surrounded by the apartments, he heard the muffled sound of voices raised in argument. The flat roof was deserted now; the voices came from somewhere beneath it. At first, he thought Harrington and Nash had renewed their quarrel, and his spirits drooped at the thought of the implications for the rest of their week here. Then it seemed to him that the voices were male and female. He wondered if Meg Peters and Tony Nash were arguing about the vehemence of his reaction earlier in the evening. But there were other people staying here as well as their party, he reminded himself.
He let himself quietly into his own room. To his surprise, it was empty. He hardly realised how much he relied on the comforting presence of his wife in all he did; perhaps he did not want to acknowledge such dependence. But he was not seriously disturbed.
Alison’s absence did not at the time seem significant.
Chapter 3
TUESDAY
George Goodman had a disturbed night.
Although it had been late when he crept between the sheets, he woke from an uneasy sleep to the sound of the dawn chorus. It began with a solitary thrush and swelled to a massive avian outburst as the different species added their contributions to the rich and varied sound, and he heard every detail. He knew now that he had overdone himself; he wasn’t as young as he used to be. On those mournful thoughts, he turned away from the light and tried desperately to sleep.
Two hours later he accepted dolefully that there was no more rest for him. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then padded through his first arthritic groans to the thin flowered curtains, drew them back, and surveyed the scene. Clear blue sky; the sun invisible somewhere to his right, but gilding the trees with its low morning rays. No human presence that he could see; rabbits busy at their eccentric play on the edge of the woods a hundred and fifty yards away. Whether God was in his heaven was debatable, but all seemed well in
what he could see of the world.
He set the electric kettle in the corner of the room to make tea, then shaved carefully with soap and water in the neat little bathroom. He looked with some distaste at the bishop’s face that others found so benign. He had not always looked like this. It was middle age which had whitened his hair and tonsured his dome: within this benign clerical figure he felt a lively and lustful young blood trying ineffectively to avoid eclipse. Why couldn’t the mind and the body keep more effective step with each other on their march through life? He sipped his tea and wondered how many more springs he would see.
It was an unwelcome reflection, arriving unannounced to a mind that had not prepared defences against it. But at least it prompted him into activity, perhaps in an attempt to keep unwelcome reflections at bay. Through his window, he caught a glimpse of the most unlikely early riser in their party. With an abstracted air, Tony Nash, his yellow hair in uncharacteristic disarray, was wandering towards the course and the low eastern sun.
Goodman went outside and sniffed the cool, clear air appreciatively. This was always the best time of day in spring and summer—once one had made the effort to get up and dressed. His days as a village boy in Norfolk came vividly back to him. Was it really half a century since those days when he had trailed behind farm labourers, who had seemed to his wide small boy’s eyes so magnificently, impossibly strong?
He stalked his man softly, enjoying seeing him start when he called from ten yards or so behind him, ‘Glad to see someone else couldn’t sleep either!’
Tony Nash looked even worse than George felt. His eyes were dark with lack of sleep beneath the dishevelled hair, his clothing in uncharacteristic disarray. He followed Goodman’s gaze, looked down and tucked away the light blue leisure shirt that was half in and half out of the band of his trousers. ‘Thought for a moment my flies must be undone!’ he said.