“We don’t know that they did sell the golf course.”
“Well, somebody did. If it belonged to the village, and now it doesn’t, somebody had to.”
“And then Winifred Martin spilled the beans, while trying to pretend it was a mistake.”
“Of course; her job’s at stake. At the same time, she didn’t want to offend the councillors. Who are the councillors, by the way? Are they golfers?”
“No. At least, I’ve never seen any of them out on the golf course. Their names, not that you care, Klovack, are Morrison, Ferguson, and Lamont. Sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it? All men, of course. Lamont is a retired zoology prof, who keeps his beetles, thousands of them, in a big case in the living room. Once, his son-in-law, for a joke, hauled a few dozen of them over to his place and switched them for most of the canapés his wife had laid out for a cocktail party. Mrs. Humphrey, the first guest to stroll into the den after the switch was made, fainted and keeled over face-first into the salmon mousse.”
“I don’t care,” said Hanna. “Get on with the councillors. What do they do?”
“Nothing much. Freddy Tompkins, the deputy reeve, looks after things, mostly, and gets the councillors to okay whatever he’s done after he’s done it. He’s an old boy, well into his seventies, and some sort of relation by marriage to the Flannery clan. He’s been the deputy reeve for as long as I can remember. He used to be called the reeve, but got demoted somehow by the county bureaucrats, who reckoned that, with a permanent population of forty-six, we didn’t rate a whole reeve. The three councillors have been around quite a while, too; we have an election only about once every twenty years. Usually, they just let their names stand and go in by acclamation.”
“Well, there’s going to be an election next time, unless this gang has got a pretty good explanation as to why they suddenly all took off in the middle of this mess.”
“Perhaps they’re all attending a meeting of the Ontario Municipal Board somewhere.”
“Then the note would say so, wouldn’t it? That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Hmm, you have a point. Here, help me shift this chaise longue so I can get at this next bit of wall.”
“Ah, yes, this is the very chaise longue, is it not, where Blossom Brains was sunning herself the other day? Maybe you should paint a sign for it, “Eyeball Alert” or something like that. Say, Carlton . . .”
“Mm. Here, less talking, more heaving.”
“Do you really like Amelia?”
“She strikes me as a very vivacious and attractive young woman.”
“Oh, she’s got great boobs, I grant you that, but what I mean is, do you, you know, like her?”
“What’s it to you?”
The young shrimp stiffened and gave me The Glare, while I cursed myself inwardly. I had blown it again, hadn’t I? I had.
“Well, keeping this strictly on a professional basis, you big creep, you may be interested to know that I have been given another reporting assignment.”
“You have? By whom? The human haircut?”
“No. The funny thing is, I haven’t heard a thing from Peter Duke since he stuck us—I mean, me—with the lunch bill. I left a message for him at the hotel, but no answer, and his show airs Sunday night.”
“Has he got enough to carry an item?”
“Oh, Lord, yes. You know television; he doesn’t need any information, just pictures. You haven’t asked me what the new assignment is.”
“That’s because I’ve already guessed.”
“Okay, smarty, what is it?”
“Tommy Macklin has assigned you to cover the Martini Classic. Words and pictures.”
“How in the world did you know that?”
“Elementary, my dear Klovack. It takes place tomorrow, there is always a foursome from the paper involved, Tommy loves to see his name and ugly phiz in print, and I won’t be writing the story, so you will.”
“Right, on every count. I’m impressed.”
“I wonder who Tommy’s going to get to take my place on the Lancer foursome? The ad guy, Harry Hibbs, Mrs. Post, Tommy, and I usually enter for the paper,” I explained, “but Harry’s away on holidays, so the only golfers left in the office are you and Mrs. Post and Tommy.”
“He asked Olga Kratzmyer.”
“And she told him to take a hike?”
“No, she said, okay, as long as she got a day off for working on Saturday afternoon, and that he clearly understood that she didn’t know the first thing about golf.”
“Golf is not the game he would have in mind if he ever got Olga into the rough.”
“Apparently Mrs. Macklin felt the same way, so that was vetoed. I was sort of hoping,” her voice dropped and she gave me the full treatment with her eyes, “that you’d see your way clear to playing with us.”
“Me? Why should I? I don’t even work for the paper anymore.”
“Just for the fun of it?”
“Fun, hah! This is the Martini Classic.”
“Explain that. What is the Martini Classic?”
I had started scraping, but I lowered the scraper and raised by eyebrows at Hanna. “You mean, Tommy didn’t tell you?”
“No. I assumed it was some kind of special golf game.”
“Oh, it’s special, all right. It’s a kind of Drunk’s Progress we hold every year at the Bosky Dell course. A lot of people from Silver Falls play in it, but the Classic started here, and stays here. You play in foursomes, for low score on each hole. Whoever wins the hole in each foursome has to drink a Martini—you come equipped with large batches of the booze in your golf cart—and everybody else has to put a buck in the pot. The money all goes to charity, and the booze goes down the hatch. Then you go on to the next hole, and so on. Of course, the better golfers get tight faster, so, by the end of about fifteen holes, everybody’s oiled to a fare-thee-well. There’s usually a fistfight, a few screaming matches, and a lot of throwing up. It is,” I concluded, “a barrel of laughs.”
“And you write about this in the newspaper?”
“A somewhat sanitized version appears in print; we present the tournament as a frolicksome afternoon of fun and sport, with charity as the big winner. We leave out the fistfights and the throwing up. One year, when Mrs. Post got squiffed and called the deputy reeve a sententious old poop before laying her three iron across his trouser seat, I covered the entire incident by condensing it into a single phrase that referred to the give and take of sporting competition.”
“How do you stay sober enough to report on it?”
“Oh, that part’s easy. I make sure I lose every hole, no matter what.”
“I see. You mean, you just play your usual game.”
Well, I’d been asking for it, hadn’t I?
“Just kidding, Carlton, honest. Well, how about it?”
“How about what?”
“Will you play? For me?”
Had the question been, “Will you swallow a five iron, and jump off a bridge into a pool of flaming oil while carrying a bomb under each arm for me?” the answer would have been the same.
“Oh, all right. I guess it won’t hurt me, one more time.”
So it was arranged that I would join the Lancer foursome the next afternoon, with a tee-off time of 4:10 p.m., which would put us in the second group to play, and I was just about to ask Hanna if she was sure she remembered what I had shown her about the interlocking grip, when we heard the slap-slap of sandals on cement, and around the corner came Amelia Jowett, dressed in about five square inches of cloth, as usual, to cover the strategic areas, and a square yard of red kerchief on her head.
“Hey, you two,” she said, in a voice far from her usual honeyed tones. “Up to the house right away. My great-uncle wants to see you.”
Chapter 16
The living room of the Jowett joint is about for
ty feet long and thirty feet wide, with three walls sheathed in pine—the other is all windows, looking out on the lawns that lead down to the lake. About halfway to the cathedral ceiling, which is at least sixteen feet high, huge wooden beams are slung across at ten-foot intervals. The floor is of tamarack, and the walls are decorated, here and there, with the heads of various big-game animals, looking faintly reproachful as they gaze out into the room. Think of the main hall of a baronial manse in Germany, and you’ll get the general idea. Massive. Expensive. Uncomfortable. The furnishings are, as we say in House and Garden, eclectic; a three-foot-high Inuit carving in the beautiful blue-green stone of Belcher Island, depicting a hunter about to plunge his spear into a seal, confronts a full-scale, cigar-store wooden Indian, wearing a headband advising the onlooker to smoke Havanas. In the middle of one wall there are ranged a collection of various sharp instruments: an assegi from South Africa, a stiletto, a couple of machetes, and a war-boomerang from Australia. Under these is a small, printed notice straight from the 1960s—“Make Love, Not War.”
In front of the huge stone fireplace at the far end of the room, where Conrad Jowett was fooling around with a poker, lay the skin of a giant polar bear, with the head still attached and the mouth opened, as if the dentist had just murmured, “Wider, please.” Once, on an earlier visit, I had asked Pa Jowett if this beast was one of his own trophies, and he said, Yes. He’d potted it at Eaton’s, with a gold Mastercard. And he laughed, a noise like stones pouring down a tin trough.
He didn’t look much like laughing now, as Amelia hustled us into the presence. A maid, complete with black uniform and white trim, scuttled away.
“Hmmph,” he growled. “Withers. Time you got here.”
I introduced Hanna as a colleague, pardon, former colleague, at the Lancer. “We know,” he said. “Sit,” he added, and gestured with his poker to a pair of chairs ranged on one side of the fireplace.
Hanna gave him one of her looks—she is not used to, and doesn’t like, being treated like a serf—but he didn’t even see it. We sat. Old man Jowett didn’t; instead, he began to pace up and down in front of the fireplace—there was a huge fire blazing away, quite unnecessarily on such a warm, early autumn day—swinging his poker. He was an impressive-looking gent, you had to give him that: my height, or perhaps an inch taller, with a massive girth sheathed in a dark blue business suit. He must have arrived from, or been heading for, the city of Toronto. White whiskers covered most of his face, and steel-blue eyes peered fiercely out from under a pair of eyebrows of the size and shape of window ledges.
We sat there for a minute or two, Jowett pacing, Hanna fidgeting, Amelia hovering, and self brooding, before the old man suddenly poked his implement at Amelia.
“You,” he said. “Beat it.”
Amelia scuttled away. I could hear a clock in the background, probably the huge grandfather clock on the main staircase upstairs behind me, and the fire crackling, and the solid thump of Jowett’s massive brogues on the late, great polar bear. I finally decided to break the silence; I could see that, if I didn’t, Hanna would, and I didn’t want that.
“For whom are we waiting?” I said, perfectly grammatical, you understand, and Hanna gave a whoop.
“For whom?” she cackled.
“Robinson,” the old man said. He gave Hanna a silencing glower, and went back to pacing.
Hanna leaned down and picked up a magazine from a pile on the lower shelf of a coffee table beside her; what she drew out was a copy of Canadian Business with a cover photo of Old Man Jowett and the caption “Conrad Jowett: Do Not Disturb, Genius at Work.” There were about fifty copies of this under the table, and nothing else to read at all. Hanna did not seem much impressed, gave it a quick flip, and slid it back on top of the pile.
We went back to stage one, Jowett pacing, us sitting. I suddenly realized that I had to go to the bathroom—tension always catches me short—and I was trying to work up my nerve to raise the subject, or my hand for permission, when, suddenly, Hanna jumped up.
“Well, goodbye all,” she said, and started for the door leading to the wide front porch, through which we had originally entered the presence.
“Here,” grumbled old man Jowett. “Get back here.”
Hanna stopped, turned around, looked him up and down, and said, in a very flat, impersonal voice, “Piss on you.”
I leapt up. “Mr. Jowett,” I gibbered, “she didn’t mean . . . Hanna, you don’t . . .” I glowered at the fuming female, and tried to subdue her with the sheer force of my personality, as projected through glares and hand-waves. You can guess how well I succeeded.
“You, too,” said Hanna, and turned towards the porch door once more. I implored, “Hanna, for Pete’s sake . . .”
Suddenly Jowett laughed, and the stones came rolling down the tin again.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I have been unpardonably rude. My dear young lady . . .”
“I am not,” Hanna hissed, “your dear young lady.”
“No, no, of course not. Well, then,” Jowett was hastening to Hanna’s side, one hand held out in propitiation, “young lady . . . No? Young woman. Got it right finally, have I? You will have to forgive me. You, too, Carlton, of course. So many things on my mind. Please, I beg of you, please do come back and sit down. We’ll have a cup of coffee. Robinson won’t be a minute, I assure you, and you will want to hear what he has to say.”
He had Hanna by the elbow now, and was ushering her back, with great bows and flourishes, to her chair. She sat down again, looking slightly mollified, but still ready to kick up if necessary, and Old Man Jowett thundered out the door on one side of the fireplace, which leads to the kitchen. We could hear him bellowing for coffee. Even the thought of it gave my bladder the willies.
“Cover for me,” I said, and dashed up the big staircase, past the grandfather clock, to a long hall on the second floor. There had to be a john somewhere here.
There was, with the door invitingly open, about halfway down the hall. I rushed gratefully in. Surprising, the way the rich live; generic toilet paper in the loo.
When I came down the stairs a few moments later, Old Man Jowett and Hanna were chatting away like a couple of sailors on shore leave, over a tray loaded down with a silver service, Royal Doulton china, and about four kinds of coffee cake. I paused on the stairway to drink in the scene. Along the wall on my right were family portraits of what I took to be the Jowett clan. There seemed to be shoals of them, all handsome, tough-looking tycoon types, with presentation wives, all dolled up, and gaggles of children. “Ah, Carlton,” Conrad Jowett had spotted me. “Your coffee is poured.”
As I clumped down to join the others, the old boy explained to Hanna, “Carlton has just been visiting the Rogue’s Gallery.” Rich chuckle. “Portraits of my family. The very ones, in fact, which appeared in that rather flattering article I saw you perusing in Canadian Business. You must take a copy with you. Plenty more where that came from.”
And the old boy simpered as he dug down and produced a copy, which he thrust into Hanna’s hand. She gave it to me.
“Carlton just loves magazines,” she said.
We were settling down for a cosy little cup, when the door on the other side of the fireplace opened, very softly, and Robinson appeared. He sidled into the room, carrying a briefcase. He and Conrad exchanged glances, and Robinson gave the briefest of headshakes, then extended a pale and lanky hand to Hanna.
“We met briefly, the other day,” he said. “I’m Robinson.”
“My good right hand,” said Jowett. Which was true enough, I guess. The strange-looking man seemed to have no formalized role in the Jowett household, but everything that needed doing, from paying the staff to fending off the nosy journalists who turned up from Toronto from time to time, came under his purview.
“Well, now,” said Robinson, after he’d received his dollop of coffee and a slab of ca
ke. “You will want to know what this is all about.”
We did.
“I telephoned Mr. Jowett in Toronto last night and suggested this meeting, because of the developments at the golf course.”
Hanna raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. Robinson sailed on.
“As you know—certainly you know, Carlton, and you have probably told Miss Klovack—the golf course was willed to the village of Bosky Dell by Sir John Flannery, the original owner of this property. He meant it to be held, in perpetuity, for the use of the village, and he certainly never intended it to be developed.
“When Carlton told me, yesterday”—I had told him that much, why not?—“that it was, in fact, to be developed, I naturally became concerned.”
“Why?” asked Hanna.
Robinson gave her a brief smile. “Not, I assure you, because of my interest in golf. Rather, because Mr. Jowett has frequently expressed his view that nothing of major importance should be allowed to change in Bosky Dell. As with most of the local inhabitants, he regards the village as perfect the way it is.”
I nodded in affirmation. Tradition and stability are the watchwords hereabouts; the villagers in Fiddler on the Roof would have felt right at home here. When there was a brief, abortive attempt to develop the property around the church, a few months back, Old Man Jowett was away cleaning the pockets of the Japanese or Europeans. If he had been here, I now gathered, he’d have been in on the battle.
“While Mr. Jowett does not attempt to replace Sir John Flannery in the affections of the villagers, he does feel an obligation to keep up at least some of the responsibilities of Sir John. Thus, the Annual Regatta.”
The Annual Regatta, which I’ll have to tell you all about in detail some time if you’ve got an afternoon to spare, has been held at Bosky Dell since Queen Victoria was a mere slip of a girl. In the morning there are running races on the lawn of The Eagle’s Nest, and, in the afternoon, swimming and boating contests down at the dock. The old, brown pictures that the fourth-generation Bosky Dellers always keep around to make sure their visitors are bored senseless all show Sir John presiding, from a big chair lugged from one site to the other. He used to give out the major prizes, and always made a graceful little speech; the then-reeve always replied in suitably servile tones, expressing the community’s immense gratitude to Sir John for allowing us to tread on his grass and wallow in his water. It was all a bit like fête day on an English manor in about 1880. When Sir John died and his tipsy daughter inherited the estate, during what has passed into history as The Gin Regime, this pleasant annual exercise was suspended for a number of years, and when she, in turn, gave way to the Jowetts, one of the first questions had been, “Whither the Regatta?” Hither, it turned out. All went on as in days of yore, with the athletes rushing about all day in sweaty splendour and the peasants tugging their forelocks for the Grand Man.
Hole in One Page 10