Operation Nassau by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online

the tennis players, the waterskiers and sunbathers were asleep; the helicopters and the yachts not yet in motion. Only a few other cars besides the Ford Anglia crossed the bridge with me: contractors for the development company; early-morning golfers like myself. It is warm for golf by mid-morning in the Bahamas, and some people still have work to attend to.
    Wallace Brady awaited me at the golf-course, which is on the right, or eastern, end of the island. Although several luxury hotels and duplex villas have been created, and the excellent beach is fully equipped, some of Paradise Island is still largely jungle, and the straight avenues of pines dissolve into unmade roads edged with scrub, partly cleared here and there for new sites.
    Bought originally by Mr Huntington Hartford, it bore the name Hog Island, I understand. The new packaging, I have no doubt, will match the new brand name chosen for it. Hog Island, to my mind, is the more honest appellation: both simple and etymologically sound.
    However, my views on such subjects are not generally the popular ones. I drew up outside the low, canopied entrance of the golf- club, greeted Wallace Brady without undue fuss, and brought my clubs round the corner, where he had already hired an electric golf- cart, a sorry sight. We entered, and he put his foot down and drove off.
    I should here mention, I think, that golf, a game played in Scotland largely by the unemployed, is in America and those countries adjacent to her coasts regarded as a highly esoteric pursuit,.followed largely by the middle-aged and the elderly, and requiring real wealth and leisure. The equipment and facilities, as Johnson had noted, are all accordingly priced for this market in addition, naturally, to the obvious cost of maintaining in prime order many acres of grass which in Scotland would be watered, free, by the elements. For all these reasons I have noticed that if an American can afford to play golf at all, he can usually afford to do it better than anyone else.
    Mr Wallace Brady, self-styled acquaintance of Bartholomew Edgecombe and working on Great Harbour Cay, was an American. The first hole was over three hundred yards long, a dog-leg to the north: par for both, 4. I took out a Wilson X31 No. 1 wood, flexed my knees, dug in my unlined Gullanes with white aprons and replaceable spikes, and swung.
    There was a whicker and a click, and my ridiculous American ball flew, straight as a rule, well over two hundred yards down the fairway. Wallace Brady said, ‘I knew it. I’ve asked to play ball with a tiger.’
    ‘Not a tiger, Mr Brady,’ I said. ‘Just an average player from Scotland.’
    There is no virtue in exaggeration, after all.
    To describe the round would be tedious. Paradise Island golf-course is scenically attractive, with coconut palms, flowering bushes and a small lake stocked by coots, whose wooden bridge we crossed in the golf-cart. An advantage perhaps in the long American fairways, these are still to my mind no substitute for a caddy. However, I am, I know, a reactionary.
    I played well that morning, and the two balls I shot into the rough I recovered, although on the fourth I had to play a tricky chip shot from the sand. The fourth, fifth and sixth at Paradise all run by the sea, and I have known couples break off their game to sit on the rock-strewn white sand and foster their sun-induced cutaneous cancer.
    But then, on an American course one can hardly tell golfers from sunbathers. Brady, at my side, was moderately dressed in thin stone- coloured trousers and a knitted white shirt with short sleeves. But three of the foursome behind us, I noted, sported all the atrocities of bright shirts and long coloured Bermudas: one overweight person in a straw hat was playing in his bare feet. For golf, I have always worn an Orkney tweed skirt with a low inverted pleat at the back, and oversocks with good shoes. If one wishes to play properly, one must be properly dressed.
    I won that hole,