by Simon Brett
Since his debut as a novelist in 1975, Simon Brett has authored 80 books, including two new titles for 2009. In March, Macmillan brought out the ninth of his series of novels set in the English village of Fethering (The Poisoning in the Pub). At about the same time this issue goes on sale, a newBrett book, Blotto, Twinks, and the Ex-King’s Daughter, a fanciful adventure/crime novel, is due out in the U.K.
Leonard Wensam thought he had been very clever. Whenever his wife, Amanda, asked him how he’d spent his Thursday, he’d start to tell her about the round of golf he’d played up at the Westmacott Golf Club. That invariably shut her up. And soon she stopped asking.
When he’d first started talking about golf, when he’d spent all that money on a complete set of clubs in a red-and-white leather bag that zipped over the top, Amanda had tried to show an interest. She’d bought her husband a golf book that Christmas, and some little knickknack to hold tees for his birthday. But she couldn’t sustain the illusion of showing an interest for long.
Theirs was a marriage that ticked over all right. At thirty-six, Amanda was fifteen years younger than her husband. She might have liked children, but Leonard had never been keen on the idea, and as usual, his view was the one that counted. What he wanted from his wife was regular sex and a decorative presence at business functions. Leonard Wensam didn’t really like women, preferring the rough, shallow heartiness of male company. He thought husbands should have secrets from their wives.
And Amanda believed in wives having secrets from their husbands. One of the secrets she kept from Leonard was the fact that, as she had got to know him better during the early months of their marriage, she had found that she didn’t like him very much. And as he got older and chubbier, she found she liked him less and less.
But the marriage ticked over all right.
And she’d read in a magazine that husbands and wives having different hobbies was the recipe for a successful relationship. Amanda sang in a local choir, and Leonard, who was immune to any form of classical music, never considered attending any of her concerts. So she felt no obligation to attend any of his tournaments at the Westmacott Golf Club.
Neither did Leonard ever ask her how the concerts had gone, so, having suffered an excruciating hour of tedium the first time she asked him how his round of golf had gone, Amanda subsequently felt no guilt about never again even making the inquiry. As the magazine had said, it was husbands and wives pursuing different interests that kept marriages alive. Amanda felt reasonably happy with the arrangement.
It was doubtful that she would have felt quite as happy had she known from the start the interest that her husband was actually pursuing: a thirty-nine-year-old red-haired divorcée called Juliette. Every Thursday, when Leonard Wensam said he was playing a round, he was, in fact, playing around.
He had semiretired from the accountancy business he had inherited from his father. With no perceptible effort on Leonard’s part, the firm had grown satisfactorily over the years and made him a wealthy man. When his rapidly aging mother died, he would be even wealthier. He could afford to buy anything he wanted, and could have afforded to buy Amanda anything she wanted too. But it was not in Leonard’s nature to be overgenerous, so he bought very little for either himself or his wife. He was, in fact, extremely mean.
Even Juliette was becoming aware of this shortcoming in her older lover. In the early days, when he had been trying to winkle his way into her bed, Leonard had lunched Juliette lavishly at up-market restaurants, but increasingly he abandoned this expensive foreplay in favor of bringing sandwiches and a bottle of wine round to her place. Not liking this diminution of her pampering, the woman he didn’t play golf with on Thursdays looked forward to the moment when she would dump Leonard. But she was in no hurry. She liked sex, she liked the attentions of a man—even a man as mean as this one—and she was not going to get rid of him until she had a successor firmly in place.
Leonard was unaware of these thoughts going through his mistress’s mind. He was too self-centered to be aware of the thoughts going through any mind but his own. He thought he had his life well organized—financial sufficiency, the secure marriage, the “bit on the side.”
He was getting a bit fat, true. Last time he’d been to the quack he’d been told he ought to take more exercise. And that was something he intended to do ... when he got round to it.
Amanda had even once observed that Leonard’s regular golf did not seem to be making him any fitter. But he had avoided the moment of potential embarrassment by the deft assertion that golfers needed to cultivate a low center of gravity. He hadn’t put on weight; he had just redistributed muscle. And Amanda appeared to accept that lie as readily as she had accepted all the others.
Oh yes, Leonard Wensam thought he had been very clever.
It was his mother’s death that provided the first potential threat to his nice, cozy little setup. The news was phoned through from the nursing home one Thursday morning, when Amanda was alone in the house. She didn’t expect Leonard to be emotionally affected by his bereavement, but, uncaring though he undoubtedly was, she knew he wouldn’t want to be seen as uncaring by other family members. He needed to be told quickly, so that he could start dutifully phoning round and making funeral arrangements. Leonard never took his cell phone with him on Thursday (“the one day a week when I can really forget about the office”), and the information was not the kind that could be passed on in a message. So Amanda decided she would have to go up to the Westmacott Golf Club in person to break the sad news to her husband.
Though she had driven past the entrance many times, she had never been inside the grounds. Many of her friends used to walk up there (the club permitted that, so long as the walkers kept off the fairways), and in one of his moments of good resolution about getting fitter, Leonard had even spoken of exercising there. But that was before he started the golf. Amanda felt strange being in a venue that must be so familiar to her husband, so much a part of his life. She parked amid the rows of Jaguars, BMWs, and Mercedes in front of the high mock-Tudor clubhouse, and looked around for someone who might know Leonard’s whereabouts. A sign reading “Floyd Carter, Professional” seemed the most promising starting point. The young boy who was minding the shop said that Floyd was out on the practice greens and pointed Amanda toward a tall, rangy figure of about forty hunched over a putt. He had a row of six balls in front of him, and he moved along, slotting in each one with unerring accuracy.
As the last ball perched on the edge of the crowded hole, the professional looked up at her, squinting against the sunshine. He had strong teeth and his face was tanned, revealing as it relaxed a tracery of white lines around his bright blue eyes.
“You do that very well,” said Amanda.
“I’ve practiced it a few times.” The voice had a slight antipodean twang. “I can usually hit the target.” He grinned easily. “What can I do for you, madam? You want to arrange a lesson?”
“No. I’m Mrs. Wensam.” The name didn’t appear to mean anything to him. “I’m looking for my husband. Mr. Wensam,” she added unnecessarily.
The second name didn’t prompt any more recognition than the first.
“My husband’s a member here. He plays a round every Thursday.”
“Wensam?” Carter shook his head. “No member of the name of Wensam here.”
Amanda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Seeming aware of the potential ramifications of what he’d just said, Floyd Carter immediately went to the defense of a fellow male. “You probably got the name of the club wrong. A lot of other clubs around. Maybe he plays at one of them?”
“I know it’s the Westmacott Golf Club. That’s the one he always talks about.”
The professional gave an easy shrug of his shoulders.
“Well, I know the names of all the members—even the midweek hackers who spray balls all over the course—and I tell you, not one of them is called Wensam.” Still, in the cause of male solidarity, he added tentatively, “Maybe he plays under a false name?”
“Why would he do that?”
“There are a lot of members whose golf’s so bad they should play under false names.”
In spite of herself, Amanda smiled. There was something very engaging about Floyd Carter. She had to force a bit of hauteur into her voice as she said, “I can’t imagine my husband ever using a false name for any reason. He’s not deceitful.”
But even as she said the words, Amanda Wensam wondered whether she was telling the truth.
She watched as the professional gathered up his golf balls and again laid them out in a line in front of him. “Going to get them all down the hole again?” she asked.
“No, done enough putting for today. Have a go at that now. Just a few trick shots.” He pointed to the other side of the practice green where a wooden arrow on a pole pointed toward the first tee.
Selecting another club from his bag, Floyd Carter moved forward to the first ball. An effortless flick sent it up to clatter against the arrow. Before it hit the ground, the second ball was in flight. Then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth hit the arrow and bounced back.
“Can you do that every time?” asked Amanda breathlessly.
Floyd Carter gave a wry, self-deprecating smile. “Not every time, no. Can’t guarantee it.” His grin became more confident. “Often, though.”
* * * *
The following morning, Amanda woke up earlier than Leonard. Now she came to think of it, he did always seem particularly sleepy on a Thursday night. Previously, she’d put it down to the physical stresses of a round of golf. Now, though...
Amanda went down to the garage and put on the light. She rarely drove Leonard’s Lexus, but he did grudgingly allow her a spare key “for emergencies.” She opened the boot.
The red-and-white leather golf bag lay there, gleaming, pristine, clean. The clubs revealed when she unzipped the top looked equally unscarred by ball or divot. And that wasn’t just the result of post-round cleaning; the cellophane was still tight about their heads. The whole set could have been returned to the shop whence it was bought and the owners could not have refused to refund the money. Everything was as new. Nothing had ever been used.
Amanda was pensive as she closed the car boot. And a plan began to form in her head. A plan that would provide a very effective revenge on her errant husband.
* * * *
Leonard was jaunty as he returned home from the office one Wednesday a few weeks later. He had had a very cheering meeting with his solicitor that afternoon. Though always knowing that his mother had been left wealthy by his father’s death, he had only just become aware of how much her judicious investments had increased his inheritance. Leonard Wensam would soon be a very rich man indeed. This knowledge gave him enormous satisfaction. There was nothing he wanted to buy with his newfound wealth; he just liked the idea of all that money sitting there. His.
When he walked in, Leonard was surprised to find a visitor in the house. He knew that Amanda occasionally invited her female friends for tea and, though they interested him not at all, he was quite capable of being polite to them.
But it was the first time he’d found a tall, tanned young man rising from the sofa to greet him in his own sitting room.
“Leonard, I’d like you to meet Floyd Carter.”
“Hello,” he said, mystified, as he shook the firm, tanned hand.
“Floyd’s wife sings in the choir with me, and I thought you’d love to meet him ... because he’s terribly interested in golf, too.”
“Ah.” Leonard nodded at his wife’s word, playing for time. He sensed trouble.
“In fact,” Amanda went on, “Floyd’s the professional at Westmacott Golf Club. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I, Leonard?”
“No. Of course we’ve met,” her husband mumbled uncomfortably.
There was a long silence. Amanda looked excited, almost triumphant, waiting to see her plotting come to fruition.
Then to her apparent amazement, Carter said, “Too right. Of course I know Len.”
Leonard gleefully watched the dismay grow in his wife’s face during the ensuing conversation. She tried to hide it, but without complete success. Amanda had set up this interview, he knew, to show him up. The Westmacott Golf Club professional, she had calculated, would be bound to expose her husband’s lies. But she seemed not to have reckoned with the enduring strength of male solidarity. Women might shop errant husbands to their wronged wives; but no man would ever behave like that to a fellow man. The masculine reaction to hearing of another man’s infidelity was always, “Good on you, mate ... you dirty dog. Anyway, it’s not my business.”
Aware of his strength, Leonard pushed the conversation even deeper into golf, for the sheer pleasure of watching Amanda’s discomfiture grow. He initiated discussion with Floyd Carter on the idiosyncrasies of golf club members whose names he’d only just invented. He summoned up Woffles Rimington, who kept a liter of whiskey in his golf bag and had always emptied it by the end of the round; Tugboat Clark, who was so rich that he bribed all his opponents to lose to him; and Roly Crooke-Winterburn, who’d had to leave the club after being found bunkered in a compromising position with the lady captain.
As each of these fictional figures emerged from Leonard Wensam’s lips, Floyd Carter provided further recollections of their quirks and misdemeanors. The two men laughed a lot, as Amanda looked coldly on.
Leonard’s invention didn’t stop at the names of golfers; he let it spread into golfing terms too, confident that Floyd still wasn’t going to show him up.
So, for example, when the professional said, “I always think the fourteenth is an easy par. I can usually reckon on an eagle there,” Leonard riposted gleefully, “Oh, I’m afraid I usually get a pelican.”
Or when Floyd Carter recommended the use of a spoon to get out of the kidney-shaped bunker at the back of the seventh green, Leonard confessed that he got his best results with a knife and fork.
And Floyd’s assertion that he always used a five-iron and reduced backswing to guarantee getting over the water hazard at the short third was greeted by the news that Leonard had been remarkably successful using a seventeen-aluminum and a limp wrist.
He hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but he felt supremely confident. Whatever nonsense he spouted, the professional would play along. And Amanda was looking more uncomfortable by the minute. Her little plan had become horribly derailed. And there was all that money coming from his mother. Leonard Wensam could hardly prevent himself chortling with glee.
But he exercised control until, leaving a fuming Amanda in the sitting room, he saw Floyd out to his car. On the driveway, in the summer evening dusk, Leonard guffawed heartily. Everything was working out so wonderfully well for him.
Floyd joined in the laughter but stopped before his host did. “That was all right tonight,” he said, “but a bit risky.”
“Not at all.” Leonard chuckled on. “Amanda doesn’t know the tiniest thing about golf—or anything else, come to that. She may suspect she’s being sent up, but she can’t prove it.”
“Maybe not. And you’re all right with me, I’m on your side. Could be awkward, though, if your alibi was questioned in the company of other, less sympathetic golfers.”
Leonard, seeing the sense of that, stopped laughing. “You have a point.” He looked into the professional’s honest, friendly face. “Have you got some suggestions as to what I should do, Floyd?”
“I think you ought to learn a bit about golf.”
“But I have no interest in the game. I don’t want to take it up.”
“I know that, and I’m not suggesting you should. But if you knew the rudiments, knew enough of the proper jargon, then you could hold a conversation with other golfers without raising any suspicions. Your alibi would more likely be watertight then.”
Leonard nodded slowly. “That would make sense. So how am I going to learn?”
“I’d be very happy to take you round the course, Len, show you what’s what. Half a day and you’ll have picked up the essentials.”
“That’s incredibly generous. Why are you prepared to do this for me?”
Floyd Carter smiled the duplicitous smile that men have used over the centuries to exclude women from their lives. With a roguish slap to Leonard’s shoulder, he said, “We chaps have got to stick together, eh?”
* * * *
Though his offer had been genuine, the professional was heavily booked with tournaments and lessons, so the first available date was a Thursday morning a couple of weeks after their first meeting.
This was fine by Leonard. He even felt a glow of righteousness when, informing Amanda that he’d be off playing golf, he realized he was telling the truth. Juliette was left a message that he wouldn’t be able to join her until the afternoon of that day. “After lunch,” he said, planning to have something to eat on his own and then exact his sexual satisfaction without even the outlay of sandwiches and wine.
Seven o’clock seemed a rather early start, but Floyd was the one who knew about golf, so Leonard turned up on time.
“Better now,” said the professional, greeting Leonard as he emerged from his Lexus, “before the hordes of incompetents start their rounds. I tell you, it’s like being on a rifle range out there once that lot get going—balls flying in every direction. You see, you only get the quality players here Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Midweek it’s the rubbish—the retired, the learners—and the women.”
The contempt he put into the last word got its predictable knee-jerk chuckle from Leonard, and the golfing virgin moved round to remove his virgin clubs from the car boot. “You won’t need those, Len. I’ll lend you a set when we actually start playing. But first I just want to take you through a few of the technical terms and get you familiar with the Westmacott course.”
In the pro shop, Floyd Carter outlined the basics. He showed Leonard the different clubs and explained the situations in which each should be used, how the angle of each club face affected the trajectory of the ball. “Thing to remember is that the numbering starts from the vertical. The nearer the club face is to a right angle from the ground, the lower its number will be. Got that?”
“I think so,” Leonard replied uncertainly.
“Don’t worry about the detail. The clubs have got numbers on them, anyway. You can’t go far wrong.” The professional then went through a few of the basic golfing terms so that his pupil could tell the tee from the green and the rough from the fairway. Floyd did a little on the etiquette of the game, and concluded, “Well, I think that’s about it. All you need to know. The next important thing to do is—”
He stopped himself, and a hand shot up to his mouth in alarm. “Ooh, Len, something I should have told you. More than etiquette—it’s a safety measure too. Do you know what ‘Fore!’ means?”
“For? Well, yes, obviously. It means sort of ‘on behalf of.’”
“No. ‘Fore’ with an ‘e.’ You must know what that means in a golfing context.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“It’s incredibly important. Not knowing the meaning of ‘Fore!’ could cause you the most terrible problems.”
And Floyd Carter told Leonard Wensam what “Fore!” meant.
The older man nodded. “Right, with you. Now, do we start playing a round?”
“Not yet. In fact, you don’t need to play a whole round at all. With a complete novice, that’ll take forever. No, I’ll show you the basics—how you hold the club and so on—when you come back.”
“When I come back? Where am I going?”
“Ah, you’re about to do the most important bit of your induction. You’re going to walk round the entire course.”
“Without any clubs?”
“Too right. Without any clubs. You see, you really must know the geography of all the Westmacott holes. Then you can sound authoritative when other golfers ask questions like, ‘You know that clump of gorse halfway down the fairway on the fourth?’”
“But, Floyd, shouldn’t I also sound authoritative when they ask me what stroke I used to get over that clump of gorse halfway down the fairway on the fourth?”
“No worries about that. The golfer hasn’t been born who cares what stroke anyone else played. They only wanted to tell you what stroke they played themselves. That’s why what you’re doing today is so easy. You need the bare minimum of information to pass as a golfer, because with golfers you don’t have to say much. There’ll always be someone present who wants to tell you about his round.”
The professional reached to the counter for a sketch map. “Now, this shows you the layout of the course. As you see, the fairways zigzag all over the place. What I want you to do is start at the number 1 tee and walk from tee to hole, tee to hole, all the way round until you get to the eighteenth green, then come back and find me.”
“Won’t I get in the way of the golfers?”
“No, you’ll be ahead of most of them. And, since you’re not playing, you’ll go round a lot quicker than they will. Go on, Len, it always works.”
“What always works?”
Floyd Carter grinned mischievously. “My instant half-day induction course. Don’t imagine you’re the only man who uses golf as an alibi. You’d be surprised how many little wives there are out there in blissful ignorance of the fact that their husbands aren’t playing golf.”
On a wave of complicit masculine laughter, Leonard Wensam set off on his walk around Westmacott Golf Club.
* * * *
It was a bright summer morning, and Leonard felt good. He was making his Thursday alibi absolutely impregnable against Amanda’s suspicions. And he was going to spend the afternoon in the arms of Juliette, telling her to do a variety of particularly enjoyable things to him.
What’s more, all that money from his mother would soon be his. Life was excellent.
As he crisscrossed the course along the fairways, Leonard became vaguely aware of golfers starting their rounds. As Floyd had promised, there was very little competence on display. Balls flew in every direction, there were sounds of turf-sized divots being dug up, constant cries of “Sorry!” and “Fore!”
Leonard felt rather superior. Thanks to Floyd Carter, he knew exactly what “Fore!” meant, and each time he heard it, he obeyed the command.
The fifteenth fairway ran alongside the fourth, where there grew the famous clump of gorse. Leonard was in the rough of the fifteenth, feeling on top of the world, when he heard the shout of “Fore!” He did exactly as he had been instructed.
Then he was hit on the temple by a flying golf ball, and died.
As a golfer might have put it, Leonard Wensam “went out” in a state of euphoria. Sadly, he “came in” in an ambulance.
* * * *
The coroner was very regretful about the appalling accident which had taken away “a man in the prime of life, depriving his young wife of a companion, helpmeet, and breadwinner.” The coroner recommended greater vigilance by walkers who took advantage of the grounds of the Westmacott Golf Club, and suggested that more strongly worded warning notices should be erected on the course. But there was a note of contempt—almost of “served him right”—in the way he spoke of Leonard Wensam. The coroner, himself an avid golfer, could not understand people who did not share his obsession. And the deceased had clearly had no interest at all in the game. He had never been seen at the Westmacott Golf Club by any of the members, having only gone up there on the day of his death in the cause of fitness.
“And just walking isn’t going to make anyone fit,” said the coroner. “You need a few good rounds of golf to achieve that.”
The verdict of “accidental death” was a foregone conclusion.
But the coroner made it sound as if such a fate was only just deserts for a man who didn’t play golf.
He also stressed the point that no blame should attach to the unfortunate novice golfer who had shouted “Fore!” and played his shot immediately prior to Wensam’s death. The player had been aiming at the fourth green; he couldn’t even have seen his victim in the middle of the fifteenth fairway. The young man should not let this regrettable incident put him off playing the fine game of golf. He should blank it out from his memory.
But the young man, wracked with guilt, found such oblivion difficult to achieve. He even asked the Westmacott professional what he could do to make amends for the tragic incident that he had caused.
The professional recommended that he should move his right hand a little further down the shaft of the club.
* * * *
Floyd Carter himself didn’t feel any guilt. The moment he fell in love with Amanda Wensam, when he first saw her on the practice green, he knew that something was going to have to be done. And he was very happy to play his part in the plan she formulated.
He’d used her spare key to remove the red-and-white leather bag of clubs from the Lexus, so that after his death Leonard no longer had any connection with the game of golf. And Floyd later sold the set, as new, in the pro shop. Which made him a nice little profit.
But nothing like the profit he made when he married Amanda and took his share of everything she had inherited under her late husband’s will. (It was his first marriage; Floyd’s wife in the choir had been one of Amanda’s necessary inventions.)
The will’s provisions left nothing to Juliette, who, knowing how tightfisted Leonard Wensam had always been, was unsurprised. Anyway, she had since met another rich man, who was more prepared to shower his largesse on a sexy red-haired mistress, so Juliette was fine.
Floyd Carter had left the catapult in the middle of the clump of gorse on the fourth fairway as soon as he had used it to propel the fatal missile at Leonard’s head. Amanda, wide-eyed in her confidence in his skills, had expected him to use a golf club to send the ball, but Floyd knew better. Even he couldn’t guarantee to deliver a mortal blow to a potentially moving human target at twenty meters. No professional was that good.
Floyd Carter was good by most standards, but when he saw his and Amanda’s first son pick up a golf club at the age of three, he reckoned they had a potential world number one on their hands.
So, while Amanda produced more wonderful babies, Floyd set out to teach their son everything he knew about the magnificent game of golf.
Everything, with the exception of a piece of misinformation he’d fed Leonard Wensam. He didn’t tell his son that the shouted instruction “Fore!” means “Move immediately to the middle of the fairway!”