Operation Nassau (14 page)

Which was all very well. Then I remembered the blisters, and felt slightly penitent.

I approved his reticence. On the other hand, I supposed this was his profession. I went out for a session with Daffodil, and then, placing my case and two bags in the Ford Anglia, drove off to the airport to meet the 4.30 from Great Harbour Cay.

It was there already: a handsome blue and white DC3 standing out in the sunlight, with a background of larger taxi-ing planes like moths on a windowpane. And standing at the foot of the steps waiting to board it was Sergeant Rodney Trotter. He wore a short- sleeved check shirt with a pair of smartly creased pale grey trousers, a neckerchief, and a smile of ineffable welcome. ‘Doctor!’ he shouted. ‘Here I was, getting a hang-up. Thought I was going on my lonesome.’

I walked to the base of the steps before replying. ‘There seems to be plenty of time. Were you expecting me?’

‘Yes! Sir Bartholomew said I’d have you for company. I’m on my way to the Begum’s,’ said Trotter. He studied me with unconcealed interest. ‘They said I wouldn’t know you, and my word, they were right. It’s a sensation, Dr MacRannoch.’

I put a foot on the steps. ‘I’m beginning to wonder what I looked like before,’ I said freezingly. ‘Mother Goose?’ And left him to heave in the luggage.

It didn’t stop him in due course from sitting down on the sofa beside me. It was one of a facing pair in oatmeal with hide trim, and was equipped with three sets of safety-belts. The rest of the plane was filled with single and double seats with matching small tables: the bar in white and daffodil stripes was accessibly placed in the centre.

The saloon was close-carpeted in maize tumbletwist with maize linen curtains to match and held about ten of us so far, I noticed. Two of the faces seemed familiar, but I wouldn’t care to go further. I am not a devotee of the big or small screen. We fastened our belts and the engines increased their impact in decibels. ‘Mr Johnson mentioned the Tattoo business, I believe,’ Sergeant Trotter roared in my ear.

The choice of subject at that moment appeared oddly capricious. I nodded.

His brown, vigorous face became wreathed with bonhomie and a certain tinge of relief. ‘It’ll be a great opportunity,’ he shouted. ‘You know, they’ve never had a Highland Gathering? Never?’

Light broke. ‘You mean my father . . . ?’

He beamed. He nodded. The extraordinary noise slackened as we reached the end of the runway and he was able to say in a moderate shout, ‘Well, the Begum anyway. She didn’t want to say too much about it until she was sure of your father. But he’s agreed, I’m glad to say; and here I am, off to Crab Island to plan it.’

‘A Tattoo? For the MacRannoch Gathering? On Crab Island?’ I stared at him in outraged disbelief. Locked in a trance of professional pleasure, he did not even observe it. ‘But don’t you worry your head. Whatever way it’s done, it’ll be a surefire success. I’ve run Tattoos every place in the world from gym stadiums in Australia to old airfields in the back hills of India, and if anyone can get one off the ground, it’s Rodney Trotter.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ I said. The engines roared painfully and we moved off. I waited until we were airborne and said, ‘Do the Army pay you to do this, Sergeant Trotter?’

‘In a way. I’m seconded,’ he said. ‘Six years in Aldershot and twenty-two years in Edinburgh: there can’t be a man alive in the world today knows as much about Tattoos as I do. We used to get people from all over the world - Generals, even - coming to ask us how to put on a show as good as we did for Edinburgh. It got so that we hardly had time to lift our heads before someone was at us again . . . how do you do the seating, what do you feed the troops on, how much lighting have the bandsmen got to have, what do you do if it’s raining . . . ?’

‘So they decided it was cheaper to put you on circuit,’ I said.

‘Well,’ said the Sergeant. ‘A matter of public relations, they said. My Brigadier does the big ones, or we do them together. And the little ones I get to myself.’

‘What does a little one cost?’ I said. A well-made-up girl in a black dress had opened the bar and was moving from seat to seat taking orders.

For the first time Sergeant Trotter returned to the discretion of our earlier acquaintance. ‘Well, now; that’s a matter for the Begum, once it’s worked out,’ he said. ‘It was her idea, you know. Your dad had just dreamed up the idea of a Bahamian Gathering, and it was the Begum who thought of the Tattoo.’

‘With a performance by Krishtof Bey?’ I said impolitely. The hostess bent over me and I ordered a Bossa Nova.

‘I hope not,’ said Sergeant Trotter. He appeared to be looking at me with respect. He ordered a beer, and said, ‘You know why?’

‘No,’ I said. It was beginning to turn out like Miami. Or maybe it was just a post-concussive syndrome. The drinks came, in plastic cups, with large paper napkins. I took a sustaining draught of mine and said, ‘Why?’

Sergeant Trotter sat, cup in large hand, and fixed me with an inimical glare. ‘Because they go sick, that’s what,’ he said. ‘Every time you’ve got a star performer, something happens. like the six Arab Legionnaires that was to trot their camels up and down in a war dance.’

‘Who got sick?’ I said. ‘The Arabs or the camels?’

‘Camels?’ said the Sergeant, and tipped down half his beer. ‘The camels never even got into the country. No licence, see. So what do we do: we hire six more from a circus.’

The Bossa Nova was sinking agreeably into my interior. ‘You did?’ I said. ‘The Army?’

‘Well. The show must go on,’ said Sergeant Trotter. ‘And then one of them bloody legionnaires reports sick and they must have a reserve to go on, or else the pattern won’t come right. So guess who’s an Arab Legionnaire.’

‘You,’ I guessed. It was easy.

He nodded violently. ‘All done up with black beard and nightie. And they’d sent the wrong bloody camels. There were we with saddles for one hump and the bastards had given us camels with two. We had to pad them with old socks. I’ve been a Canadian Mountie.’

‘You have?’ I said.

‘And a Turkish Janissary. And a Danish cadet in one of them bellboy uniforms. I’ve been a Spahi and an American Marine and an Evzone Greek Royal Guard. I was even a Gurkha once, with me bloody face blacked, but they had to take me out because I was two feet taller than the biggest of them. I’ve been everything but the Manchester Drum Majorettes.’

I finished my drink. ‘In my opinion,’ I said carefully, ‘you’ll end up in a psychiatric ward if you do that too often.’

He finished his drink. ‘Do you think so?’ he said worriedly. We thought about it in companionable silence as the plane circled and prepared to land on Great Harbour Cay.

I remember looking down on the island: the dense blue rippled sea blending to the familiar shades of apple green and emerald and biscuit where the white beaches ran out of the water, marked with a stitching of seaweed. The island was long, like a boomerang, with above the knuckle a long gently incurved golden beach, perfectly empty. The interior I saw only as low purple-green bushes, scored by a hatchwork of white newly made roads and infiltrated here and there by the blue of the sea. Of people and houses, there was at first glance no sight at all.

A semi-tropical island paradise, the brochures had said. A splendid solitude, for those who seek it. A brilliant new sanctuary for sport. Deep-sea fishing . . . swimming in warm clear waters. . . thinking long, quiet thoughts as you stroll the beach at evening. Sharpening your golf game.

We landed. ‘Come on,’ I said to Sergeant Trotter in sudden, pleasurable anticipation, and undoing my seat-belt strode along and climbed down into the hot, scented sunshine.

You see? Insidiously, the banana bird and the palm tree were already there, invisible in my subconscious. Merely waiting to integrate.

The airport at Great Harbour Cay is neat, ornamental and small, with palm trees, flower-beds and an attractive low bungalow with a waterfall tinkling beside it, labelled H.M. Customs and Immigration. A row of Mini Mokes, a long green French bus and a London taxi stood below the control tower, which was a picturesque open-plan affair consisting of a cone cedar-tiled roof set on stilts. A row of flags flapped slowly in a light breeze. A young Negro in a grey jacket with a jockey-cap balanced on the flat of his nose said, ‘Dr MacRannoch, ma’am? Sir Bartholomew sent me to meet you. Ain’t you got no more luggage, Dr MacRannoch?’

That was when I discovered my suitcase was missing. It took half an hour to check that it wasn’t on board, and that it hadn’t been mixed up with someone else’s. Sergeant Trotter, his efficiency called into question, swore that he had put it into the hold himself at Nassau. It wasn’t there. Someone had taken it off.

Since he showed signs of holding an immediate Army inquiry. I said good-bye to Trotter and sent him off to pick up his boat for Crab Island. I elicited fresh assurances that my case would be found and forthwith forwarded. I then got inside Sir Bartholomew’s tropical Fiat beside my golf-clubs and handbag, and was driven to Sir Bartholomew’s house.

Great Harbour Cay is an island just over seven miles long and less than two miles across, then undergoing transformation into a luxurious international playground for tropical sport, whose centre was a private proprietary club named Tamboo. Or so the Edgecombes had graphically told me.

As we left the airport behind us and roared up the rough white shore road, you could indeed see what men and machinery were fashioning from a tropical patchwork of white beach and water and mangrove swamp, set with pine and palmetto brush, whose only life had been the decayed native village of Bullock’s Harbour with its primitive school and post office and church.

The roads were there, broad, straight and unsurfaced, scoring through the green jungle: Great Harbour Drive: Royal Palm Drive: Fairway Road. The beach was there, on our right: turquoise sea and dazzling sand, and a beach club, smothered in coconut palms and hibiscus, with some villas buried in flowers beside it.

But best of all, the golf-course was there.
Caution. Carts Crossing
. said the notices as we swept by empty crossroads, with the sun beating down on our blue canvas canopy and the houseboy’s black, ringed hands moving the wheel. And on either side, winding in and out to the sea, one caught glimpses of flags and fairways and manicured greens, of high close-cropped trees and bunkers and weathered boards, swinging on chains:
Hole No. 4. 400 yards. Par 4. Handicap 5.

To hell with my suitcase, I thought. At least my golf-clubs were all right.

I must watch my language.

The Edgecombes’ house overlooked one of the fairways and was reached by road from the rising waste-ground behind. This elevation I found unexpected. No one would describe Great Harbour Cay as a mountain. But it hadn’t the fibreless English flatness of most of the rest of the seven hundred Friendly Tropical Islands. Denise Edgecombe stood at the roadside to welcome me. She was gracious.

That was all right. I replied in the same key and we all went in, discussing the plight of my suitcase. ‘Let’s see what I have that will fit you,’ said Lady Edgecombe. She was, I would guess, at least four inches taller than I was. She was wearing a pair of striped trousers with a black linen top and a lot of beads. I said, ‘Don’t worry. It’ll turn up. Or if not, there’s probably a shop on the island.’

‘There isn’t,’ said Lady Edgecombe. She said it as if she were making a point of it, and I realized that we were at the door of the sitting-room and that Sir Bartholomew was sitting in an easy chair just inside. ‘Of course, there’s the pro shop,’ she added. ‘But we find things there awfully expensive.’ She pushed open the door.

Like the few other houses I’d noticed, this one appeared built on stilts, in the form of a cluster of wood-clad roundettes, with a second level slung half down the hillside. The octagonal roofs, weathered silver, looked like a group of cockle-shells left on a beach. A sun balcony. red and yellow with potted flowers and creepers, ran round the whole golf-course side of the villa, but lay at present in shade: it must be, I supposed, at least a quarter to six. Denise said, ‘She’s lost her suitcase. Give her a drink, will you, Bart darling? I must go and change. We’re due at the clubhouse at seven. That’s your room.” She pointed to where the houseboy was already disappearing with my clubs and my bags, smiled cursorily, and disappeared. I was right. I was not Denise’s most-wanted guest.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe got up and patted a seat. ‘You’ve done a day’s work. You must be tired. Come and sit down,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you. And I am sorry about your case. What happened?”

He looked better. He looked, in fact, more relaxed than at any time l had seen him, with what one could recognize as authority back in his voice, and efficiency in his movements and manner, ‘I said. It got mislaid in Nassau. It doesn’t matter: they’ll send it. I’m glad to see you looking so well. . . No tomato juice, thank you. A Coca-Cola. perhaps?’ Even in Loch Rannoch, we do not push things to extremes.

A moment later, standing over me with the drinks: ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to come,’ he said abruptly. He sat down beside me. You know it was Johnson’s idea?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I thought he’d washed his hands of us both.”

‘Do you think he would?’ said Edgecombe. And a moment later, ‘You think you know him. perhaps. But . . ‘

‘Inside that elegantly simple body lurks a mountain goat of a car?’ I quoted.

He betrayed no surprise. Perhaps he had smelled the Bossa Nova. ‘Let’s say that wearing those bifocal glasses is a personalized Army assault vehicle with amphibian characteristics,’ he said. ‘He possesses both brains and tenacity, which is why he is my superior officer. All I have is an amiable nature.’ And he smiled at me and drank his martini.

‘Why not retire fully, then?’ I said. ‘If you don’t enjoy it? Or did you, before all this started?’

He took out a gold cigarette-case, offered me one, and took one himself. ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘You’re in the centre. You hold all the strings. You send in your reports and the people at the top decide what’s to be done, and you see there’s no trouble when they send men to do it. It’s subtle, and interesting, and I never minded an element of danger. But this . . . this is something different.”