Stark Naked on the Links
Even those of you who know my Uncle Edward well may be unaware that there are two great passions in his life. Or rather, two in addition to my Aunt Adele. That is to say, if you know my Uncle Edward, chances are you’ve also a more than nodding acquaintance with my Aunt Adele, and with their obvious, if rather mysterious, devotion to one another. So in fairness to you I should instead say you’re probably aware of at least two, but perhaps not all three, of the great passions in Uncle Edward’s life.
Well, that’s rather a muddle already, I’m afraid. Let me just back up a tick and say that I, Hubert Middlebottom, Your Humble Narrator, stipulate to you, the reader, certain knowledge of one (1) great passion in my Uncle Edwards’ life, viz., his undying love and devotion for my Aunt Adele, and get on with the bit about the two (2) other great passions in his life, of the full facts concerning which you may, or in some cases may not, be in complete possession.
Members of that jolly crowd of revellers who join us each season at the Seventh Veil Resort on the sunny Caribbean Isle of St. Anthony’s know that the first of these passions is Naturism, or “nudism” in the vernacular. Uncle Edward’s nudism, while still considered eccentric by some, has long since ceased to be a scandal among his set. That day is now seldom spoken of when Edward, a houseful of guests gathered below him awaiting their dinner, appeared at the top of the stairs in the great hall at Butney Down wearing his monocle and not a stitch else. Few, if any, still recount the fact that he had said, “My dear friends, I have something I wish to share with you all.” And if you wish to share in a good tongue-clucking over the story of what followed, you are unlikely to still find any takers.
But just in case you are unfamiliar with the facts, I will rehearse them here as a sort of public service. Uncle Edward, as mentioned, stood at the top of the stairs and expressed a desire to bestow the generosity of his person upon all and sundry. What followed that promising entrée was almost certainly a little speech about how he had discovered the liberating joy of the nudist mode of living, its healthful aspects, and its beneficial effects re: harmony and communion with nature. But whatever he said, no one in the assembled throng heard a word of it, by dint of being rather busy trying to cope with the sight now lumbering downstairs towards their helpless eyes.
This spectacle put the guests in rather a sticky position, vis-à-vis the evening’s planned activities. On the one hand most of them had been pottering around a country estate for the better part of an afternoon with no more nourishment than the traditional pre-prandial cocktail. On the other was the frightful prospect of an evening staring past their soup spoons at a distinguished member of the landed gentry, a few years past his prime and more than a few stone past his ideal girth, doing the Lady Godiva bit at his dinner table. There was a brief hesitation in the crowd as discretion struggled with valour, social obligation with moral outrage, and hunger with fear. The outcome of these struggles was inevitable, I suppose, and in the ensuing stampede for the door your narrator narrowly avoided being trampled by a pair of spinster neighbours and was very nearly gored to death by a rampaging earl. The departing guests flowed like a river around a speechless Aunt Adele, who was standing opposite the stairs at the other end of the hall. Tiny squeaking noises emerged from her at intervals amid the low rumble of sorry-must-dashes and oh-my-is-that-really-the-times burbling around her. In the end the only warm bodies still present at dinner were self (I was obliged to stay due to an early engagement in the village next morning, and certainly not out of any morbid curiosity), one uncle au naturel, one mortified and glowering aunt, and their shell-shocked staff.
Aunt Adele, one need hardly say, took it pretty big. But to her credit she knew there was no force of persuasion that can pry the bone from Uncle Edward’s jaws once he’d got his teeth into it. She kept her silence, hoping perhaps that the universal disapprobation, to say nothing of the social isolation, that inevitably met this change in dress code would work where honeyed words or harpy’s tongue would not. But after a week of staring every evening across the dining table at the crumbs dropping into the generous tufts of grey hair on her husband’s chest, she decided that radical action was called for. She pleaded. She begged. She wheedled and cajoled. She attempted bribery and extortion. She even threatened to leave him. Nothing worked.
I was not in attendance, fortunately, when Aunt Adele deployed her ultimate stratagem. But as I understand it, she had decided that turnabout was not only fair play, but in fact her last hope, and one morning went down to breakfast and calmly settled in to her eggs and kipper, as naked as Mother Eve. Her reasoning was that it was quite all right for Edward to parade around the house in the nude preaching about health and harmony—he didn’t have to look at himself all day. If, however, he would be subject to a taste of his own, his brain might at last come nigh the absurdity of it all, and give up this nonsense. Aunt Adele was convinced that the sight of her undraped form tottering ‘round the place would prove too much for him to endure, and within a day or two at the worst she would have her happy and fully-dressed home back.
I won’t say she was wrong in her thinking, either. If there was anything to rival the naked sight of Uncle Edward in its power to interfere with the digestion, it was the naked sight of Aunt Adele. She reckoned without Uncle Edward’s stubbornness, however, and a few weeks later there was a round of if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘eming, and Adele announced that they would be packing off for the Caribbean that winter to spend the season ‘as nature intended’. Their enthusiasm slowly but steadily made partisans of the rest of us as well, and eventually the Seventh Veil came to be like a second home.
There was only one problem with this second home, and that brings us back, rather behind schedule I fear, to the other of Uncle Edward’s great passions: golf. There is no golf course at Seventh Veil, in fact no golf course anywhere near the island of St. Anthony’s at all. And as the seasons went by, this fact began to weigh on him like an ever heavier load.
Oh, he was all right through the winter, when the thought of the grey skies and the damp back home were enough to keep anyone happily horizontal, sipping rum punches on the beach for weeks on end. But right about March 1st he would begin to get a little agitated. You could see it in the way his eyes would dart back and forth over breakfast, and his hands would absently come together gripping an imaginary mashie. Sometimes he would gaze at the sky in the morning and announce that it looked like fine weather for a change, though the weather had been unchangingly sunny and warm for months. He would wet his finger and check the wind, as if the same light breeze hadn’t blown steadily in off the sea from the north all winter.
So the announcement, when it came, that Uncle Edward had convinced the Seventh Veil’s ownership of the need to build a golf course was not surprising. What was surprising was the part I was expected to play in carrying this plan off. The news of the scheme was brought to me by Stark. Of course you know the remarkable Miss Stark, if you’ve ever been to the Seventh Veil. She is not just the concierge, but really the sine qua non of the whole Seventh Veil operation. A cool competence seeps from her every pore. And there is no more striking a set of pores anywhere in the Caribbean, perhaps anywhere in the Commonwealth. She somehow packs the wisdom of the ages into the shape of a starlet. Unlike most of us at Seventh Veil, Stark shows not a bit of ankle—the formality of her office always finds her in a crisp pair of spats and a keenly polished pair of shoes. Northward of those, however, our Miss Stark is the most dedicated nudist ever seen. Grown men have been known to faint dead away at the sight.
Stark and I are old chums, though, me being long past the fainting-dead-away stage. So when she approached me that day as I lay on the terrace, soaking up the solar, I gave her my usual jolly greeting in expectation of a pleasant afternoon’s chat. “What ho, Stark,” I what-hoed.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she said. “Lord Tynsdale has desired me to speak with you if I may on a matter of some importance to him.” Lord Tynsdale, of course, being my Uncle Edward.
“Say on,” said I. She laid the facts before me, how Uncle Edward had at last persuaded the management to buy into his scheme to add a golf course to the list of Seventh Veil’s many amenities. Now you may think that for a place with a half mile of pristine Caribbean beach, a swimming pool, two restaurants, a night club, five tennis courts and a cricket pitch, the addition of an eighteen-hole golf course is coming it a bit high. I do, anyway, and I said so to Stark.
“Indeed, sir,” she replied, “but the Ownership considers Lord Tynsdale to be a very important customer.”
“He does bring an awful lot of return business, I suppose.”
“As you yourself can attest, sir.”
“True, Stark, very true. And very interesting, of course, but what’s all this to do with me?”
It would not be fair to say Stark looked sheepish, for there was not a trace of movement in her features detectable to the human eye, but something in her manner, perhaps an infinitesimal pause before her answer, let me know that it was not my fate to be a mere disinterested observer in this plot. “His Lordship desires your assistance with one small aspect of his plans, sir,” she said.
Any time His Lordship desires my assistance with one small aspect of his plans turns into trouble for Hubert. Once when I was five years old, on a trip to some zoological garden, he asked me to squeeze through the bars of the baboon enclosure to retrieve his pocket-watch, which he had dropped while trying to attract the baboons’ attention with its shiny surface. “Just nip through and back before they spot you, there’s a good lad,” he said. Only Aunt Adele’s timely intervention saved your narrator’s life on that occasion, and that was just about the least of the favours Uncle Edward has asked me to do over the years.
“His Lordship,” Stark explained, “has very specific wishes as to the design of the course. It seems he ardently desires that it conform in minutest detail to the architecture of a certain Scottish golf course of his acquaintance.”
“Let me guess—Dundoran Burn?”
“Indeed, sir. Dundoran Burn is the name of the course in question. Apparently, His Lordship has found this course particularly challenging and wishes to re-create the experience.”
“The old boy’s potty over that course. Spends absolutely ages up there every summer. I suppose if he’s going to have only one golf course to last him through the season, he wants it to be a cracking good one.”
“Precisely, sir.”
“But I still don’t see how I come into it.”
“I am coming to that, sir. The course lies on the estate of Dundoran Manor, which is owned by Sir Alistair McCready, the Laird of Dundoran. Since no design schematic is in existence, it seems Sir Alistair’s permission will be required for the landscapers to survey, and subsequently duplicate, the particulars of the course.”
“I feel certain my name is going to pop up any time now,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Stark said, and again assumed that nearly undetectable air of sheepishness. “His Lordship would like you to approach the Laird personally to request his approval for the scheme.”
“Me?” I goggled. “Why me? I don’t even know this McCready chap. I don’t see why I should cut my holiday short on the whim of some dotty old uncle, much beloved though he may be, and pack myself off to Scotland for the sake of one silly conversation. Why can’t Uncle Edward just ask the Laird himself?”
“It seems His Lordship and Sir Alistair are no longer on speaking terms, owing to an incident on the golf course last year.”
“What sort of incident?”
“I am not privy to the details, I’m afraid, but I gather that some sort of wager was involved.”
“Ah, betting on golf again, eh?”
“It appears so, sir. Both your uncle and Sir Alistair are well-known for their sporting enthusiasm.”
“So, Uncle Edward lost a bet and now won’t even speak to this fellow?”
“Actually, the outcome of the wager is unclear, sir. When asked about the matter, Lord Tynsdale only muttered something about ‘that damned silly book’.”
“Book?”
“Yes, sir. Reference was also made to a ‘snivelling little cheat’.”
“Meaning Sir Alistair?”
“One cannot be certain, of course, but I am told that Sir Alistair is a man of modest stature.”
“I see. Anything else?”
“His Lordship refused to elaborate further, except to say that you must take care when approaching Sir Alistair not to introduce His Lordship’s name into the conversation. And of course, to emphasize the importance of your cooperation in this matter.”
A slight archness in Stark’s look as she intoned the word “importance” indicated that all hope for your narrator’s continued joy was lost. There is simply no defying Uncle Edward where one of his life’s great passions is involved.
“When do I leave?” I sighed.
“Our boat departs tomorrow morning for Maracaibo, whence we travel by airship to London, and then on to Scotland by train.”
“Our boat, Stark?”
“Yes, sir. In order to represent the interests of the ownership,” and here a true look of distaste perturbed her imperturbable features, “I have been asked to accompany you.”