Todd turned round sharply. “Muirfield?”
“Yes,” said Betty brightly. “He plays down there at least once a week these days. He’s a little bit slow now, with his leg playing up, but he always gets in nine holes. He has the same four-some, you know. David Forth, you know, Lord Playfair . . .”
“Yes, yes,” said Todd irritably. The mention of Muirfield had annoyed him. How long had Ramsey Dunbarton been on the waiting list, he wondered. Probably no time at all. And what was the use of his being a member? He would surely get as much enjoyment from playing somewhere closer to town.
“You know him?” asked Betty. “You know David?”
“No, I don’t,” said Todd. “I know who he is. I don’t know him.”
“I thought that you might have met him out at Muirfield,”
she said. “Do you get out there a great deal?”
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Todd looked over his shoulder in an attempt to catch the waiter’s eye. “No,” he said. “I don’t. My brother plays there, but I don’t. I play elsewhere.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to be in the same club as your brother?”
asked Betty.
Todd shrugged. “I’m perfectly happy,” he said. “And I really don’t get the chance to play much golf these days. You know how it is. Not everyone wants to be a member of Muirfield, you know.”
Betty laughed – a high-pitched sound which irritated Todd even more. It would be impossible to be married to a woman like this, he thought, and for a moment he felt sympathy for Ramsey, but no, that was going too far.
“I was going to tell you about this shortbread,” said Betty. “I was sitting down for a cup of tea while Ramsey was out at Muirfield, with David and the others, and I decided to have a piece of shortbread. Now the shortbread itself was interesting because it had been baked by no less a person than Judith McClure, who’s headmistress of St George’s. You know her?”
Todd stared at her glassily. “No,” he said. “But I know who she is.”
“Well,” continued Betty, “I had gone to a coffee morning at St George’s, in the art centre, with a friend, who’s got a daughter there – a very talented girl – and I’m friendly with her mother, who lives over in Gordon Terrace, and she very kindly invited me to come to the coffee morning. Anyway, we went off and there was a stand with all sorts of things which had been baked by the girls and by the staff too. They were selling scones and the like to raise money for a school art trip to Florence. So I decided to buy something to add my little contribution to the cause. I love Florence, although Ramsey and I haven’t been there for at least twenty years.
“Mind you,” she went on, “there are lots of people who say that Florence is ruined. They say that there are now so many visitors that you have to queue more or less all morning to get into the Uffizi in the afternoon. Can you believe that? Standing there with all those Germans and what-not with their backpacks?
All morning. No thank you! Ramsey and I just wouldn’t do that.
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“But I suppose if you’re an Edinburgh schoolgirl and you’re young and fit, then it’s fine to stand about and wait for the Uffizi to open. So anyway I dutifully went over to the stall and bought a packet of shortbread which said:
– one can write a history of the papacy during the day and then cook at night. Something like that.
“The shortbread was delicious. I had several pieces over the next few days and then, without any warning, while I was eating the very last piece, a bit of tooth broke off. It had nothing to do with the shortbread, of course. I wouldn’t want her to think that her shortbread broke my tooth – it didn’t. It was just that this tooth was ready to break, apparently. There must have been a tiny crack in it and this was the time that it chose to break.
One can’t plan these things in life. They just happen, don’t they?”
She did not wait for an answer. “I felt it immediately. If I touched the bit that had broken off, I felt a very sharp pain, like an electric shock. And so I telephoned the dental surgery, but it was a Sunday, and I got a recorded message telling me to phone some number or other. But the problem was that the person who left the message on that tape spoke indistinctly – so many people do these days – and I just couldn’t make out the number! So what could I do? Well, I’ll tell you. I had heard that there was an emergency dental service down at the Western General hospital, and so I phoned them up and asked whether I could come down and have the tooth looked at. And do you know what they said? They said that if I was registered with a dentist then I wouldn’t be allowed in the door! That’s what they said. So I said to them that I couldn’t make out the emergency number and therefore couldn’t get in touch with my own dentist, and they just repeated what they’d said about my not being able to go to their emergency clinic if I was registered elsewhere. Can you believe it! I’d fallen into some sort of void, it seemed. It’s, what do they call it? A catch 23.”
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“Catch 22,” said Todd quietly.
“No, I’m sure it’s 23,” said Betty. “Same as the bus that goes down Morningside Road. The 23 bus.”
Todd looked at his watch. It was only 10.22. No, 10.23.
“Let’s have some fun,” whispered Jim Smellie to Mungo Brown.
Taking the microphone in his hand, he held it up and called the ball to order. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen!
