Quintin Jardine: On Honeymoon With Death

When he found Mary Queen of Scots whacking a ball around on Musselburgh racecourse, she was marked down for a very unfortunate life thereafter, and a very brutal end, as the accounts of her execution bear out. The old Devil was so pissed off that he even made her wig come loose when the axeman picked up her severed head.

He couldn’t stop the game from taking hold, of course. Not even he can get in the way of a clutch of Scots caddies waiting in slavering ambush for the next busload of Americans or Japanese. But he has twisted it to his own ends, by making it such that it takes normal men and women and, over the course of a three-hour walk, turns them into cursing, spitting, vengeful, violently masochistic beasts. In a final act of vengeance he has also taken from them the ability to resist spending large sums of money which most of them cannot afford on increasingly complicated and expensive equipment which does them no bloody good at all.

I know, I know; occasionally a Jack, or a Gary, or a Seve, or a Nick, or a Tiger bursts from the throng to show that the game can be a thing of unsurpassed beauty, but in fact they simply demonstrate that God in His Paradise is not completely oblivious to the ways of mankind and is still capable of reminding Works Number 666 not to push his luck.

He hasn’t done it with me, though; I still play off thirteen, and rising.

I don’t know what I did to attract Mr A’s attention. I thought I always tried to be as relaxed and laidback as I could, to do a good, sound dependable job, giving no one any bother, any hassle, not never, not no-how. Maybe that was it. Maybe I was too good at it and the master of my destiny decided that he wasn’t having any more of it.

And that’s where I come back to his special sense of humour. A Devil with less imagination would simply have given me piles, or eczema, or male pattern baldness; or if he’d really had it in for me, a crippling cerebral haemorrhage, or testicular cancer, something like that.

But no. What did that capricious bastard do to me?

He gave me Primavera Phillips, that was all!

On the face of it, my second wife has always seemed to be a sensible, straightforward, ingenuous woman. On the face of it.

I thought that for years. From the moment of our first meeting, when she walked into her flat and found me there, alone yet not alone, in most unusual circumstances, she struck me as just that solid no-nonsense person, an ultra-capable woman given neither to fear nor panic.

We fell in lust at first sight. Ever since then I’ve barely passed a day which in my old world would have seemed normal. Some might say that sharing a loft in Edinburgh with a green iguana named Wallace is not everyone’s idea of normality, but it suited me at the time.

Not even our courtship was straightforward. We did our thing together, and, our lucky shamrock having made its presence felt at an early stage, went off to Spain with a bag of money and spent some time shagging ourselves insensible. Then Prim fell in love with someone else, at the same time as I realised that I wasn’t a real person without Jan, the girl with whom I had grown up, and whom I had mucked around for several years.

They’re both dead now, Prim’s soul mate and mine. That old Devil had an invisible hand in Jan’s death, that’s for sure. As for the other one, I’m pretty certain now that he and STA were related. I should have guessed it at the time, but I was still an idealist then. I told myself that I believed in the basic goodness of the species. Now I admit publicly what privately I’ve always known, that the Seven Deadly Sins have a hell of a lot more pulling power than the Ten Commandments.

The night my wife Jan died, I was fifteen hundred miles away, in another city. And whom did I meet, right there, for the first time since we had gone our separate ways? Primavera Phillips, that’s who.

In my innocence, I thought it was a kind of serendipitous coincidence. But I’ve seen a lot of evil since then and I don’t believe that any more. I believe in Fate, but not that it has a kindly eye and a long white beard. I don’t believe that Luck is a Lady either. No, I see them for the single demon they are.

Okay, okay, okay. I’ve got my tongue in my cheek. I’m not the happy-go-lucky yuppie I once was, but if I have a saving grace it lies in the fact that I’m still Mac the Dentist’s son, and that’s all that a bloke could ever hope for. When my dad dies. . if he ever does, because he’s strong as an ox and never ill. . then the Architect of the Universe will have a partner at Augusta, one who’ll give him a few tips on those fast greens, at that. Someone once said to me, watching him hole a curly forty-footer on the difficult thirteenth at Elie, ‘Your old man putts like God.’ That was rubbish, of course; I don’t care how long God’s been playing, he can’t be as good a putter as Macintosh Blackstone.

And don’t get me wrong about Prim, either. She’s not Jan and I’m not. . him. . but when I married her it was because I thought I loved her to bits. Sure she’s a trouble magnet, but while she’s been at my side I have also done things I had never even dreamed about, and come into possession of a right few million quid in the process.

So when she proposed that for our honeymoon we took an extended break in Spain, to give it a second shot together in happier and more settled circumstances, I worked out the odds against lightning striking three times and fell into line. (You’d think a guy who’s won the lottery would have been less likely to disregard a long shot.)

There was nowhere else we wanted to go but the Costa Brava. This was not as simple as once it might have been, since we had sold the apartment which we had owned together in the historic village of St Marti d’ Empuries. We had bought it at a knock-down price from a Dutch bloke whose wife had left him, and who flogged it way under value just to spite her. She must have got the message, for after a while she came back, and he asked us if he could buy it back.

He was amazed when we said that he could have it for what we paid him; but the truth was that the place was too full of ghosts for me. . and for Prim, but I’ll get around to that.

So we booked into the finest suite in a country house hotel called Crisaran, a medieval building which has been beautifully restored by its lady owners. We arrived in mid-November, checked in for a month, and barely left the place for the first week, doing mostly what honey-mooners are expected to do — reading and watching television.

When we had had our fill of that, we climbed into our hired Mondeo and set out to visit an old friend. Shirley Gash, the ex-pat queen of L’Escala, isn’t that old, actually. Somewhere in her late forties, one might say, but it would be irrelevant, for she is a woman in her prime. . a lot of woman. About six feet tall, blonde and gorgeous, with a figure that outdoes any screen goddess I’ve met since I made my first movie.

Miles Grayson’s Snatch , co-starring his wife. . Prim’s sister Dawn. . and ‘introducing’ Oz Blackstone, private enquiry agent turned wrestling announcer turned actor, had just opened in New York. Shirley watches CNN and Sky News like some people watch Coronation Street and EastEnders , so after brief congratulations on our marriage, there was only one thing she wanted to talk about.

‘Was it a one-off?’ she asked. ‘Or are you going to do another? They say you’re great in it. . Well, not bad for a newcomer, anyway.’

I had practised self-deprecation in front of the mirror, but I still hadn’t cracked it, so I guess my smile was more self-satisfied than modest. ‘That’s kind of them,’ I responded, ‘but you know what they say about beginner’s luck. As a matter of fact, Miles has offered me a part in his next movie. I’ve said I’ll do it; but that’s as far ahead as I’m thinking.