Arthur & George

up and down the lists, wondering which items were strong, and which weak. Farrington, for instance. Farrington was a rough miner who worked for the Wyrley Colliery and had been convicted in the spring of ’04 – just about the time George was being moved from Lewes to Portland – of mutilating a horse, two sheep and a lamb. The police naturally maintained that the fellow, despite being a rude, illiterate loafer in public houses, was an associate of the known criminal Edalji. Obvious soulmates, thought Arthur sarcastically. Would Farrington lead him somewhere or nowhere? Was his crime merely emulative?
    Perhaps the mercenary Brookes and the mysterious Speck would yield something. That was an odd name, Speck – though the only direction it was leading his brain at the moment was to South Africa. When he’d been down there he’d eaten a great deal of speck, as they called their colonial form of bacon. Unlike the British version, it could be derived from any number of animals – indeed, he recalled that he had once eaten hippopotamus speck. Now where had that been? Bloemfontein, or on the journey north?
    The mind was wandering now. And in Arthur’s experience, the only way to concentrate it was first to clear it. Holmes might have played his violin, or perhaps succumbed to that indulgence his creator was nowadays embarrassed to have awarded him. No cocaine syringe for Arthur: he put his trust in a bagful of hickory-shafted golf clubs.
    He had always regarded the game as being, in theory, perfectly made for him. It required a combination of eye, brain and body: apt enough for an ophthalmologist turned writer who still retained his physical vigour. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, golf was always luring you on and then evading you. What a dance she had led him across the globe.
    As he drove to the Hankley clubhouse, he remembered the rudimentary links in front of the Mena House Hotel. If you sliced your drive you might find your ball bunkered in the grave of some Rameses or Thothmes of old. One afternoon a passer-by, assessing Arthur’s vigorous yet erratic game, had cuttingly remarked that he understood there was a special tax for excavating in Egypt. But even this round had been outdone in oddity by the golf played from Kipling’s house in Vermont. It had been Thanksgiving time, with snow already thick on the ground, and a ball was no sooner struck than it became invisible. Happily, one of them – and they still disputed which – had the notion of painting the balls red. The oddity didn’t stop there, however, because the snow’s icy crust imparted a fantastical run to the slightest decent hit. At one point he and Rudyard had launched their drives on a downward slope; there was no reason for the garish balls ever to stop, and they skidded a full two miles into the Connecticut River. Two miles: that is what he and Rudyard always believed, and damn the scepticism of certain clubhouses.
    The coquette was kind to him that day, and he found himself on the eighteenth fairway still in with a chance of breaking 80. If he could get his niblick pitch to within putting distance … As he contemplated the shot, he suddenly became aware that he would not play this course many more times. For the simple reason that he would have to leave Undershaw. Leave Undershaw? Impossible, he answered automatically. Yes, but nevertheless inevitable. He had built the house for Touie, who had been its first and only mistress. How could he bring Jean back there as his bride? It would be not just dishonourable, but positively indecent. It was one thing for Touie, in all her saintliness, to hint that he might marry again; quite another to bring a second wife back to the house, there to enjoy with her the very delights forbidden to him and Touie for every single night of their lives together under that roof.
    Of course, it was out of the question. Yet how tactful, and how intelligent, of Jean not to have pointed this out, but to have let him find his own way to that conclusion. She really was an extraordinary woman. And it further touched him that she was involving herself in the Edalji case. It was ungentlemanly to make comparisons, but Touie, while approving his mission, would have been equally happy whether he had failed or succeeded. So, doubtless, would Jean; yet her interest changed matters. It made him determined to succeed for George , for the sake of justice, for – to put it higher still – the honour of his