‘One hundred and twenty-nine, sir?’ said Mr Entincknapp. ‘It’s supposed to be one hundred and fifty, sir. Fifty pounds a week, sir, and you’ve had him for three weeks.’
‘Indeed, my good man,’ replied Royston Chittock, ‘but for the last three days he hasn’t done any work. He didn’t catch any at all. So I owe you for eighteen days, not for three weeks.’
The moleman was stunned. ‘Eighteen days, sir? Why, sir, he didn’t get any more because there weren’t any. You agreed three weeks, sir, so you did, and it’s three weeks you’ve had him for, and that’s one hundred and fifty pounds.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Entincknapp, but that’s my last word. I have rounded it up, you know. Strictly speaking it should be one hundred and twenty-eight point five seven one four two eight pounds, that’s to six decimal places, and I have rounded it up to one hundred and twenty-nine pounds.’ He looked imperiously at the moleman and said, ‘You are excused.’
‘Oh, I’m excused, am I?’ replied Mr Entincknapp. ‘Well, sir, that’s very big of you. Excused, eh?’
As he started to leave with Sergeant Corker, he turned and said, ‘Did you know, sir, that round here “chittock” is an old word for “magpie”?’
‘No I didn’t. How very interesting.’
Mr Entincknapp opened the garden gate, and said, ‘A very appropriate name, sir. Magpies are bloody thieves, so they are.’ Thereupon he left, without a backward glance, his single eye glowing with anger and contempt.
Mr Chittock felt sad afterwards in his empty house, and thought about getting a cat of his own.
There had not been a molehill on the lawn for over a week, and Uncle Dick therefore returned in his spare time in order to make the lawn lovely enough to putt on.
Mr Chittock had not realised that the creation of a putting green is no simple matter, and neither is it cheap. ‘How long will it take?’ he asked the greenkeeper. ‘A couple of weeks?’
Uncle Dick looked at him as if he were mad, and said, ‘It’ll take a good year, sir, unless you don’t mind a bodge.’
Chittock was astonished. ‘A year? A whole year? How can that possibly be?’
Dick explained. ‘I don’t mean a whole year of me being here workin’, I mean a year before it’s fit to play on without makin’ a sorry mess of it. It’s got to settle, and the grass has got to get contented. First thing is, this is clay soil. It’s heavy stuff, so we’ll have to dig out a couple of feet for drainage, and fill it up with shingle, unless you’d rather be sloshing about in mud. Then we got to put a few pipes with holes in when we build it up.’
‘Build it up?’ echoed Mr Chittock, who had hitherto been thinking of a green that was at lawn level.
Well, sir, do you want the green raised, with nice curves and little difficult bits, and a bunker to chip out of like a proper realistic green that’s just like the real McCoy? ’Cause if you do, you’ll need to build it up.’
The idea appealed to Mr Chittock, who pictured himself holding aloft a series of trophies. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but can you make it behave just exactly like the ones at the West Surrey?’
‘Yes, I can, sir, but in the end everything depends on the maintenance.’
Chittock stroked his chin with his hand and said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to do the maintenance?’
‘I’m sure we can come to an accommodation,’ said the greenkeeper. ‘I expect young Robert would mow it for you. It’s the mowing and rolling that matters mostly, and putting down poison for the worms, and I can come and sort out the spiking and feeding and everything else.’
Royston Chittock volunteered to help Uncle Dick with the labouring, having entertained romantic ideas about the dignity of labour and the benefits of fresh air and fitness, but after one hour he had aching muscles and blisters on his hands. He told Uncle Dick that he had urgent paperwork to attend to, and left him smiling knowingly to himself as he removed and stacked the turves.
Dick set about cutting cubes of clay out of the ground. It was just the right time of year for it, because the ground was neither baked hard, as it is in summer, nor sodden and glutinous as it is in winter. Even so, it was very hard work, complicated by the roots of a may tree nearby, and Dick almost regretted not having ordered in a small earth mover. His reason for not having done so was that he was being paid by the hour, and couldn’t see the point of hurrying anyway. He was happy to dig out the hole over several visits, as long as it didn’t rain too much and turn into a quagmire. He reflected more than once that it would have made an ideal garden pond if it were puddled. The clay was just right, smooth and almost yellow, unalloyed by dirt and stones. It occurred to him that he might be able to sell any surplus to the brick factory.
As the days went by the hole grew larger and the heap of spoil turned into a small hill. Then one day a lorry came from Godalming, reversed across the lawn, leaving tracks four inches deep and emptied several yards of shingle into the hole. Uncle Dick built a kind of wall of clay around it, and laid irrigation pipes out from the centre in a fan. Then another lorry came from Godalming with a load of medium shingle, followed by another a few days later with a load of coarse soil, followed by another loaded with medium soil.
Uncle Dick spent some frustrating hours with his client, who hummed and havered over precisely what contours he wanted. Several times he arrived at something that was simultaneously beautiful, practical and challenging, only to have Mr Chittock come out and say, ‘I was just looking at it from the landing window, and I thought, “What if we just …”’ and then he would explain that he wanted something quite different to what had been previously specified. In the end, taking account of Mr Chittock’s endlessly retelling the story of his ace on the second hole at the West Surrey, Uncle Dick proposed that they reproduce the contours of that particular green, in commemoration of the historic feat. The ploy worked, although the new green would have to be very considerably smaller, and the bunkers proportionally less horrifying.
A lorry containing several yards of sieved topsoil arrived from Hurtmore, and reversed across the ever deepening tracks in the lawn. Uncle Dick raked it for hours to get it into shape, and six inches deep. When this was done to his satisfaction, he knocked on the door of the house and informed Mr Royston Chittock that, although he would be back from time to time, in order to get rid of any weeds, and to roll it, there would be a six-month wait before the next step.
‘Six months!’ exclaimed Chittock. ‘Six months! Really, this is preposterous! Six months!’
‘You let it settle before you seed it,’ said Uncle Dick imperturbably. ‘That’s the best way to do it. If you want it done badly, I’m sure there’s those that might oblige.’
A certain hostility had arisen between the two men over the previous weeks. It was not just because of Mr Chittock’s frequent changes of mind. It was because the latter’s urban suspiciousness led him to cavil constantly about payment, both for labour and materials. He all but accused Uncle Dick of slacking when he wasn’t looking, and of over-ordering shingle so that he could sell some of it on. Uncle Dick had become more and more irritated and curt with his client, and that had only made things worse. By now he had also heard the moleman’s story about the short-changing of Sergeant Corker, and, after initial disbelief, had come to share his disdain for the displaced townsman.
Uncle Dick turned up once a week to see how the ground was settling, sometimes with young Robert’s pet rook, Lizzie, in attendance. Ever since the bird had learned to fly, she had taken to dropping out of the sky on to the shoulders of those she knew, so that she would meet Robert when he alighted from the bus upon returning from school, or, with a jubilant squawk, crash-land in his mother’s shopping basket when she was walking home from the Cricket Green Stores, in the hope that it might contain cheese or grapes. If Lizzie spotted Uncle Dick, whether at the golf course or elsewhere, she would land on his shoulder, murmur sweet nothings in his ear, and set about tidying up the tufts of hair that protruded about his ears from beneath his cap. When he was working on Mr Chittock’s new green, she sat in the hawthorn tree, raising and lowering the feathers on the top of her head as she watched out for worms or leatherjackets. Uncle Dick would stop and stroke her under the chin, repeating ‘silly bugger, silly bugger’. Mimicking young Robert’s voice, she would reply, ‘Come on, come on.’