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letter, I’d come to think of him as a lucky escape. I’d found him attractive, sure, but . . . a lapsed priest, for Christ’s sake!
    The fact is, my sexual career hasn’t been very exciting or very extensive. I won’t list all my partners: suffice it to say that I’m well short of double figures. And here’s the truth, boys. Of that number, only Oz really knew what he was doing down there, or to put it another way, cared about what he was doing for me. The others ate, shot and left, more or less. A wise and cynical lady, whose name I’ve forgotten, once said that the two saddest times in a woman’s life are, one, when her partner can’t find her clitoris, and two, when he finds it. I’ve had enough sadness in my life, and I’m not about to go looking for more.
    Our leisurely breakfast behind us, we hit the road. I didn’t take the scenic route. Patterson had to make do with the scenery from the autopista. It took little more than three-quarters of an hour to find the championship venue. The newish PGA course is set between two trunk roads, just south of Girona Airport, but not so close to the flight path for it to be a major nuisance. It’s tree-lined, with undulating fairways (for non-golfers, those are the close-mown bits where the ball’s supposed to land) that look odd, given that they’re still surrounded by forest, the rest of which was cleared so they could be made. It’s a lovely course, though, and on that day had been beautifully presented for play.
    Patterson was surprised to find that the visitors’ car park was far from full. In fact, the place looked deserted. In the distance I could see vans standing beside a giant marquee; it was the exhibitors’ tent, I supposed, but they all seemed to be dropping off stock, so I realised that it wouldn’t be open for business for a few hours, and probably not that day.
    ‘Where do they sell tickets?’ Patterson asked.
    ‘What makes you think they will?’ I countered. ‘They might charge a few euro admission during the tournament itself, but not on the practice days.’
    ‘If this was Wentworth,’ he began, ‘even on a Monday . . .’
    ‘But it isn’t Wentworth,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s Spain, and in this country, golf is still very much a posh people’s sport. Sure, there are plenty of courses around but they’re mostly used by Brits, Germans and Swedes. You can walk up and play on them, but they’re not cheap. As for tournaments like this . . . when this starts properly, you’ll find that most of the spectator announcements will be in English.’
    As I spoke I wondered whether I should have talked them into waiting until Wednesday or Thursday; but what the hell, I’d shown them the way. If they wanted to come back when the action started, they could. In the meantime, we were there, and there was nothing to do but go in search of whatever there was to be seen.
    As we left the car park we saw that there was more bustle about the place than we had realised. Plastic seats were being fitted on the spectator grandstands, a television camera was being winched up on to a stand and a giant leader-board was under construction, beside what I guessed had to be the eighteenth green. The tented village was being set up just behind a big modern clubhouse, around which, happily, there seemed to be plenty happening. There were tables out front under a sun awning; all of them were occupied, exclusively by men, some in blazers like Patterson’s (I had begun to think of it as his uniform), others in what seemed, from a distance, to be designer golf gear. None of it, I reckoned, had been picked up for a couple of euro at the Palafrugell street market.
    ‘What do we do?’ Shirley asked.
    ‘Find the practice ground?’ I suggested.
    ‘How?’
    I looked around for any sort of public information, but saw none, not even a layout of the course. Then I glanced back towards the clubhouse and saw three men appear. One, in a T-shirt and shorts, was carrying an