We had both improved considerably in the two years we’d been playing together, coaxing one another on, but for Mark the process was different: calm, creative, unfussy. A bad round never seemed to bother him. For me, it was increasingly a case of three steps forward, two steps back, sometimes with one extra step back just after that. I’d noticed golf had been much easier when I knew far less about how to play it. At this point, when I had become much more than just somebody who hit a ball and tried to get it into a little hole in as few strokes as possible, my mind became fascinated with the margins for error, with the allure of the countless potential negative outcomes, as opposed to the one simple potential positive outcome. I watched the pros at Augusta and Lytham and St Andrews and Troon on my mum and dad’s black-and-white TV, and, while there were a few inflamed exceptions – usually men from Spain or South America – the solidly successful ones often came across as robots in jumpers, pastel droids who might potentially sell you some insurance between shots. They did not appear to have exciting brains or, on the few occasions they did, they seemed to have the discipline to make those brains unexciting for the five or so hours they were on the course. They say golf is a game of the mind but that does not mean you actually require one to play it well. It could even be argued that possessing one is a distinct disadvantage. But Mark struck me as more akin to those rare pros who had a bit of swagger to them, who had plenty of intelligence but were able to somehow reduce it, control it, when they were over the ball. It had been me who’d first brought him up to the club, after I took a bag of balls down to the playing field in Underhill and found him already down there, with that prehistoric nine iron of his. I’d barely known him back then, only recognised him as a distant figure from breaktimes and the bus queue, but we’d instantly bonded, and I’d already been in awe of what he could do with just that one Edwardian club: fading it, drawing it, driving it low, more than 150 yards, into a strong breeze, then seconds later using it with great finesse for the featheriest of lobshots. I still had the authority at that point, though: it was me who told him how to grip the club properly, me who recommended his first pair of spiked shoes. I’d overcomplicated it for him, brought him into the universe of handicaps and etiquette and left-hand gloves and deconstructive video lessons and cruel bounces and lip outs and sucker-pin positions, when he could have just stayed happily thwacking balls all day, down behind the village. But, unlike me, he responded to the psychological torments of the game like a Buddha, appeared to sleepwalk through it all, even, shrugging, easy, that looseness in his swing that made him able to power his drives so effortlessly far being a greater looseness; a looseness of face, of eyes, of character, of mind.