Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  ‘You’ll remember this for the rest of your life,’ Dad said. I remember wondering if this was true. For a start, the ‘rest of my life’ seemed impossibly distant. I could no more imagine being forty-two (his age then; my age as I write this) than I could imagine ‘London’ or ‘the BBC’. And, secondly, walking on the moon did not seem that big a deal. Only that afternoon I had personally paddled across the Amazon in a cardboard box, making landfall beneath the plum tree at the bottom of the garden just as night fell. Neither the boa constrictors nor the best efforts of a tribe of Indians could stop me and I had just enough time to beach my craft and disguise it with twigs before going in for supper.

  Dad is lost in wonder at the moon landings, and not only because Neil Armstrong’s roots are in the same part of the Scottish Borders as his. His eyes are moist as he gazes into the distance. From time to time, he shakes his head at the miracles that science has made possible. Together we stand on the lawn and gaze into the twinkling night. The moon is a thin sliver in the sky over Pietermaritzburg.

  ‘They’re up there now. Can you imagine that? Walking on the moon. That must be as good as it gets,’ he says. ‘No one can ever trump that.’

  This does not overly impress me. I have little doubt that one day I will walk on the moon, possibly on my way to Mars. Instead, I focus on the new word. ‘What does “trump” mean?’ I ask.

  A slow grin spreads over Dad’s face. ‘This ought to be fun,’ he says. ‘Go and fetch your brother.’

  But David is busy softening up a rabbit skin. I never find out where they come from, but at that time it is not unusual to find rabbit skins pegged out in the back garden. Dad brings tannin home from work so David can cure them. To my surprise, he seems to like doing this. He arranges the pelts neatly in rows and tells me not to worry about the blood. He shows me where their eyes were and how the membrane peels off easily if only I will do it right.

  ‘We’re all like that under the skin,’ he says.

  I leave him to his gore and go inside to recruit my sister, Jackie. Together she and I will learn about this new word, ‘trump’.

  Dad sits us round the table. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘I’m going to teach you how to play bridge.’

  It seems entirely reasonable that to understand a word we must first learn a game. But it is not until I teach my children how to play bridge that I see that the first thing they understand is the idea of trumps.

  It is April 2003, a couple of months after Dad died. April is South Africa’s autumn, and my girlfriend and I and our three children are in the Drakensberg mountains, where we have rented a holiday cottage.

  The weather is kind to us. The days are hot and we spend them walking mountain trails and swimming in fledgling streams. When my brother joins us for a few days, we go rock climbing. He finds his way to the top of the cliff so that he can belay the children from above while I stand below and offer helpful advice.

  ‘Move your left foot across to that toehold. No, not that left foot, the other one.’

  My girlfriend is nervous of heights. She likes the idea of our children climbing cliffs, but she does not like to watch. She takes photographs with her eyes shut.

  In the cold evenings, we barbecue chops and boerewors and watch the mountain air darken. My son, Cal, is eight years old. He likes to play with the hot coals. He pushes them from one side of the barbecue pit to the other. He lights sticks and holds them up against the darkness.

  ‘To keep the baboons away,’ he says, with only a passing regard for the truth.

  The nights fall swiftly at this time of year and soon we find ourselves retreating into the warmth of the cottage. One evening, I get out a pack of cards. ‘Come on,’ I say, ‘I’ll show you how to play bridge.’

  My brother snorts loudly. Neither he nor my girlfriend is interested in playing, but the children are keen. They like games. We settle round the table to play, as always, boys against girls. Cal and me against my two daughters. The girls look forward to beating us. We ‘boys’ put on a wholly unjustified air of nonchalant superiority. I deal the first hand and start to run through the basics.

  ‘You need to understand that the idea of the game is first to reach a “contract” by agreeing how many “tricks” your partnership will make,’ I say. ‘And then you need to try to make them. A trick is a round of four cards, with one card being played in turn by each player.’ And even in saying this I knew that the phrases were not mine but my father’s and that my voice was my father’s voice. ‘There are fifty-two cards in the pack and there are therefore thirteen tricks to be won. Got that? Fifty-two divided by four is thirteen. The highest card of the suit played first wins the trick. Unless it is trumped. In agreeing the number of tricks your partnership will try to make, you are also determining which suit will be “trumps”. Trumps are cards with special powers. If a trump card is played on a non-trump lead, the trump wins the trick.’

  It is only in watching my own children that I realise that it is trumps that first hold a child’s attention. Children love the idea that a little baby of a card like the two of whatever suit is trumps can silence a big adult ace of something else. Trumps upset the adult order of things. They invert the natural hierarchy. Trumps make the weak strong and the strong weak. They have miraculous properties. They are biblical, like floods and plagues. There is a violence to trumps, which can take the highest card and spit in its face. They are David to Goliath. But there is a gentility to them too. Trumps can turn water into wine. With them, the meek can inherit the earth.

  At this point I no longer sound like my father. In the good Catholic household of my childhood such flippant views were not expressed. But they were understood. The meek and their place – if we take ‘meek’ to mean the disempowered majority – were, of course, a subject of some concern. Repression cannot last forever. In South Africa, the numbers alone meant that the apartheid government could not endure forever. And, though for the moment ‘things were quiet’, nobody could be confident that it would always be this way. This also was not discussed in our good Catholic household.

  What is discussed are the magical properties of trumps.

  ‘There’s many a man,’ my father says, ‘who walked the streets of London because he didn’t draw trumps.’ Assuming the bidding has not been stupid, the declarer – the person playing the hand – will have more trumps than his opponents. It is often, though not always, in his interest to force the opponents to play their trumps (i.e. to ‘draw’ them) so that the only ones remaining are his own. Otherwise, he is likely to find himself losing tricks he thought he would win and failing to make contracts that would otherwise have been ‘cold’. Cold, in bridge, means ‘certain to succeed’. From failing to make cold contracts, it is only a short step out on to the cold streets. ‘Cold’ in this sense means something completely different. Quite why these streets, in Dad’s metaphor, should have been in London and not, say, New York (where bridge began) or Johannesburg (which was ‘paved with gold’) was not clear to me at the time. I realise now that, although he learned to play in Scotland and spent most of his life in South Africa, the sort of bridge to which my father aspired, the bridge of elegant squeezes and dramatic coups, had its spiritual home in the smarter clubs of London. He could imagine the dashing men in tuxedos playing for high stakes while sipping vodka martinis and seducing women of impeccable breeding and pleasingly fluid morals.

  In Moonraker, Ian Fleming reproduces one of the most famous hands in cards and uses it to rile the arch villain Sir Hugo Drax. The hand actually comes from whist, the precursor to bridge, and is known as The Duke of Cumberland hand. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Duke, the second son of George III, was a high-stakes gambler and was playing whist in a gaming house in Bath. The story goes that he was dealt the following hand:

  A K Q J

  A K Q J

  A K

  K J 9

  Almost all the top cards! At the very least, he must make ten tricks in a no-trump contract and, if hi
s partner has anything at all, he must make twelve (a ‘small slam’) or thirteen (a ‘grand slam’). But, without so much as a by-your-leave, the opponents bid seven clubs. He doubles and they goad him into a rash bet, saying he will not win a single trick. The Duke takes the bet, even though as a gambling man he should have suspected something was up. He duly makes no tricks, for these are the full hands:

  With clubs as trumps, the declarer (the person who first bid the suit in which the final contract is agreed) has only to finesse the clubs twice, trump two rounds of diamonds and claim the balance of the tricks.

  It is said to have cost the Duke twenty thousand pounds.

  In Moonraker, James Bond and Drax are playing for more modest, but nevertheless high stakes. They are at the Blades Club in London. They despise each other. As the game progresses, the stakes rise. Bond is deliberately offensive. He feigns drunkenness and insults his opponent. Honours are more or less even when Bond deals from a prepared hand. In bridge, as in so much else, Bond is prepared to break the rules in the service of his ego, his libido or Her Majesty’s Government. M, his partner, has been warned that when the bidding gets a little wild he must keep quiet. The cards are dealt and Drax looks at his extraordinary hand. But Bond is the dealer and he opens with a bid of 7 . Drax, sitting West, gulps a few times and wonders what to bid. He has no obvious slam of his own and, eventually, in impotent rage, he doubles for penalties. His partner leads a diamond and Bond’s hand is secure. His trumps and suit length destroy the high card strength of the West hand. 7 bid and made and – more importantly – Sir Hugo Drax is fifteen thousand pounds in the hole. Round one to Mr Bond. No doubt they will meet again.

  Fleming loved his bridge, and played regularly at the Portland Club and at Whites. The fictional ‘Blades’ is something of a mix of the two and an entirely appropriate setting for what Kingsley Amis described as ‘probably the most gripping game of cards in the whole of literature’. With typical attention to detail, Fleming sets the scene, by evoking the animosity between Bond and Drax, but also through his vivid descriptions of the minor characters found in any rubber bridge club. There is General Bealey who ‘doesn’t know the reds from the blacks. Nearly always a few hundred down at the end of the week. Doesn’t seem to care. Bad heart. No dependants. Stacks of money from jute.’ Or Duff Sutherland who was ‘an absolute killer. Makes a regular ten thousand a year out of the club. Nice chap. Wonderful card manners. Used to play chess for England.’

  I suspect that Dad imagines himself ‘making a regular ten thousand a year’ (or its modern equivalent). He may well imagine himself playing chess for England. But, in fact, he does neither. What he does is teach his son that trumps have magical properties. ‘Everyone gets dealt some cards,’ he says. ‘It’s what you make of them that counts. Just remember to trust trumps more than you trust your high cards.’

  For Dad, character will always count for more than wealth.

  5. Latitudes

  PARENTS APPEAR TO their children fully formed and it is many years before they question who they are and how they came to be that way. They are simply taken as they come. He smells of tobacco? OK. He listens to the radio with a faraway expression on his face? So be it. Silence becomes him? He wears long socks and has two-tone legs? His shoulders shake when he laughs? He stalks the house in dark rages that come and go without warning? He sometimes uses curious words that no one else uses and when you ask why he talks about some place called ‘the auld country’ or even ‘home’?

  The bit about home confused me a little but I did not dwell on it. By the age of seven, I had come to accept that words mean different things, especially to adults. Home for me was our house in Wembley, Pietermaritzburg. It had a veranda at the front and a wild fig tree in the garden. There was a woodshed I thought of as Brazil and a carport for Antarctica. It didn’t bother me at all that the world I mapped out in our garden bore only a passing resemblance to the globe in my bedroom. The top lawn was the Atlantic Ocean. The courtyard outside the kitchen was Siberia. Round the back of Antarctica, somewhere near Australia, were some rooms where Margaret lived. Margaret was the maid. She was big and black and called me ‘Mafuta’, which means fat. She meant this as a compliment.

  At night, I lie on the sitting-room floor with the globe in front of me. My father calls out place names and I have to find them. Mostly he goes for exotica. Popacatepetl and Lake Baikal. Some are easy, like Salisbury, and some are hard, like Riga. Occasionally we reverse the game. I find places on the map and spell out their names. I have no memory of catching him out. He seems to know everything, even before I say it.

  ‘Just using the available evidence,’ he says. ‘Just reading the signals.’ He tamps his pipe and looks at me with a smile. ‘Remind me to teach you one day.’

  In bridge, players will use cards that have no other value to tell their partner something. This is called signalling. At its simplest it is a way of telling your partner whether you want him to continue playing a suit, or to switch to something else. Alan Truscott, in the New York Times Bridge Book, explains it like this: ‘Signals come in many guises. When you are making your first discard, you can play a high card to say, “I have strength in this suit and want it led,” or for a low card to say, “I am weak in this suit and do not want it led.”’

  Of course, it is not only your partner who reads the signals. Your opponents are watching too.

  If you are going to signal, you should signal as ‘loudly’ as possible. If you have an honour sequence of, say, Q-J-10, then you will discard the Q. If you discard the J, it means you don’t have the Q and so on. ‘But,’ according to Truscott, ‘there are two things to beware of: Firstly, only signal when you think the message will help your partner. Very often a signal will help the opposition and should not be given. This requires judgement, and experience is the only guide ... If in doubt, do not signal.’

  Dad watches me tracing the contours of the globe with a finger. Before I can read the name on the map, he says it himself. He knows where my finger is before I do. He knows that I am likely to choose places with short names in preference to places with long names. He knows only big cities and big rivers make it on to the globe. He is reading the signals.

  ‘Ask me more places,’ I say to Dad.

  ‘Jedburgh,’ he says, but he has to spell it out because it is not pronounced as it is spelled. And his accent makes it worse. When he says Scottish place names, he exaggerates the pronunciation, which makes them even less intelligible. I scour South America for a place called Jedburgh.

  ‘Try Scotland,’ he says.

  I find Scotland, but Jedburgh is too small to appear on the globe.

  ‘It’s not here,’ I say crossly. ‘There’s no such place.’

  Dad has a point to prove, so he goes over to the bookshelf to get the old atlas. There he finds a map of southern Scotland.

  ‘That’s Jedburgh,’ he says. ‘That’s where your grandfather was born. Now find Istanbul.’ I find Istanbul without too much trouble. In Dad’s old atlas it is still called Constantinople.

  ‘They say that’s where bridge began,’ he says. ‘I think it was about the time I was born.’

  Well, yes and no. Dad was born in the autumn of 1926 and the rules of the bridge we play today – contract bridge – were first formulated towards the end of 1925. But it came from a long tradition of whist. In 1742, Edmund Hoyle published a short book called A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, Containing the Laws of the Game, and Also Some Rules Whereby a Beginner May, With Due Attention to Them, Attain to the Playing It Well. The original is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford although many pirated copies exist and later editions are housed at the British Library in London. According to Alan Truscott, one of the great bridge writers, Hoyle’s book was ‘the biggest seller to make its appearance in the 18th century’. He was soon able to introduce similar guidance for other games and by the time he died in 1769 (at the ripe old age of ninety-seven) he was the accepted ‘arbiter of law and order in all
games’. It was Hoyle who set the standard for the most remarkable feature of the game. In a world occupied by cheats and gamesmen, cardsharps, thieves and brigands, he insisted upon a ‘Code of Ethics and Fair Play’ that appears, with very minor changes, in the laws by which we play contract bridge today. Hoyle would not have approved of Bond’s use of prepared hands. Not even in the interests of Her Majesty’s Government.

  Little is known of the early history of bridge. In the Bodleian Library, there is a pamphlet by an anonymous author dated 1886 and entitled ‘Biritch or Bridge Whist, or Russian Whist’. It describes the general features of a game that it claims is a variation of the Russian game of Vint. The writer, Mr Keiley, was a member of the Khedival Club in Cairo. He writes, ‘bridge was the principal card game played there at my entry and had, so the members told me, long been so.’ Some years later the Daily Telegraph carried an article by a Mr O.H. van Millingen who had lived in Constantinople in 1879 or 1880 and remembered ‘a very interesting game called Biritch that became very popular in all clubs and dethroned the game of whist’. He included as evidence a letter from a friend called Graziani who had worked as a translator in the Italian embassy in Constantinople. Written in 1922, Graziani’s letter said that nearly fifty years previously he first played bridge in the home of Mr Georges Corionio, manager of the Bank of Constantinople. Also present at the game was ‘a Rumanian financier’ by the name of Serghiadi, who taught the others the principles of the game. Some historians have speculated that the game was played by British troops while serving in the Crimea. As many as 14,000 soldiers would have been stationed in and around Constantinople.