Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  And yet the game didn’t arrive in the United Kingdom for some decades or, if it did, no record survives. Perhaps, as the American Contract Bridge League’s Official Encyclopaedia of Bridge notes, ‘its creators were killed at Balaklava or Inkerman’. The game is, of course, a variation of games that have been played for centuries under a variety of names. But Mr Keiley’s letter appears to have been the first time the name ‘bridge’ was used in writing. It is not certain where the name came from. In 1854 or 1856, a resident of Istanbul, Metin Demirsar, wrote that, ‘As part of a course on Ottoman history and architecture ... my guide mentioned that British soldiers invented the game bridge while serving in the Crimean War. The card game ... got its name from the Galata Bridge, a bridge spanning the Golden Horn and linking the old and new parts of European Istanbul, where they apparently crossed every day to go to a coffeehouse to play cards.’ Thierry Depaulis wrote a comprehensive Histoire du Bridge in which he concluded that the game had started in the diplomatic community in Constantinople, and he associates it with words from Serbo-Croat and Ukrainian. Rex Mackey, another historian of the game, notes these various attributions and particularly the suggestion that the name derives from the Russian word ‘Biritch’. Sadly, there is no such word in Russian and he concludes that perhaps ‘it was a Slavonic mode of address to a female partner’.

  In 1894, Lord Brougham introduced the game of bridge to the Portland Club in London. He had, apparently, learned it from army officers in India and it differed from whist in one particular respect: the dealer (or, if he declined, his partner) had the prerogative to name the trump suit, after which the bidding ensued. In 1904 – and again the exact circumstances are not known – there was another innovation. It was agreed that the player willing to commit to making the most tricks would be able to name the trump suit. As Alan Truscott notes, ‘it took some time to work out the details. It was easy to decide that a bid of two ranked higher than a bid of one. It was not so easy to settle the rank of the suits. Spades started at the bottom, but then became the top suit, with the result we know today: in ascending and alphabetical order, clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, with no trump outranking them all.’ In other words, a bid of two spades is higher than a bid of two hearts. The highest possible bid is seven no trump.

  Over the next two decades, various innovations came and went. The scoring changed. In India, four officers of the Raj, including Hugh Clayton, later knighted as a member of the Indian Council of State, developed a system of scoring in which there were bonuses for making game (ten tricks), a demislam (eleven), a small slam (twelve) and a grand slam (all thirteen tricks). French players adopted the same principles and incorporated them into another version of whist called ‘plafond’. Players were ‘encouraged by the scoring table to climb to their plafond, or ceiling’. Auction bridge made no such demands. If a player bid one spade and made four, he scored his game just as if he had bid them and, according to Rex Mackey, this was ‘naïve and pleasant for sweet old ladies and retired warriors at the nineteenth hole, who found it difficult to add up to four anyway. Accordingly, the apologetic attempts to introduce Plafond into England were met with the same sturdy resistance as their grandfathers had accorded the Reform Bill.’

  But plafond did introduce the idea to a young American in Paris that tricks made only count if you bid them first. It was here in 1919 that Harold Sterling Vanderbilt, known to his friends as ‘Mike’, played the game at the Traveller’s Club and mulled over it for some years before introducing it to the United States as contract bridge.

  In our sitting room in Pietermaritzburg, Dad and I are spinning the globe.

  ‘And you?’ I ask. ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘I was born here,’ he says, pointing to the coast of Fife. ‘Kirkcaldy.’ But Kirkcaldy does not feature on my globe either. We have to retreat to the atlas to find it on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth, almost directly across from Edinburgh. Even now I can hear the way he says it, with a soft Scottish burr and a faraway look. The ‘l’ is silent so that the ‘caldy’ of Kirkcaldy rhymes with ‘body’. I try it, but it feels wrong. I pronounce both ‘k’s and the ‘l’.

  Dad laughs. ‘Well, maybe we’ll take you there one day,’ he says.

  It occurs to me now that Dad never said where his mother was from. Years later Cal and I visit one of his brothers who tells me that she came from Edinburgh from a mix of Scots Catholic and Irish Catholic stock. Granny Quinn was Irish, but Granny Lee was Scots. The Balfours were lowland Presbyterians until my grandfather met Rose Quinn and fell in love. He converted when they married.

  At this point in my life, I have not met my paternal grandparents. They are names from faraway, like places on a map. And while I think of Dad as a ‘father’, it doesn’t really occur to me that he is a ‘son’. I recall vividly the moment my son made the connection. We were in London and I was on the phone to my mother in South Africa. I called her ‘Mum’. Cal, who was a little over four at the time, looked at me sharply.

  ‘Why did you say that,’ he said. Why did you call her “Mum”?’

  ‘Because she’s my mother,’ I said. ‘I’m her son just like you’re my son.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’

  There was a silence while he thought about this.

  ‘So you and me are both sons?’

  I nodded. ‘Every man is somebody’s son. You can’t be a man unless you’re a son.’ But, for Cal, the thought foundered on the realities of inner-city London life and he went on to list any number of his contemporaries who had no one that they could acknowledge as their father.

  ‘They’re still sons,’ I said, ‘even if they don’t really know their father.’

  ‘OK.’

  That night I wrote down this conversation in a diary I keep for Cal. Strange what you reveal when you think you’re writing about someone else.

  6. Daft at cards

  I REMEMBER SUMMER dew and winter frost and the way the bees used to hover over the fallen flowers from the jacaranda tree. David is allergic to bee-stings. Jackie and I are not. She and I catch bees and offer them to David like gifts. We are vastly amused when one stings him. My mother purses her lips and prepares a compress of bicarbonate of soda. Dad shakes his head with a smile and remembers his brother Robin, who could start a fight in an empty room. Dad had three brothers and he was the eldest. He knew them well when he was young and hardly at all when he was old. He knew his sister better. She moved from Scotland to live near us in Durban. I remember her smoky voice and her laughing eyes.

  And I remember being driven into ‘town’ and being taken to Catechism. This takes place in the school across the road from St Mary’s Catholic Church in Pietermaritzburg. There we dutifully recite articles of the Profession of Faith. We learn about the Liturgy and the Holy Sacraments. We read stories from the Gospels and discuss their relevance to modern life. We are told to love our neighbours and to honour our mothers and fathers. We are told about the importance of prayer in Christian life. We learn about transubstantiation.

  ‘It’s like magic,’ David explains.

  I follow him to the altar to take Holy Communion. The Body of Christ sticks to the roof of my mouth. I wonder if I should mention this at confession.

  Afterwards, Dad takes us across the road to the museum where there is a regular morning film show. Usually these are some kind of science documentary. One morning, we watch a film about the annual sardine migration that causes such excitement along the coast of Natal. Vast shoals of fish swim inshore. People scoop handfuls of them into buckets, nets and plastic bags. The narrator tells us the fish are doing what nature intended. He says this suicidal migration is ‘part of the natural order’. As far as he is concerned, things have always been this way, and they always will be. In another film, scientists study animals by catching them in nets. In some films they catch the animals by hand. A man will run into a herd of impala and grab two or three by their hind legs. One emerges holding fiv
e females. He has a wild look in his eyes and blood running down one cheek. In another film, Lake Kariba comes into being. They pour concrete and ‘relocate’ the wild animals. These films are full of a world in which it seems important to be big. Big men in short trousers with large moustaches talk about Africa in the same way my father talks about mowing the lawn. It’s dirty work, but someone’s got to do it. Trouble is, when Dad mows the lawn small pebbles are apt to get caught in the rotor blade. They shoot out to one side and shatter the windows in the sitting room.

  ‘Don’t go there,’ Mum warns. ‘Get some shoes on.’

  We seldom wear shoes. Our days in Pietermaritzburg are spent with our feet bare and our noses burned by the sun.

  In one film, yet another man with a moustache tells us that Africa is drifting apart. The Great Rift Valley is becoming wider. The whole continent is on the move. I make a mental note to ask Dad about this. I wonder which way Pietermaritzburg will go. I worry that our house will be split in two.

  Dad says he thinks we are on solid ground. He is sure the crack in the ceiling is not caused by continental drift. We’re sitting on the veranda at home, waiting for the stars. I like to see Venus rising and to watch Betelgeuse emerge small and bright and orange, like a parrot on the shoulder of Orion. While we wait, Dad is reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped to me.

  Like the Requiem and A Child’s Garden of Verses, Kidnapped holds a special place in the Balfour family’s affections. My brother has the same name as the book’s hero, David Balfour. I have the same name as David Balfour’s father. Stevenson took the surname from his mother, Margaret Balfour, to whom we are distantly related. His full name was Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, but he dropped the ‘Balfour’ when he started writing and adopted – an author’s affectation I imagine – the French spelling of ‘Louis’. When Dad reads Kidnapped, it is not just because it’s a cracking yarn. It is a rite of passage into a mythical world.

  In the book, the wicked uncle Ebenezer sells his nephew David Balfour into slavery. We only learn at the end of the book that Ebenezer came to own the estate when he and his brother fell in love with the same woman. A deal was done; Alexander followed his heart and Ebenezer backed off on condition he got the estate. The story begins when David, the son of Alexander, the elder brother, comes to ‘claim what’s his’. His ship is wrecked off the west coast of Scotland and he escapes. He teams up with Alan Breck, a wanted Jacobite rebel and together they make their way across Scotland to Edinburgh.

  Stevenson liked to write ‘in the vernacular’ and Dad likes to read it that way. For me, the story is easy enough to understand, but the words are hard to follow. And so progress is slow. We have to recap at regular intervals. Dad loves these strange Scottish words. ‘Birstle,’ he says, and ‘Clanjamfry’. ‘Whillywhas’ is another favourite. He unpicks each word gently, giving each syllable its full weight. He plays with them, like a man spooning honey from a jar. He turns the spoon smoothly to stop the honey from falling.

  ‘Ye muckle ass!’ he quotes when I spill juice on his knee.

  When I ask him to explain different words, he is a little impatient. ‘Words like that mean what you want them to mean,’ he says. But then he explains anyway. Birstle means to get sunburned. Clanjamfry is another word for rabble. He reserves a special reverence for whillywhas, which means flattery. He loves the word and hates the idea. Dad is not given to overstatement, although he has mastered the raised eyebrow of approval. He can make me feel special with one direct glance because he so seldom meets our eyes.

  In storytelling, his approach is like that of Stevenson. Writing to his friend, Charles Baxter, about the book, Stevenson says, ‘it is more honest to confess at once how little I am touched by the desire of [sic] accuracy. This is no furniture for the scholar’s library, but a book for the winter evening schoolroom when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near ...’ Stevenson has ‘no more desperate purpose’ than to ‘steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams’.

  It’s a challenge Dad loves and he warms to his task. He is seated on a chair with his feet up on the low wall that surrounds the veranda. Beyond the caps of his shoes, I can see the orange lights of Pietermaritzburg begin to twinkle in the gathering dusk. The green trees of my world become sombre shadows in the night. Dad has a lovely resonant voice. After retirement, he will read books on to tape for visually impaired people to enjoy. In his hands – or rather on his tongue – Stevenson’s strange Scottish words take on a life of their own. The ‘Heugh of Corrynakeigh’ becomes a place of mystery and wonder. He plays with the words, like a juggler.

  He can keep three or four ‘Rs’ in the air at a time like Miriam Makeba singing ‘The Click Song’. He rolls them around in his mouth and swaps them from side to side. He sends them floating on to the night air like a clown blowing ping-pong balls. I am sitting on his lap as he reads to me. His body rumbles with the reverberations of his deep voice. Sometimes he reminds me of a fire-eater I once saw in a photograph in a magazine. The man had big sideburns and a shaven head. He wore only a kilt and big boots. He looked like a human volcano. Dark purple and red tattoos flowed down his torso like lava. In the photograph, the spectators recoiled from the ball of fire that shot from this man’s mouth. One mother covered her child’s eyes. Another had her hand to her chest as though crossing herself. But when Dad speaks aloud there is nothing to fear, even though somewhere deep inside powerful forces are at work. With my head resting on his chest, I can hear what goes on in the middle of the volcano. Sometimes he reads sentences again, just for the sound of them. When the heroes fight, I can hear – no, feel – the guttural whoosh as Dad expels the air from his lungs. ‘Oh man,’ he cries on Alan Breck’s behalf. ‘Am I no’ a bonny fighter?’ He shoots a bright-orange flame of Highland profanity out into the evening air.

  I imagine the sparks dying on the azaleas.

  As darkness falls, the twins, Castor and Pollux, appear above the edge of the plane tree. Beyond the jacaranda, I can see the Southern Cross. From the kitchen, we hear my mother calling us in for supper.

  ‘Come on,’ says Dad.

  Reluctantly, I follow him indoors. It is only recently that my sister and I have been allowed to eat our suppers at ‘big table’. We used to eat them in the kitchen with Margaret for company. Dad sits at the head of the table and prepares to carve. The vegetables are in front of my mother who sits to his right. My mother does the cooking, but it is my father’s taste that dictates the diet. It comes straight from his childhood. Nothing fancy. Nothing spicy. Just good, wholesome ‘meat and two veg’ as long as one of the ‘veg’ is potatoes. When, occasionally, Mum makes a mild curry he breaks instantly into a sweat. Beads of perspiration form on his brow. They race each other down the canyons of his frown. In later years, my mother tries to vary things a little. It doesn’t work with Dad. All he wants is his meat and two veg. He’s not much interested in anything else, except perhaps beer and a dram.

  We always sit in the same places. In bridge parlance, we would say Dad is ‘sitting South’, which is not really anything to do with the points of a compass. North, East, South and West are just names of convenience to describe the relations between the players. In bridge, both the bidding and the play of the cards go clockwise. The dealer deals and he opens the bidding. The person on his left bids next. The bidding carries on until three players in succession have passed. Whoever first bids the suit in which the final contract is agreed is known as ‘declarer’. It will be his task to play the hand. The person to his left plays the first card, which is known as ‘leading’. Once the first card is led, declarer’s partner puts his cards on the table. They are face up, for everyone to see. At that moment all the players know where twenty-seven cards are – thirteen in their own hand, thirteen in dummy, and whatever card has been led. The challenge is to work out who holds which of the remaining tw
enty-five cards.

  At our dining-room table Dad is sitting South, then Mum is sitting East. Jackie and I sit West, opposite Mum. And North, down the far end of the table, is David. If he played bridge, he would be Dad’s partner. But he doesn’t.

  It is an arrangement that will last the next decade.

  Dad is playing the hand in the sense that he directs whatever becomes the topic for discussion. ‘Let’s bat that one around,’ he likes to say when we ask him a question. And our hearts sink, for we know there is no escaping it. Everything is up for debate, even though he knows all the answers in advance. This evening, he has not finished with his bridge lessons. In fact, they’re only beginning.

  ‘First thing is, what’s in your hand,’ he says. ‘What’s it worth?’

  We wait.

  ‘Not only the obvious things,’ he says as he carves. He puts two slices of pot roast on a plate and passes it to Mum. It is going anticlockwise, the opposite way to bridge. Mum ladles on the vegetables and passes the plate to David. He calculates whether the next plate will have more or less and, in the hope of better luck, he passes it on to my sister, Jackie. Jackie is polite. She passes it to me. I have no one to pass it to.

  Mum pushes the gravy boat across the table, while Dad rehearses the basics.

  The aim of the game is for each partnership to try to take as many tricks as possible. Actually Dad is not convinced about this. While winning as many tricks as possible may be the aim of the game, it does not necessarily follow that it is the aim of the people playing the game. For if it was, they would surely behave differently. In his series of books on Bridge in the Menagerie, Victor Mollo put it like this. ‘There is too much stress everywhere on the art of winning and not nearly enough anywhere on the art of losing. Yet it is surely the more important of the two, for not only do the losers pay the winners but they clearly enjoy doing it. Were it otherwise, they would have stopped playing – or taken up winning – long ago.