Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  But Rosenberg and Mahmood are always looking for more. Never settle for ten tricks when thirteen might be possible. And so after South opened 1 , Rosenberg bid 4 . By their system this showed a very strong hand in an (unspecified) major and invited Mahmood to show any strength he had with a view to exploring slam. But Mahmood had no strength to show and no suit to bid. I was watching the play on the Internet at the time and even over the distance of several thousand miles I could sense the tension in the room. What do you do when your partner has made a bid you don’t fully comprehend? And when you have nothing? The situation was further complicated because the opponents were playing a Precision Club system which meant they might have opened 1 with as few as 2 diamonds. Mahmood thought a long time before deciding to pass. He must have calculated that his partner’s bid was natural. Of course the opponents passed too. And instead of making 10 easy tricks with hearts as trumps, Rosenberg found himself going down five in diamonds, a shocking result on the cards.

  But it happens. I like to think Rosenberg would do the same again.

  Over the course of a single weekend the Optimist takes shape. It’s an ugly little boat with a snub nose and a flat hull, but Dad is very proud of it and so are we. It is, according to the brochure, ‘quite simply, the dinghy in which the young people of the world learn to sail’. Dad builds like he does everything else. He assumes he knows how it’s done. Only when that fails does he read the instructions. Undeleted expletives hang in the air. I remember the smell of sawdust and varnish.

  Mum covers polystyrene floats in bright canvas. We launch the dinghy with all due ceremony on a sunny day at Midmar Dam. The dam is a little way out of town. There are grass slopes to sit on and wattle trees for shade. The Optimist is too small for Dad to sail, but David takes charge. I am a little in awe of David’s ability to handle the boat. He finds my willingness to do what he tells me useful. When we play together there is no need to negotiate who takes control of the hand. He is my big brother. After a few weekends of ‘pottering about’ he takes me out into the middle. There is only the faintest wind. All over the lake, other dinghies wallow disconsolately on the glassy surface of the water.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s see if we can sink it.’

  This strikes me as a very silly idea.

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  ‘You climb the mast,’ he says. ‘And lean out as far as you can.’

  Like I said, it is a silly idea. I climb the mast, lean over, slip and fall in the water. David thinks this is hilarious.

  Some time later we arrive back on shore.

  ‘How was it?’ Dad asks. He’s fishing for compliments.

  ‘I fell in,’ I say.

  ‘We tried to sink it,’ David says. ‘But we couldn’t.’

  ‘’Course you couldn’t,’ says Dad. ‘I made it.’

  ‘Mum made the floats,’ says David.

  8. Welcome to our world

  ZIA MAHMOOD COMPARES learning to play bridge with falling in love. On the cover of his bridge memoirs, Bridge My Way, he writes, ‘If you’ve never been in love – don’t read this book.’ His book is for crazy people, for people who believe in ‘fantasy, romance and obsession’. His book ‘is for all those people who ever started doing something and became so involved in it that they lost track of time, because the thing I started doing was playing bridge and the time that went so painlessly by was my life’.

  I learned bridge from my parents and later I came to love it. But it took me a long time to work out what I had learned and why I loved it. Dad may have been right – everyone likes bridge; they just don’t know it yet – but he glossed over the difficulty that some people never get to know it. Even Ely Culbertson, the man who made the game a worldwide phenomenon, initially struggled to like it. And it seems he never really fell in love with the game, even though he was a man always on the verge of love. For him, it was a business proposition. An entertaining one, to be sure, but first and foremost it was business. Culbertson first came across the game – it was still auction bridge then – on a boat trip from Europe to New York in the autumn of 1913. Strolling on deck, he saw four people playing cards. Naturally, he was drawn to them. He was already very good at several other games, including poker and Vint, which he had learned while in prison in Chechnya. The game he saw on board the ship, he says, ‘resembled the Russian Vint except that the dummy was exposed and the bidding was very limited. Every now and then I heard one of them exclaim, “Partner, may I play?” “Pray do!” “No spades, partner?” and the father, who was a cautious businessman, sometimes added, ‘What, no spades? Please look among your clubs.”’

  Culbertson stopped to watch them play. Writing in his memoirs, a curious book called The Strange Lives of One Man, he recalled, ‘The game was called bridge. I was urged to join, but after a few sessions I gave up in disgust. It’s a stupid game, I thought.’ The italics are Culbertson’s own, and I suspect that a great dollop of hindsight’s wisdom informs this version of events. The more likely story is not that he thought it a stupid game, but that he did not wish to appear to be anything other than the best player, and for that he needed more than three minutes to study it.

  A year later, he is reintroduced to the game by ‘a girl’ whose parents are ‘rich enough to send her to one of those foreign schools where, in a mere two years, a perfectly nice girl is usually turned into a finished product of useless knowledge and imitation glamour’. Part of which, even then, was a working (though possibly useless) knowledge of bridge. He is dissatisfied with the arbitrary nature of the rules. ‘Who made them?’ he wants to know. What were they thinking of? Why didn’t they do it like this? What is the underlying philosophy of the game?

  I read into his recollections a different question: why would I be interested in a game if I am not the one running it? Perhaps there is gold in those hills. His father was an oil prospector. Culbertson was looking for a dark seam of money to call his own. He continued to play, but he irritated his partners and opponents alike with his brooding. He never ceased his infernal questions, especially the one that troubled him most: ‘What is there about this silly game that they understand and I don’t?’ When the others merely laughed at him he resolved to become ‘the best player on the planet’.

  There is a similar story of the experience of Charles Goren, the man who took over from Culbertson as ‘the face of bridge’. Like many others – notably Culbertson and later Zia Mahmood – Charles Goren first got into bridge because of a young woman, who laughed at his ‘gaucherie and lack of skill’ when she hosted a bridge party in Montreal in 1923. Goren was a law student at the time and recalled that the young woman’s laugh ‘was like putting a knife through me’. He went home to Philadelphia, bought Milton Work’s Auction Bridge and set about making good his resolve that he would not ‘sit down at a card table until [he] knew how to play the game’. He quickly became an exceptionally good player and attracted the attention of Milton Work, who also came from Philadelphia, but it was not until 1936 that Goren stopped practising law and turned his attention full-time to the world of bridge.

  If you learn as a child, as I did, it cannot really be love at first sight. I was too young and bridge is too complicated and too difficult. You can’t love it until you know it – and it takes time to get to know. But it was something. Mahmood, however, was hooked from the beginning. ‘I was trying to get better acquainted,’ he writes in Bridge My Way, ‘with an attractive young woman whom I knew only slightly. The good news was that she finally agreed to meet me. The bad news was that the venue was a bridge party ... I had, of course, told my date that I could play.’ Unsurprisingly, the bridge element of the party was a disaster and Mahmood performed ‘embarrassingly badly’ although he ‘managed to save [himself] from complete exposure’. But he did fall in love that evening, and not with the young woman. Bridge was the object of his desires. ‘I became enthralled; the spark had been lit and soon became a fire. No, not a fire, more like a furnace.’ Mahmood started to read everything
he could get his hands on and soon found himself swept away by the world of bridge, its life and its characters. He read about Ely Culbertson who was ‘to bridge what Muhammad Ali was to boxing’, and about the Italian ‘Blue Team’, the Squaddra Azzura that so completely dominated the world of bridge in the 1960s until they were challenged by Ira Corn and his Texas Aces.

  There is little doubt that, by the time Mahmood came to the game, bridge was ‘a world’ and that this world is not just about the four people around the table. I have before me, for example, a copy of a British Armed Forces recruiting poster from 1916, which the then War Office used to invite men to come and fight in the trenches. The poster, printed in full colour, was widely distributed in England and Ireland at the time and shows three men in the trenches settling in for a game of bridge. The men are clearly ‘chaps’: one has a pipe, another is happily brandishing the ace of hearts, and all three have sculpted jaws and perfect white teeth. They surround a suspiciously clean, linen-covered crate serving as a card table. Only the sandbags behind them and the butt of a rifle leaning against the white cloth suggest that life in the trenches is any different from, say, the officers’ mess at Sandhurst or an evening at the club in Curzon Street.

  ‘Will you make a fourth?’ runs the caption on the poster and the implication that trench warfare is one long game of cards is clear. So, too, is the implication that bridge is synonymous with all that is good, with all that ‘we’ were fighting for. The poster is not without its ironies. It was distributed in Ireland as well as in Britain in 1916 and photographs exist, for example, of it on the walls of Dublin’s Four Courts shortly after the city (and, indeed, the courts) had been shelled by the British forces.

  My father is unlikely to have known the image. It was from ‘before his time’, but he would have understood the sentiment. I once heard him call the bridge table his ‘small square yard of freedom’, and he meant it literally and metaphorically, and probably metaphysically as well.

  The question ‘Will you make a fourth?’ is older than that, of course, and has been asked for as long as the precursors of bridge – whist and plafond and other games – existed. C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels are set in the early nineteenth century and in, for example, Lieutenant Hornblower we find the eponymous hero saying, ‘I am always glad to make a fourth,’ before explaining to his companion that a good many men from the services ‘drop in [to his club] for a game of whist’. The same scene occurs, almost exactly, for example, in Balzac’s Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, first published in the 1830s. Charles Dickens poses the question in a private letter written in 1841. For him, as for others, the question was metaphorical as well as literal. To make a fourth was to enter a purer world and to leave behind you the noisy and dislocated distractions of other worlds.

  This is the ‘world’ of bridge. Writing in 1925, Milton Work predicted that ‘The Auction Bridge World is entering upon a new era – the era of stability. During the formative period, deficiencies have been supplied, undesirable features eliminated, and every innovation has received the test of experiment and experience.’ He was wrong. Unfortunately for Work and his many and varied sources of income from auction bridge, the books and magazines, teachings and columns, radio lectures and personal appearances and all the other cacophonies through which a sporting celebrity may derive wealth and fame, the era of stability on which he was so confidently embarking was about to end. Auction bridge was about to die and be replaced by contract bridge, the game we know today. The middle of the third decade of the twentieth century was a difficult time to be making predictions, for only three years after he wrote these words Work lost a considerable part of the fortune he had derived from bridge in the stock market crash of 1929. He later found it necessary to take up again the lucrative bridge activities from which he had at that point retired.

  And yet I find Milton Work’s confidence a little seductive, precisely because of his use of the word ‘world’. Others use it too, for example, The Official Encyclopaedia of Bridge, a work of such monumental and exhaustive proportions that I struggle to lift it with one hand and which runs, in the edition I have beside me, to some 1,000 pages. Here again, we find the phrase, this time on the cover, on which we are told that the ‘world of bridge has undergone a revolution since the fifth edition of this book was published in 1994’. Not only a world, then, but also one in which revolutions occur, heads of state are chosen, deposed, assassinated – if only in character – and replaced. A world in which the language of politics is scattered liberally through its literature. As Zia Mahmood puts it, ‘Squeezes are always “inexorable”, entries are always “carefully preserved”, a 4–1 trump break is always “bad news”. Anything above a ten is never discarded but “spectacularly jettisoned”. Gory images are all-pervading – one doesn’t just double, one “wields the axe” and an 1,100 penalty is invariably a “massacre” or a “bloodbath”.’ Similarly, we find that attacks develop, weapons are neutralised, slams are forced and defences are planned. It would take little effort, Mahmood concludes, to turn the average bridge column into a Tarantino script.

  This is the bridge world. I like it. It is a comfortable place to be. But David doesn’t like it and he doesn’t play in it. Not if he can help it. I am not sure why, but I have another picture which offers a cautionary tale. It is a facsimile of the illustration by Marcus Stone for a scene from Great Expectations in which Pip is playing a rubber of whist at the house of Miss Havisham. At first glance, we may admire the players’ focus on their game. The men are hunched thoughtfully over the table. They are playing in these pairs: Pip and Miss Havisham; Mr Jaggers and Estella, the object of Pip’s affections. Both Estella and Miss Havisham are concentrating hard. But as we look more closely at the faces of the older woman (for the men’s backs are turned to us) we see the dark eyes, the scowling face, the clenched fists. She has a desperate and hungry look, a feral focus on survival. And we realise that she has more about her of the heroin addict than of a gentleperson of leisure. She is trapped in a world – that word again – from which there is no easy escape and in which, as Pip nonchalantly tells us, all her hopes come temporarily to nothing.

  Of course, for Pip, as for Dickens, the game speaks volumes about so much else. ‘Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody, and came out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say nothing ...’ For it is not about the cards at all. ‘What I suffered from, was the incompatibility between his cold presence and my feelings towards Estella,’ and the cards (especially the ‘mean little ones’) are only the outward expression of a far deeper turmoil. In this case, the fourth member at the table is Mr Jaggers whose cold indifference drives Pip to distraction. The text does not say who took all the money in the end but one takes it from Miss Havisham’s expression in the illustration that she lost, and that she held Pip accountable for the fact and the scale of her losses. It was Sartre who remarked of football that it is ‘endlessly complicated by the presence of the opposing team’. Bridge has the additional complication of one’s partner.

  Or, in my case, my family. Somewhere, round about the time I turn ten, my family becomes complicated.

  9. Falling in, falling out

  IT STARTS WHEN my father changes jobs. For a time, he commutes between Pietermaritzburg and Durban, but in the middle of 1972 we move to the old house on the hill, overlooking the distant Indian Ocean. It is here that Dad will spend the last thirty years of his life.

  The change of job has not been easy; his career path – this should have been the moment of transition from engineer to senior management – is interrupted at precisely the moment the children are most expensive. There are school fees and clothes, sports equipment and holidays. We eat vast amounts, particularly David and I. He has grown tall and wiry. I have merely grown. Perhaps from the pressures of work or perhaps because he is tired, Dad starts to drink too much. By 1976, it is serious. We see it in different w
ays, but say nothing. I notice it when Dad can’t catch a rugby ball. We’re playing in the garden on a Saturday evening. David is in his school team. He sends long ‘torpedo’ passes the length of the lawn. I am learning to run on to the ball, to ‘take it at speed’. Dad tries the same. The ball knocks into his knees. He stumbles and falls. When he gets up his knuckles are grazed and there is blood running down one knee.

  ‘Tough game, rugby,’ he says, but none of us is fooled. Nor do we know what to do. We share his embarrassment. For weeks afterwards, he will pick at the scab. David and I continue to throw the ball to each other. Wherever possible, we play around Dad, rather than with him. I’ve seen him do it at the bridge table. I’ve seen him do it with me. Occasionally, we are cruel about it. We set up dummy runs at Dad and run circles around him. David has a wicked sidestep and he uses it to good effect. We joke in Afrikaans about his ‘sidestep’. It’s a pun on ‘stumble’.

  We start to call him ‘the old man’.

  At the dinner table, there are shouting matches. We are seated in our usual places, which puts David in the line of fire, as it were, directly opposite Dad. The food gets passed around in the normal way. Dad carves, Mum does the vegetables. But our discussions are no longer free-ranging. We no longer take up Dad’s offer to ‘bat that one around a little’ because there is no telling where the conversation will go. Quite often, it goes nowhere, but at other times it ends in furious arguments without purpose or resolution.

  One night, my parents have a furious row; I can’t remember why. Dad storms from the room, shouting, ‘That’s a lie.’ I go to bed early and lie awake listening for the tense aftershocks from the earthquake. I have been there for some time when Dad comes through to my room. He knows the argument is ‘his fault’ and he has come to apologise.