Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But don’t worry. Everything will work out fine.’

  For the first time in my life, I don’t believe him. How can everything be fine when your family are crying?

  The fights seem to coincide with supper, when Mum most wants the family to be together and Dad is most angry at the world and his failures at work. He takes his anger out on the family.

  Jackie and I keep our heads down, but David is too tall.

  After supper, we play bridge. It becomes a form of peacemaking. At the bridge table, Dad is not angry at himself or the world. He does not shout. Here he continues to shine. He can play bridge even when he is drunk. His body doesn’t work properly, but his mind does. He struggles to shuffle and deal, but he reads the cards easily and fluidly. It is as though he has entered ‘the zone’ that top athletes describe. He is in the ‘pure serene’ of Chapman’s Homer, while we sit, ‘silent on a peak in Darien’. Wide-eyed and in awe, we shuffle and deal.

  Dad wonders whether anyone will notice if he has another beer. At some point, he has started to brew his own ales, to ‘put his chemical engineering skills to some use’. The beer he makes is heavy and yeasty and quite unlike the lager brewed by South African Breweries. Our house has some ‘outbuildings’, which is where the maid lives but also where Dad has his workshop and a ‘studio’. Here he starts to experiment with brewing. Vats arrive and bottles. There are brewpots, fermenters and airlocks, bottling buckets and hosepipes. There is a machine for putting the tops on bottles and another for washing them. There are the ingredients too, sacks of hops and malt, yeasts of one sort and another and a big drum of sugar. And there are things to measure with. To get the beer ‘just right’, you have to test the temperature and measure the alkalinity. You have to watch your enzymes and beware of excessive diacetyl. It’s not easy brewing beer, Dad tells us. There’s a science to it. You have to get everything just right at every stage of the process, from cleaning the bottle – ‘Here, scrub those out for me, will you?’ – to making sure you put the cap on just right.

  ‘We don’t want any air getting in,’ says Dad. ‘No, no, no. We don’t want that at all.’

  What we want is for this to stop, but it doesn’t. From time to time, it has mildly comic effects. In brewing, the more ‘fermentables’ – sugar, corn syrup and so on – you put in, the higher the alcohol content. Dad overdoes the ‘fermentables’. From time to time, bottles explode, leaving beer on the walls and glass on the floor. The studio is at the bottom end of the garden, near the road. Sometimes it gets burgled. The thieves find only beer. They drink some and steal the rest. The next day, the police find them comatose by the side of the road, a bottle of Dad’s beer in one hand.

  ‘Try some,’ says Dad, but I decline.

  Beyond our door, South Africa is at war. In 1975, ‘we’ invade Angola and begin our increasingly brutal war of destabilisation against the newly independent countries of Mozambique and (later) Zimbabwe. On 16 June 1976, policemen fire on schoolchildren demonstrating in Soweto. Crowds take to the street and more violence follows. Many children are killed. Dad declines to get involved. He condemns the ‘anarchy’ of the protesters, but he cannot quite bring himself to approve of ‘the Boers’. He has always refused to learn or speak Afrikaans and he indulges in the ridiculous snobbery of English-speaking white South Africans that allows them to ‘look down’ on Afrikaners.

  The question of conscription arises. In 1978, I receive my first call-up papers to the South African Defence Force. I announce that I will not go. I have not yet decided whether (forgive the pretension) ‘I will go to prison or into exile.’ Like all fathers, Dad has to have a view – but I don’t know what it was. He never says anything one way or the other. Perhaps he thinks I am old enough to make up my own mind. Perhaps he doesn’t care. For me, neither of these is completely satisfactory. Angrily, I rehearse the arguments to myself. He should have a view? He has been a soldier? He fought against fascism?

  But Dad says nothing. The questions are put to one side and instead cards appear on the table. When we play bridge, a kind of calm descends on the room, but David is not there to witness it. We laugh every time a finesse fails. We remember to draw trumps, lest we end up ‘walking the streets of London’. We signal loudly and clearly. In the studio, a beer bottle explodes.

  We go one down, which is good bridge.

  We let the game smooth over a multitude of emotions. In the fifties, Samuel Barber wrote his comic operetta, A Hand of Bridge, the libretto for which describes with uncanny precision the world that is social bridge at any time between, say, 1925 and the present. The piece starts with the formalities of the game, each voice bidding in turn. Nobody is vulnerable but, as the characters begin to speak their inner thoughts, things take on an altogether more sinister tone.

  David, a ‘florid businessman’, is playing with his wife Geraldine, who (as the libretto helpfully puts it) is ‘middle aged’. Their opponents are Bill, a lawyer, and his wife Sally.

  Sally is an airhead. The bidding progresses and she soon finds herself playing dummy – again. ‘Once again, I’m dummy. Forever dummy,’ she moans, to Bill’s alarm. He reads more into the lament than is actually there. Dummy, he thinks, what does she mean by dummy? Is she talking about me? Does she know? Have I been found out? For his thoughts turn immediately to his lover, Cymbaline.

  ‘Cymbaline, Cymbaline, where are you tonight?’ he asks. ‘On whose mouth are you murmuring senseless night words with your geranium-scented breath?’

  Their opponents have other concerns. Geraldine wonders what has got into Bill. He is playing distractedly, and mistakenly trumps one of his own winners. What is he thinking of? And why does his foot no longer seek out hers under the table?

  There’s an easy answer to that, but Geraldine does not dwell on it. Instead, she contemplates the desperate barren years ahead, unloved and with no one to love. All the men in her life – her father in his photograph, her ‘stock market husband’, her ‘football son’ – are more or less useless in this regard. All that’s left is her ailing mother who ‘could have loved me had I let her’. But the years have not been kind in this regard. Too busy with her own affairs, Geraldine has neglected her mother and now ‘there she lies in her pain, cocooned in her illness, an indifferent stranger, hatching for herself the black wings of death’.

  This is heady stuff indeed, and I feel a certain sympathy for Geraldine. It is not easy to be past the first flush of youth, with one’s shoulders and legs thickening a little, and one’s husband’s (and lover’s) attention straying. But on the surface the game progresses and the players call out the cards as they play them. Bill is in control of the hand, though not, quite, his emotions. He continues to play, wondering all the while on whose mouth Cymbaline might at that very moment be breathing her geranium-scented breath. It should be him. It should be me! But his troubles are as nothing compared with the silently repressed David, the more or less useless stockbroker whose particular dream is not only to be his own boss but also to be rich! To be powerful! To be a man! As he plays, his desires grow ever more fantastic. He longs for the money and the fame, but he doesn’t stop there. He also wishes for an ‘alabaster palace in Palm Beach’. He wants it filled with ‘twenty naked girls, twenty naked boys’ all of whom will have no other purpose but to spend their days ‘tending to my pleasures’.

  But he knows it will never be. His epitaph will read, ‘Worked for Mr Pritchett every day, and every night played bridge with Sally and Bill.’

  And so the hand and the piece reach their climax. The contract – they’re playing in a contract of 5 – appears to be made. The cards are shuffled for the next deal. Silence fills the room.

  In bridge, little is said, though everything is felt. I wonder what Dad was thinking all through those years.

  It gets worse as the decade passes. I miss the brunt of it because I am away at boarding school. Before we moved house, my brother was sent to a Catholic boarding school thirty miles away.
He came home only at weekends. But then we moved to the house on the hill. David became a day scholar and I was sent away to a different boarding school, an Anglican school. Around this time we stop going to Mass. Dad is beginning his

  ... melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind ...

  The ‘sea of faith’, Matthew Arnold says in Dover Beach, was once ‘at the full’. But no more. The Second Vatican Council was the beginning of the end for Dad. This was the Catholic Church’s attempt to address a changing world. Called by Pope John XIII, the Council brought many changes to the Church, not the least of which was the introduction of ‘the vernacular’ to parts of the Mass. It sowed the seeds of doubt for Dad, and over the years they took root and grew. I remember once how I came home from school and told Dad about something that happened during Mass. Although mine was an Anglican school, they made special provision for Catholics. There were about ten of us, and on Sundays we would go down to the ‘crypt’ beneath the school chapel where a Catholic priest was waiting to perform the Mass. One year, I acted as altar boy. But disaster struck. The priest’s hands were shaking – I didn’t think it was just communion wine on his breath either – and, after the blessing, after transubstantiation, he spilled some wine on the altar cloth. The horror! After Mass, the priest asked me to fetch a bucket of water. He washed the altar cloth in it and then insisted I help to drink the water. All of it. It would not do, apparently, to leave the blood of Christ lying around.

  I had been moving away from my childish faith for some time, but this is where I date my own departure from the Catholic Church. Dad seems to be keeping time with me. I tell him the story. ‘Och, well,’ he says, ‘it’s all bullshit, really.’ He does not go to Mass any more, and he does not take us. I suspect he thinks confession would take too long. I think also he is just plain embarrassed. It is too much to look the priest in the eye. At this time, Dad is not looking many people in the eye. He blames himself, but he acts like it’s their fault.

  In 1978, David leaves home. We four that remain – when I am not at boarding school – eke out the decade in silence. Sometimes, we play bridge. More often, we bury ourselves in books. It is a dismal time for everyone.

  In 1980, I leave home to go to university in Cape Town. Every year I receive a new set of call-up papers to the SADF. One Christmas, a school friend comes home from Angola in a body bag. The country is under the control of P.W. Botha, who is playing politics with his tri-cameral parliaments and renaming of this or that instrument of the apartheid administration. But really he is a military man. His ‘solution’ is repression in every form. I have long since decided that I will leave the country in preference to ‘going to the army’ or ‘going to prison’. The only question is when. While at university, it is possible to defer military service. After I graduate, I can defer it for another year by taking a teaching job in a government school. But, by the end of 1983, I can put it off no longer. It is time to go. My girlfriend and I head for Zimbabwe and from there to London. Mum, Jackie and David drive from Durban to Harare to see me off. Dad stays at home.

  I don’t remember saying goodbye.

  10. A house of cards

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, on the evening after Dad’s funeral, I walk through the old house. The guests have all gone and darkness comes quickly. A couple of lamps are lit; outside, the garden is bathed in black ink and the neighbourhood dogs are barking. Across the valley, the lights go on one by one. It is the night of the new moon and a light cloud covers the stars. The air is warm. In the garden, the silhouette of the flat crown is swallowed by the black sky. There is no wind; the azalea bushes are still. I slip outside. I close the door carefully, so as not to wake my mother.

  The garden has shrunk over the years. When my parents bought this house on the hill, it came in three parts. There was the house and the surrounding lawns, together with the swimming pool and the tree, which even then covered the entire lawn in its shaded embrace. On the western side of the house, there was the driveway, some vegetable gardens, some old outbuildings and, below a right of way through to the neighbour’s property, another patch of land noted mostly for its thriving avocado trees. This patch of land was known as ‘the triangle’ for its shape. To the east, where the house looked out towards the distant Indian Ocean, the land fell away sharply into the valley. Beyond the crest of the hill, invisible from the sitting room, lay a wild and untended hinterland known as ‘the paddock’, which I assumed was because the previous occupants had kept horses. Three tall blue gum trees, some hundred yards distant, mark its bottom edge. The treetops are just visible from the sitting-room window.

  But now the garden is smaller. Over the years pieces have been sold off or knocked down. The triangle ‘went’ first, followed by the paddock, and then the tennis court on which somebody else’s house now stands. The sales of the paddock and the court meant that driveways had to be built to either side of the house, so that the garden is shorter and narrower. The outbuildings too have been knocked down and replaced with yet another stretch of lawn. My father used this space to indulge his mild pyromania as he put a match to the piles of cuttings that seemed always to gather in this fertile and rich hilltop. It is hard to think of him now without also seeing the flickering flames, and the curls of sweet-scented smoke.

  I return to the house and Jackie and I start looking through the mahogany chest of drawers in the alcove off the sitting room. It is here that the family memories are stored. There is one drawer for ‘photographs (new)’ and another for ‘photographs (old)’. There is one for school reports, another for old letters and forgotten diaries. There are insurance policies and car registration forms, passports and old ticket stubs, all the paraphernalia of life, the documents that tell us who we are and where we have been.

  And there is an entire drawer for packs of cards that somehow have never been thrown away, but have sat for years, for all my life and even longer. There are rubber bridge-scoring pads too, the stubs of pencils and a few scraps of paper with memorable hands scribbled in my father’s illegible writing.

  It comes as a shock now, perhaps thirty years after I first played with them, to see some of the cards and their designs, a shock of recognition, for it is more than twenty-five years since I lived at home, and possibly that long since last I opened this particular drawer. There are the Bicycle cards, of course, the staple product of our games and the world game, made by the American Playing Card Company and deeply ingrained in the psyche of any card player. But there are also ornamental cards and novelty cards, cards in ornate packs designed as bridge gifts, cards with photographs of places visited and places never seen, cards new and old, clean and dirty, cards with Greek gods and forgotten movie stars.

  ‘This book could in theory begin with the invention of playing cards, probably in China a millennium ago,’ says Alan Truscott in his ‘anecdotal history of the game of bridge’. ‘The evidence is scanty, and it may have been in India, or even further west. There is a pleasant legend that they were invented by the Emperor S’eun-Ho to keep his concubines amused in the year 1120, but he was, it seems, at least 140 years too late to claim the honour.’ Others suggest that the invention worked the other way round – that it was the concubines of the imperial Chinese harem who invented cards. Another tale suggests that the earliest cards came from India where the wife of a Maharajah was irritated by her husband’s habit of pulling at his beard. It is claimed she invented cards to alleviate her boredom – and to give her husband something to do with his hands. It seems more likely that cards were invented in China, where paper was invented. Even today, some of the packs used in China have suits of coins and strings of coins – which mah jong players know as circles and bamboos.

  It is generally assumed that cards entered Europe from the Islamic empire (some blame Marco Polo), where records of the first card manufacturers come from Nuremberg in Germany in the fourteenth century. German card makers produced a variety of suits, so
me based on hierarchical representations of medieval society, and others using acorns, leaves, hearts and bells. At some point, these were replaced by representations of courtly human beings: kings and their attendants, knights (on horseback) and foot-servants. To this day, packs of Italian playing cards do not have queens, nor do packs in Spain, Germany and Switzerland. There is evidence that Islamic cards also entered Spain, but it now seems likely that the modern cards, which we call Spanish, originated in France, ousting the early Arab-influenced designs.

  Cards came to the United Kingdom later than to the rest of Europe. The earliest mention dates from 1463 when manufacturers of playing cards petitioned Edward IV for protection against foreign imports. John Clay, in his collection of Tales from the Bridge Table, tells us, ‘Kings Henry VII and Henry VIII played cards and the costumes on today’s British and American court cards are those of this period.’ In 1495, Henry VII issued an edict forbidding his servants and apprentices from playing cards except during the Christmas holidays (and amongst his private accounts at the time are several entries ascribed to ‘losses at cards’). Elizabeth I took it further. She granted a monopoly in making cards (and protection from imports) to Ralph Bowles, and then charged him three shillings per gross for the privilege. By the early eighteenth century, cards had become popular, although the games played varied by class: ‘The game of ombre was favoured by ladies, while the gentlemen preferred piquet. Clergymen and country squires played whist, and the labouring classes played all fours, cribbage etc.’

  And the cards were taxed. The ace of spades became the card that was stamped to show duty had been paid; in 1765, it became known as ‘the duty card’, and the Stamp Office would keep a stock of pre-stamped aces of spades. Manufacturers were required to print the packs without a spade ace. ‘When the tax for the pack was paid, the Office issued the ace of spades to complete the pack, and the deck could then be sold. The tax was abolished in 1960, when duty was back to three pence per pack. Yet today, most packs still display the ornate ace of spades for the manufacturer’s design.’