Victoria Gromova won the club lead and then played two rounds of trumps. She had to keep one in dummy. The key play came when she attempted to finesse spades; this failed and North won with her king. She was now on lead. Had she led a club, South would have trumped it and the contract would have failed. But she didn’t. For whatever reason – most commentators assumed that she thought South had started with only two trumps – North led a diamond. East won with the ace and the contract was secure. ‘A big result for Russia,’ said one commentator with elegant understatement.
The vugraph audience was very knowledgeable. They gasped and then cheered when the diamond lead came down. It looked like the underdogs would win – and indeed they did. The Americans made further gains in the remaining ten hands – but not enough to win.
‘In tournaments, you sometimes win points by playing badly,’ Tatiana says. ‘And sometimes you do it by playing well. We did some of both.’ She knows they were lucky to win, but she is glad to have ‘put Russia on the map’. She is pleased that her country is now part of the world of bridge.
A few weeks earlier in Kamchatka, a misty depression has set in. Heavy cloud squats on the surrounding volcanoes. The helicopters will be unable to fly; we are advised to prepare ourselves to spend a few more days in Nalychevo.
‘Cool,’ says Cal to my friend. ‘You can learn bridge.’ My friend, the professor from Moscow, who is sixty-five years older than Cal, looks only slightly surprised to be taking lessons from a nine-year-old. Cal doesn’t care. He has the cards out before we even sit down.
I start out on the basics, but I am hardly into my spiel before he takes over.
‘What you have to understand is that the idea of the game is first to reach a “contract” by agreeing how many “tricks” you and your partner will make. And then you need to try to make them. A trick is a round of four cards, right? Each player plays one card. 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 ...’
David and I look at each other.
‘Oh, dear God,’ he says. ‘Where have I heard this before?’ But really he’s remembering those evenings at home when we were young and the evenings later when Dad lay dying. After our game, Cal and I find him by the river, listening to the wind in the blueberry meadows.
There is nothing, our friend said, to compare with the silences of Siberia.
24. Coming and going
AS ALWAYS WITH our family, silences accompany dad’s death. A little after Christmas, he is admitted to hospital. He has difficulty eating because of a cancerous obstruction in his throat. He starts to lose weight fast.
David calls me at my office in London. ‘You’d better come,’ he says. ‘Tonight would be good. They operate tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Ja. The doctor reckons it’s fifty-fifty.’
‘I’m on my way. Have you called Jackie?’
‘She’s coming.’
‘How’s Mum?’
But neither of us is ever quite sure how Mum is and the question goes unanswered. How do we expect her to be? They’ve been married for nearly fifty years.
I go home to pack and to say goodbye to my girlfriend and our children. My suitcase looks like something a funeral director takes on holiday: dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, black shoes ... two pairs of swimming trunks, sandals, a couple of faded T-shirts, two or three baseball caps. On the flight, sleep is impossible. I stare for hours out the dark window until I see the first traces of a red dawn lighten the sky above Mozambique. It feels strange to be sealed in this silent cocoon in the sky. I try to imagine Dad.
‘He’s thin,’ David has warned me. ‘I mean, really thin.’
‘He always was,’ I say.
‘Not like this.’
I am uncomfortably aware that I might be too late. Perhaps he has lost consciousness. Perhaps he is already dead.
I shake my head. Too many memories. Too much to take in, but I cannot help trying to assemble something from the jumble of images that course through my mind. How I see Dad is a different question. Even now, two years after he died, I find that I have difficulty stopping the speeding carousel of images in my mind. If, briefly, I do succeed in freezing the frame, I catch him seated at the bridge table in the sitting room, thirteen cards fanned in one hand.
His pipe is in his mouth, probably unlit. His unruly white hair – it has been white for as long as I can remember, although once it must have been dark – falls forward over his crevassed brow. His forelock is, in fact, not wholly white, but off-yellow, the effect of years of nicotine making its way past his eyes. His face is unnaturally long, a vast acreage of forehead plummeting down to pleasant and even features. It is jagged and craggy, covered with lines, scars and wrinkles. There are no straight lines. It reminds me of a waterfall in the dry season, the washed rocks bleaching in the unaccustomed sun. His nose is big and even, his lips full and sensitive. He wears a small moustache and has what are sometimes described as thoughtful eyes. They are deep set, grey and steady. They have a watery quality too; except when he is grinning, he looks like a man on the verge of tears. His legs are crossed, right over left, and, like his forehead, they are longer than one would reasonably have thought possible, so much so that he may from time to time cross them twice and tuck his right foot behind his left calf. He is wearing short trousers and a checked shirt and he peers from beneath shaggy brows at me or his cards or the monkeys that used to come to steal fruit from the garden.
He is smiling as he waits for play to begin, but softly and to himself, at some unspoken thought. He was not one to reminisce, at least not publicly, though it was possible from time to time, should I be particularly bloody-minded and should the weather have cooled a little, to get him to acknowledge that the past existed and that it might not be without interest to stroll a little down memory lane. But his memory lane is not the wisteria-lined avenue that the name suggests, but something altogether more noisy and disruptive, a place to be visited at one’s peril, a road full of dead ends and wrong turnings, sudden yawning chasms and unexpected rock falls, and peopled by gangsters, vagabonds and (worse) fools. And, while peril may have been something that appealed to him in theory, he lived too long and too well not to know that, before heading into danger, one must first secure one’s exits.
And, besides, his experience of life was of a dangerous and lawless place where charlatans prosper. Neal Ascherson puts it neatly when describing their native Scotland: ‘But there are those countries,’ he writes, ‘which have left the past in its original condition: a huge, reeking tip of unsorted rubbish across which scavengers wander, pulling up interesting fragments which might fetch a price or come in handy. Scotland has been one of these.’
It is true of Dad, too, for the little he spoke of his past comes to me now as shards of glass that may as easily draw blood as catch the light. As I wander through the curious landfill of my memories, I struggle to bring order to the chaotic and tumbling fragments, part fact, part myth, the unsorted stuff of a life lived more or less across the twentieth century. And sometimes the broken glass seems more like water, mercurial and mobile, plunging over cataracts, disappearing into deep wells, slipping through my fingers into a parched desert. Even in its liquid form, it catches the light and twists it this way and that and the light is at once turbid and bright. And, at other times still, it comes to me as a chorus of glittering melancholy of the sort one might hear carried faintly from the distance on the night air, the silent reproachful stars withdrawing into the softening clouds that creep in from the west.
I can hear Dad laughing now except that, when Dad laughed, you didn’t so much hear him as see him and – if you were in a car, say – feel him. His laugh could make a car shake until it squeaked. In the back seat, we children would nudge each other while Dad’s shoulders heaved up and down. The cars – the whole succession of cars that populated our childhood, the Peugeots and the Fiats, the Mercedes and t
he Nissans – would bounce with him and we bounced too. Nowadays, when my children want to tease me, they mimic the rise and fall of his shoulders.
‘You laugh like Tom,’ says my daughter. ‘Just don’t dress like him, OK?’ My daughter is fourteen, an age when fashion matters. When she says she doesn’t want me to dress like Tom, she means that I shouldn’t wear short trousers and yellow cardigans, long socks and veldskoen.
‘It’s how he was,’ I say by way of explanation. As a child and as an adult, he wore shorts in all weathers, in the cold and the moist and the heat of summer too. Roaming the ‘Braids’, the fields south of Edinburgh, he came to love the elements, the way the fronts would sweep across Scotland from the west.
He loved the weather reports and their relentless repetitions. Time and again, fronts, hot and cold, warm and wet, form over the Atlantic and wash across this island, always the same pattern repeated. It is an industry in itself for the forecasters and the recorders, the broadcasters and the insurance companies, and for those who merely make small talk. And yet, even as these fronts pass over, even in the minute they leave these shores heading east, always east, they cease to be of interest, for the focus is always on the new and the next and yesterday’s rain is lost forever, like a footprint in melting snow.
Even now I cannot hear the phrase ‘Partly cloudy and hot with isolated thundershowers’ without immediately calling Dad to mind. I see him in his chair by the radio, a book perched on his knees or thirteen cards dwarfed in his long gnarled hand as he surveyed the view from his window, or me or any of the other distractions that intruded on the thoughts of this most private and isolated of men. It is curious also to think too in this image summoned by the weather forecast how his body is neither young nor old, although in my mind it has certain characteristics of the later part of his life: it is folded up, all 6'5'' of it, like a concertina, the edges worn from use but the notes still true and the melodies precise.
His knees are brown from the sun. They are conspicuously South African, demarcated exactly by the distance from the bottom of his short trousers to the top of his long socks, which he wore in the South African manner. Either side of these dividing lines, his skin was Scottish, pale and blue-veined, soft and bald, the hairs long since worn away by the friction of the cloth. But the knees themselves were of the colonies, knees that had seen action in North Africa and Italy, knees that knew the sun and knew the grazes and scabs that come from playing rugby on the hard winter fields of the Eastern Cape. These were knees that were, at least until his final days, dark and taut, as though stained with betel juice and preserved in tannin from the wattle trees that grew in abundance in Natal.
It was his knees, too, which caused excited comment some thirty-five years ago when we went en famille to Scotland, where in Edinburgh some children made fun of Tom both for wearing shorts and for the colour of his knees and were shocked to find themselves cussed in the roundest accents and ripest language of Fife. And I remember my father being surprised at himself, as it must have been fully thirty years before that he last spoke like that. But, now I think of it, as with his knees so with the rest of him too. Those parts which were not clothed, his head and his hands and forearms and a deep V about his neck, had been claimed by the sun, by Africa, by experience, but his heart remained in part in Scotland, in the mists and soft heathers (though, in truth, he was a city child) and in what I suspect always felt to him to be a state of comparative innocence, unspoiled by the long years of his exile or the war and unscarred by the natural vicissitudes and compromises of life. It was an innocence to which I suspect he often longed to return but he never believed he could. For it was axiomatic that there was no going back, not for love and certainly not for money. The water flows to the sea and stays there. The drop that fell in the High Street, Kirkcaldy, ended up beside the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. It mattered not one jot to him that it could have been otherwise.
It was his firm belief that the card once played, even the wrong card, must stay on the table as it does in bridge, a penalty card the playing of which one’s opponents may determine at their leisure, which is to say at the moment when it may extract from your good self the greatest price. For, just as he loved its rules and their certainties, Dad loved the fact that bridge has no particular etiquette of sympathy and even the most brilliant players will be able to recount the intense, public and drawn-out humiliation of playing a mistakenly bid hand.
The moment the first card is led in a hand of bridge, dummy puts his cards on the table. There are twenty-five cards invisible to declarer, and yet for all the information that has been given in the bidding, and for all the ability of declarer to know his opponents and to guess the position of their cards, still it is easy to get it wrong. Declarer is peering always ‘into a glass darkly’, working with what he knows, guessing at the rest. But I am aware that, in insisting on the rules, which is to say that ‘A card prematurely exposed (but not led) by a defender is a penalty card’, Dad would unconsciously have made a transition in his mind. Just as he saw himself as declarer and not as dummy, so he saw himself not as the one who made the error and paid the penalty, but as the one who extracted the pain and determined the price. It was a transition that, though it was undoubtedly true of him at the card table, was not, I think, true of him in life.
25. A tour of duty
THE HEAT AT Durban airport is almost unbearable. David picks me up in his bakkie. We have, he says, less than half an hour to get to the hospital. Jackie’s already there. She came in from Brussels and was able to catch the earlier connection from Johannesburg to Durban. We run for the car. As he drives too fast along Sydney Road, David explains that the operation to remove the cancerous blockage is set for ten o’clock that morning. Dad is very weak. He might not make it.
Nor might we, the way David is driving. We screech to a halt outside the hospital and rush in. The nurses recognise David; he knows his way and we hurry through to the wards. Despite the long night in the aeroplane, I realise I am unprepared for this.
The hospital corridor leads past the nurses’ station. A series of doors lead off to the right. David nods at the third one. I knock and go in. It’s a shared ward with five beds and huge windows overlooking Durban Bay. The room is bright and clean and pleasantly cool after the early-morning heat of midsummer. Jackie is standing near the door. We hug briefly and I look for Dad.
‘Where is he?’
She looks at me for a moment and then nods at one of the beds. I glance at it and then look around again, but she points me back to the bed. It takes a moment to realise that this old man, this shrunken, whiskered shadow of a man, is my father. His eyes are closed against the light.
‘He’s very weak,’ Jackie says. ‘He hasn’t eaten since yesterday because of the operation.’
At the sound of voices, Dad opens his eyes. I haven’t changed and he recognises me immediately.
‘You made it,’ he says, though he hasn’t the strength to smile.
‘So will you,’ I say.
He grunts. ‘Och, well ...’ and he shrugs. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Are you afraid?’
He grins weakly and grunts again. ‘Just bloody knackered,’ he says, as his eyes close.
The nurses come to usher us out. It’s time for the operation.
We go home to wait. The call comes a few hours later. The operation has been a success. He is alive. He will survive on a liquid diet for a few days; within a week, he should start taking solids. Yes, we should make preparations for him to come home.
But later, when we meet the physician, he qualifies this assessment. The operation has been a success insofar as it has cleared the obstruction to Dad’s throat. But he has not tried – and sees no point in trying – to remove the cancer. To do so will surely kill Dad. Any care from now on will only be palliative. We can ease his pain; we cannot fix him.
In his ward, Dad looks, if possible, even smaller than he did that morning. He is grumpy and clearly in pain.
; ‘You can go now,’ he says. ‘I never did like bloody kibitzers.’
His eyes are closed before the door.
But he did like an audience, which is not quite the same thing. At home we decide it is better to visit him in turn and we establish an informal rota. The next day, I have the morning shift. He seems glad to see me. We talk about a book which is about to be published and about my children. He asks the right questions – how is Cal? What are the girls up to? – but he is impatient with the answers. He seems to have something on his mind.
He looks about him furtively. ‘So let me take you on a tour,’ he says.
‘Do I want to go?’
‘Sure you do. How else do you learn anything?’
‘Really?’ I’m not sure I want this at all, but he seems determined.
‘It’ll be fun.’
I pull the curtains around his bed so we have privacy and help him to lift the sheets off so that he can show me what remains of his body. It is strange and distancing, which I imagine is as he intended, to see this muscle-free, bony old body. He has no penis – that ‘went’ with his cancerous bladder before Christmas. There is a great cut the whole way up his abdomen from the previous day’s operation. On his side, there is another hole. This one has a tap for the colostomy bag. There is no muscle, no bulk, no strength. He looks like something laid out in a biology class. Feel here, he insists. Have a look at that. His body is a Technicolor dreamcoat of bruises that will never heal, but he seems to gather strength from the ‘tour’.
Vulnerable in Hearts Page 17