‘One day, my son,’ he says, adopting the sonorous tones of a pompous captain of industry, ‘all this will be yours.’
I appreciate the handover, but all I can manage is a weak smile.
‘Hey,’ he says, ‘I’m the one who’s bloody dying.’
The tour continues. His ribs are like the windblown dunes of a dry, white desert. ‘Try this,’ he says, and he shows me how if you pinch his skin it takes several minutes to resume its place.
His skin is cold and soft, and very pale.
‘Are you ready?’ I ask.
To some questions, there would appear to be no answer and I do not really expect him to say anything. It’s his turn to smile weakly and then to look out the window.
‘It’s your lead,’ he replies.
The day Dad died was like any other. It was ‘shorter’ for him and felt longer to us. He was seventy-six years of age, which was, as he put it, ‘neither young nor old’. Alert until the last two days when a cocktail of morphine and gin enhanced his going, he seemed to me to have lived a life I knew only partially. It was not that I did not know some of the details, nor that I had not lived a life of comparable distraction. I had, after all, reversed his southbound journey by leaving South Africa to live in Britain. I too had three children. And I too sometimes find myself consumed by doubt as to the proper place of private action in public life. It was more that in his triumphant ordinariness – his strength and his weakness – my father posed questions that I was not always willing to accept. There was one particular afternoon in his hospital ward when we were struggling, as we had for some days, properly to time our goodbye. This time I wanted to remember it. We were watching a yellow-billed kite ride the thermal currents coming up from the Bay when he remarked on how stilted we were in our declarations of love, how incompetent at speaking from emotion. He said that he knew of no one – and forgive the proud father’s hyperbole – better with words than he and I, and couldn’t understand why we found it so difficult to say what must have been blindingly obvious to the silent patients watching us from the four other beds in the ward. I, choked with emotion, found little answer and, as was our way, we took refuge in the metaphor of bridge. I vaguely recall some banter about ‘low raises’ and ‘forcing passes’. There may even have been something about ‘doubling for takeout’, a conversational gambit with which we were both familiar and in which the invitation to takeout was invariably accepted in an attempt to reach safer, less emotional ground.
Outside the window, the kite turned effortlessly on the self-replicating thermals, rising and falling. Dad took a breather from these conversational exertions by pulling on his ill-fitting oxygen mask, which then lay askew on his erratically whiskered face, giving him the appearance of a mildly deranged pirate. I stood at the window and watched the bird. Like any child of that part of South Africa, I could recognise it from below from the distinctive ‘V’ shape of its tail. But the hospital was perched on the edge of the high hills of the Berea and, from time to time, the kite would swoop below me. For the first time I recall, I was able to observe its colouring from above, and I remembered Melville’s memorable passage in Moby Dick in which he wrote that there is ‘a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he flies forever within the gorge, that gorge is within the mountain, so that even in his lowest swoop, he is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.’ I realised then as I realise now that to cast my father in so heroic a mould is to presume too much. He was strictly a bird of the plain even when he soared, as sometimes, fleetingly, he had at the bridge table.
On that hot and desolate day in Durban, I left the kite to its troubling vortex and turned from the window back to my now sleeping father. He seemed impossibly small in his bed, so small that it was not easy at first glance to distinguish which were his limbs and which were just the folds of the white hospital sheets. I stood a long while at that distance and watched him. I have no real recollection of how much time passed. Perhaps it was ten minutes. Perhaps an hour. Nor do I remember what I was thinking, except feeling acutely – but not saying – that to be alive is always and everywhere to be vulnerable in hearts.
26. For the record
IF THIS WERE a movie, it would fade to black. Instead, we move slowly about the old house, packing our bags and getting ready to go our various ways. David and I find ourselves looking in corners. We find pieces of Dad in forgotten drawers. Some business cards that must date from the 1970s. A short story typed out one finger at a time, unfinished. A letter that starts ‘Dear Sand,’ and gets no further. In the twenty years I had lived in Britain, he wrote to me only twice. I think for a moment it must be of recent vintage. Perhaps he had something to say? But David shakes his head. The writing is too legible. It must be old. In the dining room, we find Dad’s old campaign medals from the war. The Africa Star. The Italy Service Medal. The George VI Medal. Later, I take them home with me, to London. When, some months after that, I show them to Cal, he turns them over in his hand.
‘So he got these for fighting?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘Although he always denied he actually did any fighting. He said he was always too far from the front.’
‘Do you believe him?’
Do I believe him? I think about it for a moment and decide I do. In the big things, I believe Dad. ‘I don’t think he enjoyed being a soldier,’ I say. ‘He hated the fighting. I think he saw things that were really quite horrible.’
But Cal has moved on already. ‘I miss him, you know,’ he says, like someone stumbling over the thought.
One medal – the African Star – is engraved with the simplest legend: T. Balfour. Actually not engraved, but stamped in an uneven line. You can sense the impatience of the engraver. One down; how many thousands to go?
In Dad’s cupboard, David and I discover our old school ties, which have somehow survived untouched since 1979. Never worn but nor were they thrown away. We suppose they will be now.
In the carport, the old tools lie undisturbed. Against the walls and in the rafters is more ‘unsorted rubbish’ through which we wander ‘pulling up interesting fragments which might fetch a price or come in handy’. There are pieces of timber rescued from some or other project – Dad was always a reluctant and impatient handyman – and put by, like a spare trump, for a day when they might ‘come in useful’. The way back to the house takes us through a gate erected to keep the dogs in. It has a cowbell attached, the nearest Dad ever came to accepting the need for ‘security’ in these crime-fearing days. Even now the house is completely unprotected. No fences, no alarms, no guns. The old pellet gun was handed in to the police some years ago, during one of their periodic amnesties for unlicensed firearms.
We wander back inside. These are our last moments and we’re not very sure what to do with them. I will return to London, Jackie to Brussels. David is heading off to the bush somewhere. In one sense at least, Mum wants to be alone. The past few weeks have been exhausting; she needs time and space to recuperate. Already she has plans to sell the old house and move somewhere smaller. Our flat crown tree will become someone else’s tree. Its leaves, nurtured with Dad’s ashes, will give their shade to others. It’s the right thing to do, of course, but we find ourselves looking out past the crest of the hill to the distances on either side and saying nothing.
It’s a couple of days after the funeral. The weather has turned unpleasantly hot, the worst of the midsummer days. It is humid too, but the promised thunderstorms never arrive. They remain, as we do, ‘isolated’. The dogs disconsolately seek shade. That evening we gather again in the sitting room. Mum sits in her corner where she has always sat, but we find that the geography of it doesn’t work any more. Dad’s chair sits in the corner, a resounding reminder of just what it is we no longer have the energy to discuss. Beside it is his stool with an old pipe in the ashtray. I wonder what Mum will do with it. Throw it
out too, I suppose.
‘Come on,’ says Jackie. ‘Let’s play.’
We all look to David.
‘Oh, shit,’ he says. ‘Is this absolutely necessary?’
Our silence confirms his worst fears.
‘I’ll get the table,’ he says.
Jackie and I look at each other.
‘You can have him,’ she says.
‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Boys against girls,’ says Mum with a brittle brightness. ‘Just like ...’
But she can’t bring herself to finish the sentence because it is not like anything we have done before. This is new territory for all of us. The four of us have never been ‘a four’. We have never previously played bridge together. Not once in forty years. But, on this oppressive summer night in Durban, with the barometer hovering in the danger zone and the neighbourhood dogs barking their frustration in endless rounds, David has little choice but to relent. It has become necessary for us to play bridge. And so this prolonged, tender and dismal vigil is the first time, and probably the last, that we four will play together.
Boys against girls. The pairings bring a slight – but false – edge to proceedings. Jackie teases David. I confine myself to the occasional foolish pre-empt. Mum plays mechanically. David and I are determined to follow Skid Simon’s famous dictum, which comes to us by way of Dad: ‘When in doubt, bid one more.’ We do. Almost every hand we bid one more, and down we go. Sometimes a little and sometimes, as Dad used to put it, ‘a lottle’. But we’re pretty sure he would have been proud of us, for, though the ‘girls’ won, we lost with style. Or at least comprehensively.
And once, just once, we got it right:
They are spectacular hands. The bidding goes like this.
Dad seems to be watching. I can hear him whispering in my ear as the bidding progresses.
1. That’s my boy. It didn’t all go in one ear and out the other.
2. Why? Bid 6 . I hope David leaves you there. I hope Jackie doubles you. You’ll go down a million and you deserve it.
3. Oh, dear. I didn’t mean it about leaving you there! Well, you made your bed and now you can lie in it.
4. Oh, very clever, dear. (This comment is both genuine and sarcastic. 5 is an elegant but, under the circumstances, very unfortunate bid.)
5. Oi! Watch what you say to my wife.
6. Jackie always was the best bidder in the family. You could learn a thing or two from her. Mum’s spades can’t be that good if she’s got diamonds as a second suit and in that case 6 is unlikely to make.
7. Better late than never. With any luck, someone’ll double you.
8. Didn’t they learn anything? Always bid one more. How many times do I have to say it? One down is good bridge. Well, it’s cold now.
No one doubles and no one bids one more. David has bid the hearts and so he has to play the hand. Needless to say, if we had been left in 5 , I might just, through good play, have managed to get out of it for seven down.
But a contract of 6 cannot fail. The contract is cold. There are no losing tricks in the black suits, for David can trump anything the opposition might lead. He has only to lead once through West’s diamonds (given her 5 bid, Mum is almost certain to have the king) to make two tricks in that suit. He does that successfully, runs his trumps and finally concedes a diamond trick. A small slam, bid and made.
David is elated. It’s his first and only slam.
‘You see,’ I say, ‘bridge can be fun.’
‘The old man would have been proud,’ he agrees.
‘The “old man”,’ says Jackie, ‘would have bid seven.’
For the first time in weeks my mother smiles.
Acknowledgements
There are many thousands of books on bridge, more than anyone could read. The authors that I found most helpful and to whose books I returned again and again are Victor Mollo, S.J. Simon, Alan Truscott, Rex Mackey, Terence Reece, John Clay and Zia Mahmood. And, of course, Ely Culbertson. In the course of writing this, I spoke to many world-class bridge players. All were unfailingly polite and helpful as I explained that I was writing a book about bridge that wasn’t really about bridge at all. None asked why I was wasting their time. In particular, I would like to thank Alan Truscott, David Burn, Zia Mahmood, Fred Gitelman, Michael Rosenberg and Tatiana Ponomareva. My thanks too to my excellent editors, Toby Mundy and John Glusman, to Bonnie Chiang and Corinna Barsan, and to my friend and agent, Isobel Dixon.
My family suffered through many drafts of the book and were kind enough to say they enjoyed it.
Vulnerable in Hearts Page 18