Vulnerable in Hearts

A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Contract Bridge

Sandy Balfour

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781843543664
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782393733
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

Sandy Balfour's father and the game of contract bridge were both conceived in 1925. Vulnerable in Hearts spans the eight decades of Tom Balfour's life and the same period in the epic story of bridge's spread around the world. Sandy Balfour's poignant and beguiling book traces both journeys to explore the relationships between a game and an empire (and the rules that supported it); and a father and a son.

Contents

PART I ONE DAY IN JANUARY

1 Shuffling

2 Brothers-in-arms

3 Voices

PART II WHEN MY WORLD WAS YOUNG

4 Walking on the moon

5 Latitudes

6 Daft at cards

7 Capsizing an Optimist

8 Welcome to our world

9 Falling in, falling out

10 A house of cards

11 People not cards

PART III WHEN HIS WORLD WAS YOUNG

12 An evening in Panama

13 Travels with Cal

14 Remembering everything

15 Man bites dog

16 The man who made contract bridge

17 The square yard of freedom

18 The game goes global

19 Bloody Culbertson

20 Freetown

21 Second-generation bridge

22 A brief war

PART IV A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING

23 The far side

24 Coming and going

25 A tour of duty

26 For the record

Acknowledgements

PART I

ONE DAY IN JANUARY

1. Shuffling

WE WERE A family of five, which is the perfect number for bridge. Four to play and one to make tea. I say ‘were’ because Dad is no longer with us. He died with a void in diamonds and a hole in his heart and, though I loved him dearly, I sometimes thought I hardly knew him. He died quietly and not quite alone in a hospital in Durban in the summer of 2003. He was angry and sad and he made me smile. When he laughed his whole body shook. It would start with his shoulders. They would heave up and down like a threshing machine. Then it would spread to his stomach and his cheeks. His jowls waggled like an old bulldog, while his bony knees knocked together like castanets. His laugh could fill a room or a hall or a young boy’s world until a coughing fit caught up with him and he would turn puce and hawk and spit to clear his throat of tobacco-stained phlegm. Even now people speak of it. It made us giggle and reduced him to tears.

I saw a lot of him in his last few days. He was in a hospital in Durban in a room that looked over the bay. There were container ships out to sea and a breeze in the trees. We talked a lot too, more than in the twenty years since I left South Africa. There was nothing else to do. He couldn’t move, and I couldn’t budge. I felt bolted to the chair beside his hospital bed and I spent the hours watching the life ebb and flow in his strange, depleted white body. Some days he was tired; others he seemed stronger. Our conversations were as they had always been, coded, cautious and full of silences. They were like the bidding in bridge. Few words were needed, and those we used took on different meanings depending on when they were said and by whom. He said dying was sad only for those who insist on living. He asked whether it was cold, or was it just him? He said he had nothing to say and that he wanted to shave. He wished his bloody hands would stop shaking.

I said I was sorry.

He said to give his regards to the kids – my kids, his grandchildren.

‘Just regards?’ I asked.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘The rest they’ll get from you.’

I wondered what the rest was. When I asked if he had any regrets, he made what in bridge is sometimes called a ‘forcing pass’. It required a response from his partner, although exactly what this response should be would have depended on the partnership understanding and on what the others at the table might have to say for themselves. Often a forcing pass comes into play when one or other pair at the bridge table is about to or has the opportunity to make a ‘sacrifice bid’. A sacrifice bid means that the partnership reaches a contract which it knows it is unlikely to succeed in making, but which it anticipates will be less expensive than allowing the opponents to make a rival contract. The scoring in bridge works that way. If you make a vulnerable contract of four spades, it’s worth 620 points to you. And nothing to your opponents. If they’re not vulnerable, they might decide to bid five clubs even though they know they’re unlikely to make it. Because, even if they fall three short of the required number of tricks, it will cost them only 150 points. They lose – but, relatively speaking, they win. Partners playing the forcing pass sometimes have to guess. Should I bid or shouldn’t I? And, if so, what? I knew that I would have to decide the question of Dad’s regrets for myself.

At least he was glad to hear I was playing bridge again. He thought it would do me good. He’d been playing a bit with a bunch of grumpy old men from the local club. Each afternoon they would meet in a different house. Their wives would put out sandwiches and tea and go to the movies. But they’d play in silence and it wasn’t much fun. In the last couple of years, he had more or less given it up. Pity, in a way, but what could you do? If it wasn’t fun, there wasn’t much point, not even to keep Alzheimer’s at bay.

‘Do you remember actually learning the game?’ I asked.

‘No, not in any detail.’

Detail was important to Dad. He liked things to be precise. He liked mathematics.

‘Everyone has to learn somewhere,’ I suggested.

‘Sure,’ he said, shrugging.

I told him I had read somewhere a story about Omar Sharif. Sharif is almost as famous for his bridge as he is for his movies. In one interview, he said that he learned bridge while relaxing on a movie set in Egypt in 1954. ‘I found myself with a lot of spare time waiting for the cameras to be ready. I found a dusty old book and read it. It happened to be about bridge. Had it been about fishing or gardening, I would have been a healthier, outdoor, tanned old man,’ he said.

Dad supposed he had learned bridge from his parents back when they lived in Edinburgh. Come to think of it, he was sure he had.

‘It would have been Pa that taught me,’ he said, ‘although Ma wasn’t so bad herself.’

‘A bit like you and Mum,’ I suggested.

But Dad was lost in a reverie that sped him back across the decades to Edinburgh. That’s where he grew up, in a house on a hill in the south of the city. This was in the late thirties, when bridge was at its most popular. His dad was a bank clerk and his mother a teacher. It would have been strange if they hadn’t taught him bridge.

‘Aye, but it was Uncle Willie made me love it,’ he said.

Dad remembered that his uncle Willie played until old age. He had lived in the Borders someplace, in Scotland, and suffered from Parkinson’s disease. His eyes shone and his hands shook. When he came to stay they would play through the night. Willie had been gassed in the trenches during the Great War. Dad said he kept everyone awake with his coughing. The next morning he’d put them to sleep with his analysis of the play. When he could no longer keep thirteen cards in his hands, his brothers built a special wooden rack to hold them.

I wondered what happened to the rack. Dad asked why it mattered. I said because things do and he said perhaps. He said it was a pity we couldn’t play. He would have liked to beat me one more time.

‘But we always played together,’ I whispered.

‘Och, aye,’ he said. ‘Boys against girls.’ He and I were the ‘boys’. My mother and sister, Jackie, were the ‘girls’. Sometimes thinking (erroneously, as it happens) that I was better than Jackie (and certain, it goes without saying, that he was better than Mum), Dad would mix us up a little, which is to say I would play with Mum and he with Jackie. But this arrangement never quite worked. There was no edge to it and we all played worse as a result. The former plan was better. They may have got all the points, but we got all the glory, and in Dad’s mind the pursuit of points was as nothing compared to the pursuit of glory.

‘So how could you beat me?’ I asked. ‘We were partners.’

But he passed again, which was my punishment for being too bloody literal. And, besides, it is not unknown at the bridge table for players to treat their partners even more brutally than their opponents. Zia Mahmood, one of the great players of the modern generation, writes (approvingly, by the way) of a particular player who frequents the New York bridge club scene and who ‘played what I call “Israeli Savage”, an aggressive version of “Paki Savage”. Basically, the system has two rules: 1) Bid no trump and 2) punish your partner and your opponents alike without mercy.’ Mahmood comes from Pakistan, though he now plays for the United States, and is a keen advocate of what he calls ‘Paki Savage’, an unbridled style of bidding intended to make life extremely difficult for your opponents. And if your partner can’t keep up? Well, that’s his problem.

Dad smiled at my discomfort, which must have hurt like hell. He wanted to laugh but his body couldn’t take it. Even the smallest movement pulled at the stitches from the operation to clear the cancerous blockage in his throat. He winced and closed his eyes, which was how he disguised his pain. I could see he was drifting off. It was time to go. He held my hand a moment.

‘You can still play,’ he said. ‘You’ll have David.’

David is my elder brother.

‘He doesn’t play,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t like the game.’

‘Och, ja, so he says.’ My father is the only person I have known to say ja with an Edinburgh lilt.

‘It’s true, he doesn’t.’

David is a scientist, a botanist and an ecologist. For many years he has lived and worked in South Africa’s game reserves. His fingers are scarred from working in the bush. He is tall, tanned and muscular. There is rhino dung under his nails and he smells vaguely of diesel. He doesn’t look like a bridge player and he doesn’t want to be one. If he were on a movie set and found a book about bridge, he would use it to prop up his wobbly workbench. Despite his upbringing, despite his father, despite everything, David has never shown any interest in bridge. Not a glimmer. Once, when asked to play, he said he would rather bathe in soggy lettuce, a vegetable to which he at that time had a near-pathological aversion.

‘Everyone likes bridge,’ Dad said. ‘They just don’t know it yet.’

2. Brothers-in-arms

DAVID DOESN’T EAT meat and I don’t drink alcohol, but this morning we’re doing both. Beyond the bougainvillea-laden fringe of the veranda where we sit, the sun drips on to a dappled lawn. There have been night rains and the air is clean and fresh and for the moment it is almost cool. There is enough cloud to suggest that it might rain again, but for now tendrils of steam rise from the leaves and grass and a slight breeze caresses the leaves of the jacaranda trees that line the driveway. A cat stretches out on the windowsill.

We’ve gone for the works. ‘Everything,’ David said to the waiter. ‘Eggs, bacon, sausage, mushroom, beans, maybe a bit of steak? Toast, hash browns, I don’t know. Bring us everything you’ve got. Maybe put some cheese on that steak.’

‘And champagne,’ I added. ‘Your most expensive. And orange juice and coffee and maybe a little fruit salad.’

‘With ice cream,’ says David.

The waiter looks at us and starts from the top.

‘Eggs for two?’

‘Please.’

‘Scrambled or fried?’

‘Scrambled,’ I say. David prefers his fried.

‘And sausage?’

‘Ja.’

‘Also for two.’

We’re laughing now and the waiter is beginning to relax a little. After all, it is late for breakfast, a little after eleven in the morning, and we are the only customers in the restaurant.

‘Mushroom, beans, toast, steak. Everything,’ David says.

‘And champagne,’ I repeat.

‘The most expensive?’ says the waiter with the trace of a grin.

‘You got it. Two bottles.’

‘Two bottles?’ He looks at me and then slowly begins to write. ‘2 btle Chmp.’

‘But don’t open them, OK. I think we should open them. And cold please.’ I turn to my brother. ‘I can’t drink the stuff unless it’s really cold.’

‘OK,’ says the waiter. He looks at the list on his pad. ‘You want the fruit salad first or last.’

‘Together,’ says David. ‘Except the champagne. We want that first.’

‘And maybe the ice cream. Bring the ice cream and the champagne first.’

Eventually the waiter is confident that he has our order. As he disappears through the large French doors that open on to the veranda where we’re sitting, he casts one last backward glance at us as if he thinks we might make a run for it the moment he is out of sight. There’s something not quite right about these two middle-aged men behaving like schoolboys at this hour of the morning. And so well dressed?

It doesn’t add up, but it’s true. We are well dressed. I’m wearing a suit and dark tie, and a new white shirt. The gleam of my polished shoes mirrors my shiny face because for once I am freshly shaven. David, of course, isn’t. It must be twenty years since he was last clean-shaven and probably longer since he last wore a tie. But by his standards he looks quite respectable. His cotton shirt is neatly pressed and his trousers have a crease. He has even polished his shoes. He got married a decade ago, so maybe it’s only ten years since he last polished his shoes.

We look at each other; there is not much to say, but slowly the hint of a smile begins to form around the corner of his mouth, and I can feel mine starting too. Once we start to giggle, there’s no stopping us. Holding our sides, lying face down on the table, we laugh until we cry, and then we laugh some more. Our shoulders shake, but only moderately.

‘Oh, Christ,’ I say, ‘the porn!’

‘Jesus, I’ll never forget those bloody pictures. Did you see Mum’s face?’

‘And the handprints on the wall? Must have been ash!’

And we laugh again at the thought of Mum’s face, and the porn and the handprints of the ashes of the dead on the wall, even though the porn wasn’t hardcore, just the centrefolds from Scope magazine, South Africa’s equivalent of ‘Page Three Girls’.

‘Oh, dear God.’

But after a while the laughter can’t sustain itself, and we sit up a little straighter and look back to the French doors.

‘I hope I never have to do that again,’ I say.

‘You won’t,’ says David.

It takes me a moment to work out the truth of this statement. Just then the woman who owns the restaurant comes through the French doors. She is carrying a silver tray with a bottle of champagne, a carafe of orange juice and two bowls of vanilla ice cream.

‘So howzit, gents?’ she says in a South African accent so strong that if I had heard it in London it would have sent shivers down my spine. But here in Hillcrest, KwaZulu-Natal, on this warm summer’s day with a hoopoe on the lawn and a purple-crested loerie in the avocado tree, it sounds just about right. It is warm and throaty, filled with the sound of sun and cigarettes and the evening dop. ‘What’s the celebration?’

David is busy with the champagne bottle and so it falls to me to answer. ‘You don’t want to know,’ I say.

‘Ah, come on,’ she replies, ‘don’t keep it to yourselves.’

She’s maybe our age, maybe a little older, maybe quite a bit older, when I look too closely. I guess she’s fifty, which makes her ten years older than me, seven more than David. She’s not unattractive, here in the subdued light of a cool veranda in a quiet commuter suburb twenty miles inland from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Dedication and Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• Contents