On weekends, the boy ate breakfast with his mother in silence. His mother often did not eat until late in the afternoon and sometimes not until late at night, but there was always a glass of wine near at hand. She laid out the morning’s newspapers on their dining table like clean linen and scanned down their columns with her first knuckle, occasionally stopping to cut out snippets with tailor shears and paste them into her scrapbook. They were articles about the war, careful arrangements of its progress and abstract cost.
When he was finished eating, the boy excused himself and said, not very loudly, that he was going to the club. His mother would not even notice his absence until she was awakened from her work by the clatter of empty plates when the maid took them in.
The boy walked by himself to the club. Sometimes, if one of the old gentlemen was available to walk him home, he stayed till after dark. The old gentlemen were too old to fight in the war, its instruments were now too different and too deadly, and they accompanied the boy for the prospect of exchanging a few words with his mother, whose beauty was a small consolation to their concluded manhoods. But the boy had also begun to make a name for himself. He had defeated Sir Arthur Thompson, the local chess champion, and the old gentlemen had taken to calling him "Little Capablanca" because of his precocity and because of the perfection and transparency of his play. Many of them even paid him for lessons. They delighted in the novelty of receiving instruction from a boy not much older than their own grandsons. And they loved his seriousness.
The boy's father had taught him the rudiments before he had gone: how the pieces moved, how to play the opening, how to read the funny notation used to record the games, the common tactics–the fork, the pin, the discovered attack. He had left behind a stack of British Chess Magazine Quarterly which the boy had quickly devoured in his absence, learning the games of Alekhine, Lasker and especially Capablanca, by heart. His mother, who had no understanding of the game nor understood its appeal, did not like her son to visit the club. It was filled with grognards. There was even a recruitment officer, Charles, who often loitered about the place and was rumored to fudge birthdates to secure his commission.

The clubhouse was always filled with smoke. The scrape and snap of cigarette lighters rang constantly amid the duller, slower, tick-tock of the pieces and the clocks. The old gentlemen nodded at the boy as he passed, and a few of them pulled out chairs at their tables for him to sit down, but he shook his head. He wandered from game to game, evaluating positions, measuring strengths, noting who had improved, who was new.
At the back there was a girl, about his own age (but by those same years shed of her childhood) whom he did not recognize. He guessed, by her glances toward Mr. Dobson, that she was a relation of his. She sat very straight in her chair and in her lap she held a folded letter, whose crease she pinched absentmindedly. The boy, not accustomed to the company of women, and not yet awakened to their charms, stared unabashedly at her. Their eyes met. Neither looked away.

She waved at him to come closer. He saw that she was a head taller than himself and he felt a strange embarrassment he had never felt before.
“What’s your name?” she asked, in the cheery voice adults always reserved for children.

“St John,” he said. “However, no one here calls me that anymore.”

“What do they call you?”

“Nevermind. Have you come with Mr. Dobson? Are you his granddaughter or something?”

She dropped the affectation. “Yes,” she said. “I mean, he’s my great-uncle, that is.”

“Do you play? Do you know how the pieces move?”

She flushed and looked down and pinched the crease of her letter in rapid strokes, and the boy thought he must have offended her. But then she asked “Would you like me to teach you?” and he was stunned. She took him to an empty table and by the time she reached the intricacies of the knight’s movement, her grand-uncle had spotted them.

“What?” he said, running over. “Bella, love, don’t waste his time.”

“It’s alright,” said the boy.

“I was just teaching him, grand-uncle,” she said, a little indignant of her grand-uncle’s unusual reverence.

“What? Bella, love, what are you saying? You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“It’s alright,” said the boy.

“He was teaching you, you mean?” said Mr. Dobson.

“Teaching me?” she said.

“It’s really alright,” said the boy.

“What? He’s the best player in the club,” said Mr. Dobson. “You didn’t know? Eh? What? Were you playing a trick on her, young man?”

St John could say nothing. He began putting the pieces back to their starting squares.

She huffed as she rose from her seat. “He told me he didn’t know how to move the pieces.”

She came again early the next day–without her grand-uncle–and waited for St John. She wanted to play him. He could not help obliging her.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” said St John, almost whispering. “I didn’t mean to trick you.”

She played better than the old gentlemen of the club: she didn’t blunder her pieces or fall into simple traps (as her grand-uncle did), yet very soon she found herself in a lost position. She played him again. She lost again. She would not let him go, but kept setting up the pieces, herself always with the white (he did not dare ask her to switch), always with the same opening. They played for hours. He did not let her win even once. He sensed, as when his father would play him, that no matter how decided or terrible the outcome, to throw the game would have been still worse. Defeat could be endured, but not deceit.

“Why do you always play the Spanish opening?” he asked, absently, as he helped set up the pieces again. He expected no reply, and indeed, none came. The old gentlemen exchanged secret smiles as they observed the two playing late into the night.

Next weekend, she was back, but she was no longer interested in playing against him.

“I want you to help me beat someone,” she said. She had another letter–or perhaps the same one–which she was holding to her chest.

“Who?”

“I want you to play for me,” she said. “It’s a correspondence game and I want you to play for me.”

“I won’t cheat.”

“It’s not cheating.”

He returned to the game he was studying.

“I’ll pay you,” she said.

“How much?”

“I don’t know.” She began rooting around in her purse.

“Well, anyway, I won’t cheat.”

“It’s not like he’ll find out.”

“Who?”

“The other player. It’s a correspondence game, so he won’t–”

“I’m sure your father won’t appreciate your deceiving him.”

“My father? It’s not my father. My father’s never even played chess.”

“Who then?”

“My father’s died,” she said. There was an uneasy silence in which the boy just stared at the pieces. “So then, you’ll do it if I pay you?”

“I can teach you, if you like,” he said, “but I won’t cheat.”

“Then forget it.” She left, but only a moment later she returned. “Well, then, how much if you teach me?”

“No, that’s alright.” He charged the other members five shillings an hour, sometimes double that when there were a lot of them together, and he was saving all his money for a trip to the capital, for the 26th championship tournament, but he was afraid, suddenly, of talking about money. When she began rummaging again in her bag, he felt the jangle of her broken change down in the pit of his stomach. It was not the sound of shillings and it made him sick. When she insisted on paying, he finally negotiated her down to an offering of baked goods (of her preparation).

He soon found out that Belle (as she preferred to be called) put to question the proverbial ease of pie. Not a single item from her oven came anywhere near to being edible, but St John consumed everything unflinchingly, mechanically, like medicine, never once allowing Belle to taste one of her cakes or cookies and break the facade. He could not himself tell you why he did this.

Months passed. He went to the club every day. He went early, so that he could reserve a certain table by the windows whose curtains she had once remarked in passing that she liked. Except for those moments when his thoughts were occupied by his ambitions, or with his mother, or with the secret, crushing fear of loss, he was consumed with her instruction. He was more patient than ever, more serious than ever, more brilliant than ever. He taught her the intricacies of the Spanish game, the favorite opening also of Capablanca, and ran her through the matches in his magazines until she could offer rook odds to any gentlemen in the club. But he would not let her defeat him. It didn't seem to bother her that against him she always lost, only victory in the correspondence game seemed to matter and that was slowly coming. The day St John found out that it was her fiance, Lieutenant Cuthbert, who was her opponent, he went home early, complaining of a stomach ache. The ginger snaps she had baked for him he had tossed mindlessly into a pond in their back garden for the fish and the birds to nibble on. He did not cry. There was no yelling or screaming, or any of those things which he filed under the heading of melodrama. He merely frowned a little. He had fallen in love much in the same way that frogs are boiled: by the time he realized it, it was too late.

He didn't stop the lessons.

…

In those days, they would deliver important news by telegram. St John volunteered at the local telegram office and post office, understaffed as they were because of the war. He sometimes helped deliver those happier pieces of correspondence that did not require the company of a priest or officer, but mostly he sorted the mail.

One day, he discovered a telegram addressed to Belle. It was on behalf of her fiance. He had seen enough of these kinds of messages to guess their funeral contents and in a flash of blind panic he slipped it in his trouser's pocket and carried it home.

It was near evening. St John's mother was asleep on a divan in the living room, a half-empty bottle of wine on the table beside her. He attended automatically to the detritus she had gathered around her, which he had instructed the maid not to bother with: books, newspapers, letters from his father, a photo album. It was one of her bad days. The photo album only came out when she missed his father beyond all endurance.
Having put everything back in its proper place–knowing they would be scattered again tomorrow or the next day–he went upstairs to get her a blanket and pillow. He found a half-written letter sitting on the roll top desk in her bedroom. It was addressed to his father but there were several mentions of his own name. In fact, he seemed to be its main subject. He read a few snippets and then remembered the telegram in his pocket and hastened downstairs to finish his work, but the words he had read swam in his mind, even as he tucked her in.

He was quiet even before you left, but now he doesn't speak to me at all. I feel a coldness in him I don't fully understand. He's brilliant, of course, as always, and always well-behaved, yet I can sense no compassion in him, no tenderness, no love. Do you know he hasn't once cried since you left? Is that strength? Is it possible for a little boy to possess such strength? He frightens me, Harry. I don't know where my little boy went. I don't even know if he misses you, we speak so seldom of it. I believe he hates me. He's never in the house. I suppose I'm no help in that either. I'm as much to blame, I know. What have you done, Harry, leaving us here all alone and what am I to do with him? How are we to go on if you do not return?

He stared at her sleeping face a moment, the brow at last unfurrowed by the release of dreams, whose dimensions were not of space and time but of love, and he kissed her gently on the head and went away.

Once in his room, he took out the letter and placed it on the heavy black typewriter that sat like a mausoleum on his small desk. Around it were assortments of papers: letters to his father abandoned mid-sentence, chess games he had copied off the magazines for personal annotation, snatches of a diary, the neat columns of attempted poetry.

He sat down at the desk and stared at the letter. He held it up to the window behind the desk, letting the light expose the folded paper within. Of course, he had to show her the letter. There was simply no way around that, and moreover it was not his responsibility to shelter her from the truth. Her fiance was dead. He caught himself smiling in the window's faint reflection and he jumped up from the chair. He tossed the letter on the bed, and began pacing the room. He would go tomorrow, first thing, and put the letter back. That was all. No one would be the wiser. Yes, the lessons would have to end… but there was no other way. And all the better—he could finally focus on the championship, he had fallen behind on the latest games because of her. Things would go back to normal.

But no one else knew about the engagement. Not her grand-uncle, not even Lieutenant Cuthbert's parents. While the news would be officially delivered to the parents, they would have no reason at all to tell Belle. He snatched up the letter again. It had no official stamp, most likely it had been written by another soldier, one of Cuthbert's confidants, a friend dutifully keeping a promise. Further correspondence was therefore unlikely. There was only this letter. He glanced at the sconce beside the window, from which hung an unlit gas lamp.

Everything thereafter would be a lie. He would be teaching her to win a game that had already ended. And what of that game? How could it continue without him? The answer came instantly: he could write the letters himself. He could make the moves in his place. He'd played through their games, remembered the content of his letters (and with what joy she had narrated them), imitation was possible, was easy. But it would be a lie, after all. He would have to sit there with her, knowing that it was a lie, and could he do that? I can sense no compassion in him, no tenderness, no love. But which was the more compassionate? Which one was love?

He forced himself to sit down at the typewriter, fed it a fresh sheet of paper, and began furiously typing out a letter. He wanted to express to her everything he felt, he wanted neither to hide that he had stolen the letter, nor why he had stolen it, nor to withhold its contents. Her fiance was dead, but he was alive, and he loved her. Coming to those words, he ripped the paper out from the roller, and crumpled it up. He fed a second page into the roller, and tore that one up halfway through, and then a third, which he simply left blank for an hour. There was nothing he could say that would improve the situation. His love was poor consolation to her loss.

He got up and lit the gas lamp, staring at that letter on his bed all the while. Then he rushed towards it, snatched it up, and stuffed it in his desk drawer. He sat once more at the typewriter. My Dearest Belle, he began, in imitation of her fiance's writing. In half an hour it was done. The next day he deposited the letter with the usual outgoing mail and waited.

…

Office Charles was tall, handsome, and urbane to a fault. He had a natural talent for guessing at people's deepest truths: the want of courage or renown, the want for companionship, the object of giddy pride, and the secret shame, were all to him an open book. For this, he was the confidant of soldier's wives and other young women of the town, and the bane of mothers. He never spoke dishonestly, on the contrary, he prided himself on his allegiance to absolute truth, an allegiance he believed absolved him from law and bureaucracy. It was on his head to supply the war with soldiers–men, which the law delineated by age–but the truth was that age was not a determinant of manhood, and often a deterrent; it could–it must–be ignored.

Officer Charles had set his sights on St. John since the first day he had spotted him in the club, playing an exhibition match against six other members more than thrice his age, all of which he soon defeated without the slightest fanfare. It was this unnatural composure that caught his eye, and he knew, in that instant, that St. John would make a fine officer. He began to frequent the club once a week, only when he knew St. John would also be there.

Recently, his approach had been frustrated by the presence of a young woman. A newcomer to the town, the nephew of the late Dobson jr. and, from the boy's private attention, his clear favorite. The girl had an instinctual dislike of Charles, as much as a protective sister or mother might, and it was not possible to do what he needed to do in her presence. And yet, they were always together.

He began asking around. In the course of a few days he managed to piece together the details of their arrangement, the correspondence game, and even the girl's clandestine betrothal to one Lieutenant Cuthbert. What he didn't understand was how the arrangement persisted after Lieutenant Cuthbert had married a French nurse, with whom he'd apparently fallen madly in love  while stationed with her in the reserves (a station no doubt obtained through the influence of Lord Cuthbert, his father). According to one of the soldiers under Cuthbert's command (Officer Charles kept in regular contact with all the men he had recruited to fight), he'd broken things off with "that strong-headed gal" months ago, even going so far as to inform her of this through a third party, to prevent any chance at reconsideration. There was no possibility of her maintaining a ruse or leading him on. It was obvious the infatuation was one-sided. Yet, the lessons continued. More bizarrely, the letters continued. Beyond the occupational interest, Officer Charles's devotion to the truth demanded an answer.

…

Her play was now indistinguishable from when she first began. St. John found himself more and more often pondering his next move, rather than playing instantly. She had not yet defeated him, neither in the correspondence game (which frustrated her to no end) nor in their live matches (which were of no consequence). She'd even progressed in her baking. The cake she had offered him on his 16th birthday was the first bit of confection he was willing to share. Their relationship, he thought, had also progressed to something more intimate. He had surprised himself with how easy it was to commit subterfuge. He had even convinced her to send her letters through him, as a liaison to the post office. They all sat in a neat pile in his desk drawer. He had gleaned from them in advance all that she would come to tell him later: the death of her father in the trenches, her mother's descent into hysterics and imminent recovery (which never seemed to come) in a mental hospital abroad, her painful isolation and loneliness. There was never any mention of himself, of course, but when he wrote the responses he could pretend it was all for him. More than one letter had to be scrapped because he got carried away and let slip his own voice; hours were spent every day in their careful composition, and in them he could forget the war, forget the ever present fear, forget even the game.

It was another weekend. Officer Charles had come with the chaplain to deliver the news–St. John would later find out that he had insisted on this particular visit, though, by his own admission, there was no easy way to say what needed to be said: St. John's father had been killed. There was no body, only a grave where he had fallen.

St. John's first thought was that he had a lesson with Belle that afternoon and would have to miss it. Then the situation seemed to enclose him like the folds of an envelope and he lost himself to darkness. When he came to, he was in his mother's lap. She was alternately dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and stroking his hair.

"Where's Officer Charles?" he asked.

"Have some brandy," she said. "You're so pale."

He sat up and looked around. The lamps had been lit and the curtains were all drawn. "Is he gone?"

She nodded. "We'll just have to make do, that's all. Just make do by ourselves." She repeated this several times, like an elegy. "Have the brandy… that's a good boy."

The photo albums were all strewn about on the table and the carpeted floor. Weathered, yellow photographs of his father in the various stages of his life. In one of them, he was a boy, with the same likeness as St. John. He picked it up and sat down heavily on the sofa.

There was a knock at the door.

"No, no, you sit, I'll go check," said his mother.

A moment later he could hear the determined lilt of another feminine voice and he rushed immediately to the door. His mother was trying to bar Belle's entry.

"It's alright, mother."

"You know this girl?"

"I'll just be a moment." He stepped out and closed the door behind them.
"Funny that I've never been to your house," said Belle. "Or you to mine."

"Why is that funny?"

"I suppose it isn't really."

They began walking down the long path toward the road. Night had fallen and without the lantern in Belle's hand, it would not have been possible to navigate the darkness. The ground was hard and misshapen in the summer heat. Once or twice Belle stepped on a rock and St. John would be there to catch her arm and right her. A recent growth spurt had reversed their stations, he was now a full head taller than her, and he took great pleasure standing beside her now. They stopped briefly to look at a pair of fireflies dancing together, until their lights vanished back into the darkness.

"I think we should stop the lessons," he said.

"I heard what happened. I'm sorry."

"So you don't have to come to the club anymore."

"What if I don't want to stop the lessons? I haven't beaten Sammy yet."

"I've taught you enough that you can learn by yourself now. I can give you some books and magazines–"

She stopped in front of him. "Are you going to go off then?"

He did not answer.

"You haven't finished what you started," she said. "You promised you'd help me beat Sammy."

"I don't remember promising anything."

"Well, I remember. You can't quit now. Maybe we can do it every other day instead of every day, how about that?"

"That won't work."

"Why not?"

"I can't play anymore. I won't."

"Why not?"

"My father's dead, do you understand?"

"Yes, I do understand. If nothing else, I do understand that."

He fell silent again. They continued along the path.

"Officer Charles was in the club today," she said. "He was the one that told me about what happened, and do you know what he said afterwards?"

"I don't care."

"He said he would be —ed if he was going to let a little thing like age keep a fine boy like you from his patriotic duty. You don't care? He's going to come after you, the little cretin."

"I won't be going to the club again."

"We'll have the lessons at your house then. Or mine, I don't think your mother likes me very much."

"You… you were a distraction. The game, the lessons, all of it, so I could forget about my father and the war and the possibility of… of this. But it's happened. So what's the use now?"

"But you promised."

"I didn't promise! And besides it's all meaningless anyway, the stupid game with your fiance, the letters. It's all nothing!"

They had arrived at the gate. Beyond was a waiting carriage, with only the dark outline of the horses visible above the hedgerows. He opened the gate for her, but she remained standing where she was.

"I'll be at the club tomorrow," she said.

"I won't be at the–"

"I'll be there the day after that and the day after that. I'll be there every day at our usual time at our usual place. I'll be there waiting for you." So saying she finally stepped through the gate and boarded the carriage.

St. John trudged back home, full of intentions toward drastic action. He would burn all the letters first, including the ones he'd written and never sent, and he'd burn all the magazines too, the copies of the games, his meticulous notes, everything.

Back in the house he saw his mother collapsed on the sofa as always, surrounded by memorabilia of something now forever beyond their reach. He did not proceed with his usual clean up duties this time, but left in abject disgust. In his room he began gathering all that which represented his grief into a pile of tinder, wrenching his desk drawer out of its slot and dumping everything onto the floor. He stared at the small mound, breathing fast, choking from the hot lump in his throat, until at last he sat down on his bed and dissolved into tears.

A few hours later he put everything back and went downstairs to do the same with the photos and his mother. He would go the next day to the club but not enter, and she would be there waiting for him with a piece of confectionery. And the next day it would be the same and the day after that.

Finally, he resumed the lessons and the letters.

Office Charles, who believed that the time had come at least to make his move, was once again stymied by the unusual persistence of their arrangement. It had been more than a month since he'd delivered the news. He had not involved himself in their affairs any further and held a secret hope that the unfortunate circumstance of the father's death would compel the boy on its own, but it was clear the girl's influence was strong. Something therefore had to be done and as usual, the truth was his guiding light. Through a series of correspondences he managed to obtain a letter which, in no uncertain terms, detailed the engagement between Lieutenant Cuthbert and his new lady.

He took Belle aside one day in the club (she was now arriving before St. John did) and handed her the letter. She would not believe its contents at first and nearly made a scene there in the club, but Officer Charles, ready for just such an eventuality, produced a photograph that was beyond reproof.

"But he's been writing me letters," she said.

"I don't believe he has been, miss."

"I've seen them with my own eyes," she snapped.

"What I mean, miss, is that perhaps it was not him that wrote those letters."

It was at that moment that St. John walked into the club.