The Spanish Game

On weekends, the boy ate breakfast with his mother, in silence. His mother did not eat until later in the afternoon and sometimes not until late at night. She laid out the morning’s newspapers on their dining table like wet laundry and scanned down their columns with her first knuckle, searching for her husband's name. When he was finished eating, the boy excused himself and said, not very loudly, that he was going to the club. His mother did not look up from her work and would not even notice his absence until the maid came in later to clear the plates.

The boy walked by himself to the club and he remained there all day. Sometimes, if one of the regulars was available to walk him home, he stayed till after dark. The regulars were old men--too old to fight in the war--and they accompanied the boy for the prospect of exchanging a few words with his mother, whose beauty was a small consolation to their challenged manhoods. But the boy was also beginning to make a name for himself. After defeating Sir Arthur Thompson, the local chess champion, they had begun calling him the "English Capablanca". They treated him to lunch and hovered over his games and argued with each other as to whom he would play next. His mother soon gave up trying to discourage him. His 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–and 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.

The clubhouse was always filled with smoke. The scrape and sharp snaps of cigarette lighters rang out constantly amid the duller, slower, tick-tock of the pieces, the occasional cough. They nodded at him as he passed, and a few of them pulled out chairs at their tables for him to sit, but he shook his head, and wandered from game to game, trying to evaluate the positions, measure the strengths of the players, see who had improved, who was new. At the back there was a girl, perhaps only a few years older than himself (but by those few years shed of her child’s body) 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 reserve 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.”

“I saw you looking. 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 arrived at the intricacies of the knight’s movement, her granduncle had spotted them.

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

“It’s alright,” said the boy.

“I was just teaching him, granduncle,” she said, a little indignant of her granduncle’s deference towards the boy.

“What? Bella, dear, 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? Were you playing a trick on her, young man?”

The boy could say nothing. He began rearranging the pieces to their starting positions.

“He said he didn’t know how to move the pieces,” she said and she rose from her seat. Very soon afterwards they left. She came again the next day–without her grand-uncle–and upon sighting the boy, immediately challenged him to a game.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” the boy said quietly. “I didn’t mean to trick you.”

She played in silence and her play was better than many of the members of the club: she didn’t blunder her pieces or fall into simple traps (as her granduncle 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. She did not win even once.

“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 other members 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 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, and he was saving all his money for a trip to London, 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, and it made him sick. When she insisted on paying, he negotiated her down to merely treating him to lunch.