Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  28 December

  Arrival of Mike, James & Francesca. Great to see them. We had a big dinner (11) in the evening. Lovely to all be round one table, but wondered how much longer I would be able to do this. Mike as ever working frantically hard on various projects. I know both that it stresses him and that he would not have it any other way. He has a kind of toughness and practicality that I have never had, an entrepreneurial spirit that has taken him far. It is good to see him relax and it is obvious how much he adores his children.

  29 December

  Ben + Katharine left today. Lunch out with Mike & co. Matt & Kate back to supper. That funny period between Christmas and New Year that is neither one thing nor the other, when you start to notice pine needles falling from the tree in greater numbers and everything has a somewhat uncertain air. One year nearly over, the next yet to begin.

  Colin still pre-occupied by work and what is going on there, but not really keen to talk about it. He paces a lot and occasionally after he has gone for a solitary walk I can smell the hint of cigar smoke on him. I know he takes it all quite personally, finds it hard to get a perspective on it. I never know quite what I should say, to suggest it will all be alright is to be dismissive of the problems, to agree that it is all terrible hardly seems that it will help.

  30 December

  Mike & Co left. All planned to meet at Mike’s on 3rd Jan. Our leg of the festivities now over, for which I feel relieved.

  2004

  3 January

  Dropped Theresa then drove to Portsmouth. She was in good spirits, looking forward to seeing her friends again. She always enjoys this time of the year and I am glad that even without Dave that has still been the case, although I know how much she thinks to him.

  4 January

  We had a big party at Mike’s for Noreen, Janet, Paul, Nick, Patrick, Richard, Sue, Mike & Sarah. They were absolutely stunned by the house which is huge & grand, almost unreal in its scope. The place is on four stories and I will try to describe it.

  From the road it looks a bit like a wedding cake, given its different layers and it appears very grand. However, this is not how it is meant to be viewed. It has been designed such that its best view is from the water. It is built into the slope and is almost twice as tall when viewed from the garden, rather than the main road entrance. Of course, the garden ends where Wootton Creek begins, and Mike’s boats are moored on his jetty.

  There is a games room at the top with table tennis, table football and a pool table. An amazing place for everyone to play, and we have already had a lot of fun up there. The next floor down sees the bedrooms which are all en-suite with wooden floors and luxurious fittings. Then there is the main grand hall with a huge chandelier (albeit some of the light bulbs need replacing), main sitting room with large log fire and a host of other rooms, including an eating area that looks out across the sea. There is a large roof terrace for summer barbeques. Finally, on the lowest level, is the indoor swimming pool, complete with Jacuzzi and changing area!

  The party went very well and went on from 4–12 midnight. It was really good to see the other side of the family again. I thought to how many years it must have been since we first celebrated Christmas together with Anna and Martin, Noreen and Hugh. The year of all our births of course, so long ago and yet…

  Further developments post-Christmas! Theresa has decided to move to Ledbury so have visited estate agents to check prospects – no good at present as nothing is available. It will be easier for her to be closer. The drive from Hereford to Bognor is not an easy one, and she feels that she needs a little more support now. I think this could all cause other challenges though. We will make it work.

  23 Jan

  Still no progress with estate agents. Matt’s situation still the same, did not see him at all this weekend. Great news about Ben – a promotion. He’s acting boss after his boss was seconded to another firm. He has that look about him I remember seeing in Colin toward the start of his career when finally things seemed to be moving in his direction.

  Chess Stories –

  Viktor and David – 2011

  It is a soft meeting, an excuse to be in London during the day. To catch up with someone who used to work for me, but now does not and is leaving the business anyway. She had been in my team when my mother died, but this is another time, a different sort of conversation. We talk about her new job, what she wants to achieve, what might worry her, and then finally we say goodbye for what will be the last time and I cross the city to play chess. The London Chess Classic is taking place at the Olympia Conference Centre on Hammersmith Road, and I am due to take on one of the game’s most famous players

  Sitting on the tube, heading through London tunnels and then onto streets I do not know, I think to what will follow. It is called a simultaneous, where an elite Grandmaster takes on thirty mere mortals at once. A chance to actually play your heroes; few other games or sports could facilitate something like this.

  The tables are set up in a horseshoe shape, such that the Grandmaster can make his way from board to board, game to game with ease. Like a doctor surveying a mystified patient, he knows in an instant what needs to be done. The chances are that his prognoses will most likely be more accurate than a doctor’s. Julian Barnes once wrote something along the lines that for the protagonist a simultaneous was like brushing the sleep out of his eyes. I will be sat at one of these boards and my opponent will be Viktor Korchnoi, widely considered to be one of the strongest players in the history of the game never to have been World Champion.

  He had been a slow developer in the scheme of things, only peaking in his forties – at a time in life when most elite players were well into their decline, he was just getting started. Perhaps it was the complexity of his style, which meant it took so long to hone. Many other world -class players acknowledged that they found it hard to understand his ideas. Perhaps it had taken him that extra time to tame those complex thoughts, to finally be all he could be, even if at one level it hadn’t been quite enough. He had fallen agonisingly short, although things might have been different had the playing field not been tilted against him.

  Three huge battles with Karpov for the world title in the 1970s and early ’80s had captured the public imagination and left Korchnoi’s followers distraught. During the first two he had come so close despite the huge Soviet backing for Karpov, the youngster who described his hobbies as Marxism and stamp collecting, the face the regime wanted to show the world. Karpov was certainly seen as the safer and better long-term bet for a Soviet chess establishment which had been rocked by the rise of the American Bobby Fischer and was now determined to reassert itself. The ageing and unpredictable Korchnoi simply did not fit the mould.

  After the first of these matches Korchnoi defected to Switzerland. The Soviet press refused to print his name. His family was persecuted and denied leave to join him. A state attempt to ban him from future competitions was unsuccessful.

  Their subsequent matches were amongst the bitterest in memory, mired in controversy over coloured yoghurts potentially containing coded messages, rejected handshakes, hypnotists’ glasses, a wooden panel placed underneath the table to stop the two from kicking each other.

  In 1978, in this an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion, Korchnoi came back from 4-1 and 5-2 to 5-5 as Karpov tired, before going down 6-5. He might have been the older man, but Korchnoi had the greater stamina and it nearly paid off. His famous biography, Chess Is My Life, told the story of these matches and all he faced off the board, enshrining his place as a symbol of resistance against the Soviet regime.

  By 1981, age had finally caught up with him and Karpov won their final match more comfortably. In 1983, at his final series run at the world title, Korchnoi was knocked out in the qualifying matches by the young pretender, and Karpov’s ultimate usurper, Kasparov, though he did manage to win the first game. He remained one of the world’s stronge
st players, the next level down so to speak, for a very long time after.

  He once remarked that every time he won a tournament in advancing age, he despaired for the future of chess. Even now, in his early eighties, he had just beaten Fabiano Caruana, who would make number two in the world soon afterwards. His history was his main draw, but even in 2011 he clearly still had it.

  Before any simultaneous, someone will come and talk the players through the rules. You can pass three times if you are not ready to move, but no more than that. You can only physically make your move when your opponent is at the board to see it.

  Announcements such as these are generally quite routine information for the participants. I had played simuls before and knew the drill, but this one would prove to be a touch different.

  “Viktor is a little prickly today,” the organiser says, somewhat wistfully. “If you do happen to win, please don’t ask him to sign your score sheet for you, as he almost certainly won’t. In fact, if you do win, it is probably best to avoid talking to him at all.”

  There are wry smiles all round. It is not unheard of for a Grandmaster to lose a game in a simul. Indeed, an expected performance would probably be something like twenty-eight wins, a draw and a defeat. It is almost impossible in thirty games not to make a mistake somewhere, not to give a potential chance that could be seized upon by a competent player, if their luck holds. We all play these events in part because the chance is there, but none would think it in any way spoke to our strength relative to that of our opponent, but there we have it. Even here and now in this setting, at this advanced age, his ferocious competitiveness is undimmed.

  Then he appears. An old man now and a little stooped, suit both clean and well worn. He wears a tie, perhaps draped a little loosely around his neck. Before he even reaches the tables, one of the players rushes up to him with a photograph he wants to share. Korchnoi is clearly irritated but listens whilst the guy explains that this was a picture taken actually playing Korchnoi in the 1970s.

  Korchnoi makes little effort to hide his lack of interest. “Would you mind signing it for me?” he is asked. There is a pause and the organiser looks on from the edge of the room like a startled hare, unsure whether or not to run.

  “I am here to play chess, not to sign things,” Viktor says firmly. “Perhaps later,” he adds, in a voice that makes it clear he will not.

  The younger man’s partner is also looking on. “Well, if he won’t he won’t,” she whispers and gives a conspiratorial wink. The man smiles back at her and the room seems to breathe a sigh of relief. He has retained his dignity and Viktor has not walked out either, so we are good to go.

  The organiser re-caps the rules again and explains about the three passes. Korchnoi shakes his head. “No passes. I’ll say if people can pass later on.” Everybody is happy to agree not to pass.

  He sips from a plastic cup of water and finally we are off. I am on the sixth board of the thirty and I watch him start to move around the horseshoe. He pushes his king pawn up two squares on the first three boards, then his queen pawn in similar fashion on the next two.

  Finally he is standing in front of me, both a colossus of the modern game and a prickly eighty-year-old. There is nothing about his air or his mannerisms that remind me of either of my grandfathers. He shakes my hand and we look into each other’s eyes for a moment, just as he has thousands of times before with everyone who is anyone in chess for the last seventy years. In that instance, it is just me and him and this is what I have come here for. I push my queen pawn up two, the most common response to his identical thrust, and he pushes his queen’s bishop pawn to take us into the queen’s gambit.

  The hall is air-conditioned and cool. Other tournaments, including the London Classic main event, are going on in different parts of it. Occasionally a game will finish and we will hear a mutter of commiseration (rarely congratulation) and players will start to fiddle with the pieces, trying to appraise what should have happened, before they are shushed and pointed in the direction of the analysis room.

  Disputes are not uncommon. Somebody touches a piece and then does not want to move it; that happens from time to time. A mobile phone going off results in an automatic forfeit, which always creates bad feeling. Once in a league match this happened to the most hapless of our first team stand ins. His ring tone announced “Peter, answer your phone”, which made the crime difficult to deny.

  This is all a long way removed from the atmosphere when I first played competitively as a kid. Then, smoking was not only allowed, it was virtually compulsory. You would look to make out the outlines of your pieces through the glooming, and by the time you had finished playing you would stink. In hindsight I was grateful that neither of my parents objected to the time I was spending in such an environment.

  Both drove me miles along country roads to the points of civilisation where things like chess happened. The Hereford Congress always used to take place in the Royal College for the Blind where my mother taught. I think she used to like telling her colleagues that I was in it, even if I was not very successful in those early days.

  “I am pleased to reach one out of three in such a big tournament,” I wrote in my scorebook at the end of the Saturday of my debut, aged eleven, in the Hereford Minor. If it hadn’t been for my somewhat unlikely knack of being able to look on the bright side when it came to chess, at least back then, I would probably have retired before I started.

  Korchnoi plays down the main line of the Cambridge Springs. It is pretty solid, unspectacular stuff. The rule for the Grandmaster in these situations is to play carefully, not to commit. Wait for your opponent to show you why he is nowhere near your level. It is the same for all of us when faced with a weaker player. Show me, you think. But in the early stages of the game his approach means there are advantages for me too. I know the theory and do not have to think much about my responses. Everything that is unfolding is not too bad for Black.

  Korchnoi plays slowly, taking his time as he moves from board to board. I think back to the first simul I ever played in as a child, organised by the Hereford Chess Association, a village hall somewhere, another Grandmaster, though a very different one: David Norwood. Young and charming, immaculately suited. As he was a long way removed from the normal greasy haired, carrier-bag hugging figure my mother had come to associate with the world of chess, she was clearly impressed by him. It was just before the 1992 general election and I had got Dad to place a bet for me on Party Politics in the Grand National, and I am thinking partly about this as we play.

  David is very smiley, and very good. He will not reach Korchnoi’s level and will semi-retire to make vast sums of money in the City soon afterwards. Our encounter is interesting but lacks intensity. He hangs a bishop, but I fail to spot it. You just aren’t programmed to expect such a thing from a Grandmaster. He goes on to win, but so does Party Politics, and I do not mind too much. Only later do I start to see it as an opportunity missed.

  We are into a complicated middle game now. The position is an interesting one and a handful of spectators are looking on. Adrian Walker is playing in a different event in the same hall and every so often he will come across and look at my position. He is my chess colleague in all this as well as my friend and I am pleased he is here with me in London. If I had thought, I would have asked him to take a photograph, but I didn’t and he doesn’t.

  Other games are starting to finish already, though Korchnoi’s simuls are known to generally last for a very long time. Perhaps it is age, but from what I remember reading about him I think not. Where most Grandmasters will whizz from board to board, barely stopping to look, Korchnoi stoops to examine each position with extreme care. There are long moments where he stands in front of me, and for all the games he has played in the past, right now this is his focus.

  Whenever you play chess you have to want to crush your opponent, to destroy him, to prove his worthlessness. But in the here and
now all I want is not to annoy him and not embarrass myself. I could cope with most people’s verdict on me, but to be condemned by a deity of chess would be something I would not find it easy to come back from; I would not have been able to shrug off him refusing to sign my picture as easily as the other guy seemed to.

  I still understand this game, can see what is happening, but it is impossible for me to imagine what is going on in his brain as he looks down on these same lumps of plastic. Then finally we reach the crucial moment and I sense that he has made a mistake. Or is there a tactic I have missed? It is not clear to me what he is doing. It is now or never and I take the chance.

  He pauses and frowns at the position for a long time. It is almost as if he had not considered that I would do this. Perhaps he instinctively knew that it did not quite work, without even having to consider it when he made his last move. He hesitates for a long time and then in response comes up with something I had not considered. As he plays, both I and the spectators recognise what he has done; my sense was that those watching weren’t sure either during the wait, but we all are now.

  Now there is no way back. A few moves later he plays another good move and says politely in English still heavy with a Russian accent “… and you resign?”, which I do.

  He shakes my hand and smiles at me. I sense he appreciates the suit I am wearing (one of the few) and my sense of deference. Perhaps the game even interested him for a moment. Who can say?

  Had my father been a chess player, he would not have cared what Korchnoi thought of him, would have been more ferocious in combat. If he was at my level technically I think he would have had a better chance of winning a game like this than I would. The result would have mattered more to him, the rest of it less so. It is all conjecture, but I suspect that it is true.