by Ben Graff
“Good effort,” says the organiser, and I can sense his relief with the way things have turned out. A spectator introduces himself to me. He is a professional magician as well as a keen chess player and he gives me his email address so that I can send him a copy of the game, but unfortunately I lose his scrap of paper on the train.
I phone Dad and talk him through it. He sounds interested, but I am not entirely sure whether or not he knows who Korchnoi is, who back in the real world beyond the subculture of chess was still relatively obscure.
He certainly knew who Nigel Short was though. When Short had played Kasparov I used to make Mum drive us home from school as quickly as possible so that we could watch the match on Channel Four. Years later experts reckoned Short had got himself into better positions than most but ultimately was facing the greatest player of all time, probably at his absolute peak, and so was crushed. Short was rubbished in the media, disparaged as an Eddie the Eagle type figure, despite the fact that he had beaten everybody else on his route to the final.
I played him in a simul a year after Korchnoi and lost just as would be expected. A level endgame, the sort of position where a draw would be agreed against a player of similar strength, but inevitably I was overwhelmed by his endgame technique and lost a few moves on from my apparent equality.
It was shortly before Dad’s diagnosis that I played my last simul during his lifetime. He almost came along. He was with us for the weekend and expressed an interest. It wasn’t far from our house and I would have liked for him to see me play; it had been years since he had last peered over a board while waiting to drive me home.
In the end he chose the newspaper, and so after so many near and not so near misses he was not there to see me draw a complex knight endgame with Jon Nunn. A chess achievement that, even if it could rightly just be shrugged off as a simul performance, partially validated the time I spent on this impossible game.
It meant a lot to me and he was not there to see it. But if it hadn’t have been for his teaching and his driving, and the previous experiences against Korchnoi, Short and thousands of others, there would not have been anything to witness.
As he sat on the sofa reading the paper while I sweated over the board I knew I was doing something that Dad had had a hand in.
Find Another Place –
August 2008
It was the only night of the year when we were all under the same roof at Mike’s house on the Isle of Wight, on the site of his grandparents’ house which had been the original Holmes dwelling. Mike and Rona had watched a film. We had turned in early, tired from the journey. Things could have been different that night, if only we had known.
Mum had not come downstairs when we arrived the day before. I sensed something might be wrong then, though not this, but relaxed once she had been to see the doctor. Dad drove her; a final trip. Her final outing. She had returned to a house for the last time; it was better that she did not know this.
Later, I looked in. She was sitting up in bed, reading a book about lay people spending time in a monastery. It was based on a television programme. Radio 4 on in the background. Normal.
She hadn’t felt well for several days. A brief trip to the Ventnor Botanic Garden earlier in the day had been aborted. Now she worries that she won’t be much use this holiday. I keep my distance, wary of germs. She has an infection of some sort.
I tell her it will be alright. I do not kiss her. When I leave the room, something will be over, but it would have been unbearable had we known that.
Standing at the kitchen sink in the early morning, making a cup of milk for Francesca, bright midsummer light streaming through the window. Even at this hour it is clear it is going to be a beautiful day. I am half-awake, which is as good as it gets with a battery powered two-year-old, especially in a house that for all its luxury does not have good blinds in the bedrooms.
But we are here, at the start of our first full day, and everything is as it should be. Except, unbeknown to me as I apply the lid to a bright green beaker, it already is not. Everything has changed forever, even if not for me for another moment or so.
I had spoken to my mother a few days earlier on the phone. A week before that, we got stuck in traffic on a long trip back from Cornwall and stayed the night with them. A chance meet-up, the last proper one, another hot day. “Kicking off the summer,” someone said. We drank juice in the garden, read newspapers, splashed with the children in the paddling pool. Another normal day. Dad bronzed by the sun. Time somehow stilled in the heat. The year at its peak; no hint as to the rapidness of the descent about to follow.
Mum had phoned the day before we set off for the Island. I was out at a work dinner. Team building: watching my boss play footsie under the table with his secretary and hearing her ask whether her toothbrush was in his car. So it was true.
Katharine said that Mum had sounded slightly confused on the phone. A warning that might have been heeded, perhaps; but, equally, how could it have been? It might not have been linked at all. I don’t know. I would have phoned back, but it was late.
Now here on this morning, in Mike’s kitchen, I feel a presence and turn to see Rachel, my sister-in-law. “Mary’s dead,” she says and walks away, giving me the space to think.
This piece of information cannot be right. It has no place here and can surely be rationalised away if I can only focus on it for a moment. There has to be a solution.
I hear noises; people are congregating in Mum and Dad’s bedroom. He is trying to rouse her. He shakes her but it is as if he is shaking a rag doll, and I can see by his expression that he knows that it is hopeless.
It all starts to move, in wave after futile wave. The screech of sirens, police and paramedics, the crunch of feet on gravel; it is all much too late. The look in the policeman’s eye, that this might be something interesting. To him, at first, in among the money and the heat, but it is just as quickly obvious from his subsequent expression that he can see that there is no story. Not one that he will remember or tell.
“There are no vital signs,” a paramedic says, confirming what we already know, but it still feels like a verdict being rendered.
Emergency vehicles stand idle on the drive, lights flashing but no sound; it is somehow all half-hearted. No urgency now. Wailings on arrival have faded to nothing; just mechanics and paperwork, routine questions.
I tell Katharine while she is in the shower and she takes the children out of the house, away from the melee. “The longest ever day on Appley Beach,” she will tell me later. I want them anywhere but here.
Matt leaves to tell Theresa. “Is it Mary or Colin?” she will ask.
They are only three weeks back from their holiday in Greece. “It was nice, but he didn’t think the food was great,” she had told me. There are photos of her swimming and looking at Dad across restaurant tables.
All so normal.
We had been responsible for Theresa in their absence and she had fallen when we went out for lunch, blood running down her leg in a pub restaurant, other patrons pretending not to notice. A trip to Worcester hospital, a wheelchair she would not use. Farce, then sorted.
“An adventure,” she says, with a huge smile.
We had taken her back to her flat and re-stocked the cupboards with food within its sell-by date. I had driven back up the motorway eating a packet of Hula Hoops with one hand, which Katharine said was dangerous.
“You did very well, but we are back now, so we can take over,” Mum had promised. A fortnight ago, that was all.
A priest arrives and says some prayers, at peace with himself, his aura of calm somehow soothing.
Dad and Mike talk to the police in the lounge. The things that need to happen are being taken care of. The professionals know their roles and give a structure for the rest of us to cling to. This has happened before, except it hasn’t, not exactly. Not to her. Not to us.
A year and two days on from her sixtieth birthday party in this same house, her body is taken away in a red bag.
“They won’t let her stay here,” Mike has said.
I will see the paramedics carry her down the stairs, under the chandelier and through the front door to the ambulance. Natural causes, the post-mortem will decide.
We light candles at Quarr Abbey. Mike and Dad attend a service.
“That’s the worse news,” my boss will say when I tell him. My deputy (neither of our choices) will text on the day of the funeral – All Our Thoughts Are With You.
I will keep the text.
The Royal National College for the Blind website is soon alight with tributes. They radiate shock. A year on from retirement, Mum knows most of those still there, many she has known for years. Knew, I suppose.
The principal, who is widely seen as a disaster for the college, by Mum and all her friends, writes a nice letter. Shortly she too will die unexpectedly.
In the weeks that follow we will be overwhelmed with letters and cards. Could it have been other? Had Dad missed a clue in the night? He always says not. Should the GP who saw Mum that last evening have suspected something apart from the kidney infection, accurately diagnosed? Seen beyond the obvious?
Maddie asks why Grandpa is sad. She says he should forget about her and waves her hand dismissively. She is four and is trying to help. He does not react. She shares a birthday with her grandmother. Last year they had a joint party. The final party they will share. They blew out candles on a cake together.
Later in the funeral home, Theresa will ask Mum to give a sign and generally goes completely crazy. They will play an Enya tape that Dad hurries to switch off. There are booklets in the waiting room about surviving a murder, coping with suicide. A poem on the wall says that whatever I was to you, doubtless I still am. I visit twice and she is less present on each occasion. I doubt I will go to a funeral home again. I hope not.
“You are braver than I am,” Mike says when I tell him about the visits. On the way to the funeral itself, Theresa complains about the slowness of the car and urges that more speed should be utilised at her own funeral, when the time comes.
“She was always fragile,” she will say to Dad.
“She wasn’t. She just got arthritis. OK?” For once his irritation with her feels well placed.
Then, in a service that starts in rain and ends in sunshine, the church filled to overflowing, we will say something. Not goodbye. It’s not that.
“You have to find another place for her,” the counsellor will tell me. That is what I am destined to keep looking for.
Dad’s Other Women
“I thought he was very handsome,” Mum smiled, her first reflection back to when they met. I am not sure what he would have said had I asked him what his sense had been when he had first met Mum. None of your business, probably. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising, given she married him and all. What did surprise me was how often other people said the same thing. Old friends from back when they first got together: “Very handsome,” or “He was so tall and handsome,” and “Very dark and masculine.” He certainly had some appeal. There was a presence: six feet tall, jet black hair, solid build, and outward confidence, that when blended with his enigmatic nature seemed to present an intriguing proposition. Mum was not the only one to think so, although I never saw any hint of an affair.
After she died there were at least two years in which he could not contemplate anything, let alone another relationship. No Christmas tree or decorations. Trips out rarely worked, such as a time at Center Parcs where he broke down and cried while we ate at the sports café. Loud music banging, a waiter asking if he was alright and being reassured he was fine. It was all very British and a long way from where he wanted to be.
In the end we encouraged him to think about meeting somebody else. Not a replacement, nothing like that. I told him that I didn’t think he was very good on his own, and surprisingly he agreed with me.
So began a slightly bizarre period of watching my father’s internet dating career.
“Why do they always use out of date photos?” he would ask me with a sigh. There was a reason, and I assumed he would figure it out for himself.
He was surprisingly open, in his more familiar not entirely open way, about what he was up to. We would get snippets of updates. Occasionally he would pop in at our house with somebody for cups of tea, when they had happened to be in the area. A slightly random phone call, such as you might get from a teenager: “Are you around, because we are?”
One Christmas Eve he phoned to say he would be bringing a guest, somebody we had not met before. She was to form the subject of much discussion when we went out for a Christmas Eve meal.
“Who is coming tomorrow?” one of the waitresses asked.
“Grandpa’s girlfriend,” Francesca replied to much laughter from her sisters.
According to the stories, one was beautiful but crazy, another just crazy. He met a whole host of other characters along the way. He was always struck by how many had been abandoned by their husbands and left with nothing but still managed to keep going, looking forward, making new plans. None of this was what he would have chosen, but in the end what could he do?
“You have to make the most of things,” he said quietly, as if to convince himself as much, slowly nodding his head and looking straight at me. Not aggressive, but rather as if he had learnt to come to terms with something hard, with a truth that could not be changed, or at least with the fact that he was not going to come to terms with it, but there were still things he was going to do.
He dated the widow of a famous sports star for a while.
“I’m not being funny, Dad, but if he was her type, what does she see in you?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I often wonder the same thing myself.”
For whatever reason, they drifted apart on good terms, and then he met Sheila and it seemed that things were coming together. Sadly this was not too long before his diagnosis, and everything was cut short by that.
Beginnings and endings can be one and the same, and this one was all the more brutal for it. Sheila had already lost one partner and now had to go through it all again.
At the wake after the service another lady came up to me and said that if Colin had not become ill he would have been with her instead of Sheila.
Even after the end they all thought he was very handsome.
New Year
Dad had come up for Christmas too. We had eaten lunch quite early. Francesca was given a skateboard that we went out to test, watching her skate past windows through which people with paper crowns were still eating. Katharine drank too much and fell asleep. Gabriella toddled.
He was relatively relaxed, at least for him. The fact that it was all more chaotic and alcoholic than it would have been during our childhood Christmases did not seem to trouble him. He had learned to let some things go, to live in the moment a little more, even if that was not always easy. Things did not have to be perfect. Nothing ever is, I had said to him, not even back then and he knows it.
Then back for New Year’s Eve, with Katharine’s parents, Anne and Roger. Not as good as the neighbours’ party, is Annabelle’s verdict, but not bad. We played party games: Charades, Jenga; lots of buffet food and alcohol. Prosecco. Maddie made sure there were no nuts.
Sitting on the black leather sofas we watch the countdown to 2014 on the television. Fireworks flash across the Thames. Gary Barlow. “You are the best audience I’ve had all year!” he shouts.
They say it can be a melancholy time, but it wasn’t. Not really. Just the normal sense of time passing, as the family followed a recognisable variation on the usual rituals. No more than that. The end of one season, the start of another. We weren’t a big New Year family. There was nothing to suggest that there was anything particular about this one that it would be the las
t Dad would see.
I remember him marking the millennium in Bosbury in The Bell. “Grab a table and it’s every man for himself,” he said enthusiastically on the phone, when he talked about his plans. But they had arrived too early and ended up going back home to return later.
Mum said he used to go to Trafalgar Square when he was younger. Something I did once too. I remember battling the crowds, and the bustling in the freezing London air that fogged with cigarette smoke and alcohol, wanting the night to be over. All those stories you could only part guess at. Once was enough for me, but I think he did it more than that. Those were different times and different Londons. But we must have stood on roughly the same patch of concrete, in the same chill air.
I thought getting through 2013 unscathed was a relief. A ridiculous superstition perhaps, but 14 felt like a much better number. Luckier. He was more settled. Not over anything, but his grief felt less raw. He was coping better six years on.
The Christmas where we argued at Mum’s grave seemed a long time passed now. I had only just passed my driving test at that point and was meant to be driving him up to our house for Christmas, as a seizure had temporarily meant that he was not allowed to drive himself. He had wanted to go to Ledbury to buy flowers and to go to the grave, which we did, but I was nervous; the radio had said that this was the worst day of the year for travelling, and I thought that the longer we waited, the more difficult the journey would get. He did not realise that that was why I wanted to keep moving and we clashed. He thought I was just rushing him or had no interest in being at my mother’s grave, and eventually we drove to my house in a silence that extended for several further hours.
He was still not busy enough. A governor at our old school. Playing bridge. Some astronomy. Meals out. Buying two more cars than it was strictly necessary for one person to need. Perhaps lacking the big project.
