Bridge is an improbable solitary vice, but I confess to its lonely pursuit. I no longer play, but I remain an obsessional reader of bridge columns and books. I also sneak away for one-handed sessions with my electronic toy, which is too predictable to be a satisfactory substitute. The ingenious gadget has another, vulgar defect: you cannot play it for money. Wittgenstein pondered if you could play chess without the queen; he might as well have asked whether it can still be bridge if there is no price to pay for ineptitude.
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thirty years ago, I was an addict to the four-handed version. I wasted my afternoons at Crockfords and at the Hamilton club. My addiction began when obliged to watch my parents playing with my paternal grandparents on wartime Sunday afternoons. Having acquired the general idea by osmosis, I achieved, when still at prep school, a world record score by redoubling when my partner had doubled, thus enabling us to collect 4,000 points in a single hand. It was only in the following holidays that my father broke the news that one cannot redouble unless it is an opponent who has doubled in the first place. Well, Napoleon gained his reputation for generalship in the Italian campaign, by breaking the rules of war and cutting a corner-and turning a flank-through neutral territory. Correlli Barnett was terribly shocked, but the result stood.
I renounced serious bridge in 1970, after my father was thrown through the windscreen of a car. He had not fastened his safety-belt lest doing so cast doubt on the driver's competence. He and I had been duplicate partners for some 15 years. My father's stoicism was established by his long willingness to have me for a partner; I am both a bad loser and an unreluctant critic.
We had our small successes, not least when we won the Crockfords cup. Our regular partners were John and Mary Moss. Mary (who became an English international) was of Polish origin, very attractive and a memorable cook. The couple met while John was a colonel in the Allied government in Germany.
The Mosses went to live in the south of France where they were in great social demand until, in her early 60s, Mary fell victim to Alzheimer's disease. John became Mary's nurse. By the end, she was unable to communicate, except very first thing in the morning. She would open up her eyes and say, "Hello, darling." It was his only, and sufficient, reward for devotion. He outlived her by many years, but waited for death like a man in the departure lounge, reading Eliot, Gibbon and Tacitus. He always told me that he went to Oxford, but I suspect that he imagined it.
John had many scabrous stories about the bridge world. Of one international player, he recounted that everyone had been surprised when he got married. On his wedding night, to which he went directly from the bridge table, he was in the middle of his conjugal duties when everything came to a stop. His bride said, tenderly, "Darling, what's the matter?" To which he is said to have replied, "I've just realised; if I duck the first club I can make that six spades." As with the Carlyles, we are left to conjecture which of them arranged for the news of what didn't happen to reach the outside world.
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i have never stopped reading bridge columns. For decades, the clearest and tersest was by Terence Reese, in the Evening Standard. I once caught him out in a faulty analysis. He acknowledged the justice of my correction, but not in print. For a long time I subscribed to Country Life because it always contains a whole page causerie on bridge. This used to be written by M Harrison Gray (known in bridge circles as "Gray" and Reese's implacable enemy). The late Pat Cotter, whom my father used to say was "almost the nicest man in the world," then took over. Pat went on writing his column even as a nonagenarian. Boris Schapiro, in his mere 80s, still writes his, in the Sunday Times; Boris is sprightly enough, but he might give us more than one hand in the space available to him.
The longevity of bridge writers gives us a clue to the popularity of the game: it fosters the illusion of timelessness. North, south and east, west are eternal adversaries who neither weary nor age. Systems come and go, but the aura of "Skid" Simon's book, Why You Lose at Bridge, still hangs over every rubber at the clubs. "Skid" was co-author with Caryl Brahms of Don't Mr Disraeli and A Bullet in the Ballet, a spoof murder mystery with heartless footnotes such as one advising against sympathy with one of the victims: "His Petrushka was lousy."
Of today's columnists, Robert Sheehan is the sharpest, and most amusing. However, Albert Dormer (the man he succeeded at The Times) recently published Deduction, which is surely as good as Reese's Expert Game. Its Holmesian alertness to the inferences to be drawn from dogs who fail to bark reminds you that bridge is a game which diplomacy, mathematics, greed, logic and the killer instinct turn into a metaphor for almost everything that is both subtle and pitiless in the human character. No wonder there is no known cure.
