own condition was entirely healthy. We were planning to head out for a walk as soon as the rain eased. But the rain didn’t ease off. It grew heavier and more dense, and the windows were now almost opaque, as if we were living behind a waterfall.
‘It’s like being on an ark,’ I said, and of course Elsie asked what an ark was. Where should I begin?
‘It’s a story,’ I said. ‘A long long time ago, God – he had made the world, in the story, but he thought it had all gone wrong, that everyone was behaving badly. So he decided to make it rain and rain and rain to cover the whole world and kill everybody…’
I stopped and looked anxiously over at Finn, who was stretched out on the sofa. Even the word seemed insensitive. How had she taken it? Finn wasn’t looking at me. She was looking across at Elsie. She rolled off on to the ground and scrambled over to where Elsie was seated by her box of toys.
‘But he didn’t kill everybody,’ Finn said. ‘There was a man called Noah and there was Mrs Noah and their children, and God loved them. So God told Noah to build a huge boat and to put all the animals on the boat, so that they could be saved. So he built the boat and put every animal he could find inside. Like dogs and cats.’
‘And lions,’ said Elsie. ‘And pandas. And sharks.’
‘Not sharks,’ said Finn. ‘The sharks were all right. They could look after themselves in the water. But the others, the family and the animals, they all stayed in the ark. And it rained and rained and the whole world was covered with water and they stayed safe and dry.’
‘Did it have a top?’
‘It had a roof. It was like a house on a boat. And at the end, when the water had gone away, God promised that he would never do it again, and do you know what he did to show his promise?’
‘No,’ said Elsie, her mouth gaping open.
‘Look, I’ll show you. Where are your felt-tips?’ Finn reached into Elsie’s playbox and took out some pens and a pad of paper. ‘See if you can guess what I’m drawing.’ She drew a crimson curve. Then she drew a yellow line along its top edge. Then blue.
‘I know,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s a rainbow.’
‘That’s right. That’s what God put in the sky as a promise that it would never happen again.’
‘Can we see a rainbow? Now?’
‘Maybe later. If the sun comes out.’
Which it didn’t. We had a good old-fashioned rural ploughman’s lunch as invented by some flash git who lived in a city. Good fresh bread, bought half-baked from the supermarket. I unpeeled the polythene from a wedge of cheese. Some tomatoes from a packet. A jar of relish. Sunflower spread. Finn and I shared a large bottle of Belgian beer. Elsie chattered, but Finn and I didn’t say much. Beer and cheese and the rain on the roof. It felt enough for me.
I got some logs from the shelter at the side of the house and made a fire in the grate in the living room. When the flames were shimmering, I got the chessboard and pieces and set them out on the rug. As I played through an old Karpov-Kasparov world-championship game, Finn and Elsie were on the other side of the chimney- breast. Elsie was drawing with fierce concentration while Finn told what sounded like a story in a conspiratorial, low voice. Sometimes Elsie whispered something back.
I looked down at the board and lost myself in Karpov’s strategic spiders’ webs, turning the tiniest of advantages into an irresistible attack, and Kasparov’s heady plunges into awesome complication, confident that he would be able to emerge ahead. I was playing around with variations, so the games took a very long time to get through. After some time, I don’t know how long, I heard a clink of china and a warm familiar smell beside me. Finn was kneeling beside me with a tray. She had made tea and toast and a couple of hot-cross buns for Elsie.
‘How will I ever manage to go back to an office?’ I said.
‘I don’t know how you can lose yourself like that in a game,’ Finn said. ‘Are you just playing through something that someone else has already played?’
‘That’s right. It’s like watching thought in action.’
Finn crinkled her nose.
‘Doesn’t sound like much fun to me.’
‘I’m not sure that
‘What do you mean?’
‘That a bishop moves diagonally, that a king moves one square and all that.’
‘Yes, I know that much.’
‘Then look at this.’
I quickly returned the pieces to their starting positions and began to play through a game I knew by heart.
‘Who wins?’ Finn asked.
‘Black. He was thirteen years old.’
‘Friend of yours?’
I laughed.
‘No. It was Bobby Fischer.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He became world champion. Anyway, his opponent was overconfident and neglected his development.’
I played White’s seventeenth move.
‘Look at the board,’ I said. ‘What can you see?’
Finn pondered the position for more than a minute with that grave concentration of hers that so impressed me.
‘It looks as if White is in a better position.’
‘Very good. Why?’
‘Both Black’s queen and his horse…’
‘His knight.’
‘His knight… are being attacked. He can’t save them both. So how did Black win?’
I reached forward and moved the bishop across the board. I looked with amusement at Finn’s puzzled expression.
‘That doesn’t do anything, does it?’
‘Yes, it does. I love this position.’
‘Why?’
‘White can do lots of different things. He can take the queen or the knight. He can swap off the bishop. He can do nothing and try to batten down the hatches. Whichever he chooses, he loses in a completely different way. Go on, try something.’
Finn looked for a moment and then took Black’s bishop. In just four moves there was a beautiful smothered mate by the knight.
‘That’s wonderful’, said Finn. ‘How could he work out all that in his head?’
‘I don’t know. It hurts me just to think about it.’
‘It’s not my sort of game, though,’ Finn said. ‘The pieces are all out in the open. Poker is my game. All that bluff and deception.’
‘Don’t let Danny hear that or he’ll keep you up all night at it. Anyway, that’s the whole beauty of the game. Chess, I mean. Two people sit across the board from each other. All the pieces are in full view and they manipulate each other, bluff, lure, fool each other. There’s no hiding-place. Hang on a second.’ I reached for a book that was beside the board and nicked to the epigraph. ‘Listen to this: “On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.”’
Finn gave an almost flirtatious little moue.
‘Sounds a bit scary to me. I don’t want to be laid bare.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We need our little self-deceptions and strategies. In real life, I mean, whatever real life is. Chess is a different world, where all that gets stripped away. In the match I just showed you, a little boy lured a grown-up master chess player into destroying himself in the open.’ I saw that I was losing her attention. ‘We must
