The Stars’ Tennis Balls

‘But it can’t be anything like … it can’t be that long! That would make me twenty-seven years old. That’s impossible!’

‘I hate to be the one to tell you, Thomas, but you look nearer thirty-seven or forty-seven. There’s grey mixed in your hair by the temples and those eyes of yours do not contain at all the look of youth. Ah now, he’s glaring over at us. Turn and look away.’

Martin came towards Ned, a meanly sarcastic smile on his face. ‘This was quick game. You no good for chess? You letting mad old man beat you?’

Ned shook his head.

‘I don’t like him,’ he said, gesturing towards the mumbling Babe. ‘He smells.’

‘You come and play and talk with Babe every day. Every day one hour longer. Is good for you each.’

‘But…

‘No but. No but. You make complaint and I have you two together all the time. Share room maybe? You like that? You like share your room with smelling old man?’

‘I won’t,’ said Ned, outraged. ‘I won't! You can’t make me!’

Over the next eight weeks Ned went to his room with small scraps of paper hidden about him. On them were written all the chess theory, attacks, defences, gambits, combinations and end game strategies that Babe knew. His course of instruction began with games played by Phillidor and Morphy and masterpieces of the romantic age, games that, like paintings, had titles: titles like The Evergreen, the Two Dukes and the Immortal. Ned was moved from these towards the age of Steinitz and the modern style, then to an understanding of a positional theory called the Hypermodern that made his head ache. Next came an induction into opening play and counter play whose language made Ned laugh. The Caro Kann and the Queen’s Indian, the Sicilian and the French Defences, the Gioco Piano and the Ruy Lopez. The Dragon variation, the Tartakower and the Nimzowitch. The Queen’s Gambit Declined and the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. The Marshall Attack. The Maroczy Bind. The Poisoned Pawn.

‘We shan’t be friends until we can play a game of chess together. You have it in you to play a decent game. Everyone has it in them to play a decent game. It’s nothing but memory and a refusal to think of yourself as a mental rabbit. If a soul can read and write, a soul can play a game of chess.’

There was so much Ned wanted to ask Babe, but any questions were waved aside over the board.

‘Chess lad. Pressing lidless eyes, we will play a game of chess. Your move, and watch your back rank.’

Dr Mallo had paid a visit to the sun-room during Ned’s first week there and ordered Babe away for a turn on the lawn.

‘I want to talk to my friend Thomas. I shall not move the pieces,’ the doctor had assured Babe, who shuffled away mumbling oaths into his beard.

‘So, how are you finding it, Thomas?’

‘It’s a little strange,’ said Ned uncertainly. ‘He’s a very peculiar man and I don’t really understand much he says. He can be very rude, but as long as I don’t talk too much he doesn’t seem to mind me.’

‘Have you talked to any other patients, I wonder?’

‘I try to sometimes,’ said Ned. ‘I don’t know which of them speak English. I upset that man over there yesterday by taking a chair that was next to him and he swore at me in English.’

‘Yes, that is Dr Michaels, a very unhappy man. You will never derive much sense from him I fear. Unstable, but not dangerous. I am pleased, Thomas, that you are able to sit out here. And Babe is not – ' Dr Mallo looked down at the chessboard with what Ned could instinctively tell were uncomprehending eyes, ‘- Babe is not curious about you? He does not load your mind with questions?’

‘He doesn’t ask me anything,’ said Ned in a disappointed voice, ‘except when I’m going to make a move or why I bounce my knees up and down under the table.’

‘Ha! I ask, you understand, because it is so important that you are not encouraged into more fantasy concerning yourself. If anyone were to ask who you were and what is the nature of your illness …

‘I don’t know what I would say, Doctor. I would tell them that my name is Thomas and that I am getting better. I prefer not to talk about myself.’

‘Quite so. He plays a good game of chess, Babe?’

Ned shrugged.

‘I think not, you have a checkmate in four moves if you look closely,’ said Dr Mallo rising and taking his leave with a brisk and satisfied nod of his head.

‘Mate in four moves, my arse and the arse of every man here!’ Babe had hissed under his breath when Ned reported the conversation to him. ‘The bullshit of the man, the fraud and fakery of him. If you don’t move up your h pawn you’ll be the one to be mated and in one move, never mind four.’

‘When can we talk of anything except chess, Babe?’

‘When you have beaten me.

‘But that’s never!’

‘Don’t you believe it. I’ve written out the Nimzo-Indian for you today. You’ll love it.’

As the weeks passed, Ned found himself becoming more and more obsessed by their games. He fell asleep each night with the diagonal tensions and energetic force-fields exerted by each piece pressing against his mind. Chess and the power of each man on the board dominated his inner life. He began to replay positions easily in his head, without having to picture the whole board. His questions, now solely confined to chess, began to please Babe.

‘Ah now. You’re confusing strategy with tactics there. That’s a thing that reminds me of my old lessons in military training. The strategy, you see, is the battle plan, the Big Idea. We will win the battle by taking that hill. There’s your strategy, to take the hill. How do we take the hill? Ah now, there’s your tactics. We might soften her up with artillery and follow through with an assault by armoured troops. We might bombard her from the air. Perhaps we will pretend to deploy around another target altogether and fool the enemy into thinking that we don’t care a damn about the hill. By night we send in our special forces, knives in their teeth and boot-black on their faces, to take our hill by stealth. There’s any amount of tactics and all at the service of the one strategic idea. You follow me?’

It was only later that Ned, all absorbed in the detail of chess, turned his mind to the remark ‘my old lessons in military training’. A man of Babe’s age had probably fought in the war. The Second World War. When Ned had first asked him if he was English, Babe had replied ‘Devil a bit I am,’ which Ned took to mean an emphatic negative. Babe’s voice however, in accent and delivery, was very English indeed, a rich fruity and deliciously old-fashioned sounding English that reminded Ned of old wireless broadcasts. The way he spoke, though, his choice of words and the strange spin he put on familiar phrases, that was somehow not very English at all. It had a stage Irish, or Hollywood pirate quality to it. One day he would discover more about him.

Meanwhile, two months into his training, Ned had an exciting week ahead of him. He had, for the first time, drawn a game. Babe had been the one to extend his hand across the board to make the offer which Ned, in his excitement and with the scent of victory in his nostrils, had turned down. Babe then forced an exchange of queens and rooks and the game petered out into the draw which it was always destined to be. But Ned had been playing black and to draw as black was always a positive result. The game of chess is so delicately balanced, Babe had explained, that the advantage of the first move is enough, in tournament play, to ensure that the majority of victories go to the player with the white pieces. Ned knew that this result with black was therefore a turning point.

The following day, Babe playing black had won easily and Ned, furious with himself, made assiduous plans that night to do something magnificent the next day.

He fell asleep with an idea in his mined that he should try the Winawer variation of the French Defence, which some instinct told him Babe did not enjoy playing. He awoke with a fully formed sense of how to win implanted in his mind. The plan involved not only the absolute chess of the game but psychology too and when Rolf, whose duty day it was, led him out to the sun-porch, he was already looking grouchy and underslept.

‘I shouldn’t have lost like that yesterday,’ he said, without offering any of his usual polite greetings. ‘You trapped me. It was pathetic.’

‘Dear me,’ said Babe straightening the white pieces in front of him. ‘Did we get out of bed the wrong side this morning?’

‘Let’s just play,’ said Ned moodily, inwardly praying that Babe’s king pawn would advance but staring instead at the c-pawn, as if hoping for an English opening or deferred Queen’s Indian.

With a shrug, Babe played e-4 and Ned instantly replied by pushing his own king’s pawn forward to meet it. Babe moved his knight out to f-3 and Ned moved a hand to his queen’s knight, as if resigned to an Italian or Spanish game. Then he dropped the hand back with a resentful tut and started to think. He took five minutes over his second move, the dull, seemingly ultra-defensive and amateurish d-6 that marks the French Defence. Babe continued to rattle out his pieces in the standard way and Ned haltingly replied. His heart beat faster and faster as each move repeated the pattern that he had planned the night before, developing into the very line of the Winawer that he had prepared. A moment came when Babe had to play with extreme accuracy to avoid a trap that Ned knew would cost him the loss of an active pawn. Babe stopped himself from playing the quick and obvious move and Ned, his head down, could sense in his field of peripheral vision, that Babe’s head had turned up to look at him. Ned did not shift, but continued to frown over the board, not revealing anything when Babe, avoiding the mistake, played the only correct move possible. Ned had not banked everything on a cheap tactical trap as he might have done two weeks earlier. In fact, he would have been disappointed if Babe had fallen for it. He knew that his position was good, and that was all that counted.

After an hour of fraught and completely silent play, Babe found himself a pawn down and having to marshal unconnected pieces to avoid all manner of tactical horrors. When a position is won, dozens of attacking combinations, traps and spellbinding sacrifices present themselves to the player on the winning side. Ned was busy considering a spectacular sacrifice of his queen that he believed would force a checkmate in five or six moves, when Babe knocked over his king and gave a rich, low chuckle.

‘Outplayed from pillar to post, you devious son of a mountain whore.’

‘You resign?’

‘Of course I resign, you dastardly bog and vice versa. My position is so full of holes it’s a wonder the board doesn’t fall to the floor. You planned this, didn’t you, boy? From the first petulant pout of the lip to the last maddening stutter. Oh, you’re wicked. Wicked as whisky.'

Ned looked up anxiously. ‘But the chess, it wasn’t all tricks and psychology was it? I mean, the pure chess was good too.'

‘Lad, there is no such thing as pure chess. There’s good chess and there’s bad. Good chess takes in the breath of your opponent and the dip of his head as much as depth of his mind and the placing of his knights. Good chess cares about the way you move a piece just as much as the square you move it to. Did you know you played a Smyslov Screw just now? You did, you know. A real life Smyslov Screw.’

‘A what?’

‘Vasilly Smyslov, world champion from the Soviet Union. I saw him play, as it happens. A master of the endgame and as wily a fox as you’d care to be matched