Vulnerable in Hearts - a Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Contract Bridge
By Sandy Balfour

(Atlantic Books, 2003)

Even at its best the father-son relationship is never a satisfactory one. There are many reasons for this but at bottom lies the single observation that a father holds all the trumps. While a son has only one father - to whom he looks in reverence during the formative years - a father may have many children, wives, mistresses and other pressing entanglements to distract him. Yet it is the father who chooses where his son should live, where he should be schooled and holidayed, how and for what he should be punished or rewarded, and in which moral soil his tastes, enthusiasms and prejudices should be bedded. Any relationship built on a foundation as lopsided as this is bound to crack - but we mustn’t repine. That fathers and sons should grate incessantly against one another is a healthy function of the evolutionary machine, as natural as a snake disagreeing with its skin, and those caponised sons (I have met one or two) who call their fathers their “best friends” must be branded a menace to the species whose pathetic destiny lies at the blocked end of an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Sandy Balfour is not such a son but he is one of a growing breed among young male writers to recognize the literary value of exploring his own father-son experience. But what lifts this book above the level of most run-of-the-mill daddy-logues is the author’s deft weaving together of a poignant family memoir and a social history of contract bridge. The idea might seem odd but taking a simple plot about human relations and mixing it in with some form of connoisseur obsession is now quite a fashionable technique. It was what made the film Sideways (a love story involving a couple’s passion for wine) such a hit, and was also the secret to the success of Sandy Balfour’s previous book, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8), in which the author set ruminations about his own life, his move to Great Britain from South Africa, his fatherhood, his girlfriend etc., in the context of a manic obsession with cryptic crossword puzzles.

Like all books by sons about their fathers this one is a little sad. The author never really gets to know his dad, a Scotch chemical engineer from Pietermaritzburg, as the old man won’t have heart-to-heart conversations, nor does he often look his son in the eye. Where father and son do find common ground however is in their shared obsession for bridge. If at first the son’s impulse is simply to gain his father’s attention and respect, relentless rubbers over many years eventually lead him to some kind of understanding of his father’s veiled nature. He needs to dominate, to feel in control, as Sandy eventually comes to realize “Dad only ever found his self belief at the bridge table. Away from it he shrank, not completely but noticeably.” His nature found its truest expression when the “the square yard of freedom” was before him and he could hog the centre game by bidding aggressively in to captain all the hands even if it meant “going down.”

But the relationship nevertheless remained, as they all do, a one-sided affair. A deathbed guided tour of his father’s cancer-ridden body including a scar the length of his abdomen, a hole in his side for a colostomy bag and an amputated penis, did nothing to draw the two together and although Sandy wept at his father’s death he and his brother also felt a strange need to celebrate.

To enjoy Vulnerable in Hearts the reader probably needs knowledge of the rudiments of contract bridge. It might also help if he or she has already experienced something of the kind that Sandy Balfour describes. I remember well my own father at the bridge table. He always had a “sticky” by his side – usually Punt e Mes or Crème de Menthe - and with the fingers of his left hand (those that were left after he had shot one of them off) he drummed irritatingly on the table. In both the bidding and the playing of the hand he cheated remorselessly, telling his partner. “Don’t you have a higher card than that? “If you have two aces say 'Five Hearts'. Do you have two aces?” I once withdrew from the table because he was cheating so much I could bear it no longer. So he called me “priggish” - my behaviour he said was “an affront to morality.” Generally I adored my father, but I can’t say I liked him very much on these occasions. Unlike Sandy Balfour I cannot therefore recommend contract bridge as a patch to the abominable father-son predicament. I can, however, recommend his engaging new book - a fresh, engrossing memoir and a masterful advertisement for the game.