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Thursdays at the Whetstone: The Handicap

By nine o'clock the Crazy Eights had been put back in Mr Ferreira's biscuit tin, with the new card on top, and the second Thursday in November had become one of those evenings that nobody wants to end. The rain had not stopped. The café owner had turned the music down and stopped pretending she was about to close.

Ruth Abernathy had been sitting at the end of the table all night with a small chess set in front of her and a notebook beside it, playing through a game on her own and frowning. She was in her seventies, upright and quick, and she had played club chess on the Green for fifty years. Most of the regulars knew her by sight. Few of them had dared to sit opposite her.

"Trouble?" said the Captain, who had never been afraid of anyone.

"My grandson," said Ruth. "He's eleven. He loves chess. He's getting good, actually, properly good. And I beat him nine games in ten." She closed the notebook. "I can see him starting not to want to play."

"Easy," said the Captain, with the confidence of a man who had not played chess against a child in some years. "Let him win now and then. Quietly. Make a little mistake, leave a piece hanging. He gets the pleasure of winning, you lose nothing, everyone goes home happy. It costs nothing."

There was a small silence at the table. Nobody said anything, because it was such an ordinary thing to say. Half of them had done it. Nana Fives had let her daughters win at dominoes for years.

The person who broke the silence was a woman nobody at the table knew well. She had come in out of the rain at eight, ordered soup, and stayed. Her name was Morag; she was a nurse who worked nights at the hospital in the town and had, she said, one evening off a week, and liked to spend it somewhere with people who were not ill. She had a Scottish voice and a habit, the regulars would learn, of asking one question and then simply waiting.

"Can I ask something?" said Morag. "Has he ever noticed?"

Ruth did not answer straight away.

Morag waited. She did not fill the silence. She did not add another question to help. She just looked at Ruth, kindly, and drank her tea.

"Yes," said Ruth at last. "Last month. I left my queen where he could take it. I thought I'd been subtle. He looked at it for a long time. Then he pushed the board away, quite gently, and said, 'You let me.' And he went upstairs." She turned her cup round on its saucer. "He didn't play for two weeks."

"So it costs something," said Morag.

"It costs something," said Ruth.

The Captain had the grace to look abashed. "I withdraw the advice," he said. "But then what? If you play your best, he loses nine in ten and stops wanting to. If you play badly, he notices and it's worse. Those are the choices."

"There's a third one," said Ruth, and opened the notebook again.

It was a ledger. Every game she had played with her grandson since the summer was in it: the date, the result, and a short note in a column on the right. Some of the notes said level. Some said R off. Some said R+N off.

"After the queen," said Ruth, "I went back to the old way. When I was a girl, strong players gave odds. You take a piece off your own side before the game starts and say so, out loud. It used to be very common, a couple of hundred years ago. Rook odds. Knight odds. Rook and knight." She ran her finger down the column. "Playing level, I win nine in ten. Giving him a rook, I win six in ten. Rook and knight, five in ten. Half."

"Half," said Nana Fives approvingly, who liked a number that came out round.

"And he knows," said Ruth. "That's the point. I don't hide it. I take my rook and my knight off the board in front of him and put them in the box. He knows exactly what the handicap is, and he knows I'm playing as hard as I can with what's left. When he wins, it's real. When I win, it's real too."

"Does he mind?" said Morag. "Being given a head start?"

Ruth smiled for the first time that evening. "He minds that he still needs it," she said. "He has a plan to get me down to just the rook by Christmas."

The Captain, as he always did when he had been wrong, tried to state the right answer better than its owner. "So the handicap does what letting him win was supposed to do," he said slowly, "give him a real chance, but it does it in the open. He can trust it. And you can measure it, so you know when to take it away."

"Yes," said Ruth.

"Then I'd add one thing," said a quiet voice from the other end of the table.

It was Mr Sato. He came most Thursdays, sat at the corner, drank green tea and said very little. He was a widower who lived alone above the dry cleaner's, and everyone knew that he played patience every morning, at the kitchen table, before breakfast, with an old pack of cards that had been his wife's.

"I play a game alone every day," said Mr Sato. "Patience. There is nobody to beat. Some mornings it comes out and some mornings it doesn't. For years I thought I was playing against the cards." He turned his cup. "Then I started writing down how far I got. How many cards I put up before I was stuck. Now I am playing against yesterday. That is a much better opponent. It is always exactly as good as I am."

"How does that help Ruth's grandson?" asked the Captain.

"Her ledger is about her," said Mr Sato gently. "Her wins, her pieces. The boy needs a number of his own that isn't about her at all. Count something he does. How many moves he lasts, perhaps, or how many of her pieces he takes. Write it down for him. Then, even on the days he loses, he can look and see whether he lasted longer than last week. He is not playing his grandmother. He is playing his last game."

Ruth wrote it down in the back of the ledger, in a new column. Moves lasted. Pieces taken.

"He'll like that," she said. "He likes counting."

Inkling's grandmother had listened to all of it. Now she looked round the table, at the eight of them where on most Thursdays there were three. Nana Fives with her notebook. The Captain in his cardigan. Mr Ferreira and his tin. Marguerite with her chalk. Ruth with her ledger. Mr Sato with his tea. Morag, who had asked the only question that mattered and then waited for the answer.

"So what have we got?" said Inkling's grandmother.

"Don't lose on purpose; he'll find out," said Morag.

"Take a measured handicap, out loud, and take it away when the ledger says so," said Ruth.

"Give him his own score to beat," said Mr Sato.

"And ask him," said Morag, "what he wants. I'd start there, honestly. I always do."

Ruth laughed, and said that she would.

The question for your own table

Have you ever let someone win? Did they know? A handicap you can both see is a different thing from a mistake you hide.

Something to do

Next time you play a child at anything (chess, draughts, a race to the gate), keep a short ledger: date, result, and the handicap if there was one. Agree the handicap out loud before you start. Give the child one number of their own to beat, and look at it together afterwards.

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