A short story about chess, time and immortality
His name is Thomas Marston. He was a Captain in the Royal Engineers, and today he’s a hundred and forty-one years old. I chose the engineers because I needed a surveyor so then, in turn, I could have him in the latter part of another century on the Tibetan plateau. He’s making maps, pin-pointing things in space – mountains, rivers, lakes. He has a skill with instruments – theodolite, chronometer, sextant. The British are either planning an invasion of Tibet, or they’re thinking of defences, should the Russians come that way.
And maps are important. Maps of the territory.
Today though, he’s in this coffee shop in a provincial town up north. Get through the beard and long hair and you’ve a guy in his early forties, with far away eyes. What colour, I don’t know. I’ll leave that to you, but it’s all the same really. His eyes have seen a lot, and that’s all we need to know.
I’m not sure why he holds on to the title. He resigned his commission in 1897, and no, that’s not a misprint. When I said this guy was a hundred and forty one years old, I wasn’t joking. He’s lived a long time. He may even be immortal, barring accidents. He really doesn’t know, and neither do I at this point.
As for the present day, I’m placing us somewhere post pandemic – the Covid-19 one – so maybe a year or two out from its peak. That was a period of stop-start quarantine, with most other countries, bar the States and Brazil, pretty much back to normal. But if you have a fully stamped CV passport, with all the known mutations up to date, you can at least get into town now and then for a coffee, which is what Marston’s doing.
The years of quarantine have rendered him more relaxed in his dress, at least judging by his appearance today. I’d like him to smarten himself up a bit. I know he can do it. Indeed he was always fond of that parade-ground polish, and quite the snappy dresser, whatever decade you pick. He’s got one of his habitual doses of black dog, then, and not uncommon, given his condition – his condition of years, I mean – for longevity does not necessarily bring enlightenment.
It gives us a handle on him though, lets us get to grips with him a bit – this guy, a hundred and forty one years old, and no end in sight. Maybe you’re thinking he’s not much to be depressed about, but we’ll see.
The café’s quiet this morning. There’s this woman, sitting in one corner, staring over the rim of her teacup, at no one in particular. There’s an old guy too. He’s in the window: long Harris Tweed overcoat in dog-tooth check, a beret and thick spectacles. He looks like one of those existentialist philosophers – someone to be forgiven their appearance on account of their genius, or something. He has a coffee at his elbow, and he’s bent over a small travelling chess set, on which he’s playing both sides of the board.
None of them notice me, which is reassuring, since I’m not really there. Or rather I am and they’re not. Marston’s glancing at the woman, thinking she looks vaguely familiar, but he can’t place her. Old girlfriend perhaps? It’s unlikely. For all of his advanced years, he has no problem with his memory and both he and I know the last woman he courted was in nineteen fifty two.
Relationships are a particular problem. Passing for forty, romance isn’t exactly off the cards of course, but things tend to fall apart when the lady in question finds out how old he really is. Or more likely she just thinks he’s mad when he tells her he was a captain in the engineers. at the time of the Raj.
The old guy’s in his eighties, let’s say, which makes him relatively young, compared with Marston at least. But, unlike with Marston, father-time is knocking, and it’s having a stiffening effect on the body. Marston of course remains active, and potentially useful to society, just no longer possessed of the will to actually use it, since no action he can think of seems useful any more.
He’s seen the old guy, made his customary assessment, is intrigued by the chess set and the fact the guy is playing both ends. You’d see that a lot in cafés, and on long train journeys in Marston’s once-upon-a-time, but not any more. Like pocket-watches and pipe smoking, travelling chess set players are unusual.
The old guy catches Marston’s eye. “Do you play?” he asks.
He does.
Now, Marston’s game is unimaginative, but solid. But he’s had a longer time to practice than most, and I’m sure you can’t help picking up a few tricks along the way. So Marston gives the nod and moves to join the guy, orders another coffee from the waitress with little more than gesture of his finger and glance at his cup. That’s something else about him. He can make himself understood, sometimes in quite complex ways, with the simplest of gestures. He makes me wonder if our natural language is symbols, not words. We’ve forgotten the symbols, but we can still read them. It just takes someone of Marston’s years to have worked that out, albeit unconsciously.
“Edward,” says the old guy, by way of introduction.
He does not offer his hand, not like people used to do. Such things are still forbidden. Bumping elbows is promoted as a viable alternative, but Marston considers that somewhat undignified, and apparently so does Edward, since neither man offers it. None of this makes any sense of course, since they’ll shortly both be handling the chess pieces and sharing whatever germs are lingering thereon.
Still, rules are rules: no physical contact between strangers.
“Tom,” says Marston.
“Pleased to meet you, Tom.”
The pieces are elegant – the classic Staunton style, but coloured in cream and red. They’re like a set I inherited from my father, made some time in the 1960’s. But if they were made at all, it was for this scene, which I witness vividly, this sitting down of two men, one plausibly old, the other less so.
Edward does the gentlemanly thing and offers Marston the white pieces, so Marston opens with the king’s pawn, to which Edward responds in kind. The king’s pawn opening is the only one I know, so it has to be this one, though with me it generally peters out into confusion and chance after the fourth move.
For the second exchange Edward brings out his queen.
Now, I’ve always assumed a decent player will hold his queen in reserve until the game’s developed a bit. She’s the most powerful piece on the board after all, and there’s no sense risking her in the opening moves. Both Marston and I are surprised by it. Sometimes that happens, even when you think you’re making things up.
One’s reaction is to want to punish such risky play, wipe the smug expression off your opponent’s face by taking that queen. But Ed’s expression is disarmingly kind, almost apologetic for making so bold. So maybe Marston’s guard is lacking, or maybe he’s underestimated his opponent and doesn’t see it coming, but in just five moves, and about half as many minutes, the red queen has him in checkmate.
The game is over.
Now, in those old-time lessons about story writing, there’s a thing about setting up your characters and then creating a dramatic high-point. I suppose the books meant a murder, or some other such thing, but that was our high point – the old guy beating Marston at chess in just five moves, and Marston, older and nearly a century the wiser, unable work out how it happened, and remembering too it’s not the first time. And he never worked that one out either.
Five moves? Hell, Marston, the last time you fell for that trick was… well…
Yes, but Yasim was always the better player.
Yasim?
That’s what I want to call him. I picture a man of middle eastern looks. He and Marston are playing chess under cover of a storm-rocked tent, a Tilley lamp flickering. It’s 1896 and they’re literally in the middle of nowhere, a place not yet on the map, because they’ve yet to draw it. This is not to say there’ll be no consequences if they’re discovered, becasue the natural denizens of this nowhere place carry the map in their heads. And a Webley revolver isn’t the protection it used to be.
Marston’s remembering all of this now, and wondering what Yasim is up to these days, because Yasim’s still around too, though they’ve not seen each other since 1982. Yasim had a particular quirk about him, being what they called a human calculator. Marston never understood how he did it, calculate the figures and angles in his head. Marston read the raw numbers from the instruments, presented the evidence of his eyes. But it was Yasim who triangulated everything, make a territory of the abstract, using a process that seemed gifted by the gods.
It was impossible of course – one of those things one had to be polite about mentioning – except Marston knew he could trust it. Thus he and Yasim had a reputation for being able to map out a territory faster than anyone else. Maybe that’s what he was missing, a trust he’d once had in the unknown. And if he’s only held onto that, maybe he could have seen the Red Queen coming.
“Sorry Edward,” he says. “I would have liked to have given you a better game than that.”
Edward’s not one to gloat over his victory. “Nonsense, Tom. It’s a pleasure to find anyone who knows one end of the board from the other.”
“Ah, true.”
So yes, Yasim had pulled that Red Queen trick as well, long ago, and more than once, yet try as he might, Marston had never been able to see it coming. Was that down to the fact Yasim could merely think so many moves ahead of him? Or did this too owe more to a faculty none could explain or understand?
Marston’s about to offer Edward another game, when the door-bell tinkles, announcing the arrival of another character. Let’s see: a woman, tall, red haired, expensively attired – something of the regal about her. She gives Marston a cautious look, then addresses Edward.
“Time to go, Dad. Karl’s waiting.”
Cold voice. Impatient. If there is any love there, she has forgotten how to show it. The red queen is impressive in her power, thinks Marston, but also careless with it and insensitive in her moves – all of which, of course, renders her endearing
“Ah,” says Edward, though he appears to be addressing Marston, and somewhat dryly. “Mustn’t keep Karl waiting. Karl’s a busy man.”
But the woman lacks patience for playful asides. “Come on, Dad.”
She doesn’t exactly tug him up by the elbow, but that’s the impression Marston and I have when we’re thinking back on this scene.
“I’m here most Saturdays,” says Edward. “Around the same time, if you fancy a rematch.”
“I’d be honoured, sir,” says Marston.
Sir?
Honoured?
Yes, I know – a little antiquated, a little Victorian. But Marston’s like that, obviously, being literally born Victorian. The woman picks up on it and we both sense she doesn’t like him, partly because right now he looks like street beggar, but also because her world has become so closed, she does not permit anyone she does not know across the threshold.
Marston stands respectfully while the old guy is hauled to his feet – another etiquette that marks him. But still, there it is. There is something of the officer in Edward that Marston feels is worth saluting, but he refrains, of course – I mean from actually saluting. Instead, he returns to his own table, just in time for the waitress to catch up and deliver his coffee.
See that? The Red Queen. Out of nowhere.
OId guy. And the Red Queen…
Stories are like dreams, the way they take shape I mean. You can read them, the way the waitress read Marston’s gesture, and understood it to mean: “Another coffee, please?”
Five moves, and the King is dead.
I don’t know what that says, and neither does Marston, and that’s a pity because I’m relying on him to come up with a meaningful story here. Or rather I’m not. Stories seem to come more from bumbling through them, and waiting for something meaningful to drop. I don’t know where that comes from, but when it arrives, you know it by the shape of it.
He takes a sip. But the second coffee is never as good as the first.
“Have you the time please?”
Time?
It’s the woman in the corner. I’d forgotten about her. I wait for Marston to respond, to take out the pocket watch he’s carried since his father gave it to him in 1890. But it’s me she’s asking.
Me.
She exists in my universe, not his. Well, not entirely anyway.
“Em… half past one.”
She checks her watch, taps the dial, nods her thanks. Perhaps her watch has stopped, or she’s just checking it for accuracy.
“Half past one,” says Marston. The woman nods, smiles mysteriously.
You had to be careful with time, respectful of precision. Marston knew that, knew how to take care of those chronometers they’d drawn from the quartermasters, and had to keep running accurately for months. Without them the sextant was useless, and not even Yasim could make a magic out of nonsense.
“Thanks,” she says.
I’m thinking of a story for her, that perhaps she’s been stood up, which makes me feel sorry for her. But then I wonder if that’s not just a bit trite and could we not find a bigger part for her to play here. Let’s leave her sitting there for a bit and see what comes of it. Meanwhile, we’ll turn our attention back to Marston who’s still thinking of the game, thinking too of the few moves we’ve got in life and the short time we have to work things out before the Red Queen comes along, and makes us realise we know nothing at all.
Just five moves and the King is dead.
Five moves!
It had always bothered him how Yasim didn’t know how he knew what he knew. Marston remembered him trying to explain it one night as the wind blew outside the tent and lamp flickered. Give him any combination of numbers and Yasim could merge them like clouds in his head, and the resulting shape was the answer to the question – multiply, divide, square or root. Whatever. But Yasim was happy to leave it at that, a thing Marston couldn’t understand, since he always craved the rational explanation.
He knew his instruments. He could do the maths too of course, log tables, slide rule – but it took him longer and he made mistakes. Yasim was never wrong, and the answers came in seconds. Thus the maps were made, the territory gradually shaded in. But Marston struggled with the idea of it all depending upon a deeper layer of reality, one for which he’d no feel, and which Yasim had no desire to explore, nor explain.
Another sip of coffee, both me and Marston, or let’s say right now there’s no difference, since our thoughts are following along similar lines. Old Edward there, enjoying his chess as the midnight hour approaches, and his daughter treating him as a child, leading him away by the elbow. It seems undignified, disrespectful. But there. It’s done now. Is it that the red queen really doesn’t care? Is it mere necessity that drives her? Is there no way to see her coming in advance and head her off?
But of course the biggest mystery was the one Marston had learned to ignore – that of his own apparent immortality. On this subject again, Yasim was sanguine, at least he was the last time Marston saw him. As for Marston the best he could do was pinpoint its origin to the morning after the storm. That was when he and Yasim emerged from the tent to find things had shifted, that the mountains had literally moved, and the lake from which they drew water had become a river.
The shock of that was in some ways still upon him. And like all impossible things, like the Red Queen and checkmate in five, it was best to gloss it over, and not think about it. Like a couple of fools they simply set about attempting to re-map it, if only because it seemed the most pragmatic approach, and there was some comfort in it.
But by noon, Marston knew something wasn’t right about the place, that it mapped more like a dream. He was tracking the sun through the sextant, thinking to time the meridian, only to find the sun was not moving, and neither were the chronometers, nor even his own pocket-watch. With nothing to define their location in space or time, the day took on a strange floating feeling.
And then came the old man, nomadic, ragged, skeletal, wandering into camp and begging food. They’d not much, but shared what they had. The distant horizons were still hazy from dust after the storm, and there had come upon Marston a sense of the earth having shifted on its axis. Without the chronometers, without the time tied accurately to the motion of the earth, they were lost, and he was trying not to panic about that.
Still, they tended to the old man who quickly recovered his strength, and went on his way with a parting gesture neither of them understood. He bowed to each, and as they bowed in return, he touchwd his fingertips to their foreheads. And then, though Marston had watched the sun high and rock steady in the sky all day, it was into the sunset now the man walked. And in the morning the mountains were as they had originally mapped them, and the chronometers were running again.
So you’re thinking wait! And to be honest so am I, and therefore so is Marston, who takes out his pocket-watch and lays it beside his coffee cup, but before he can look at it, he drifts off, thinking about how he and Yasim never spoke of it – how for an entire day, the mountains had moved, and the sun had held still, and time had stopped. And afterwards, they played chess by the light of the Tilley lamp as the winds swept the Tibetan plateau and ruffled the canvas of their tent. And yet again, Yasim deployed his queen ahead of the game and Marston was frustrated by it, time and again no matter how he tried to see it coming.
But they didn’t need to talk about what had happened. He knew what Yasim would say: that there was no explanation and, as the years mounted up with no effect on them, he’d rested easy with the mystery of it. That much was plain to Marston, as early as the twenties, when they were both in Paris. And I’m thinking maybe it was a mistake dragging Yasim into this, and why couldn’t I have let him die of natural old age, leaving Marston to march on alone. But there he is, and no more than a figment of our imaginations, unable to speak for himself.
And for now Marston’s second coffee’s down to the dregs, as are mine, and we can’t possibly resolve any of this in the time remaining. And another coffee is out of the question. But he’s looking at the woman again and still thinking he knows her from somewhere, or maybe she just reminds him of someone he and Yasim knew briefly in Venice, some time in the seventies.
He catches her eye, as do I. We get a brief nod, before she gathers her things and comes and sits opposite Marston. Then she opens her hand, which was closed tightly around something. And there in her palm rests a chess piece, a white king – Marston’s king – not from Edward’s travel set, but from the set he and Yasim had used to play those nights on the Tibetan Plateau.
His watch is still on the table by his coffee cup and now he notes the time hasn’t moved since she last asked him. It’s still half past one. She sets the king on the table between them, then reaches up and touches him lightly on the forehead. It startles him a little, yet there’s something familiar in the feel of it.
Then he’s back under canvas, sitting across from Yasim, their faces lit by the flickering light of a Tilley Lamp. And Yasim is smiling, having just checkmated his king with the red queen. But this time Marston knows or rather he sees how he lost the game in the second move, and how not to make the same mistake. But the revelation comes at him not as a rule but as a pattern in which he sees the shape of things, just as I feel the shape of the story coming finally together.
“Let’s do that once more, ” he says.
Yasim sets them up, observes Marston checking his pocket watch. “Have we time, do you think?”
“All the time in the world, my friend.”
And more, when Saturday comes, as it must, he’d sit down with Edward.
And this time, he’d be ready.
The Rivendale Review 
