Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  The brougham drew up outside a thatched Dutch building called The Thatch Inn, and the black coachman climbed down to open the door for Barney and extend the steps. Hunt said, ‘You find yourself a room here for tonight. Talk to Mr Shearer, he’s the proprietor, and tell him you’re a guest of Government House. Then tomorrow, at noon, I’ll meet you at Clark’s Eating House on Adderley Street.’

  The coachman carried Barney’s valise into the Inn’s front doorway, and across the cool black and white tiles of a wide entrance-hall. Then he scurried away. Barney walked up to the mahogany reception desk, above which an array of ill-matched clocks told the time in London, in Moscow, in New York, and The Hague. He stared up at the grimy ormolu clock which told him it was only five o’clock in the morning in New York, and he tried to imagine Clinton Street as it must be now – dark, and freezing, and thick with snow.

  The clerk behind the counter was watching him with a composed, monkey-life face. Then, without impatience, he asked Barney: ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Barney. ‘I wanted a room for the night. Just a single room, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all your luggage?’ asked the clerk, peering over the counter at Barney’s valise as if it were a small and unwelcome dog.

  Barney shrugged his assent. The clerk scratched his ear with the end of his pen and noisily turned the pages of the hotel register.

  ‘I have an upstairs back. Bit cramped, I’m afraid. Bit hot too, being right under the roof.’

  ‘I am a guest of Government House,’ ventured Barney.

  The clerk stopped scratching and looked at him with an expression that was on the pitying side of sympathy. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘In that case, I’m going to have to ask you to pay in advance, too.’

  ‘Is Mr Shearer here? The proprietor?’

  ‘Good God, no. Mr Shearer wouldn’t stay in Capetown in high summer. He’s gone up to Wellington, for his health.’

  Reluctantly, Barney paid for his room, and a grinning Bantu in voluminous white trousers showed him up the winding stairs to the upper landing, and along the corridor. Halfway along the corridor hung a colour lithograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which the Bantu cheerily saluted.

  The clerk had been right. Barney’s room was tiny, and so hot that he began to sweat as soon as he stepped into it. But it was clean, with whitewashed walls, a wide-boarded yellowwood floor, an iron bed, and a single riempie-thonged chair. He went straight to the window, and opened it, and found he was looking out over a small fenced garden, dense with bougainvillaea, and overshadowed by a tree which he later learned to call a Huil Boerboonboom.

  Behind the garden, and beyond a scattering of old Cape-Dutch houses, rose the foothills of Table Mountain, and then the mountain itself. Over the clear-cut edge of the mountain, huge white puffy cumulus clouds hung in a sharp blue sky.

  Barney sat on the edge of his bed. He said a broche for the vivid scenery of Capetown, and a broche for his room, and a broche for his safe arrival. Then he raised his head, and closed his eyes, and breathed in the scent of flowers and fruit and warmth. He felt as if he had arrived, prematurely, in Paradise.

  That evening, he ate alone, in the garden, under the rustling leaves of the Huil Boerboonboom, his meal lit by a candle. He was served a curious fried fish which the waiter told him was snoek. He drank a fruity Cape wine, and finished his meal with slices of bread spread with moskonfyt, a thick grape syrup. From the tables all around him came the scissorlike accents of British farmers, talking about apricot growing, and cattle farming, and the shaky condition of the Colony’s economy. A skeletal Scotsman with a brambly red beard was leaning back in his Zandevelt chair and declaring in a loud voice, ‘Well – it’s my opinion that Sir Philip ought to trek out and find himself another diamond. A few more like the Eureka, and he could at least afford to give Government House a fresh lick of paint.’

  One of his companions swallowed a large mouthful of whiskey and shook his head. ‘No such luck, McFee. You remember that James Gregory fellow – the one they sent out from Emanuel’s in London? Well, he’s written a report in this month’s Geological Magazine, and he says there isn’t a single chance of finding diamonds out on the Orange River, or anywhere around. An imposture, he calls it. A South African Bubble.’

  ‘There was the one diamond, though,’ pointed out the man called McFee. ‘And if there was the one, why shouldn’t there be others?’

  ‘It was a fluke,’ put in another farmer, dogmatically. ‘If you found a sovereign in Riebeeck Square, you wouldn’t start digging up the road, would you, to look for more? Gregory says the Eureka was probably dropped by an ostrich.’

  ‘Och, where’s your optimism?’ said McFee. ‘Just think about it. A fellow would only have to find himself one respectable diamond, and he’d be rich for the rest of his life.’

  ‘Are you going to trek out to the Orange River and start scrabbling around for one, then?’ asked his friend.

  McFee raised his glass. ‘Not I, Bernard. Too much sweat. And, besides, I wouldn’t know what a diamond looked like if I tripped over one.’

  Barney lay on his twisted sheet that night, under the shadows of his mosquito net, and thought about what McFee had said. One respectable diamond. Just one respectable diamond. Outside, in the hot fragrant darkness, a few of the guests were still drinking and laughing. Someone played an impromptu air on the fiddle for a while. Barney slept, and dreamed of meeting Joel. For some reason, Joel would not look at him, and Barney woke in the small hours of the morning feeling a hair-raising sense of fright.

  *

  Clark’s Eating House was the favourite lunchtime meeting-place for the young shipping agents and bank tellers who worked in the stately white stone buildings of Adderley Street. Clark’s did a tolerable beef pie and mashed potatoes, as well as antelope steak, and curried snoek. Barney was there ten minutes before Hunt, and he took a table by the window, and asked for a carafe of white wine. All around him sat loud young men with British public-school voices and faces the colour of corned beef. A woven fan flapped steadily overhead, stirring the sweltering air, and vaguely irritating the aspidistras which stood around the eating-house in hideous blue jardinières.

  At last Hunt came through the door, wearing a smart white suit and a straw boater. He was tugging along behind him a mournful Boer, whose faded grey linen jacket and worn-out veld boots accredited him at a glance as a professional trekker.

  ‘Well, you found your way here all right,’ smiled Hunt, shaking hands. ‘This is your guide, Simon de Koker. Mr de Koker – this is Mr Barney Blitz, from New York.’

  Simon de Koker took off his floppy hat and studiously wiped around the sweatband with his table-napkin. He had one of those long, lantern-jawed Boer faces, fringed with whiskers, with tiny sun-bleached eyes, and a mouth that was permanently downturned – whether out of pessimism, or pain, or Calvinist disapproval, it was impossible for Barney to tell. Barney later used to say that when the Lord was fixing on the babies’ smiles, He accidentally stuck Simon de Koker’s smile on upside-down.

  ‘You want to trek to Oranjerivier?’ asked Simon de Koker, in that snipping accent of the Cape Dutch.

  ‘My brother’s there. He has a farm.’

  ‘A Jewish fellow, in Oranjerivier, with a farm?’

  Barney was pouring Hunt a glass of wine, He paused. ‘That’s right. His name’s Joel Blitz.’

  Simon de Koker took a long drink of wine. Then he slowly shook his head. ‘I know every farm in Oranjerivier. There’s nobody farming out there by the name of Blitz. And no Jews, for sure.’

  Barney reached into the pocket of his suit and took out Joel’s letter. ‘He wrote me and told me. Here it is, look – a sketchmap of how to get there from Oranjerivier itself.’

  The Boer took the letter and studied it. His nose was beaded with perspiration. Eventually, he handed the letter back and said, ‘I know the farm you mean. Derdeheuwel, it’s called – third hill. It used to belong to a voortrekker called van
Diedrich. Then van Diedrich died, and his daughter sold it. I don’t know to whom. But now it’s owned by a Portuguese fellow. No question about that. A man called Monsaraz.’

  Barney sat back. He felt suddenly, and peculiarly, alone. He had imagined all kinds of difficulties in making a new life for himself in Cape Colony. Joel had written in graphic detail about the heat in the summer and the frosts in the winter, and the thieving Hottentots. But Barney had never thought for a moment that he might not be able to find Joel at all.

  ‘Listen,’ said Hunt, ‘we ought to order lunch. What will you have, Barney? I can recommend the snoek.’

  ‘I had snoek for dinner last night,’ Barney told him. ‘I’ll try the antelope steak.’

  ‘Is it kosher for Jews to eat antelope?’ asked Simon de Koker.

  Barney nodded. ‘Antelope have cloven hoofs, and chew the cud. I learned that from school. The cooks here may not prepare it according to strict dietary law, but when there’s no option, we are allowed to eat some things that are trayf. Otherwise the whole world would be populated by starving Jews.’

  A Malay waiter came up and took their order. Hunt called for another carafe of wine, and some bread. He sat drinking and chewing for a while, and frowning hard.

  ‘Do you still want to go out to Oranjerivier?’ he asked Barney. ‘It’s all of 700 miles, you know, by horseback or ox-waggon, and that’s going to take you the better part of five weeks, maybe longer. It could take you two months. And then, supposing your brother isn’t anywhere to be found?’

  ‘What else can I do?’ asked Barney. ‘I won’t be able to find any work here. I’m a tailor. And not even a very good tailor, at that.’

  ‘How much money do you have?’ asked Simon de Koker.

  ‘About ninety pounds,’ said Barney.

  ‘Well,’ said Simon de Koker, dolefully, ‘that should last you six or seven months, allowing for the cost of your trip out to Oranjerivier, and your lodging when you get there. I know a fanner who might rent you a solder, a loft.’

  ‘But how do I find my brother?’

  Simon de Koker shrugged. ‘He’s either dead, from malaria, in which case you won’t have much trouble finding his grave. Or else he’s drunk, and you’ll find him at Maloney’s Bar, near Dutoitspan, more than likely. Or else he’s sold up whatever he’s got left, and moved on, in which event you may never see him again. It all depends.’

  Barney took a piece of bread, tore it, and began to eat it unbuttered. ‘I have to try to find him,’ he said. ‘You can understand that.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hunt. ‘But what will you do if he’s dead, or gone off without a trace? It’s not very hospitable out there, you know. Those that malaria doesn’t dispose of, the blackies will.’

  ‘What about diamonds?’ asked Barney. ‘I heard some fellow yesterday say that if you could find yourself a decent-sized diamond up by the Orange River, you’d be made for life.’

  Simon de Koker laughed, although his mouth remained bitterly downturned. Listening to the noise he made was about as pleasant as closing your finger in a doorjamb. ‘Diamonds?’ he said. ‘There was one diamond, the Eureka, and that was found by the Orange River a couple of years ago by a fellow called Schalts van Niekirk. But that was an accident. A twist of fate. It probably came from hundreds of miles away, that diamond, in some animal’s paw; or maybe in the crop of an ostrich. They showed it at the Paris Exhibition last year. But you won’t find any more, and you’d be a damned fool to try.’

  ‘How much will you charge to take me out to Oranjerivier?’ asked Barney.

  The food arrived – Hunt’s grilled snoek, and Simon de Koker’s pie. The waiter set Barney’s antelope steak in front of him, and asked him if he wanted moskonfyt with it. Barney shook his head.

  Simon de Koker said, ‘I’ll take you to Oranjerivier; and find you lodging, for ten pounds, plus feed for the oxen, water at threepence a bucket, and thirty shillings for the bearer.’

  ‘You’re a fool to go,’ said Hunt, cutting up his fish. ‘I could easily get you a job here, with the Cape Bank, or even at Government House.’

  Barney sniffed the rare, aromatic smell of antelope meat. In those days, the Great Karoo was thick with antelope.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was a fool to give up my business in New York and come all this way to meet my brother. But I think I’d be a greater fool if I didn’t make an effort to find him. If you’ll guide me, Mr de Koker, I’ll go.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll guide you,’ said Simon de Koker, as he cut up his pie-crust.

  Simon de Koker, despite the permanent misery of his expression, turned out to be far more amiable than he had first appeared. He was waiting for Barney outside The Thatch Inn on the morning they were due to leave for Oranjerivier, clad in a red-checked shirt and a huge white hat, and smoking a meerschaum pipe. In the back of his waggon, drawn by a single disconsolate ox, was his own rhinoceros-hide travelling trunk, and a bulging canvas gunny-sack which looked as if it had been stuffed with five small boys.

  ‘No bearer?’ asked Barney, as he lifted his valise on to the back of the waggon, and climbed up.

  ‘Not yet,’ de Koker told him. ‘Just for the sake of convenience, we’re travelling as far as Paarl by train.’

  The railroad that climbed inland from Capetown to Wellington, a winding distance of sixty-three miles, was Cape Colony’s only line, apart from a seven-mile spur which connected Durban, the principal town of Natal, with the coast of the Indian Ocean. No telegraph lines penetrated inland, and all mail and provisions had to be hauled out to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State by ox-waggon. Simon de Koker’s gunny-sack was crammed with letters and packages for British and Boer farmers. Some of the letters had been franked over a year ago.

  ‘Those Boer farmers are made of nails,’ said Simon de Koker, as he turned the ox-waggon around in the rutted yard of Capetown’s Dutch-fronted railroad station. ‘Most of them trekked a thousand miles or more, and what they had to endure across those mountains and deserts, well, God only knows. It’s going to be bad enough for us, I warn you, but thirty years ago it must have been hell. Even now they’re barely scraping a living. But, they’re free from the British, and that’s their main concern.’

  The small steam locomotive laboured up through the sandstone mountains, away from the ocean, under a glaring sky. Simon de Koker sat with his arms tight-folded and his legs crossed, looking out at the trees and brightly-coloured shrubs and rocky krantzes, and placidly smoking his pipe. The only other occupants of the carriage were a Dutch girl with huge pale forearms and a blue summer hat the size of a small cartwheel, and an agitated Englishman of about twenty-five, who perspired furiously, and kept fiddling with a selection of large butterfly nets.

  Barney asked Simon de Koker, ‘Do you think I’m a fool, trying to find my brother?’

  De Koker shrugged, without taking his pipe out of his mouth. ‘If your brother’s alive, and you find him, then who can say that you’re a fool? But if he’s dead, and all his money’s gone, and you don’t find anything but a gravestone …’

  ‘I dreamed about him the first night I was here,’ said Barney. ‘I dreamed he was alive.’

  ‘Well, man,’ said de Koker, his face still a study in sadness, ‘that might increase his chances.’

  Paarl was little more than a small collection of Cape-Dutch cottages and farms in a flowery, upland setting. The air was fresher here, and the scent of summer blooms was carried on a wind that was dry and bracing. It was only a few miles from here, at Wellington, that the proprietor of The Thatch Inn was spending his summer vacation. Barney and Simon de Koker climbed down from the train, and crossed the yard to where an ox-waggon was waiting, tied up to a rail under the shade of a row of mulberry trees. A blackman was asleep in the back of the waggon, his frayed straw hat over his eyes, his long bare legs clustered with flies.

  ‘They’ve given me Donald again, the bastards,’ said Simon de Koker, without any apparent emotion. ‘Donald, wake up, you idle Kaff
ir! Do you know why they call him Donald? His name’s Simkwe, really. But some bloody Scotchman paid him to take him across the Great Karoo, and always called him Donald. Whenever Simkwe said, “Me Simkwe,” that bloody Scotchman said, “You’re Donald, Donald, and don’t forget it, Donald.” ’

  Donald jerked awake. ‘I’m awake, sir!’ he shouted.

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ said Simon de Koker. ‘Go get our bags from the train, and be quick about it.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Donald exclaimed, and hurried off towards the depot. He was thickset for a blackman, and his skin was the colour of treacle toffee, instead of the intense black of the Bushmen or the Zulus.

  ‘He’s a Griqua,’ Simon de Koker explained. ‘Half Hottentot, and half Boer, and more than half stupid. It’s the sun, if you ask me. It’s braaied his brains.’

  ‘What are we going to do for water, and provisions?’ asked Barney.

  ‘That’s just where we’re going now,’ Simon de Koker told him. ‘This waggon, and Donald, both belong to a fruit farmer friend of mine, Henk Jeppe. I sent word we were coming a couple of days back, by train. He should have everything ready for us, six pounds the lot.’

  Donald came back across the square with Simon de Koker’s rhinoceros bag on his head, and the other two pieces of luggage under his arms. ‘Mr Henk says you going to Oranjerivier, Mr Simon.’

  ‘That’s right, Donald.’

  ‘That’s good, Mr Simon. My sister live in Oranjerivier.’

  ‘I thought your sister lived in Hope Town.’

  ‘That’s my other sister, Mr Simon.’

  Donald climbed up on to the waggon, and clicked a loud Xhosa-like click to the oxen. Slowly, their angular haunches going up and down like the bobbins of a sewing-machine, the oxen turned out of the square and along the street.

  ‘Donald has sisters everywhere,’ remarked Simon de Koker. ‘They’re not really sisters, if you know what I mean. But he was brought up by a British missionary, and he learned the art of hypocrisy at an early age. Decorum before truth, you understand.’