Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘What did he say?’ Barney asked Jan Bloem.

  ‘He says you can think what you like about the horse, but he paid £27 10s for it.’

  Barney, wearily, smiled again. ‘Tell him I’m eternally grateful.’

  At last, Mooi Klip’s parents were ready to leave, taking their daughter home with them. Mooi Klip sat between her mother and her father, her carpet-bag stowed in the back of the ox-waggon, and she looked as stiff and as pale as marble. Her mother give Barney a small, understanding wave, and Barney guessed what Mooi Klip must have said to her.

  ‘One word,’ said Jan Bloem, before he climbed up on to his own waggon.

  Barney said, ‘What’s that? Don’t count chickens before the eggs are laid?’

  ‘No, it’s not a motto,’ said Jan Bloem. He held Barney’s arm with one black, well-manicured hand. ‘I just want to say that if you care for Natalia, come back as quickly as you can and marry her. But, if you don’t, then leave her alone. She’s pretty, she’ll find someone else in time. One of our own people, more than likely; and whoever it is, they’ll look after your baby for you. But don’t hurt her any more.’

  Barney laid his hand on top of Jan Bloem’s. ‘Thanks for your advice,’ he said, ‘but only Natalia and I can decide what we’re going to do next. Not you, not her parents. Not anybody.’

  ‘Well,’ Jan Bloem told him, ‘I wish you the best of luck in any case. What do you say? Mazel tov!’

  ‘Say mazel tov when I get back from Durban with a healthy brother,’ said Barney. The horse Alsjeblieft snorted and tugged at his rope. He could sense that Jan Bloem and Mooi Klip’s family were about to set off, and he was feeling anxious about being left behind.

  Mooi Klip turned around only once as her father drove their ox-waggon away through the midday dust, and steered around the rim of the Kimberley Mine. Barney thought he saw her mouth the word ‘goodbye’ but he could not quite be sure. Edward Nork came up and said, ‘It’ll work out all right, you know. It really must. Do you want me to take care of this dreadful horse while you’re gone?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Barney, eyeing the creature’s fraying mane and speckled, fly-bitten hide. ‘If you can ride it, by all means ride it. If you can’t, then probably the best thing you can do is to eat it.’

  Edward looked at the horse reflectively, as if he could imagine it on a dinner-plate, with roasted potatoes and fresh peas. The horse snuffled nervously, and backed away from him on clicking hooves.

  *

  Not even Barney’s voyage out to South Africa and his attempts to find Joel among the mines and settlements of north Cape Colony had been as harsh and as hopeless as his six-week journey to Durban. With Joel strapped in as comfortably as possible on a bed of blankets and pillows, Barney travelled day after day across the vast plains of the Orange Free State, under skies that were dark with sunshine, amidst dust that was as blinding as flour. The odds were almost overwhelming that Joel would die of infection within a matter of days, but when each morning broke across the grasslands and Joel was still alive, still murmuring and whispering and crying with the pain of his injuries, Barney would mount the waggon’s seat and snap his whip at the oxen, and they would plod eastwards again, towards a blue hazy horizon which they never seemed to reach.

  Joel had hours of lucidity, when he would lie amongst his pillows, his face set in a grimace, talking to Barney in short, agonised sentences about what had happened. Barney kept his back to his brother most of the time, rarely turning around. The Blitz family burden, at this stage in his life, was more than he could bear. He was driving Joel to Durban because he had to drive Joel to Durban, because it was the best hope for Joel’s survival, and because Joel was his brother. There were no other reasons.

  One Thursday morning, they saw for the first time the distant blue outline of the Drakensberg Mountains, which they would have to cross before descending into Natal, and then making their way down through Colenso and Pieter Maritzburg to Durban. Joel, propped up on his pillows, said, ‘We shouldn’t go back you know.’

  ‘Because you’ve lost us our claim?’ said Barney.

  ‘Because there’s nothing to go back for,’ said Joel. ‘It’s a fool’s game, diamond mining. What the hell’s the point of it? You dig all day, you break your back, and for what?’

  ‘We could have been rich,’ said Barney.

  ‘We could have been old before our time,’ retorted Joel.

  Barney wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief. Ahead of him, the oxen plodded steadily foward, their heads down, their thin-bladed haunches rising and falling with every step. ‘You can stay in Durban if you want to,’ he told Joel. ‘But I’m going back. There’s all of our money in the London and South African Bank, for one thing.’

  Joel brushed a fly away from his face. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘we have a little problem with that.’

  Barney lowered the reins. ‘Problem? What are you talking about? We have seventeen thousand pounds in that bank. What problems?’

  Joel looked towards the horizon. ‘We owe the bank two thousand pounds’.

  Gradually, Barney drew the oxen to a halt. Then he turned on his seat and said, ‘What?’

  Joel’s face was ghastly with pain. Pursing his lips, he said, ‘It doesn’t matter. For God’s sake, just carry on.’

  ‘I want to know, Joel. What problem? How in God’s name can we owe the bank two thousand pounds?’

  Joel said, ‘I gambled a little. At Dodd’s.’

  ‘You gambled? But you didn’t gamble seventeen thousand pounds!’

  Joel nodded. ‘Just get this waggon going, will you? The sooner we get this trip over, the better.’

  But Barney was wide-eyed, paralysed. ‘You gambled all of those seventeen thousand pounds at Dodd’s Bar? All of them? And two thousand more?’

  Joel raised a hand beseechingly. ‘Barney – will you please get going. I can’t take any more of this.’

  ‘You can’t take any more?’ screamed Barney. He jumped down from the driving seat, and advanced on Joel with his face crimson. ‘How can you say that? Everything I’ve worked for, everything I’ve been counting on! You’ve wasted everything! All that talk about saving our money, about sticking to one claim only! God, you’re crazy! God, you’re as crazy as Mama was!’

  Joel lay back on his pillows. He eas exhausted with heat and agony. ‘All right, so I’m crazy. You got your gun back from Harry Munt. So shoot. Save yourself a journey.’

  Barney stood beside the ox-waggon for over a minute, in the relentless heat of the afternoon. The oxen flicked their tails at the flies, and the insects chirruped on the veld, and there was nobody and nothing around for mile upon mile, as far as the settlement of Paul Roux.

  He could have taken out his Shopkeeper’s pistol and shot Joel in the head, and nobody would ever have known. He could have buried the body in the dust, and returned to Kimberley and told Edward Nork and everybody else at the mine that Joel had died of his injuries. Joel had gambled away all his money, raped his wife-to-be, ruined his wedding, and cheated him out of his claim. What else did he deserve, but death?

  Yet Barney remembered his father, sitting by the pale light of the upstairs window at Clinton Street, and the way his father’s fingers had turned the first thin page of the Bible, and read, ‘What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.’

  Barney turned his face in the direction of the wind, narrowing his eyes against the grit and the heat. Then he climbed back up on to the waggon, and clicked at the oxen, the same Xhosa click that Donald had taught him, and they continued their trek across the plains of the Orange Free State.

  Each night was the same, huddled under blankets by a flickering fire, after a meal of dried meat, dried fruit, and warm water. Each night Barney had to let down the side of the waggon
and help Joel to roll off on to the ground, so that he could lie on the dust on his back to empty his bowels. Most nights, Joel screamed out loud as he forced shit through his shattered pelvis; and then he would whimper incessantly as Barney cleaned him up. After that, there would be a gagged-down meal, a heavy dose of ipecacuanha, and a few hours of restless sleep. In the morning, the process would have to be repeated all over again.

  Miraculously, though, Joel’s crushed leg remained free of serious infection. It began to knit together in an odd crooked shape, and it gave him excruciating pain, so much so that whenever the waggon lurched down a rough slope, he would shriek out to Barney to shoot him at once. But the skin had not been broken, and most of the lacerations had now healed up, and as they approached the Golden Gate, Barney’s hopes at last began to rise a little.

  The Golden Gate was utterly silent and eerie as Barney’s ox-waggon passed through. It was a towering formation of weird and brooding sandstone crags, rising out of the scrub like massive totems. Above the crags, the sky was as dark and unforgiving as always, and the lamb-catching eagles, the lammargayers, circled and circled on wings as wide as sailboats. As he wended his way upwards through the mountains, past Mushroom Rock and Brandwag Rock, with their dazzling golden faces, Barney could hear the distant grinding echo of his ox-waggon wheels like a ghostly reminder of voortrekkers from forty years ago. There were other echoes in these mountains, too: of the Bushmen who had lived here in prehistoric times, and had painted the sandstone caves with pictures of plants and bird and long-forgotten rituals. Of the cannibals who had once roamed the valley of the Caledon River, and who had slaughtered and eaten more than 30,000 people.

  In breezy silence, Barney passed a dark and distant amphitheatre of basalt cliffs; and then climbed even further through the Drakensberg to Mont-aux-Sources, where the rivers divided, and where he crossed at last into Natal. From Mont-aux-Sources, on that vividly clear afternoon, he could see back into the Orange Free State, and Basutoland, and as far as Utrecht in the Transvaal, hazy miles of dust and trees and patches of greenery. Ahead of him, off to his right, he could make out the mountain they called Giant’s Castle, where dark clouds gathered, even on a fine day, and lightning flickered incessantly. The black people had named this mountain N’Tabayi Konjwa, the mountain at which you may not point without terrible consequences.

  Joel by now was delirious. He sweated and raved and screamed, and sometimes in the night he would let out a hideous inhuman shriek that had Barney sitting up in his blankets, scrabbling for his revolver, his body cold with fright.

  But they descended the mountains at last into Natal, following the deep imprints in the rocks that the iron-shod wheels of the huge Boer waggons had left, when they had deserted their newly-established Republic of Natalia in 1842. Jan Bloem had told Barney all about those days, and it was easy for Barney to understand how bitter the Boers felt about the British. Their four-year-old republic had been annexed by the British by force, and the Volksraad, the Boer Parliament, had grimly voted to accept the annexation without fighting back. Almost immediately, the Boer farmers had packed their ox-waggons and trekked back west over the Drakensberg, to the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal.

  Five weeks after he had set out from Kimberley, Barney steered his ox-waggon between the shalestone and yellow-wood cottages of Boom Street, in Pieter-Maritzburg, the capital of Natal. It was here, on the banks of the river that the Zulus had called the Mzunduzi, that the Boers had first found what they had believed to be their promised land. Pieter-Maritzburg, named after two voortrekkers called Pieter Retief and Gerrit Maritz, had been established on the floor of a broad, lush valley, over which the shadows of the afternoon clouds passed like memories.

  Barney and Joel stayed the night with an elderly Dutch couple who ran a small dairy on the outskirts of town; and while Joel shivered in a cot in an upstairs bedroom, Barney sat wearily at the kitchen table and ate cheese and ham and drank home-made lager. The old Dutchman watched him through tiny spectacles, an unread copy of the Natal Witness lying in the table in front of him; but he only spoke when Barney had quite finished, and pushed aside the wooden board from which he had eaten his meal.

  ‘You brought your brother all the way from the diamond fields?’

  Barney nodded. ‘I didn’t have any choice. We don’t have any surgeons out there – none that are worth a damn, anyway.’

  ‘He must have suffered, your brother.’

  Barney said, ‘Yes. He’s suffered, and he’ll suffer some more before he’s through.’

  ‘Is it worth it?’ the old Dutchman asked.

  Barney looked him straight in the eye. ‘Your people fought and died to build this town, and to stay free, and you’re asking me if it’s worth it?’

  The old Dutchman picked up his paper. ‘You’re right, I suppose. Do you know that I was there, under the acacia tree, when the Volksraad voted to let the British take over Natalia without recourse to arms. I was standing as near to Andries Pretorius as you’re sitting now. I could have reached out and touched him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barney, tiredly. ‘Now, I think I’d better get some sleep. I want to get to Durban tomorrow, if I can.’

  ‘You might make Pinetown. But Durban? It’s ninety miles, easily.’

  ‘My brother’s dying. I’ll make it to Durban.’

  After supper, Barney sat in an old rocking-chair on the tiled living-room floor, and dozed. The tiles were patterned with blue flowers, and first he dreamed of fire lilies and watsonia. Then he was riding again across miles of desert, with the oxen hunched doggedly in front of him. He dreamed of the strange pinnacles of sandstone that stood silent guard over the passes between the Orange Free State and Basutoland; and of the wild herds of red hartebeest and Burchell’s zebra which fled across the grasslands.

  He was woken by a cough. He had half-dreamed that it was a baboon barking in some far-off kloof. But it was the old Dutchman, bending over him with an expression of wrinkled concern. ‘Your brother’s worse,’ he said. ‘Do you want us to send for the priest?’

  Barney had to stay for two days and two nights in Pieter-Maritzburg, while Joel twisted and shook and babbled in his whitewashed upstairs bedroom. It was December now, and the humidity was exhausting. For the first day, Barney did nothing but sit in the house, resting; but on the second morning he went down to the banks of the Umzinduzi to feel the early breeze blowing off the ruffled water.

  The old Dutchman called the local doctor, a whiskery Englishman who rolled up his sleeves to reveal the hairiest arms that Barney had ever come across. But the doctor could do nothing better than to prescribe more Dover’s powder to keep Joel’s temperature down, and to express the opinion, as he was leaving, that Joel would soon by lying in a casket in Church Street.

  On the third morning, however, when Barney went up to Joel’s room, Joel was lying on his cot with his eyes open, and a hint of colour in his cheeks, and he managed to raise his hand in a half-mocking greeting.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Barney asked him, drawing up a chair.

  ‘I’m not dead yet, whatever that doctor thinks.’

  ‘You heard him?’

  ‘I couldn’t help it. The window was open, and the man had a voice like a French horn.’

  ‘Do you think you’re up to travelling on?’

  Joel apprehensively rubbed his left thigh. ‘How far is it? This leg seems to have stiffened.’

  ‘About eighty, ninety miles. The roads are better, though. So they tell me.’

  Joel closed his eyes. ‘Just fill me up with that specific, and make me comfortable, and let’s go.’

  The last few miles of the journey were gruelling. Under his broad-brimmed hat, Barney’s face was streaked with dust and sweat, and Joel lay back on his grimy pillows with a face as ghastly as a waxwork. They could not reach Durban by nightfall, even though their waggon was light and almost empty of supplies, since Barney had to keep stopping by the side of the rutted road to bathe Joel’s face with wa
ter, and dose him up with painkillers. They slept outside Pinetown, under their canvas shelter amidst the racketing noise of cicadas.

  It was Saturday, 23 December, when they eventually arrived on the outskirts of Durban, like two exhausted survivors from some lost pioneering expedition, and passers-by stared at them in open curiosity as they slowly plodded towards the centre of town.

  In spite of the heat, Christmas decorations were everywhere. There were flags flying outside the stores along West Street, and the ironwork uprights of the horse-drawn omnibuses were wound with tinsel. Durban lay under the deep blue lunchtime sky like a small, prosperous British town, with wide streets and smart carriages and buildings as solid as any in Croydon.

  Barney asked directions of a red-faced English grocer who was standing outside his store in his striped apron, taking a mid-morning smoke. The grocer pointed out the Natalia Hotel with the stem of his pipe; but had certainly never heard of anyone called Sir Thomas Sutter, or anyone related to anyone called Sir Thomas Sutter. ‘Not unless you mean – but no,’ he added, looking at Barney’s clothes.

  ‘That fellow in the back looks a bit dicky,’ he remarked, gratuitously, as Barney whipped the oxen and turned the waggon across the street.

  Barney guessed that it was suitably sad and ironic that he should stay with Joel at an hotel called the Natalia. The manager was reluctant at first to admit Joel; but when Barney paid for a suite in advance in English fivepound notes, he whistled sharply to four Kaffirs in white shorts to carry Joel on the hotel stretcher to his room upstairs.

  ‘As long as he doesn’t pass away,’ the manager explained, noisily rubbing his hands as he watched Barney sign the register. ‘It does disturb the guests, you know … expiry.’

  Barney looked around the green marble hotel foyer, with its drawn blinds and its leather armchairs and its obligatory elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. After weeks in the mountains, he felt so tired that none of these staid Victorian surroundings seemed real; and the way in which straight-backed women in their long summer skirts came and went across the reflecting floor was like a silent ballet remembered from a dream.