Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  Barney said, ‘What about Pieter?’

  ‘You can see him, whenever you like. I’ll always be here.’

  Barney lowered his head. ‘And what about you?’ he said, softly.

  ‘I can manage,’ said Mooi Klip.

  Barney took a deep breath. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said. ‘I love you more than anybody else in this whole continent. I love you more than anybody else in this whole world. It’s almost unbearable for me to stand here next to you and know that I can’t have you. I want to get inside of your mouth and change the words that you’re saying to me. For God’s sake, Natalia, how can you be so aloof? Haven’t you missed me? Don’t you feel anything for me at all? Don’t you understand that nothing has any meaning unless you’re right beside me to share it?’

  ‘You want me to live with Joel?’ asked Mooi Klip, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Natalia – that will never happen again – I can promise you that.’

  ‘It happened once, and once was more than enough.’

  ‘Natalia –’

  She smiled. ‘Why don’t you call me Mooi Klip? The pretty stone. The glittering diamond you found in the mud, and then cast aside.’

  Barney looked up at the evening sky. ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ he told her, throatily.

  ‘Don’t say anything. Not now. Come again when you want to. Perhaps bring a gift for your new son. I am not shutting myself away from you, Barney. I love you still. But the time is not ready yet, and neither are you.’

  ‘I’ve brought a gift,’ said Barney. And he took out of his pocket the wash-leather bag that the digger at the De Beers Mine had given him, crammed with rough diamonds.

  Mooi Klip opened the bag carefully and stared at the gems with widened eyes. Then she said, ‘No. You will need these. You can’t.’

  ‘Take them,’ he said. ‘One day, they’re going to be worth a thousand times more than they are now. You can rely on diamonds to look after you, even when people can’t.’

  With an awkward heave, he mounted Alsjeblieft again, and raised his hat. ‘This is ridiculously formal,’ he said. ‘I love you, and that’s all there is to it.’

  Barney tugged at the reins, and Alsjeblieft plodded back along the street between the shacks and the tin-roofed houses and the half-built wooden bungalows. Then, without any kind of urging, the horse turned south, and began to carry him along the banks of the Vaal River towards the nearest digger’s settlement, under the willows.

  ‘Do you know something, Alsjebelieft,’ said Barney, ‘I really believe that you know where you’re going.’

  The horse kept plodding through the long grass, leaving the twinkling lights of Klipdrift far behind in the Cape Colony night. Barney began to whistle a tune that he heard a street-corner violinist playing in Durban. The tune was called ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again?’

  TWO

  Edward Nork had left a message for him on the kitchen table. ‘Am drunk, but can be found at Dodd’s.’ Barney read it, turned it over to see if anything was written on the other side, and then crumpled it up. Edward had been drinking so heavily lately that Barney expected to discover him dead one day in a ditch.

  He could not entirely blame Edward for his alcoholism. The world price of diamonds had been depressed for years, and life at Kimberley was harsher and more lonely than the profits from a thirty-one foot claim could ever relieve. When the diamond diggers were not being chilled by torrential rain, they were pickled like walnuts by the sun; and the Big Hole was now so deep and treacherous that floods and slides and cave-ins were killing and injuring diggers by ones and twos every day. Hundreds of hopefuls abandoned their claims, either because the work was too hard for the profits they were making; or because they believed they had reached bedrock, and that their ground was all cleaned out. So many left that the restrictions on how many claims one man could own were finally lifted.

  It was not difficult for a man to persuade himself that he had reached the bottom of the diamond bearing soil, particularly when he was grimy and exhausted and alone, and he had saved up just enough money to get back to whichever country he had first come from.

  That was not to say that the town of Kimberley itself had not improved. Bricks and fancy building materials had reached the town from Durban and the Cape, including a fine collection of cast-iron balconies. The Kimberley Club was now an imposing edifice of red tuck-pointed brick, with iron-pillared verandahs, a mahogany entrance-door with engraved glass panels, and a billiard-room on the second floor, under a sky-light. The effect was rather spoiled by the rusting corrugated-iron roof, but in north Cape Colony, shingles were even rarer than diamonds.

  There was a new hotel, The Kimberley Palace, and a new whorehouse with private bathrooms and brown velvet drapes with tassels. There were countless new bars; and there was even a rudimentary racetrack, with wooden bleachers, where motley races were run on Saturdays between horses that rarely looked fitter than Alsjeblieft. Most of the bets were laid in rough diamonds, or claim deeds, and Joel went along there whenever he could, although Barney kept a tight check on how much money he took with him. These days, with ill grace, Joel was prepared to let Barney keep the company books, and to allow Barney to be the sole signatory to their bank account.

  All in all, though, Kimberley remained a crude and uncivilised male society, where even the smallest luxuries like badger’s-hair shaving brushes and scented soap were almost impossible to come by, and where there was very little else to do but drink, gamble, dig the ground, or go to prostitutes. There was a small library on Barkly Street, but most of its books were inspirational stories of Christian derring-do in isolated corners of the British Empire, or bound volumes of scientific periodicals of what Edward called ‘exemplary dryness’. There was an amateur dramatic society, too, but Barney had been reluctant to join it because he knew that Agnes Knight was a member, and that she was now engaged to be married to its leading male actor, a tall Australian with wavy golden hair and a high nasal whine. His name was Robert Joy.

  It was four years since Joel had lost claim No. 172 to Dottie Evans. The claim had been sold three or four times since then, and Dottie Evans herself had been so sick of a social disease that she had left Kimberley and gone to the Cape for her health. Joel still walked with a tilting limp, and his hips gave him pain when the weather was damp, or when the wind was about to change, but otherwise he was much better. He worked for Harold Feinberg most of the time, as a kind of clerk; for Harold had done so well that he had built himself a fine brick-fronted office on the main street, with an upstairs workroom facing the north light, and he now employed a staff of seven, mostly Jews from London’s East End.

  Barney had been practically pressganged by his horse Alsjeblieft into that occupation known as ‘kopje-walloping’ – riding from one diamond claim to another, buying up roughs. Every morning at six o’clock sharp, Alsjeblieft started to kick at the rails of the kraal, and would not stop until Barney had saddled him up. There was rarely any need for Barney to direct the horse at all: he would simply trot off on the same rounds that his previous master must have taken since diamonds were first discovered.

  The veteran diggers knew Alsjeblieft by sight; and they soon made Barney’s acquaintance, too. In a white sun-topi, a belted jacket, and loud check trousers and spats, Barney was welcomed wherever he rode, and he quickly learned to play up to the diggers’ expectations of what a good ‘kopje-walloper’ should be. He brought news, and gossip, and sometimes he brought tobacco, and whiskey, and rude French playing-cards. If a new popular song had reached Kimberley from the Cape, he would learn it, and sing it to every digger he met.

  His four years of ‘kopje-walloping’ did more to strengthen his resolve to be rich, and more to help him through the pain of losing Mooi Klip, than any amount of consolation from Joel, or starry-eyed dreams from Edward. He had lost a would-be wife, and a son. But he came across men who had left everything behind them – their wives, their children, and their homes, just to brea
k their backs in the pits of Kimberley, or De Beers, or wash through gravel on the banks of the Vaal. He met hard men and bitter men; men who scarcely spoke, and men who wanted to talk to him all night. He sat by more camp fires than he could count, and shook more hands than he could ever remember. He learned to be patient, and bright, and above all he learned to be understanding. One digger had talked to him for three hours about his beloved wife Fanny, with whom he had lived in a small redbrick cottage in Streatham, in southern England. It was only later that the digger confessed that he had been found guilty of Fanny’s manslaughter, and had only managed to escape to South Africa by a lucky chance.

  ‘You don’t know what it is, to love someone, and then to lose them,’ he told Barney.

  Barney did not argue. He had learned never to argue with the men from whom he bought diamonds. They had to argue enough with their kaffirs, and with the weather, and with the yellow ground from which they were struggling to make their fortunes. All they wanted from Barney were nods of encouragement, and a reasonable price for their stones, and a song or two, and maybe an ounce of British Pluck. They did not want to know that Barney had problems of his own, or that he was the father of a four-year-old child whom he hardly ever saw.

  Barney did not pay much for his diamonds: in fact, he gave four or five shillings less than almost any other dealer. But he always paid on time and he was always square, and that was what the diggers liked about him. They felt he was one of them: a small man struggling against the world, and they would often sell him some of their best gems at bargain prices just because he had made them laugh, or brought them an envelope of dubious Egyptian photographs, or sang them two choruses of ‘The Flowers of Loch Rannoch’. He was good at Scottish songs, because of his Yiddish accent. The ‘Cheery Kopje-Walloper’ was a part that Barney had to play as dramatically as Agnes Knight and Robert Joy were to play Romeo and Juliet in the Kimberley Dramatic Society’s Christmas entertainment at the church hall, except that Barney had to play his part every single day, and with unflagging good humour, through thunderstorms and winds and droughts and days when the flies swarmed as thick as currants in a cake. His ambition depended on it.

  During Agnes’s play, he sat on a folding chair at the very back of the hall, his head lifted so that he could see over all the hats. Few men in Kimberley were in the habit of taking their hats off indoors, or even when they bathed, and some were known to keep them on even when they visited a prostitute. ‘You only take your hat off to a lady, after all.’ Barney thought how charming and spun-sugary Agnes looked, in her white diaphanous Juliet dress and her blonde hair plaited into medieval horns. And when she said clearly, ‘I, a maid, die maiden-widowed,’ he felt so affected that he had to go outside, and take a few deep breaths in the sweltering night air. He had lost her, charming and pretty as she was, and he knew that she would never have him back again. Wrong background, old chap. Sorry. The English had won an Empire by saying ‘sorry’.

  ‘Bored?’ a voice asked him, out of the shadows.

  Barney frowned. It was a girl’s voice, and it was familiar. ‘Faith?’ he asked. ‘Is that you?’

  She emerged from the darkness of the church hall porch into the misty light of the pressure-lamp which hung by the door. She was wearing a pale turquoise evening-dress, and turquoise gloves, and her hair was tied up in dozens of tiny turquoise ribbons. Behind her, the moths plattered against the lamp, and there was a shower of applause from the audience.

  ‘Actually, I came out to look at the stars,’ said Faith. ‘I’ve had more of Romeo and Juliet in two months than most people can stomach in a life-time. Agnes has been practising her lines every night since September. But soft! What light at yonder window breaks!’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Faith smiled. ‘That’s a line from the play. I think I’m even beginning to recite it in my sleep.’

  ‘I’m surprised you’re still talking to me,’ said Barney. ‘You’re not worried you might catch something, like a liking for matzo balls, or a chronic inability to work on Saturdays?’

  ‘Jews have never worried me, I’m afraid,’ said Faith.

  ‘I see. Only your father and Agnes dislike us, is that it?’

  ‘Agnes doesn’t mind Jews either. She was only upset because she thinks you made a fool of her.’

  ‘I guess I did, in a way. It was my own fault. I thought that if everybody took me for a goy, I’d stand a better chance of making a success of my business.’

  ‘Well, you’re right, of course,’ smiled Faith, rather absently, patting at her ribbons.

  ‘I used to believe I was right,’ Barney told her. ‘But these days, I don’t think it matters a damn if you play billiards at the Kimberley Club or not. As long as you work hard, and make money, who cares?’

  Faith nodded. ‘I only wish people didn’t care. But they do. Well, the sort of people that I mix with do.’

  ‘The people that you mix with don’t strike me as particularly pleasant or particularly tolerant or even particularly successful,’ said Barney, sharply.

  ‘No, I suppose they wouldn’t. Strike you as any of those things, I mean. But … they all went to the right school. And they all belong to the right club. And they’ve all seen service in the right regiments. And he who hath fagged at Eton, and been commissioned in the Blues … yea verily, success and financial ease shall follow him all of his days.’

  Barney said, ‘It takes an exception to prove a rule.’

  ‘And you’re going to be the exception?’

  He looked at her. She was a handsome girl, quite broad-shouldered, with a generous figure. He could not understand why she was not married; or perhaps he could. Out of all the English-girls he had met since he had come to South Africa, she was the only one with a distinct and uncompromising personality. He knew that she liked botany, and walking, and collecting African artefacts; and maybe all of that was why the gentlemen of Kimberley stayed politely away. They expected from their womenfolk a very special combination of fortitude and subservience, a mixture of durability and feminine fragility. If a women could reload a Lee Enfield under ferocious attack from kaffirs, and still blush furiously at an inadvertent mention of turkey breasts at table; if she could give birth to children in a strooidak hut in 110-degree heat, and still flirt and coo when her husband came home from the diamond office; if she could wield a hammer and nails during the day, and then patiently allow her husband to go out gambling and drinking at night on his own; then a Kimberley man would propose without a moment’s hesitation.

  Faith was not that kind of a girl, and that was why nobody had asked her.

  Barney said, ‘I’m going to be rich one day. That’s all I can say. And those snobbish friends of yours will tip their hats to me in the street.’

  ‘I hope they do.’

  There was a silence between them. The moths pit-pattered on the lamp. From inside the hall, they could hear nothing but the distorted voice of Juliet’s nurse, bewailing her charge’s death.

  ‘When are they going to be married?’ asked Barney.

  ‘Who?’

  He nodded towards the church hall doors. ‘Those two. Robert and Agnes.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. They’re talking about April.’

  ‘Does she love him?’

  Faith smiled at him, and nodded. ‘I think so. He’s just her type. All wavy hair and no intellect.’

  ‘You sound like you don’t approve.’

  ‘Oh, I approve. Anything to keep Agnes entertained.’

  Barney laughed. Then he said, seriously, ‘Do you think your father would object if I asked you to step out with me? There’s a cello recital next week, just after Christmas.’

  ‘Me?’ asked Faith. ‘No, you can’t ask me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘What do you mean, “because”?’

  She lowered her eyelashes. ‘Because you would probably hurt me, in the end. I asked you to accompany me to church one day, remember? And what hap
pened then? I wasn’t hurt much. Please don’t think that I was. But if I started to step out with you, then I would undoubtedly and quite ridiculously lose my self-control, and then I would lose you, too, and that would be rather more than I could tolerate.’

  Barney reached out and took her hand. There were three strings of pearls around her gloved wrists, and they shone as pale as solidified tears.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he told her. ‘All I want to do is take you out to a cello recital.’

  She gave a sad, small smile. ‘One think leads to another in my life. A cello recital would lead to a symphony; and I can’t bear symphonies. They always have such melodramatic endings. They make me cry.’

  ‘Faith –’

  ‘Let’s be friends,’ she whispered. ‘When we meet in the street, let’s pass the time of day. Let’s have coffee together, when we can. One day perhaps I’ll show you my botany book. I have some lovely drawings of acacias.’

  ‘Acacias?’ he asked her, as if he could not understand what she meant.

  That had been a year and a half ago, and he had only talked to Faith twice since then. Once in the street, when they accidentally met on the boardwalk, and once at a concert, when a stentorious singer called Daniel Napier had bellowed out thirty British patriotic songs, one after the other, without pausing for breath.

  Barney liked Faith. He trusted her, and there were many times during those four years of kopje-walloping when he felt he could have proposed to her, and married her, if only Mr Knight would have allowed him. But as time went by, he began to understand that it would have been a mistake, and that Faith’s estimation of their probable effect on each other was quite right. He would only have hurt her, in the end. He would only have made her cry.

  He saw Mooi Klip once or twice a month, whenever Alsjeblieft decided it was time for them to plod up to Klipdrift. Mooi Klip’s mother and father lived in a neat, white-painted strooidak house not far from the bend in the river, among a whole community of Griquas. They were quietly but firmly protective of Mooi Klip, and especially of Pieter, and whenever Barney arrived to see them, they would wait in the background, their arms patiently folded, and Barney could only talk to Mooi Klip in the most stilted way.