Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  Sara closed her sapphire-painted eyelids, her lips slightly parted, and sighed as softly as the wind. Barney kissed her neck, and felt that he desired her and loved her more than anyone; which at that moment, on the lawns of Khotso, may well have been right.

  They were married within three weeks, while the bells of St Paul’s Church in Durban rang above their heads, and Mrs Sutter scattered rice, and the amateur brass band of the Durban Colonial Office played The British Grenadiers five times over, in dogged discord. Later, they went to the Oxford Road synagogue, where they were married again by a rabbi. This time, according to tradition, Mrs Sutter threw barley, and wept twice as copiously. She said she was pleased, though, that Sara had not had her head shaved, and adopted a shaytl, or wig. ‘My great-grandmother wore one, and all I can remember about it is that it looked like a lopsided loaf of bread.’

  In bed on their wedding-night, in the purple velvet-hung guest bedroom at Khotso, they made love in silence, their breath as quiet as the birds that slept in the branches of the coral trees. For a moment, they held each other so tight that Barney did not know if they were one person or two. Then Sara kissed him matter-of-factly on the forehead, and struggled to pull her nightdress down.

  ‘You don’t want more?’ Barney whispered, kissing her cheeks, and her eyes, and her lips.

  She hesitated before answering. Then she said, ‘Well, it’s all very well, isn’t it? But it’s not everything.’

  Barney stayed where he was for a moment, leaning on his elbows. Sara lay absolutely still, watching him.

  ‘We’re married now,’ he told her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it jolly?’

  He dipped his head forward and kissed her once more. Then he rolled over on to his back and lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the dark drapes of the four-poster bed.

  She reached over and pressed her lips against his ear. ‘I do love you, you know, Barney. I do love you an awful lot.’

  He turned and looked at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I love you, too.’

  There was a fragrance of Mansion House pot-pourri in the air, and Sara sneezed.

  Early the next morning, Barney woke up and found Sara’s face only an inch away from his. Her mouth was open, and she was snoring softly. He looked at her for a long time, at the way her dark hair curled on the broderie-anglaise pillow, at her long shining eyelashes. She was a beautiful girl by anybody’s lights, and he touched her cheek with his fingertips as gently as a man touches anything precious.

  The French clock on the commode said a quarter to eight. He eased himself out of bed, and padded naked across the room to the wardrobe, where his clothes had been hung. He struggled into a pair of sharply-creased trousers, and a white shirt, and buttoned up his suspenders. Then he quietly left the room, and tip-toed along the corridor until he reached the stairs.

  It was only when he reached the morning-room that he realised that somebody else had been up before him. The French windows were open on to the dewy lawns, and Gerald Sutter was standing by the sundial in a lavish Chinese dressing-gown, smoking a pipe. Barney ventured out after him, and stood a little way away, his slippers stained by the wet grass.

  ‘Up early,’ remarked Gerald Sutter, taking his pipe out of his mouth and prodding at the tobacco with his finger.

  ‘I just wanted a little fresh air,’ said Barney. ‘I think I drank too much champagne yesterday.’

  ‘Well, you’re entitled, on your wedding-day. Come to think of it, you’re entitled whenever you please.’

  ‘I want to thank you for a marvellous wedding. Well – two marvellous weddings.’

  ‘Don’t give me any credit for the ceremony at the synagogue. That was all my wife’s affair.’

  ‘It was appreciated, all the same.’

  ‘Good. Good show.’

  Barney said, ‘I just want to tell you that I love Sara very much, and I think we’re going to be very happy together.’

  ‘Excellent. I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll come out to Kimberley to visit us soon,’ suggested Barney.

  Gerald Sutter swung around with his pipe in his mouth and gave Barney the sort of puckered-up look that Englishmen tend to give everybody who says anything nice, but manifestly silly. ‘Very decent of you, old chap, but I must say I’m pretty much tied up in Durban. A shipping line to run, don’t you know.’

  ‘It’s very exciting out there. The Kimberley mine is worth a visit.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it is,’ said Gerald Sutter, in a tone that implied that he supposed it was not, not for the least moment.

  There was an uncomfortable silence between them for almost a minute. Then Barney said, ‘Well, I’d better be going back in.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ replied Gerald Sutter, without taking his pipe out of his mouth.

  ‘I’ll see you at breakfast, then,’ said Barney.

  ‘Good show. Kedgeree today, I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘Good,’ said Barney, and found himself back inside the house, at the foot of the staircase, suddenly uncertain of what he was doing here. I’m married, he thought to himself. A wealthy, well-heeled, properly married man. I might even have children in a year or so.

  A Bantu servant walked past him, bearing a silver dish of steaming kidneys. Barney nodded to the servant without knowing why. For a moment he felt just like the small boy who had hidden under the summertime pushcarts of Hester Street, playing house with Leah Ginzburg.

  The breakfast gong sounded, as if it were ringing in the start of his new life.

  ‘Mr Blitzboss!’ called Gentleman Jack, when he was still more than a hundred yards away. ‘Mr Blitzboss!’

  Joel shifted himself around on the woven chair that he had dragged out on to the bungalow’s verandah, his face tight with pain. His leg had given him a difficult night, and now he was sitting out in the early sunlight with a bottle of whiskey and two packets of Dover’s powders, trying to ease the cramps which crawled up and down his left thighbone like incandescent crabs. His drugs were running low, and that did nothing to improve his temper.

  ‘What are you getting yourself so excited about?’ he asked irritably, as Gentleman Jack slid off his dusty horse and tethered it quickly to the rail. ‘Can’t a man drink his breakfast in peace?’

  ‘Mr Blitzboss – eureka!’

  ‘What are you talking about, you damned black dressed-up monkey?’

  ‘Eureka, Mr Blitzboss. Nothing less! Absolutely eureka!’

  Joel ran his fingers through his straggly hair. His years of suffering had turned him grey, and he had a wide bald patch which he usually tried to cover up by brushing his hair straight back. This morning, though, he had not tried to conceal it. He had nobody to impress but himself.

  ‘Just pass me that bottle, will you?’ he said, reaching out his hand. ‘I haven’t slept all night with this damned thighbone of mine. And losing fifty pounds to you at poker hasn’t made me feel any better, either.’

  ‘Don’t worry about the bottle, sir,’ said Gentleman Jack. ‘Here – look at this!’

  He tugged out of his pocket a greasy leather rag which the kaffirs used to protect their hands when they gripped hold of the steel winding-cable. He laid it on the wicker-topped table, and unfolded it. One flap, two flaps, and there it was. A huge rough stone, still half-embedded in Kimberlite, measuring more than an inch by three-quarters of an inch by an inch. Most of the stone’s surface was covered in dull and pitted earth, but at one corner the earth had been knocked off, and the translucent point that emerged from it was immediately recognisable as diamond.

  Joel stared at it for a very long time in absolute silence. Gentleman Jack watched him, panting slightly from his hard ride, his expression fixed in an irrepressible grin.

  ‘Give me the bottle,’ Joel said at last. Gentleman Jack handed it over, and Joel poured himself a full tumbler of whiskey. He drank two or three mouthfuls, and gagged. Then he set the tumbler down, and continued to stare at the stone on th
e table as if he expected it to move, or to speak to him, or to disappear in front of his eyes.

  ‘This is a joke,’ he declared. ‘Edward Nork put you up to this. Edward Nork and Champagne Charlie. This is a melted-down lump of wine bottle, that’s what that is, covered in mud.’

  ‘Certainly not, Mr Blitzboss,’ said Gentleman Jack, vigorously shaking his head. ‘Absolutely not. That stone we found fifteen minutes ago, on the claim No. 202. The kaffir they call Ntsanwisi dug it up with the point of his pick.’

  Joel, wincing, leaned forward and examined the stone more narrowly. ‘You’re sure? You’re telling me the truth? Because, by God, if you’re not, then I’m going to tie you up by your balls and let the vultures peck your stupid brain out. I’m not in any kind of a mood for jokes.’

  ‘This is no joke, Mr Blitzboss,’ Gentleman Jack protested. ‘This stone was found just like I’ve told you.’

  At last, cautiously, Joel picked the stone up, and felt the weight of it in his hand. ‘This is enormous,’ he said. ‘It can’t be diamond. No diamond comes this big. Have you ever seen a real diamond, this big?’

  ‘Not me, Mr Blitzboss.’

  ‘Give me your knife,’ said Joel. He took Jack’s penknife, opened it up, and scraped away at the dry Kimberlite on the sides of the stone. Jack continued to grin as little by little. Joel laid bare the dull, ground-glass facets of what looked exactly like a giant diamond. At last, when most of the earth had been picked and worried away, Joel gave the stone a perfunctory rub with the leather cloth, and laid it down on the table again.

  Rough and wrinkled as it was, the stone possessed a shine so extraordinary that it made Joel’s skin tingle just to look at it. Beneath its surface, it seemed to be harbouring a magical brilliance, a brightness as sharp and dazzling as a star, and whichever way Joel turned it, he caught glimpses of rainbows and scimitars, sequins and teardrops. It was a diamond – inconceivably large, impossibly beautiful, and probably worth more on the open market than everything that Joel had ever owned in his whole life – clothes, books, rings, hats, shoes, horses, and oxen. For more than 100 million years, which was the age of the diamond deposits at Kimberley, this stone had held beneath the ground a living fire, an almost animate light, and for all of those 100 million years it had been waiting for release, waiting for the one spectacular moment when it could stun the eyes of anybody and everybody who looked at it. The dealers gave-diamonds names when they were as huge as this one: but Joel could not imagine a name for anything so remote, and so ancient, and so brilliantly cold. It rested eerily on his wickerwork table, this diamond, as if it had silently arrived from another star, and Joel found it impossible to take his eyes away from it.

  ‘It’s a diamond,’ he whispered. ‘It’s an enormous, preposterous, incredible diamond.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Blitzboss,’ said Gentleman Jack.

  ‘Jack – it’s a diamond. Do you see the size of it? Do you see the size of it, jack? It must be – what – three hundred and fifty carats. Three hundred and sixty! Look at the size of it! It’s like a dream! I can’t wake up! Jack, it’s incredible!’

  Gentleman Jack, uninvited, sat down. He wedged his stubby black fingers together like the dovetailed joints of a mahogany bureau, and stared at Joel with serious and intelligent eyes. ‘You know what, Mr Blitzboss? If that stone isn’t flawed, it will probably fetch more than half a million pounds. Maybe more. Maybe a million.’

  Joel nodded. He groped for the whiskey bottle without taking his eyes off the diamond, and splashed out another glassful, wiping the table with his sleeve. ‘Look at it,’ he breathed. ‘Look at that bastard. Three hundred carats, at least. A fortune! Listen – go get me the scales out of the kitchen. Kitty will show you where they are. Go on, hurry, I want to weigh this bastard!’

  While Jack pushed his way into the kitchen to fetch the scales from the Griqua cook Kitty, Joel heaved himself out of his chair, picked up the diamond, and shuffled to the edge of the verandah with it, so that he could hold it up to the sharp morning sunlight. It felt cold to the touch, as a diamond should. He placed it right against his eye, and squinted without focusing into the very depths of it, through the smooth cleaved side where it had probably been broken away from another, larger piece of diamond. Edward Nork had been right about diamonds being formed by the intense heat of subterranean volcanoes: and the devastating force of the eruptions which had driven the diamonds to the surface had often broken and cleaved them. Two large stones of nearly fifty carats each had recently been dug up three hundred yards apart by kaffirs of the British Diamond Mining Company, and it had turned out that they fitted exactly together.

  Inside the diamond, Joel saw white light of a strange quality that he had never seen before, even in some of the highest grade gems that they had dug up. It was tinged with the palest of exquisite lilacs, the colour of the morning sky when the last stars begin to fade. It was like a vision of purity, of unalterable truth. He could have stared at that light all day, until the sun set. He felt as if he could somehow transfer his consciousness into the actual interior of the stone – and that it was somewhere he could feel certain, clear of his intentions, strong, wavering, and true. Inside the diamond there was no pain, no drink, no morphia, no self-betrayal. It was a sharp and celestial world in which whiskey and gambling and pubic lice were unknown. Joel felt that to look inside that diamond was to know for a moment what dying was like. There could be nothing deader than the fused carbon of a diamond: nothing harder, nor more sterile. Yet the dealers talked about a diamond’s ‘fire’, about its ‘life’, and they were right. In the deadest of all gems, the most vivacious of all reflections danced. In a diamond like this, all of his dreams could be resurrected; all of his confusions and his humiliations could be forgotten. This diamond was certainly incarnate, and he knew as he turned it, and turned it, and turned it, that it had to be his.

  Not Barney’s. Not even half Barney’s. But his.

  Gentleman Jack came out with the weighing-scale, a brass balance with an agate fulcrum, and set it on the table. He produced the small brass weights from his pockets, and set them out in a neat line. Joel lowered the diamond and came over to the table with it clenched tight in his hand.

  ‘Feel that,’ he said at last, dropping the stone directly into Gentleman Jack’s outstretched palm.

  ‘It’s warm,’ said Gentleman Jack.

  ‘That’s right. And that’s one of the ways you can tell if it’s a real diamond. It should be cold when you first pick it up, but it should quickly warm up when you hold it.’

  ‘You learned something from Mr Nork, then,’ said Gentleman Jack, a little archly.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about Nork,’ retorted Joel. ‘Balance the scale, and let’s see how much this bastard weighs.’

  It took them a few minutes to adjust the balance and weigh the diamond in the small curved pan. The scales were hardly accurate: Kitty usually used them for weighing out spices and herbs for cooking. But an approximation was all that Joel needed to satisfy his excitement. And when Gentleman Jack carefully lowered on the tiny brass weight that tipped the scales at more than two and a half ounces, Joel knew for certain that at 142 carats to the ounce, the diamond must be well over 350 carats.

  He stood straight, his hands on his hips, and looked at Gentleman Jack triumphantly. ‘Half a million?’ he said. ‘Three-quarters of a million, easily. Maybe a million.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Blitzboss. That’s right.’

  Joel picked the stone out of the scales and walked along the length of the verandah, juggling it in his hand. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘it won’t be worth selling it here, in Kimberley. We’ll obviously have to take it to Capetown. Maybe to Antwerp, or Amsterdam, to have it cut. If you have it cut first, you can ask twice the price.’

  ‘Ascher and Mendel will do it, Mr Blitzboss. Mr Barney made a special arrangement.’

  Joel inclined his head towards the eastern horizon, where the twisted branches of a camelthorn tree still clawed at the early sun.
‘I wasn’t actually thinking of Ascher and Mendel.’

  ‘They’re one of the best, Mr Blitzboss.’

  ‘You’re a Ndebele, Jack. What do you know from diamond cutters?’

  ‘I know the business. Mr Blitzboss. I know Ascher and Mendel by name. Good cutters, that’s what everyone says. Absolutely excellent with difficult stones.’

  Joel gnawed at the side of his lip. Then he said, ‘This Ntsanwisi. Can you trust him?’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Can you trust him, that’s what I mean. Don’t you understand plain English?’

  ‘Better than most white men understand plain Ndebele, sir.’

  Joel limped back down the verandah. ‘What I’m trying to ask you is, will he talk about this diamond? Will he spread it around?’

  Gentleman Jack closed his eyes, and almost imperceptibiliy shook his head.

  ‘You’re sure about that?’ Joel demanded.

  ‘Yes, Mr Blitzboss. Ntsanwisi will never give you trouble. Maybe you should pay him money. Five, six pounds. But he will never talk about this diamond again if you tell him not to.’

  ‘All right. And what about you?’

  Gentleman Jack looked up warily. ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘Yes, you.’

  ‘I don’t understand, sir.’

  Joel held the huge diamond up between his finger and his thumb, turning it in the sunlight so that it shone in soft prismatic colours. ‘If you don’t understand, Jack, let me put it clearly for you. This diamond is mine. It was found when Mr Barney was away, and that makes it mine.’

  ‘Mr Barney is half owner, sir.’

  ‘Maybe. But when this diamond was discovered, who was in charge? Me. And there’s a little saying that goes, “Finders keepers, losers weepers”. Or, “What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve over.” ’

  ‘Mr Blitzboss?’

  ‘Don’t act dumb,’ snapped Joel. ‘We’re going to take this stone to Europe, under some pretext or other, and we’re going to have it cut. Then we’re going to put it on the market at a million pounds and make ourselves rich. And if that doesn’t make any sense to you, then you’re a damn sight more stupid than you look.’