Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘I don’t suppose anybody will come,’ said Sara. ‘Not after the last fiasco.’

  ‘Tell them that I’m going to put the diamond on open view,’ said Barney. ‘Then they’ll come.’

  ‘You mean you’d actually let other people ogle your precious diamond, breathe on it, just for my sake?’ asked Sara, sarcastically.

  ‘Sara,’ said Barney, ‘I’m doing my best to please you. Do you understand?’

  Sara held her breath for a second, and then let it out. ‘Yes, my dear,’ she nodded. ‘I’m terribleh sorreh.’ Her overemphasised accent betrayed the boredom she felt, and the contempt in which any experienced Africa hand would have held a chap who was soft on the natives. Bit of a square peg, don’t-chi-know.

  Barney waited in the bedroom for a moment longer, but by the way in which Joel and Sara sat like children who were impatient for an adult to leave so that they could carry on with their game, he knew that he was not welcome. He said, ‘I’ll go down and tell Kitty to make us a light supper.’

  ‘I’m not eating,’ said Sara.

  Barney looked at her, and then at Joel. He had seen that smug expression on Joel’s face before. ‘In that case, ÿou’ll just have to sit there and watch me, won’t you?’ he said. ‘I’ll have Horace ring the gong when it’s ready.’

  He left the bedroom, leaving the door slightly open behind him. At the far end of the landing, in the shadows, he saw Nareez. The Indian amah had slipped away before he could say anything, but her perfume lingered on the stairs like an unsettling memory.

  ‘I never thought that clergymen could cook,’ said Mooi Klip, sitting back in the cheap varnished armchair by the frosted-glass oil-lamp.

  ‘It wasn’t much, I’m afraid,’ said Hugh. ‘Boiled beef and onion dumplings is really about my limit. Would you care for some tea, to follow it? Or coffee?’

  ‘Later,’ said Mooi Klip. ‘Come and sit next to me. You’ve worked so hard to make everything nice.’

  ‘I was a bit worried about the onion dumplings,’ Hugh told her, frowning back at the remains of their dinner on the small dining-table. ‘I’ve only made them for myself before, and of course when you’re cooking for yourself you don’t worry too much if things turn out rather odd. They weren’t odd, were they?’

  ‘No,’ smiled Mooi Klip, taking his hand. ‘They weren’t odd at all.’

  Hugh looked pleased, and dragged across one of the dining-chairs so that he could sit beside her. They had a special closeness now, Hugh and Mooi Klip. They had gone out on picnics together with Pieter, sitting on top of the small hay-coloured hills around the valley at the Vaal River, while clouds puffed past them like the steam from unseen trains, and the air had grown so hot that they had been unable to do anything but stay under their wide parasol and watch each other perspiring. They had gone to a fancy-dress dance run by the Presbyterians. They had walked hand-in-hand, and talked, and once they had gone all the way out to see Coen Boonzaier on his farm, and he had been quite friendly and cheerful, and offered Hugh a suck at his pipe.

  Hugh had declined, but with a smile.

  Now, with Elretha gone for the night, Hugh had invited Mooi Klip around for one of his home-cooked dinners, and he had decorated the table with wild flowers, and carefully set out his mother’s antimacassars as napkins.

  Mooi Klip said, ‘Will you stay here for the rest of your life? In Griqualand, I mean?’

  ‘It depends on my bishop, rather,’ said Hugh. ‘But I wouldn’t have thought that he would have made me stay here for ever. I would love to take you back to England with me, and Pieter too. Kennington can be very pleasant, you know, in the summer. And I’m sure mother would adore you.’

  Mooi Klip looked at Hugh fondly. She reached out to touch his face, to show him how affectionate she felt towards him; but he caught her hand first, and squeezed it tight. Rather too tight: she said, ‘Ow,’ and he hastily let go.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not very good at this,’ said Hugh. ‘But when I say that I want to take you back to England with me, well, the truth is that I do. The truth is, Natalia, that I’ve been thinking about this for weeks now, and I want most desperately to marry you, to make you my wife. The truth is, that I love you most awfully.’

  Mooi Klip did not appear to be at all surprised. She simply smiled at him, and said, ‘Hugh … you have always been good to me.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ he said, flustered. ‘It’s my job to be good to people. It’s what I get paid for.’

  Mooi Klip shook her head. ‘How could your stipend cover all of the affection that you have shown me, and all the understanding that you have given me, and how fatherly you have been to Pieter? It can’t. Not twenty years of your stipend could do that. What you have been to me, Hugh, nobody could ever have saved up enough money to pay for.’

  ‘Stipend, eh?’ remarked Hugh, furiously scratching at his leg. ‘That shows you’ve been walking out with a clerical fellow!’

  ‘Hugh,’ said Mooi Klip, ‘I want to be honest with you. I don’t ever want to lie to you.’

  ‘Well, no, of course,’ said Hugh. ‘You can’t possibly have any kind of a marriage if you lie, if you’re not completely straight. Quite right.’

  ‘Barney Blitz will always remain as the man I loved the most,’ Mooi Klip told him, with infinite gentleness. ‘It happened that way, I don’t know why. Each of us brought out the best in each other. Barney made me feel like a woman, but he also made me feel strong. He protected me, but he didn’t keep me on a chain. He was jealous, but he gave me freedom. He was a warm lover and a good friend.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hugh, white.

  Mooi Klip reached out for Hugh again now, and held his right hand between both of hers. ‘What I want you to know, Hugh, is that neither time nor the love of anybody else can ever make me forget what Barney was to me. It is a fact of what I am. I can never forget. But I am sensible enough and feminine enough to know that I can never have him back, and that I cannot live without a man beside me for ever. I love you, Hugh. Not the same way that I loved Barney. But I love your friendship, and how gentle you are, and I love to see Pieter playing with you and calling you by your name. If you can take me as I am, knowing that I still have a deep-buried love for someone else, then I promise you that I will always be a good wife to you, and that I will love you and care for you and honour you. If you really want me to marry you, Hugh, then all I can say is yes.’

  Hugh was so overcome that the tears sprang into his eyes, and he was incapable of saying anything. He stood up, and then he sat down again. Then he went across the room, and let out a peculiar noise, like a sneeze and a sob mixed up.

  ‘I’m so delighted,’ he said. ‘I’m so delighted I could cry.’

  Mooi Klip smiled. ‘You look as if you’re crying already.’

  ‘What?’ he said, a little fiercely, wiping his eyes. ‘Why should I cry when you’ve just made me feel so happy? Natalia! I can scarcely believe it! My dear Natalia, I love you so much!’

  Mooi Klip stood up, and Hugh took her into his arms. ‘I feel quite extraordinary,’ he said. ‘But I feel as if God approves! In fact, I’m sure He does! I can serve Him equally well as your husband as I could as a single man. In fact, I can probably serve Him better.’

  He kissed Mooi Klip, at first with great tenderness, so that the sound of their lips was as moist and as quiet as the opening wings of a newly-formed butterfly. But then he held her tight, as close as he possibly could, and he was trembling with the excitement of her. They kissed again and again, saying nothing, their eyes closed, and Mooi Klip lifted her hands like a blind girl to touch his face, to feel his hair and his cheeks and the curve of his lashes.

  At last, Hugh opened his eyes, and looked at her. ‘There is a great deal that you are going to have to teach me,’ he told her, in an unsteady voice. ‘I am a knowledgeable man, in my way; but I am also an innocent one.’

  She did not speak, but took his wrist and led him towards the door. He hesitated at first, with a ques
tioning expression on his face, but then she said, ‘Come,’ so warmly and so softly that he followed her.

  The bedroom was crowded with shadows. An engraved-glass lamp burned low on the chiffonier beside the bed, its flame dipping from time to time in the slight draught that blew from the slightly-open window. The bed itself was as plain as a bed could be: unvarnished oak, dovetailed and pegged, and spread with a patchwork comforter of paisleys and chintzes and dimity. On the wall above the head of the bed was a lurid lithograph of the Garden of Gethsemane. Hugh turned to Mooi Klip in obvious indecision, his voice breathless. ‘You are the first woman who has ever been in here, apart from Elretha.’

  ‘You’re afraid?’ asked Mooi Klip.

  ‘I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I said that I wasn’t. And I’m not at all sure that we shouldn’t wait until we’re married. It’s really wrong, you know, to –’ He stopped, and then ‘Well,’ he said, in a very low voice, ‘it’s technically fornication.’

  ‘Are you committed to me?’ Mooi Klip whispered.

  ‘You know I am,’ said Hugh.

  ‘I am committed to you, too. I wouldn’t have come here tonight if I hadn’t been, because I knew that you were thinking of asking me to marry you. If I hadn’t have been committed to you the thought of going to bed with you wouldn’t even have entered my mind.’

  ‘I know,’ Hugh worried, ‘I know. But it still seems so sinful.’

  Mooi Klip lowered her eyes. ‘We’ll wait, then, if that’s what you feel we ought to do. You are a man of God, after all.’

  She went to the bedroom door and opened it again. Hugh stayed where he was, his face bursting with pent-up emotion, his fists squeezed tight. Just as she was turning away towards the sitting-room, he shouted out, ‘No!’

  Mooi Klip looked back at him. In a gentler, less controlled voice, he said, ‘No. I don’t want to wait, however sinful it might be. I will just have to ask for God’s understanding of how much I love you. Do you hear me? I don’t want to wait. I can’t, a moment longer.’

  Slowly, Mooi Klip came towards him and took both of his hands. ‘Is there a word for how you feel?’ she asked him.

  ‘A word?’ he frowned.

  ‘That’s how I learn, by asking people how they feel.’

  Hugh laughed, rather desperately. ‘Well, I can only think of one word, and that’s turbulent. I am the original turbulent priest.’

  They kissed again, a slow kiss that seemed to Hugh to take whole hours, hours in which pictures from old postcard albums appeared and faded in his mind; the Oval at Kennington, the horse-drawn buses clustered around Piccadilly Circus; the divinity school at Caterham; and then the views of West Africa and the Cape of Good Hope; and the grass huts; and the heat-distorted deserts; and the naked Hottentot women with gold bangles around their arms. The nude child in the alleyway.

  Mooi Klip let him go, and then sat down on the bed. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘it will be beautiful. Come on.’

  Clearing his throat as if he were just about to begin a sermon, Hugh stepped forward and started to unbutton her dress at the back. Mooi Klip sat still and graceful while he lowered the dress down to her waist, and while he bent forward to kiss her shoulders. ‘What do I do now?’ he asked her, anxiously. ‘I’m not very good when it comes to women’s clothes.’

  ‘Here,’ she smiled, and held up the pale blue silk ribbons of her white cotton bodice. Hugh cautiously tugged them, and her bodice slipped down to one side, baring her breast.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Hugh, and reached out to touch her with shaking fingers. Her nipple knurled and stiffened, and she touched his cheek in return, and kissed him.

  Together, clumsily but lovingly, they took off their clothes. Soon Hugh was lying on his back on the comforter, his face and hands red from the sun, his body white, while Mooi Klip knelt beside him, stoking the dark crucifix of hair on his chest, and humming to him one of those haunting and repetitive Griqua songs that you can never remember and never forget. ‘Their music is like a sad cry on the wind,’ Hugh Ransome told the Bishop of Bath, years later.

  ‘I love you,’ said Hugh, intensely. ‘I can’t even begin to describe to you how much.’

  Mooi Klip pressed her finger to her lips. In silence, he watched her hand as it coursed through the thicker hair on his stomach, and at last clasped the stiffness of his erection. She stroked him tantalisingly, up and down his virgin penis. Then she rose up on her knees, her large breasts swaying, and mounted him, sitting down on him as slowly as she could, so that he could feel very single tenth of an inch of himself as he was gradually deflowered.

  ‘Natalia,’ he breathed. ‘Oh Christ Jesus, Natalia …’

  He climaxed almost straight away, but she stayed where she was, smoothing his chest with her hands, touching his nipples, kissing him, soothing him, until he began to uncurl himself again, and rise.

  They made love three times before the chiming clock in the sitting-room told them that it was ten o’clock, and time for Mooi Klip to leave. She climbed off the bed, and took her dress from the back of the bedroom chair, and quickly buttoned herself up. Hugh lay where he was, his hands laced behind his head, watching her unwaveringly, as if he were quite convinced that she would vanish through the whitewashed wall, like a ghost.

  She leaned over the bed and kissed his forehead. ‘I hope you’re at peace,’ she murmured.

  He kissed her back. ‘I’m at peace with myself, and I’m at peace with you, and I’m at peace with God. Only God could have given me such ecstasy as that. Only God could have brought you here. Natalia, you are the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.’

  ‘Shall I come round tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll come round to you. I promised Pieter that I’d try to finish that kite.’

  ‘What about the wedding?’ she asked.

  ‘I shall have to write to the bishop, of course. But there is no reason at all why we shouldn’t be married by the end of February. I’ll receive an increased stipend, too, you know. Not a fortune, by anybody’s standards, but enough to keep us both in moderate comfort.’

  ‘As long as we have enough of your boiled beef and onion dumplings, I shan’t mind,’ smiled Mooi Klip.

  Hugh wrapped himself up in his comforter like a very white-skinned visiting sheikh, and escorted Mooi Klip to the door. She said, ‘Don’t come out on to the verandah. You know how much people gossip in Klipdrift. I wouldn’t want to spoil your reputation.’

  ‘You’ll be safe walking home?’

  ‘Of course. Goodnight, Hugh. My love.’

  He gave her one last kiss. ‘I think I shall sleep better tonight than I have for twenty-nine years.’

  Hunt was at his most waspish when he came around for dinner on Thursday evening: he told a complicated and decidedly off-colour story about a diplomat in Capetown who had attended a reception for the French Ambassador dressed as Marie Antoinette, with two wriggling black monkeys crammed down the front of his borrowed gown for a bosom. Barney found Hunt inexpressibly irritating, and he sat at the head of the dining-table petulantly toying with his chicken casserole and wishing that he had never invited him. But Joel, who had swung his way downstairs on his crutches like a human pendulum, and who was now sitting opposite Hunt with his stump firmly wedged against the table-leg, thought Hunt was perfect, and kept calling him his ‘pitseleh’, his little baby. Sara appeared to enjoy Hunt’s company, too, although from the way she looked at Barney whenever she laughed, her eyes sparkling and hard, Barney felt pretty sure that she was exaggerating her amusement just to annoy him.

  ‘The funniest thing that I’ve ever seen in all of my years in the colonial service was Sir Bottled Beer trying to lower the flag on the back lawn of Government House, and tugging at all the wrong strings,’ said Hunt. ‘The flag became so hopelessly entangled at the top of the mast that they had to send a kaffir shinning all the way up to the button with a pair of scissors, so that he could cut it free. Poor old Sir Bottle went storming inside and wouldn’t co
me out of his office for a week.’

  ‘You do sound as if you have an amusing life,’ said Sara. ‘I’m absolutely dying to go to Capetown, but of course we’re so busy here, aren’t we, Barney?’

  ‘Desperately busy,’ put in Joel. ‘We have to supervise the sunrise and the sunset, and we have to count all the shovels at the end of the day in case any of the kaffirs have tried to smuggle them home in their loincloths; and then we have to decorate this mausoleum of a house in case anybody more important than a member of the Board for the Protection of Mining Industries decides to pay us a visit. It’s a full life, pitseleh, I can assure you.’

  Hunt, with a mouthful of grapes, glanced mischievously along the table to where Barney was sitting, and giggled. ‘They’re teasing you, Barney. But I can’t say I blame them. You’re not the same chap you used to be, when I first met you. You were hopeful, then, weren’t you? Hopeful and happy. Or as near to happy as anybody can ever be when they’re Jewish and penniless at the same time. It’s this diamond. It’s made you morose. I’ve heard they do that, you know. They’re really rather depressing stones, when all’s been said and done.’

  ‘And I suppose the only way to shake off this moroseness is to sell it to you?’ asked Barney, finishing off his glass of wine.

  ‘Of course,’ said Hunt, winking at Joel. ‘You’d be a million pounds better off, and you’d be rid of whatever baleful influence that stone has been having on you. Where’s your sense of fun, old boy? You’ve been chasing that same forkful of food around and around your plate for the past twenty minutes, and you look about as cheerful as a choirmaster in a nunnery.’

  Sara said airily, ‘It’s no use trying to persuade him. He’s quite determined to handle this diamond on his own, even if it makes him no money whatsoever. It’s his upbringing, I suppose. Poverty affects different people in different ways; but it’s evidently made Barney a hoarder. You know, like those old tramps you see with paper parcels packed with rubbish and pieces of string.’