Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  This so encapsulated Dorothy’s own thoughts that she found herself, despite a strict upbringing, gossiping unkindly about Mr. Naryshkin. Stacey was an enthusiastic audience. As Dorothy recounted the various ways in which Mr. Naryshkin had bullied her into violating her aesthetic conscience, Stacey’s spirits rose.

  Neither Barbara Harris nor Cynthia Carmichael had ever, even at the height of their social toleration, treated Dorothy Shabrill with the mischievous amiability Stacey Barol lavished on her as they ate smoked chicken and drank almost a bottle of Sancerre. Dorothy knew that Percy was occupied showing Piet around his mine, and apart from Mr. Naryshkin there was no one in the room she knew, not being as socially adventurous as her husband. This gave her the feeling of freedom inspired by unexpected half holidays in her youth. As she dug viciously into Mr. Naryshkin behind his back, inspired by the way Stacey looked at her as she laughed, she felt drawn to confidences. She did not tell Stacey that she hated South Africa, that the incessant cruelties of daily life necessary to be a citizen of the first rank offended the principles of her happy childhood. But she did tell her that she could no longer live in an ugly house. That Colonial taste, with its slavish adherence to the British fashions of five years ago, depressed her immeasurably.

  Watching Piet at work when his attention was engaged gave Stacey an intense, arousing pleasure. As Dorothy Shabrill spoke, she imagined how she would feel about Piet while he made a house full of furniture for a client wholly under his spell. All the sullen accretion of disappointment and irritation, blended with worry—gone. She enjoyed his carnal attentions in many moods, but when she was delighted with him…Oh, that was quite different. “Now tell me, my dear,” she said. “How much did it all cost?” And Dorothy, with a swish of red wine, told her.

  As they left, Stacey said: “Show me the catalogues you chose from.”

  Dorothy did so. Mr. Naryshkin had pasted into an album of mauve Moroccan leather photographs of each of the pieces the Shabrills had ordered from Hepplewhite’s. Dorothy’s timidity as she turned the pages made Stacey feel solicitous, even as she prepared to wound. “Dearest Dotty.” She sounded so friendly. “What is the point in being rich if one has to have such vulgar things in one’s home?”

  Dorothy had no answer to this question.

  Stacey smiled tenderly, and at this moment she did feel tender. She knew Dorothy was going to do exactly as she wished. “A lady must know when to overrule her husband.”

  —

  “NOW PIERRE,” Percy was saying, as the Packard slowed at a pair of gates topped with barbed wire, “I have one mission today, and one mission only. To help you see that men like us belong on the Rand, where the gold is. Cape Town’s for sissies.”

  Piet said nothing. Percy poked him good-naturedly in the ribs, as the popular fellows had done at school. Unlike his wife, who had been ignored by her classmates, Percy had been disliked. It made him feel anxious around Piet, who was so obviously a man people warmed to. “I’ve a little mine I thought we might look over,” he said.

  The chauffeur opened the door. Piet was hit by a torrent of orange dust. He coughed and put his hat over his mouth. “You’ve failed at the first hurdle, old fellow. Give me fresh mountain air any day, and damn your money.”

  “This is the life of a real man!” Percy banged him on the shoulder.

  They were within a high barbed-wire fence. “Once they’ve signed on the dotted line,” said Percy, linking arms with Piet, “a lot of our chaps think of breaking the contract and heading home. We don’t stand for that. Hence the gates. Occasionally someone slips out or bribes a guard, but not often. And when he does he has nowhere to go.” They stopped outside a low hut made of tin. Behind it were piles of orange earth, shaped into flat-topped pyramids. Piet had a confused sense of railway tracks and winches and cranes, rising and falling, like monstrous insects draining the sap of the earth. The ancient trees on the perimeter, which had once marked the limits of a farm, loomed like ogres. Men were milling about the mine entrance, shirtless mainly, and even the dust did not blunt their smell. The muscles and sinews on their torsos were finely etched; none had an ounce of fat. “It’s vigorous work,” said Percy, “but we give them breakfast and dinner.”

  “What about lunch?”

  “If they want it, they must buy it.”

  “How can they shop if they’re locked in here?”

  “Oh, we have a mine store. A wise man keeps the money close to home.”

  Piet had enjoyed graduating to the aristocracy of race. It was a wonderful thing to live in a country in which no white man except the very poorest demeaned himself by hard manual labour. But he was used to the blacks of the Cape, many of whom had once had the vote; who were now domestic servants, street sellers, messenger boys. The men in Percy’s compound seethed with the energy of caged animals. They watched Percy pass, their expressions unreadable, and turned away as a bell rang.

  “Are you man enough to venture into Hell?” Percy beamed with pride.

  They went down into the Pit.

  The chiseling of the rock made Piet want to scream. When the platform stopped, they entered a cavern and a rush of cool air, released from deep in the rock, caught him unawares; brought with it smells of things long left undisturbed. The drill stopped. “I’ve seen enough, my friend,” he said.

  It had not occurred to Percy that Piet might be claustrophobic. He himself was not—“wouldn’t mind spending a night underground, you see if I wouldn’t,” as he often said at the Rand Club. This chance was too good to miss. “Come along.”

  Piet looked at the narrow tunnel, two feet shorter than he was, wide enough for two men to pass with barrows, into which Percy was sauntering. He did not fancy it. A white foreman had arrived to greet Percy, and Piet felt himself obliged to go forward. He was not a coward, but he did so unwillingly. His carpenter’s eye spelt out every danger. The crossbeam of the second roof support was splintering in three places; had never been strong enough for the weight of so much rock. Everywhere one looked the supports were inadequate, waiting only the slightest tremor to crumble and collapse. “How many injuries do you have here?” he asked the foreman.

  “Oh, not too bad,” said the officer, conscious of Percy’s eye upon him.

  Piet bent low and followed Percy. They went into a small cave, and then into a tunnel. And then it was dark all around except for the light of their gas lamps. Piet thought of the three hundred metres of rock that separated him from the world of air and sky. He thought of Stacey and Arthur—gorgeous, adorable Arthur. He loved the boy with a joyful intensity that deepened with occasional periods of distance—when all he could remember was Arthur’s smell, and the way he laughed when amused; and he forgot that he could sometimes be a pain and make it impossible to nap on a Sunday afternoon.

  “This is a marvellous concern you have here, Shabrill,” called Piet. “Now let me buy you some lunch. And you, Mr. —?”

  “Walmer,” said Mr. Walmer, the foreman.

  “You’ll join us too, won’t you, Walmer? Tell me how this all works.”

  Percy was two bends further on, and went some distance before he realized that his foreman was not following him. He had gone further than he wished, even he who felt no fear, and scampered back with secret relief. When he saw how pale Piet was, his heart soared.

  —

  “WE CAN UNDERCUT that Russian Jew by twenty percent and still make a killing,” said Stacey as they dressed.

  “It’s off, darling. We will not accept money from this man. We will not take the money he makes by such means.”

  “You’ve had a trying day.”

  “Shabrill is a monster.” It was a blessing to be alone with his wife at last. “You should have seen the poor creatures toiling for him. We are not so desperate that we must seek his favour.”

  “I’m afraid we are, my darling.”

  “There are other ways. We’ll go back to Europe.”

  “And do what there, might I ask? Should I be a chorus
girl again, and you a tutor?”

  “Something will come up.”

  “My dearest—” But Stacey’s voice was knife-sharp. “The time for hoping something will come up has passed. It is sweet of you to care so much about the Kaffirs. But the gold will be mined regardless. I have fixed everything. You need only pluck the ripe fruit.” She kissed him. “I’ll wager they’re having a scrap about it at this moment.”

  —

  BUT STACEY WAS WRONG. Percy Shabrill, while blinded by Mr. Naryshkin’s eloquence and apparent cordiality with several grand dukes, was aware in his deepest soul that his wife did not care for the furniture she had endorsed. He loved his little woman ferociously. In vain had he implored her, in the dark of a mosquito-laden night, to tell him if there was anything that did not please her. Again and again she had told him that it was all wonderful, she couldn’t be happier, not possibly, and he had known in his soul it was a lie.

  When Dorothy told him the truth, which was that she wished to send everything back to Hepplewhite’s and order a house full of original objects of art by Barol & Co., he took her in his arms. Her timidity made him feel powerful, and power was Percy’s drug.

  “You women will never cease to astound me, my pussy pie,” he said. “But you are a rich man’s wife now, and you can afford to be capricious.”

  The effects of her wine at luncheon were beginning to lift, and Dorothy felt a pang of guilt at the cost of sending everything back. Then she considered the emotional toll of living with it, and made an accommodation with her conscience. “You are my little man,” she said.

  “And you are my little wifey.” Percy pulled her towards him and touched his lips tenderly against hers. It was a phrase they used with each other. It was their highest compliment.

  They went to the Carlton Hotel, and entered the Lounge just too late to hear Piet say: “Shabrill’s the kind of fool who will get more pleasure by paying double.”

  —

  THEY ATE DINNER and talked and laughed. As soon as the ladies had gone for a stroll in the Conservatory, Piet seized the initiative. “Now look here, Shabrill. Your wife has got it into her head to send all your furniture back to England and commission the whole house from me. My dear fellow, do not think of it. You have been a huge success in Johannesburg, anyone can see that—but you could not possibly afford it.”

  This was exactly the right thing to say. By the time the waiter had filled their brandy glasses for the second time, a bargain had been struck. The sum agreed was so astronomical that Piet had to dig his nails into the flesh of his palms to avoid looking jubilant. “You’ll have to pay up front, Shabrill,” he said. “In case you’re ruined while I make it.”

  Percy fancied himself a shrewd negotiator. “Six hundred pounds now, six hundred pounds on delivery, piece by piece.” And when Piet nodded, as though a great condition had been wrenched from him, his new client, in a gust of spontaneous joy, bellowed: “God save the King!”

  —

  PIET AND STACEY BAROL occupied room 238 of the Carlton Hotel. Their neighbours in 240 had a night of severely interrupted rest. They were a middle-aged German couple and lay awake in single beds, listening. It was a painful experience for them both. There had been a time when Fritz Bayer had inspired such sounds from Klara. He had not done so, he thought, staring at the ceiling, for eight years at least, not since the night—he smiled, and involuntarily reached his hand beyond the coverlet to touch his wife. Her bed was just too far away. A stiffening in her, a sense of unwillingness that communicated itself in infinite ways, made Fritz withdraw his hand.

  On the other side of the wall, Stacey said to Piet: “Let’s go again.”

  They went at it hell for leather, with an abandon that reminded them both of the first time they had made love—in another hotel room. Piet’s victory over Percy Shabrill—their victory—made him feel superb. He stayed hard for four hours and Stacey made full use of him. She did things with her tongue that flooded her husband’s head with endorphins. Sensual rapture made them whole after the anxieties of the last six months. As she lowered herself onto Piet, setting his angle with imperceptible movements, Stacey felt a surge of happiness. They could have a cook and a car and a chauffeur—at the least, she thought, mentally doing the arithmetic as a glowing orgasm built within her.

  “Just…there,” she said.

  By the time dawn broke and Fritz Bayer, who had not slept a wink, got out of bed, they were spent.

  “You shall find me much more responsible in future, my love.” Piet kissed her forehead. She turned on her side. He cuddled up against her, his nose at the back of her neck, where her smell was sweetest. “I know when I’ve had a narrow escape.”

  —

  PIET WENT EARLY to the house. It was icy on the Rand, and the air had a thin beauty. The smell of dust was damped by frost. He took a taxi, expecting to find a night watchman on duty, but in fact the house was buzzing with activity. Mrs. Mafuduka recognized him and let him in.

  Piet walked through the mansion, mentally removing the mauve hangings and papers. Herbert Baker had conceived four substantial rooms on each floor, each open on two sides to a garden, clustered around a magnificent central hall where a double-branched staircase rose to another floor, with another four huge rooms. It was monumental but spare. A space waiting for things to happen in it. Piet began to feel the prickings of an intense euphoric joy—a bubbling of his purest self that had nothing to do with his rescue from destitution. It was the joy of an artist presented with a blank canvas. He wandered the empty house as the sun rose. He began to see shadows of the drawings he would make, that would one day become furniture. He resolved then and there to copy nothing.

  He was standing in the centre of the upstairs hall, with his eyes closed, when Dorothy Shabrill coughed to announce herself. He turned to her. He felt full of love for her.

  “Dotty,” he said. “When you came on that ship, did you ever imagine what would happen?”

  It was the first time Piet had used her first name.

  “Nothing I thought would happen happened,” she said.

  They spent five hours together. Piet paid such attention to what she said that Dorothy was able to access her own intelligence, too often shut down by shyness. He let her opinions direct the thoughts of his highly creative mind. Together they settled on a subject, inspired by Percy’s toast at their first dinner: This Marvellous Country. Furniture inspired by the natural treasures, the fauna and flora, of South Africa.

  “Percy will love it,” said Dorothy. “He wants to go to Parliament.”

  When she really had to go, because she had a tea she could not cancel, she went with twenty sheets of sketching paper clasped in her hand, each bearing the wisp of an idea. Piet stumbled into the garden. His head was full of glorious dreams.

  The marble terrace announced its owner’s wealth in no uncertain terms. Piet was sobered by it. He must honour his promise to Stacey—to make money, by being practical. But how? Mahogany was devilish expensive, yet he could not settle for pine. What he needed was wood of distinction—a lot of it, as cheaply as possible. In this vast country there must be what he sought. He sat on a low whitewashed wall, looking at a rose garden being brought into being. A few feet away, a man in his early twenties was removing aphids from newly potted roses with an expression of blissful absorption on his face. He was clearly alive to the natural world. Piet stood up, went down the stairs into the garden, and joined him.

  “Good day,” he said. “My name is Piet Barol.”

  “Thank you, madam,” said Ntsina Zini.

  The Strange One continued to speak. For the first time Ntsina heard the beauty of the Strange Ones’ tongue, because Piet spoke it gently. Ntsina did not feel afraid. He felt curious to know what this person was saying to him. “Linda apho,” he said, speaking louder than was necessary—as though extra volume could help the white man comprehend. What he meant was: “Wait there.”

  Luvo was most unwilling to get involved. “It is bette
r not to understand what the Strange Ones say,” he said. But Ntsina took him to the Strange One, whom they found crouching on the ground, plucking fat aphids from the plants and squeezing them between his fingers.

  “Good morning, sir,” said Luvo. “My colleague tells me you were speaking to him. I’m afraid he does not understand. I will be honoured to translate.”

  “I was telling him my name,” said Piet. “Which is Piet Barol. And I was asking him his name, and where he comes from.”

  A quickfire exchange of isiXhosa ensued, after which Luvo turned to Piet and said: “His name is Ntsina Zini. He comes from the village of Gwadana, where his grandmother is what the natives call the sangoma. In other words”—it pained him to declare such misguided superstitions—“the witch doctor.”

  “Where is this village?”

  Luvo consulted Ntsina. “At the most easterly extent of the Cape, beyond the great forest.”

  The words “great forest” lifted Piet’s mood further. “Are the trees in this forest good and strong?”

  When Luvo translated this question, Ntsina’s face brightened. He began to talk animatedly. Finally Luvo raised a hand to stop him. “He says the trees are fine, and have many uses among his people.”

  “Who owns this forest?”

  A further consultation ensued, during which an air of puzzlement spread over Ntsina’s face.

  “He says no one can own a forest,” said Luvo.

  A forest full of good trees that no one owned: it was an answer to all Piet’s troubles. “How far is it from Cape Town?” he asked, but his mind was already half made up.

  “More than one thousand kilometres,” said Luvo.