Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You think I wouldn’t consider marrying you? You’re beautiful.’

  She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. ‘You, too, are beautiful. But I must not.’

  She started to get up, but Barney gripped her wrist. ‘I want you to stay with me,’ he insisted.

  Natalia tried to tug herself away, but Barney twisted her arm around and pulled her back on to the blanket. Then he scrambled on top of her, and gripped her between his thighs.

  She stared up at him, panting. ‘I shall cry out,’ she warned.

  Barney bent his head, and kissed her. First, she turned her face away, so that he could only kiss her neck and her cheek. But then she turned back again, with a gasp, and he kissed her full on the mouth. She bit his lips, and he tasted the sharp taste of blood, but he kissed her again, and again. She let out a stifled gasp, and pushed up against his chest.

  Barney was too strong for her. His wide-shouldered boxer’s body was too hard with muscle, too wiry with sinew, and all those months of working on Monsaraz’s farm, all those days of chopping down trees and hammering fences, all those sweaty hours of hefting animal feedbags and heaving balks of timber, all gave his passion the physical power it needed to break its way loose.

  His inhibitions gave way like an earth dam collapsing in front of a winter flood. His religious ethics fell like drowned fences. His respect for his father and his guilt for his mother were both swirled away. There was nothing inside his head but a thundering torrent of released repressions, of lust and anger and love that had never found any expression. His penis was almost painfully rigid, and already quaked with spasms that blinded him to anything but taking Natalia, and to letting go that tension that Agnes Knight had been tightening up inside him all evening.

  He pulled Natalia’s shawl away from her shoulders, and wrenched at the bodice of her mission-school dress. The cotton tore away with a noise that reminded him for one jigsaw-puzzled second of the tailor’s shop on Clinton Street; but then her heavy brown breast was bared, and he clutched it in his hand, a whole handful of softness, with a hard nipple that protruded between his fingers.

  ‘No,’ whispered Natalia, as he squeezed and caressed her bare breast, rolling the nipple between his thumb and his finger. ‘No, I must not.’

  She fought him, but she fought him silently, digging her fingernails into his shoulder, and wrestling her body between his tight-clenched thighs. Yet every twist of her hips aroused him more, and by the time he had gripped her tight enough to be able to pull at his own buttons; the front of his underwear was already wet with his repeated ejaculations of sperm. He said something inside his mind that approached a prayer.

  Frantically, he untangled himself from his combinations, half-standing, half-hopping, to step out of his trousers. Then, naked, he forced himself down on Natalia, and snatched at the hem of her dress.

  She rolled over on to her stomach, kicking at him with her heels; but Barney rolled over with her and pulled up her dress at the back, exposing her bottom.

  ‘Natalia,’ he panted, through clenched teeth. ‘Natalia, please, Natalia …’

  With a muted mewling sound, Natalia tried to wriggle forward on her elbows through the grass. But now Barney seized her thighs, and dragged her back towards him. Forcefully, he parted the cheeks of her bottom with his thumbs, as if he were opening up the twin dusky-coloured halves of a large fruit. Inside the fruit, Natalia’s flesh was glistening and pink, and her pungency aroused Barney even more.

  He wrestled with her, and jabbed at her with his penis. Twice he struck her thigh, and twice she managed to twist herself away. But then he clutched her shoulders, and grabbed at her curls, and pulled her downwards and backwards so that she was forced to sit in his lap, and so that his hardened penis slipped inside her, deep and urgent and swollen with lust that had been confined too long.

  At first, with her back arched, and her muscles as taut and dimpled as a marble by Michaelangelo, Natalia struggled against him. Then, as he thrust into her again and again, his hands grasping her breasts, one breast bare and one breast clothed, she began to struggle with him, until he realised by her trembling and gasps and her little birdlike cries that she wanted him, and that she had probably wanted him right from the beginning. This had not been a rape, but a demand from Natalia to show her just how strong he was prepared to be.

  Towards the end, crouched together in the grass under that diamond-encrusted sky, they were thrusting together, faster and faster, like runners, or racing horses, and Barney’s thighs were anointed with Natalia’s slippery juices. They shuddered together, winced together in ecstatic anguish, grappled with each other for one last moment. Then it was over and they fell away from each other and lay apart on the blankets, each of them seeking breath and balance; each of them re-mapping their lives to take account of the cataclysmic landmark that both of them had just reached.

  In one violent act of love, two destinies had been irrevocably altered. In five minutes, Barney had realised both his strength and his weakness, and what essential tasks now lay before him.

  He grasped Natalia’s wrist, and turned to stare at her. Her face glistened with sweat, and she was holding her one bare breast in her hand, absently fondling the nipple with her fingers, touching it lightly, teasing it. Her thighs were still parted, her sex sparkling in the light like diamonds, like some freshly cut-open eatable at a magical picnic under the clouds of the night.

  ‘Do you hate me now?’ Barney asked her.

  Natalia stared back at him for a moment, and then shook her head.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ said Barney. He sat up, and raked his fingers through his hair. ‘My God, I shouldn’t have done that.’

  He started to look around for his discarded underwear, but Natalia sat up, too, and wrapped her arms round him, holding him close, burying her head in the middle of his naked back.

  ‘I am already married,’ she said. ‘Last year, my husband die. I am so sad without him. I always say – I can never find another man – not like my husband. But you have that same look.’

  Barney could feel her soft curls against his bare back, and the feeling was feminine, and reassuring, and warm. He reached one hand behind him, and touched her head gently. ‘I could love you, Natalia,’ he said, in a tone that almost made it a question, as if he were asking her to tell him that she could love him, too.

  ‘You must call me Mooi Klip,’ she said. ‘That is what my husband always calls me.’

  ‘Mooi Klip?’

  ‘In Afrikaans, it means “pretty stone”. It is what they call the first big diamond.’

  He turned around, and kissed her smooth forehead. She smelled of musky perfume, and Pears soap, and sweat. ‘All right, Mooi Klip,’ he told her. ‘You shall be my pretty stone from now on.’

  They slept together in the blankets until the first wan light of dawn, when the birds began to call across the valley, and the grass rustled in the wind. Then, when Barney was still half-asleep, the girl called Mooi Klip folded back her bed and went to light up a cooking-fire, so that by the time the sun came over the eastern horizon, she was able to bring Barney an enamel mug of hot tea and some warm, doughy bread.

  Barney sat up on his elbow, sipping the tea and munching the bread, while Mooi Klip knelt beside him and watched him with the pleased, proprietorial interest of a new bride.

  Stafford Parker arrived in the Griqua camp at noon, red-faced and white-bearded, and accompanied by his usual entourage of magistrates and diggers and Griqua interpreters. He had not come unheralded: a Griqua boy had run in through the lines of tents about half an hour before, and warned Jan Bloem that he should expect an important visitor. Accordingly, Jan Bloem was standing outside his marquee dressed in his best Sunday suit, while his mother sat not far away in a red plush drawing-room chair which had been a gift from Sir Philip Woodhouse, dressed in an emerald-green promenading gown with a prominent bustle, and smoking a clay pipe.

  Barney had spent most of the morning with Joel, who
had developed a slight fever, and was thrashing around on his cot in a chilly sweat. But when he heard two or three lookout rifles crackle on the ridge, he knew that Stafford Parker was coming, and he left Joel with Mooi Klip while he opened the tent flap and went outside.

  ‘Well, then, how do you do,’ said Stafford Parker, planting himself in front of Jan Bloem with his fists on his hips. It was an aggressive, confident pose, and it reminded Barney of Mr Knight. Barney came closer, so that he was standing only a few feet away from Mrs Bloem’s parlour chair, and close enough to smell her Navy Cut tobacco.

  ‘I do very well,’ smiled Jan Bloem. ‘How do you do?’

  Stafford Parker reached behind him with a peremptory wiggle of his fingers; and one of his magistrates, a thin man with a particularly knobbly nose and a particularly blue chin, handed him a Bible. Parker held it up. and Barney recognised it at once as the Bible from which his Griqua friend Piet Steyn had been giving Joel ‘comfort to the afflicted’. They must have accidentally left it behind on the ground when they cut Joel free from his bonds.

  ‘This Bible,’ said Stafford Parker, with enunciation so clear that it echoed, like the sound of two housebricks being clapped together, ‘this Bible was found in an incriminating place.’

  ‘Ah,’ smiled Jan Bloem. ‘And where would that be?’

  ‘That would be a few hundred yards south of the mine,’ Stafford Parker told him. ‘At the very spot where a convicted diamond-thief was staked out for a sentence of three days, or death, whichever came the sooner.’

  ‘I see,’ Jan Bloem replied, unhelpfully.

  ‘Well, apparently you don’t see,’ snapped Stafford Parker, shaking the Bible as if it were a box of sugar. ‘Because the convicted diamond-thief was illegally released, and given refuge, and this Bible was left behind by whoever it was who let him go.’

  ‘You have proof of that,’ said Jan Bloem, expressionlessly. He turned to smile at his mother, who was relighting her pipe with a great deal of puffing and sucking and waving of matches.

  ‘What proof do I require?’ Stafford Parker demanded. ‘Here is the Bible. The Bible is proof in itself.’

  ‘It may have been dropped on another occasion,’ Jan Bloem suggested. ‘It may have been stolen from its owner, and dropped there as a deliberate red-herring.’

  ‘I don’t care for your mission-school English,’ growled Stafford Parker. ‘And I don’t care for your excuses, either. It says in the flyleaf of this Bible that it belongs to Piet Steyn, and Piet Steyn, as everybody in Griqualand is quite aware, is a second cousin of yours. So if the convicted man is anywhere at all, he is here, with you, and with your mother, and all the rest of your cronies.’

  ‘And what if he is?’ asked Jan Bloem.

  Stafford Parker stared at him with a grim, set, colonial expression. ‘If he is here, my good Mr Bloem, then I shall have the right to cause you more trouble than you have ever had to cope with before. I shall have the right to arrest you personally, and your second cousin, and everybody else in this encampment who has given the fugitive any assistance.’

  Barney came forward now, and rested his hand on the cresting-rail of Mrs Bloem’s chair. The old woman looked up at him curiously, with the face of a benign orang-utan, and nodded with every word he spoke, although she understood no English whatsoever.

  ‘Your fugitive is here, Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘But he is under my care, not Mr Bloem’s, and his release was entirely my responsibility. Nobody here is to blame.’

  Stafford Parker turned and glared at Barney, and then said loudly, ‘I know you. I know your face. I’ve met you before.’

  ‘My name is Barney Blitz. We met at Gong Gong once. You called me a kike.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Stafford Parker brusquely, although Barney could tell that he was embarrassed.

  Barney said, ‘Your diamond-thief, as you call him, was not far away from death. I rescued him as an act of humanity. I also rescued him because I want to challenge your sentence against him – properly and fairly, in a court of law, and in front of a jury of twelve men.’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ retorted Stafford Parker, waving his hand dismissively. ‘He’s already been convicted. His sentence has already been passed. If everybody challenged every sentence I handed down, this place would be chaos.’

  ‘We should arrest you too, you know,’ put in the blue-chinned magistrate, in a sharp Lancashire accent.

  ‘Yes, we should,’ huffed Stafford Parker, although it was clear that he was not going to try it. The everyday needs of law and order in Kimberley were generally satisfied by the trial and punishment of murder, claim-jumping, and diamond smuggling, those three. Any other offences such as rape, or harbouring a fugitive, or public drunkenness, were usually too complicated and confusing to be worth pursuing.

  ‘You can arrest me if you like,’ Barney challenged. ‘But that will only make your miscarriage of justice more serious. I have a lawyer who is willing to make representations on Mr Havemann’s behalf, and I think for the sake of your own reputation you should pay us some heed.’

  ‘A lawyer? What lawyer?’

  ‘A lawyer of considerable reputation, and that’s all I’m going to say.’

  ‘You’re bluffing,’ said Stafford Parker. ‘You’re doing nothing more than playing for time, while Havemann recovers his strength. If I let you appeal, and set a date for a hearing, he’ll be scuttling off to the border as soon as he’s well enough.’

  Barney reached into the pocket of his coat and took out the £212 which Harold Feinberg had paid him for his diamonds. He held the money up, and said, ‘There are more than two hundred pounds here. You can keep them as a bond.’

  Stafford Parker frowned, while his magistrate leaned forward and whispered something in his ear. Then Parker replied, ‘If I take that money, who’s to say that you didn’t bribe me? And why should I hear an appeal anyway? If I agree to hear an appeal, that would only be admitting that I might have been wrong in the first place.’

  ‘Perhaps you were, through no fault of your own,’ said Barney. ‘But could you bear to live for the rest of your life with the death of an innocent man on your hands, all because you were too stubborn to listen to an appeal?’

  Stafford Parker conferred with his magistrate again. ‘I want a good sound jury,’ he said. ‘No Griquas, or foreigners. And no Americans, either.’

  ‘Very well,’ agreed Barney.

  Parker was silent for a moment, pouting, while he thought about Barney’s suggestion. His magistrate waited with obvious unease. Eventually, he said. ‘All right. If you really believe you have a case to be heard, I’ll hear it.’

  ‘Do you want the money?’ asked Barney.

  Stafford Parker shook his head. ‘You can keep your bond. I’m a man of my word, and I hope for your sake that you are, too.’ He raised one rigid finger. ‘Because if you prove to be playing me false, Mr Blitz, I’ll have my dogs on you, and my dogs will chase you through thick and thin, through every part of this colony, just to get at your miserable Jewish guts.’

  ‘Kishkehs, we call them,’ grinned Barney.

  Stafford Parker, however, had already turned on his heel and started to march away up the hillside. Only his followers looked over their shoulders at Barney, and Jan Bloem, and the old orang-utan woman sitting amidst the tents in her red drawing-room chair.

  Jan Bloem thrust his hands into the pockets of his black Sunday suit, and regarded Barney with interest.

  ‘You’re strong today,’ he said, pointedly. ‘How come you’re suddenly so strong?’

  Barney shrugged. ‘Joel’s my brother. I think I’ve found a purpose at last, a purpose that I didn’t have before.’

  ‘Are you in love with somebody?’ asked Jan Bloem.

  Mrs Bloem cackled, and spat tobacco-coloured saliva into the grass. Barney did not answer, but found it impossible to suppress a smile.

  Jan Bloem turned his head and focused his eyes on Natalia Marneweck’s tent. ‘Rik Marneweck was a close, special frie
nd to me,’ he said. ‘I swore to him when he died that I would watch out for his widow.’

  ‘I won’t hurt her,’ said Barney.

  Jan Bloem made a face. ‘You can’t make promises like that. Even Jesus didn’t make promises like that.’

  Late on Saturday evening, a boy came with a message that a re-trial had been set for Monday afternoon, at three o’clock, and that Stafford Parker had already selected a jury.

  ‘He’ll have chosen nothing but Protestant bigots,’ protested Joel, sitting up in bed with a blue china bowl of sosatie that Mooi Klip had made for him. His eyes were circled with dark shadows, and he was still unshaven, but he was much brighter than before, and he was already talking about ways in which he and Barney could make their fortunes in Zanzibar, growing cloves, or in Madagascar.

  ‘That’s precisely what I’d hoped for,’ said Barney. He glanced up at Joel and smiled.

  ‘You’d hoped for Protestants? One of the most damning points Stafford Parker made against me in my first trial was that I was a Jew. A thief by heritage, he said. I’d tried to hide it, of course. You know what they’re like around here. But one of the diggers remembered me from the ship I used to work on; and that was that. Being a Jew was almost enough to have me staked out on its own.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ said Barney, quietly, ‘I was hoping for a Protestant jury. They’ll have a choice, you see, between believing the evidence of a kaffir, a mere black, and giving some credit to a white man, whether he’s Jewish or not. What I’m trying to do here, quite frankly, is play a greater prejudice off against a lesser prejudice.’

  Joel scooped up the last of his sosatie and set the bowl down beside his cot. ‘I always thought you had a good head for business,’ he told Barney. There was admiration in his voice, but also a slight seasoning of jealousy. ‘Maybe I should have insisted that you came along with me from the start.’

  ‘There was Mama,’ said Barney.