Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  Barney stood straight, and held Joel’s shoulders with both hands. ‘How can you talk this way, when you haven’t failed at all? You haven’t let anybody down – you’ve done nothing but succeed. You have a share in one of the richest diamond mines in the whole world. You have a brother who loves you, and a sister-in-law who’s going to love you, too.’

  ‘Your Mooi Klip thinks I’m crazy and cantankerous.’

  ‘Don’t be so crazy and cantankerous. Or course she doesn’t.’

  Joel smiled, and then took hold of Barney’s curls and affectionately shook his head. ‘You’re right. I’ve been acting like a fool. Miserable, sour, and mean, for no reason. And that’s why I’m saying sorry.’

  ‘All right,’ said Barney, gently. ‘You’re sorry. Now, don’t let’s anything more about it. It’s my wedding tomorrow.’

  They shook hands, and gripped each other tightly for a moment. Then Joel said quietly, ‘I’ll see you later. On your wedding-eve,’ and walked off along Kimberley’s main street towards the Big Hole. Barney climbed aboard their ox-waggon, snapped the whip, and steered their two oxen slowly out towards the De Beers mine.

  It was an unusually chilly and windy afternoon. Dust and dry weeds tumbled across the veld, and Barney had to cover his mouth with his necktie. In the distance, he could see wind-devils dancing, and trees waving at him with wild helplessness, like drowning bathers. The sky to the west, from the Vaal River and the distant Kuruman Heuwells, was devastatingly black.

  Despite the wind, he made the De Beers mine in good time. It was at this location that diamonds had first been discovered on Vooruitzigt, and the one-time arable fields were now deeply pitted with trenches and craters. Work had almost been abandoned here for a while when diamonds had been discovered on Colesberg Kopje, but not a bizarre selection of gallows-like winches were swinging the yellow ground out of the deep-dug claims as fast as they were at the Big Hole.

  Barney tethered his ox-waggon, and walked to the rim of the mine. He could see that several of the claims, like his own, were deep in vivid yellow water, and that many of the diggers were doing nothing but sitting around, smoking and drinking and waiting for a couple of days of dry windy weather to evaporate the worst of their floods. But one claim, only a few hundred yards from where he was standing, was being diligently emptied by a noisy clattering steam-pump, and the kaffirs there, although they were ankledeep in water, were at least able to continue shovelling the yellow gravel into their buckets.

  Barney skirted the edge of the diggings until he reached the tent where the owner of this claim was sitting. As soon as he saw him, Barney knew that he should have saved himself a walk. It was Rhodes, sitting on a camp-stool in his cricket clothes, reading Plutarch’s Lives while his kaffirs heaped mountains of sloshy yellow soil all around him.

  ‘Barney Blitz,’ said Rhodes, putting down his book. ‘This is a great pleasure.’

  ‘How are you doing?’ asked Barney, nodding towards Rhodes’ claim.

  ‘Well, quite capital so far,’ said Rhodes, in his high-pitched voice. ‘I average about twenty pounds a day. Do you know I found a diamond of seventeen carats on Saturday, right outside the door of my tent? Just lying there!’

  ‘You should get at least £100 for it,’ said Barney.

  ‘Well, that’s what I thought,’ nodded Rhodes.

  ‘You must be one of the chosen, after all,’ said Barney, with a wry smile.

  Rhodes held up his book. ‘It’s all a question of education, you know. A good education, properly applied, is more compelling than a dozen howitzers. Do you what Pliny the Elder once said?’

  ‘Pliny the who?’

  ‘Pliny the Elder. Born,AD 23, died AD 79. And what he said was, “ex Africa semper aliquid novi”, which means “there is always something new coming out of Africa.” Now, I learned that at school when I was ten, and when my family doctor said I had to go somewhere dry, to help my tuberculosis, I remembered it. So I thought the very best thing I could do was join Herbert in Natal, and aren’t I glad that I did?’

  ‘You must be,’ said Barney. ‘Could I borrow your pump?’

  Rhodes laughed, and kicked his heels like a small boy. ‘I was wondering when you were going to ask me that.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Barney, rather put out.

  ‘Well, you’re not the first,’ smiled Rhodes. ‘About every half-hour, one disconsolate digger or another comes up and asks me if he can borrow my pump.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t see,’ said Rhodes, slipping a grubby white cricket sock between the pages of his book, to mark the place. ‘I can’t lend you my pump, because I need it. But I can hire you a pump.’

  ‘You have a pump to rent?’

  ‘I have two. They’re inside the tent. Take your pick. Two pounds a day, if you’re interested.’

  ‘Where the hell did you get them?’

  Rhodes was terribly pleased with himself, and kept rubbing the back of his neck with glee. ‘I bought them from a frightful German, who was on his way to Kimberley. I used the last of the money I had left over from my cotton harvest. Eight cylinder pumps, eighty pounds. Not bad, eh?’

  Barney slowly shook his head. ‘I thought you said that nobody could make a fortune from growing cotton.’

  ‘Do you want a pump?’ asked Rhodes. ‘You’d better make up your mind quickly.’

  ‘All right,’ said Barney, and took his brown leather wallet out of his crumpled bush-jacket. ‘Here’s eight pounds, for four days’ pumping. But let me tell you this – these eight pounds are the first and last money that I’m ever going to pay you.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ said Rhodes, and smiled even more broadly.

  Barney and Rhodes lifted the pump between them on to the back of the ox-waggon, and Barney rode back to Kimberley with the pump’s discharge pipe rattling monotonously against the waggon’s tailgate as a constant nagging reminder of what he had just been compelled to do. He felt relieved that he had found a pump, but depressed that he had been obliged to hire it from Rhodes. He should have had the foresight to buy up pumps himself. Eight pumps, rented at two pounds a day, would have meant sixteen pounds a day, which meant that Rhodes could cover his eighty pounds outlay in a single week.

  There were plenty of fierce competitors at Kimberley – men whom Barney had already picked out of the milling mob of diggers as potential empirebuilders. Francis Baring Gould was one. Severe, haughty, he had excellent financial connections in London, and Barney knew that he was pressuring the Board to relax their old rule that one man could own only two claims. Another was Joseph B. Robinson, an unpleasant and gratuitously argumentative man whose nickname, even among his friends, was ‘The Buccaneer’. But Barney felt able to cope with men like Gould and Robinson without too much difficulty. He understood what they were seeking out of the diamond mines – wealth and luxury and petty power – and how they intended to get it. Only Rhodes baffled him. Rhodes, for all of his humour, was almost impossible to puzzle out. And yet only Rhodes seemed likely to stand between Barney and his ultimate ambition.

  Because now – with a clarity that fired him up like the finest of diamonds – Barney knew what his ambition was. His dream had taken shape, a bright and scintillating mirage rising from the African desert, and it had revealed itself as nothing less than the kingship of the Kimberley diamond mine. He wanted to stand on the North Reef of the Big Hole and look out across that burrowing chaos of intense human industry and know that it was all his.

  He wanted to sink his hands into a bucket of diamonds, a whole bucket, and know that they all belonged to him.

  The shadows were already sloping across the veld as he reached Kimberley again, and reined in the ox-waggon outside his bungalow. Most of the heavy cloud seemed to have passed over, and the western sky was like a lake of stirred magnolia honey.

  Inside the bungalow, all the lamps were lit, and Barney expected that Mooi Klip was making last-minute alterations to the wedding decorations, and fussing over the
range. He loved her the way she was at the moment: very feminine and flustered, and quite unlike the capable Griqua girl who had taken charge of Joel so calmly, on the day that Barney had released him. She had not lost her directness or her common-sense, but she had gained a new vulnerability, a new dependence on him, which Barney secretly enjoyed.

  He released the oxen from their yoke, and led them around to the small kraal at the back of the house, where he watered them and fed them. Then, tying the kraal gate, he went around to the front door, and tried to push it open.

  To his surprise, it was locked. He tried the handle again, but there was no question about it. He could not get in.

  ‘Natalia!’ he called. Then he banged at the door with the flat of his hand. ‘Natalia, are you there?’

  He thought he heard someone inside the bungalow banging at the floor boards, and then there was the clatter of a chair being knocked over. He listened, his ear pressed against the door. There was nothing for a while, until Mooi Klip’s voice was suddenly raised in a scream.

  ‘Natalia!’ yelled Barney, hoarsely, and slammed at the door with his shoulder. It would not budge. It was built of solid imported wood, and it was held on with double brass hinges. ‘Natalia!’ he bellowed again, and gripped the sides of the door-frame so that he could kick at it with his veld boots. One of the panels cracked, but the door still refused to give way.

  Exploding with fear and adrenalin, Barney ran around to the toolshed at the side of the house, wrenched open the door, and seized a long-handled axe. Then he ran back to the front, and walloped the axe into the side of the doorframe once, twice, and once again. Splinters flew all around him, and each blow jarred the muscles of his arms.

  He kicked at the door again, and again, and at last it racketed open. What he saw made him stop where he was, his axe gripped in both hands, his eyes dense with disbelief and fury.

  Mooi Klip lay crouched on the rug, her red dress pulled up over her hips, her petticoat torn into shreds. Her naked thights were criss-crossed with scratches, and patterned with bright crimson bruises. She was covering her face with her hands, and sobbing in a high, breathless pitch that scarcely sounded human.

  Joel stood stiff and still in the corner of the living-room, his plaid workshirt open to the waist, baring his dark hairy belly, and his canvas trousers unbuttoned. His face was as grave and as odd as Barney had ever seen it. In his hand, upraised, he held the Shopkeeper’s revolver which Barney had bought in New York as part of his supplies for the wilds of South Africa. The muzzle was aimed at the ceiling, but the way in which Joel was holding his arm up left Barney in no doubt that he was threatening him with his life.

  Scattered across the floor and ground underfoot were cakes and pastries and baskets of plums. Even the three-tiered white wedding cake, a gift from Scheinman’s the bakers, had been smashed sideways.

  Barney, his brain as tight as an overwound clock, slowly laid down his axe. Then without keeping his eyes off Joel, he moved across the room and knelt down beside Mooi Klip, lifting her head on to his knee. She was shaking and crying, and she would not take her hands away from her face. Barney smoothed down her dress and held her close to him, gently rocking her, and stroking her hair.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her. ‘Are you hurt bad?’

  Joel waved the pistol around carelessly as if he really had not meant to threaten Barney at all. But he did not put it down. He could see by the expression on Barney’s face what would happen to him if he did.

  ‘This isn’t what it seems,’ he said, lightly. He pulled at his left eyelid with his fingertip, as if he were rubbing sleep out of it.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ asked Barney, in a deadened voice.

  ‘It’s, er – well, it started off as fun. That’s all it was. Just fun.’

  ‘Did you touch her?’ asked Barney. He felt so cold that he couldn’t move.

  ‘We didn’t do anything. We were just joking. Horseplay. That’s all.’

  ‘Did you touch her?’ Barney repeated, more loudly.

  Joel grinned. He wiped his nose with the back of his gun-hand. ‘She was only arranging the table, that’s all, and I thought that – if I –’

  ‘Did you touch her?’ screamed Barney.

  Joel shrugged, and glanced sideways across the wreckage of the room as if he were looking for something special. ‘Touch? Well, it depends what you mean by touch.’

  ‘Did you assault her is what I mean.’

  Joel’s eyes darted back towards Barney, and he frowned.

  Barney said, ‘I’m going to kill you for this. I mean it. I’m going to kill you.’

  He laid Mooi Klip carefully on the rug, and stood up. Mooi Klip lay on her side, bunched up self-protectively tight, her hands clasped in front of her mouth and her eyes wide open. She stared at nothing but the broken cakes and the trodden fruit, and she did not stop shaking.

  ‘You said you were sorry, and I believed you,’ Barney told Joel, circling around the table. ‘I believed you!’

  ‘I was sorry,’ said Joel, swallowing hard, unable to look Barney in the face. ‘I’m sorry now.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  Joel’s lips tightened, and then he burst out, ‘What do you think it’s like, living here with you two? Didn’t you think of that, when you set up this cozy little household of yours?’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about her!’ said Joel, desperately. ‘What do you think it’s like, living here with her! Seeing her washing and cooking and cleaning everything up. Seeing her kiss you. Don’t you think I’m just as capable of falling in love as you are? Or hasn’t that ever occurred to you, that your brother Joel could fall in love? Maybe you can’t bring yourself to believe that anybody else apart from the great Barney Blitz has any kind of real existence?’

  Barney said, in a low-key, unsteady voice, ‘She’s my bride, Joel. You knew that. You knew that! And yet you could still attack her.’

  ‘Attack her?’ protested Joel, in an unexpectedly squeaky tone. ‘You don’t think that I’d stoop so low, do you? She attacked me! Tore her petticoats, begged me to take her before she was married to you. Begged me! Come on, Barney, she’s nothing but a schwartzeh, and you know what they’re like, even the educated ones! They’ve got morals like monkeys!’

  Barney pushed aside the table, with a scraping of wooden feet, and advanced towards Joel with his fists raised. Joel stumbled back two or three paces, coughing, but then he gripped the revolver in both hands and pointed it directly at Barney’s face.

  ‘You’d kill me, would you?’ Barney said shakily. ‘Your own brother?’

  ‘You’re angry,’ said Joel. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. I just want you to stay back.’

  He edged around the room, keeping the revolver out in front of him. ‘I’ve told you I’m sorry,’ he repeated. There was a terrible monotony in his voice, like a deaf and backward child. ‘I’ve told you I’m sorry, and I am sorry. But it’s one of those things. Who can help it? Anyway, it’s all over now. I can’t turn the clock back. Even if I could, well, what good what it do? I haven’t hurt her. She’s pregnant already, so I haven’t given her a baby. I wouldn’t want to. My own brother’s bride?’

  Barney hesitated, and lowered his fists. Joel began to lower the gun, too, but when Barney made another move towards him, he quickly lifted it again.

  ‘I think you’d better get out of here,’ said Barney. ‘Because I’m liable to go for you, whether you’ve got yourself a gun or not.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Joel. ‘You’re forgiving me, are you?’

  ‘Just get out.’

  Joel stared at Barney down the barrel of the Shopkeeper’s revolver with eyes that seemed as impenetrable as stones. Barney could hardly believe that this wild and frenzied man was actually his own brother. He felt as if he had suddenly found himself in a petrifying nightmare of mirrors and anguish and broken cake.

  There was a clattering sound. A few splatters of we
t appeared on the floor around Joel’s left foot. Joel wavered, but did not look down. His canvas trousers steamed with urine.

  The brothers did not speak another word. Joel slowly retreated out of the doorway, almost tripping over Barney’s long-handled axe. He crossed the vehandah, groping behind him for the rail, and then disappeared quickly into the evening shadows.

  Barney stood motionless for almost a minute. Then he knelt down and gathered Mooi Klip in his arms, and carried her like a new bride into the bedroom, where he laid her carefully down on the patchwork comforter.

  ‘I’m going to heat water for a bath,’ he whispered, close to her ear, close to her sooty-brown curls. ‘You can wash, and soak yourself, and then we’ll clear everything up.’

  ‘Barney,’ she said, her chin crumpled with grief.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he told her.

  ‘I can’t help it. I can’t help crying. How can you marry me now?’

  Barney kissed her eyelashes, and the tears that clung to them like the raindrops that clung to the silverleaf.

  ‘You’re going to have my baby. How can I not marry you?’

  She touched his face in the twilight. ‘I don’t know what happened. He was all right for most of the day. He went to the claim, and came back again. We talked about the wedding. Then he started teasing me, and trying to put his arms around me.’

  Barney laid his fingers on her lips, to try to stop her talking, but she wanted to talk, and she took his hand away.

  ‘I said no. I told him no. But he followed me around the room, and around the house, and he kept grabbing me and pulling at my dress. I called out for Janet next door, but she wasn’t there, or else she didn’t hear me. He wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t leave me alone.’