Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  Mooi Klip was rolling out dough in the kitchen of her parents’ house in Klipdrift when Mr Ransome rapped at the door and called, ‘Anybody at home?’

  Mooi Klip pushed her curls away from her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a floury white smudge on the dark skin of her forehead. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘There’s only me.’

  Mr Ransome came through the open doorway with his hat clutched in his hands the same way a small and timid animal clutches its food. He looked around the kitchen with quick, jerky smiles; and then beamed at Mooi Klip appreciatively.

  ‘What a wonderful sight,’ he said. ‘Surely this is how God meant a family home to look. The gentle woman in her place, preparing food. The fragrance of baking. And those pies! There is nothing to me more holy than a pie!’

  ‘You can take one if you want to,’ said Mooi Klip, amused. ‘But they’re hot.’

  ‘Well, no, I won’t at the moment,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘But if you have a glass of milk, I would appreciate that. I’ve been driving around all morning, and I’m feeling quite tired with the heat. It’s unseasonably hot, don’t you think.’

  Mooi Klip wiped her hands on her blue-checked apron, and went across to the dented metal churn in the corner, where her mother kept the goat’s milk. She poured out a glassful with a dipper, and set it on the plain oak table. ‘You can have a pie if you want to,’ she said. ‘I won’t be cross if you change your mind.’

  Mr Ransome eyed the pies thoughtfully. Then he said, ‘No, no. I must abstain. I must show some self-control. I do try to perform at least one conscious act of self-control every day.’

  Mooi Klip went back to her pastry-rolling. The sun shone in through the open door, and glittered in the dust and the flour, and crossed the white-washed wall of the kitchen in a long triangle. The room was simple, but its simplicity, and the simplicity of Mooi Klip’s work, made it curiously restful; so that Mr Ransome found himself saying nothing at all, but leaning back in his riempie chair and watching her through drowsy eyes as she rolled and turned the dough, and cut it into ovals for those small vegetable-filled pasties which the Griqua people called ‘little birds’.

  It was on days like this that Mr Ransome felt close to his God. He had been educated as a child with pictorial Bibles, in which he had seen the boy Jesus in His father’s carpentry shop; and he was still enchanted by sunshine and honest work. If he was ever asked about conscience, or complicated struggles of the spirit, he would smile vaguely and look the other way, his bland face transfigured by thoughts of those crisp and curled-up wood shavings around the Messiah’s youthful feet. Oh, to have been there, to have actually been there, and helped Our Lord with his chamfering, and his planing!

  Mr Ransome was a missionary; a former curate at St Augustine’s Church, in Kennington, near London, and now the sole propagator of the Word for hundreds of miles around. At the age of twenty-nine, he still looked boyish, with an oval face like one of Mrs Beeton’s pie-dishes, and a long pointed nose, and thick brown hair which defied combing. He was wearing his cassock today, as always, and his dog-collar. He believed in the simple symbols of Christian stewardship, especially when he was making the rounds of the Griqua community, whose beliefs were fierce and direct and fundamental. The Griquas combined the earthly magic of the Hottentots with the abrasive simplicity of the Boers, and Mr Ransome often thought (secretly) that they spoke about their religion with even more conviction than he did.

  He had been to see Mooi Klip several times since Pieter’s birth. He had christened Pieter in the stone font of St Margaret’s Chapel, a corrugated-iron building by the banks of the Vaal. He found something noble and yet pathetic in Mooi Klip’s predicament, and he had tried to bring her the comfort of companionship and words from the Bible. She had told him about Barney, and about Joel; and about Coen, too; and they had knelt on the brown tiles of the kitchen floor and prayed together several times.

  ‘Mr Ransome – I’ve been worried,’ said Mooi Klip, sifting flour on to the table.

  ‘Worried?’ asked Mr Ransome. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t worry. But Pieter came back from seeing his father at Kimberley not long ago, and he told me that his father wanted me to think about going to live with him, in his new house.’

  Mr Ransome tucked his fingers together. ‘Surely that’s good news.’

  ‘I don’t know. What about Coen?’

  ‘You feel more strongly for Barney than you do for Coen, don’t you? At least that’s the impression you’ve always given me. It was only a sorry accident that you didn’t marry him.’

  Mooi Klip glanced at Mr Ransome and then shook her head. ‘It wasn’t an accident, Mr Ransome.’

  ‘You still haven’t forgiven him?’

  ‘I don’t think I could.’

  Mr Ransome scratched his ankle vigorously. ‘I really don’t know what to suggest. If you hate Joel so intensely, and if you feel that Barney has betrayed you by sticking up for his brother rather than cleaving to you; and if you are still not sure of your feelings for Coen … well, then, I can only suggest that you work and pray a little longer, that you seek further guidance from the Lord. It would be very unwise to do anything precipitate, particularly when you have Pieter’s happiness to consider, as well as your own.’

  Mooi Klip laid down her pastry knife. ‘I feel so sad sometimes,’ she said, softly. ‘I think of Barney, and how things could have been between us. Then I think of Joel, and I can only feel hatred. I know that hatred is not Christian, and that I should try to forgive him. But I will never find happiness with Barney as long as his brother is there.’

  ‘And Coen?’

  She lowered her head. ‘Coen is good and kind, and I could learn to love him. But I would hate to hurt him, and I think that if I married him, I would.’

  Mr Ransome considered what Mooi Klip had said, and drummed his fingers on the table. Then he picked up his glass of goat’s milk, and drank half of it. Wiping his mouth, he said, ‘How would it be if I spoke to Barney myself? If I were to intercede on your behalf?’

  ‘I don’t know whether that would help,’ said Mooi Klip.

  ‘Well, it might not,’ Mr Ransome admitted, ‘but on the other hand it might. You never know. Jesus was always trying the impossible, and succeeding. Think what an impossible task it must have seemed in those days to redeem the sins of the entire world!’

  ‘There’s only one person whose sins need to be redeemed to make me happy,’ said Mooi Klip.

  ‘Ah yes,’ signed Mr Ransome. ‘The dreadful Joel Blitz.’

  He stood up. He looked across at the pies. ‘I have to go to Kimberley at the end of the week,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should call on him then.’

  ‘You won’t upset him? I don’t want him to think that I’m pressing him to take me back.’

  ‘My dear Natalia, I’ll be most discreet.’

  He took her wrist and gave it a confident squeeze. With dabs of flour on her cheeks, and her curly hair brushed back, Mooi Klip looked as pretty as an Italian painting. There was a golden, fragrant aura about her which Mr Ransome found strangely disturbing. It was only the mid-afternoon sunlight in her hair; only the fragrance of a young woman at work; but he found himself glancing covertly at the way that her breasts pressed so tightly against the flowery fabric of her dress, and at that shadowy crevice where her silver crucifix hung, and he knew, he just knew, that his ears had turned bright red.

  Mooi Klip smiled at him, and then kissed his cheek. ‘You’ve been such a friend to me,’ she said.

  He did not know how to answer her. He felt as if there were no words in his vocational vocabulary to describe exactly how he felt. No words to say how attracted he was, or how elated, or how ironic he felt it was that he should have volunteered to go off to see Barney on a mission of reconciliation when all the time he wished that he could have this disturbingly attractive Griqua woman for himself. He felt confident, yes: but also profoundly depressed, and yet excited, too. God, his feelings were so madden
ing! He did not realise that he was actually in love, nor that he had been for almost two years.

  He remembered the moment, though, when he had noticed Mooi Klip as a woman, instead of nothing more than an unfortunate ewe in his Christian flock. He had seen her in the yard outside her parents’ strooidak house one hot November morning, washing clothes in a wooden butt, rubbing them on a corrugated washboard with kitchen soap. Her hair had been tied back, and the sleeves of her white cotton dress had been buttoned up. He had reined in his small spidery black carriage to wish her good day, and ask how she was; and she had looked up at him, shielding her eyes against the sun, a picture of the tender savage, one dark nipple visible through the wet material of her dress like a kiss through gauze.

  Mooi Klip said, ‘Why don’t you give in to temptation?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Mr Ransome blushed.

  ‘Give in to temptation. Have a pie. I’m sure you can practise your self-control on something else.’

  Mr Ransome’s lips felt dry. He ran his tongue around them, and then he nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right. I shouldn’t be too ascetic, should I?’ He took one of the pies, and held it up in a gesture of appreciation. ‘It looks good. I shall save it for my tea.’

  She watched him from the kitchen doorway as he walked back to his carriage, where it was tied up to a nearby fence. He turned around twice, and raised his hat to her, and as he climbed up on to his seat, he called back, ‘I shall let you know about Barney as soon as I can! I promise!’

  Mooi Klip waved and smiled, and then returned to her pastry. Mr Ransome hesitated for a moment, reining back his horse. He felt like jumping down again, striding down the garden path, taking Mooi Klip in his arms and telling her that he was passionately fond of her. But unstead, he said ‘gee-up’, and flicked his whip, and his horse obediently began to carry him off along the rutted pathway.

  ‘I mustn’t,’ Mr Ransome whispered to himself, as he reached the outskirts of Klipdrift. ‘I am a missionary of God. I mustn’t!’ And his self-denial that afternoon was more painful than the refusal of a thousand pastries. He munched his pie as he drove, and he cried as he munched, and halfway back to his house he had to stop the carriage and thump his chest, because he was almost choking.

  On the night that Barney crossed the border into Natal, five hundred miles away, Joel was sitting in the dining hall of Vogel Vlei, with empty gunpowder boxes for chairs, and a large ship’s trunk for a table, playing Pope Joan with Gentleman Jack and an old-time Kimberley character called Champagne Charlie. All around them, scores of candles swayed and dipped, stuck to the polished parquet flooring with their own wax. The three men’s voices and laughter echoed from one deserted room to another; and even up the uncarpeted stairs into the upper landings.

  Champagne Charlie was a small florid man with a gingery moustache like hanks of a horse’s tail. He had earned his nickname in Dutoitspan, in 1874, by scattering broken-up fragments of the bottoms of champagne bottles over a worthless tract of dry farmland, and selling it for £3000 to a guillible diamond digger. He was known as a gambler, too, and an addict of unlikely bets.

  Jack eventually threw in his cards, and stood up. ‘I believe I’ve had enough gaming for one evening,’ he said. ‘Would either of you two gentlemen care for some more port-wine? Mr Blitzboss?’

  ‘I never thought the day would come when I would sit down on a wooden box and play Pope Joan with a kaffir,’ cackled Champagne Charlie. ‘But he’s a smart player, ain’t he, Joel? A smart player. And he drinks now, too! It only goes to show that you can teach a monkey a trick or two, if you try hard enough.’

  Joel played a queen and a jack, winning ‘Intrigue’. He looked tired, and his face was greasy and pale. ‘Some monkeys learn quicker than others,’ he said, and there was a touch of caustic in his voice.

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t let Barney get you down,’ said Champagne Charlie. He knew what Joel was talking about. After all, in every saloon and gambling house and brothel in Kimberley, wherever diggers and engineers and diamond dealers met to drink and talk and win money, Joel had tirelessly complained about Barney, about how righteous Barney was, and how supercilious, and how Barney deliberately kept away from black women just to show off his moral supremacy.

  ‘Barney does a good deal more than get me down,’ said Joel. ‘Barney makes me wish that one or other of us had never have been born. I wouldn’t have minded which. It would have been better for me not to have existed at all than to be obliged to live out this preposterous life with this intolerable brother.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem like such a bad fellow to me,’ said Jack, bringing over three glasses of port. ‘He paid me extra money, right out, and he’s always been straight.’

  ‘He wouldn’t even let me die,’ Joel complained. He stared at Champagne Charlie with citric intensity. ‘I was hurt, I was going to be carried away to my Creator. I was finally going to be released. But would my wonderful younger brother let me go? Oh, no. He had other plans for me. Six weeks of sheer agony on the back of a waggon. And then six hours of hell in an operating theatre, while my bones were broken and re-set. Now look at me. Worse off than ever, with a stick and a limp, like a cripple. Half-owner of a diamond mine that I know and he knows I don’t even deserve. “What do you think of our mine, Joel?” “How shall we decorate our house?” When all the time he knows damned well that I did nothing to contribute to either of them. That’s the salt he keeps grinding into my open wounds. He knows I hate him, he knows that I deliberately tried to ruin his life, and yet he still forgives me.’

  ‘Ain’t you pleased?’ asked Champagne Charlie, relighting his cigar. ‘I’d be pleased, if I’d done what you’d done, and my brother still forgave me. I’d be downright delighted.’

  Joel lurched off his gunpowder box, and kicked it over with a loud slamming noise. Then, leaning on his stick, he stalked around the huge dining-room, weaving in and out of the candles that were stuck to the floor, his face ghastly in the guttering light.

  ‘Being forgiven,’ he said, ‘is the most terrible punishment of all. I cannot endure it.’

  Gentleman Jack, standing tall and black in his grey frock-coat, turned his eyes towards Champagne Charlie, and rolled his lips downwards like a comical mask. Champagne Charlie let out a nervous snicker.

  ‘One day,’ said Joel, his voice distorted by the bare walls, ‘one day, I dream that Barney will do something to me that requires my forgiveness.’

  He paused, breathing hard, the ferrule of his cane vibrating against the hard oak floor, tip-tip-tip-tip-tip, his right shoulder hunched and his crooked left leg bent beneath him as if it had been drawn by a child. ‘Oh, I dream of that,’ he said, under his breath. ‘I dream of the moment when he has to come to me and say, “Joel, I’m sorry, please forgive me.” ’

  ‘And then you can spit in his eye!’ cried Champagne Charlie, slapping his thigh.

  Joel shot him a quick, triumphant look. ‘Oh, no, Charlie! I’d never do that! I’d forgive him! That’s what I’d do! I’d forgive him!’

  Gentleman Jack finished his port. ‘I believe I’m going to get some sleep now,’ he said. ‘That’s if you’ll excuse me, Mr Blitzboss. We have an early start tomorrow. A whole lot of earth to move.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Joel. ‘Pour yourself another drink.’

  Gentleman Jack shrugged. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Blitzboss.’

  Joel took two or three ungainly steps through the candles. ‘You know something Charlie,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘I do believe I love Barney. I do believe that, in spite of everything, I love him. He was my father’s favourite, you know. Not my mother’s. My mother always preferred me. But then I think that all mothers have a special soft spot for their first born. Yet … in spite of everything, I do believe I love him.’

  ‘He’s always been regular with me,’ said Champagne Charlie.

  ‘Ah, well,’ Joel told him, dismissively, ‘that’s because you’re not his brother. But I do love him. I love him sti
ll. The only thing that irks me about him, the only thing that enrages me about him, is that he always believes that he’s better than me. He always has. Even though he’s always been younger, and always will be. Even though he’s always had less experience. He – assumes – as if it’s a direct gift from Our Lord – he – assumes – that he’s better. And that’s what makes me feel like dragging him down, and breaking everything he believes is precious. Can you understand that? I used to break his toys. I tore pages out of his bar-mitzvah Torah. But it’s good for him, you know. He mustn’t always believe that he’s superior. You know that? He has to understand that he’s just as weak and as human and as sinful as the rest of us. Because if he doesn’t, you know – are you listening, Charlie? – if he doesn’t, he’s going to be very, very, seriously hurt.’

  Champagne Charlie pursed his lips in discomfort. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you want to play some more cards?’

  ‘I feel more like drinking,’ said Joel and lifted his empty glass at the end of a stiffly raised arm. Gentleman Jack came across the floor on tapping heels and poured him another port-wine.

  ‘No women tonight?’ asked Champagne Charlie.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m tired of blackies. I’m tired of those French whores too, that cackling collection of stinking women they brought in from Algeria. Only God knows how many niggers and donkeys they’ve fucked, in their lifetime. I’m tired of everything.’

  Champagne Charlie ceaselessly shuffled the cards, his podgy fingers pouring fountains of fluttering pasteboard from one hand to the other, over and over and over. ‘I hear that Agnes Knight is playing it a little fast and quick these days.’