Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You know what I mean. I shall never know why she married that thick Australian from the drama club. He couldn’t even act.’

  Barney said, ‘I guess I’d better be going home. Sara was planning on an early supper tonight.’

  ‘How’s she settling down?’

  ‘Not too bad. It’s a little rougher here than she expected, but I guess she’ll get used to it.’

  Harold gestured towards the window, with its view of brick façades and corrugated-iron rooftops and chimneys. ‘In five years’ time, she won’t even recognise the place. It’ll look like the West End of London. Do you remember what it was like when you first came here? That terrible old shack I used to work in, with the Irish whore next door? Those were the rough days!’

  Barney took his hat from the hatstand, and brushed the top of it with his sleeve. ‘I’m pretty satisfied with the Rose Innes arrangement,’ he said, ‘But I want to start pushing the Octahedron Company as soon as I can. We’ve got the capital; it’s about time we started building up some momentum. We’ve been too slow lately, don’t you think? I know I’ve been away, but Rhodes has already bought up a third of the De Beers mine, one way or another, and I’m damned if I’m going to let him outstrip me.’

  ‘I heard that Rhodes has teamed up with Alfred Beit,’ remarked Harold.

  ‘Alfred Beit? Didn’t he work for Lippert & Company, in Hamburg?’

  ‘He used to. But then they made him a partner of Jules Porges, and as everybody knows, they’re the wealthiest diamond merchants in the whole world, bar none. He’s a genius. You think I’m a genius? Beit can remember almost every stone he’s ever handled. One of Duncan’s men tried to sell him some stolen gems, and he recognised them straight away as the same gems that had passed through his hands seven years ago.’

  Barney raised his eyebrows. ‘So we’re in for some stiff competition, then?’

  ‘From Beit, sure. Beit once told me that his only aim in life was to own every single diamond mine in Africa.’

  ‘Looks like he and Rhodes are going to get on well.’

  Harold accompanied Barney downstairs to the front door of the office, so that he could lock up. On the way down, he said off-handedly, ‘By the way, did you hear about the giant diamond yet?’

  Barney opened the front door of the office, and the noises of the hot afternoon came in – waggons, and laughter, and the distant shuggg-shuggg-shuggg of steam-powered winding-gear. A Bantu was sitting on the boardwalk outside blowing a soft, monotonous tune out of an instrument like an ocarina. ‘Giant diamond?’ asked Barney, shaking his head. ‘What is it, a leg-pull?’

  Harold leaned against the door, sweating. He loosened his tie to take some of the pressure off his throat. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘I heard a garbled kind of a story from one of the kaffirs who works out at Isaacs’ claim. All he said was, ‘Boss, how much a gemstone worth as big as this?” and he made a circle with his finger and his thumb, like this, so that the tip of his finger and the tip of his thumb just touched.’

  ‘Diamonds don’t come that big,’ said Barney. ‘Not here in South Africa, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Harold. ‘There was the Koh-i-Noor, wasn’t there – one hundred and eight carats. And the French Blue, sixty-seven carats. And, I forgot – the Florentine was one hundred and thirty-seven carats.’

  ‘Sure, but all of those diamonds were Indian, weren’t they? And a diamond as big as your kaffir tried to describe would be twice the size of any of those – twice the size of the Florentine. It’s just a fairy-story, Harold, that’s all. You know what the kaffirs are like when they’ve been at the whiskey.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harold, ‘he didn’t seem to be drunk, and he didn’t seem to be trying to spin me any kind of yarn. He just said, “How much a gemstone worth as big as this?” and when I told him it would depend on who you could find to buy such a stone, rather than the current market price of diamonds, he said, “Difficult to sell, then, boss?” and I said, “Yes, of course,” I mean – if he was seriously talking about a diamond in excess of three hundred carats, then my own guess is that you could ask over a million pounds for it. Perhaps more, if you could persuade a government to buy it.’

  Barney swung the door backwards and forwards, feeling the draught against his face. There was something about this tale of a giant diamond that irritated his consciousness in the same way that grit can irritate a clam. There was something about it which seemed to make other feelings that he had been having since he returned from Durban fit uneasily into place.

  ‘What else did this kaffir say?’ he asked Harold. ‘Did he say that he’d actually seen a diamond as big as the one he was talking about?’

  ‘No,’ said Harold. ‘But I can’t think why he asked me, unless he had. And where could he have seen it? That was the question I asked myself.’

  ‘Isaacs only borders on to three other claims. Francis and Company, the Griqualand Diamond Mining Company, and mine. So, we’ve got a choice of four.’

  ‘Yours included,’ said Harold.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Barney, ‘mine included.’

  ‘What worries me is the implications of someone discovering a stone that size,’ Harold said, patting his forehead with his bunched-up handkerchief. ‘They might get themselves a million pounds, personally, but you know what effect it’ll have on the market, don’t you? The diggers will start producing twice as fast as usual, all trying to dig up the big one, and the market’s going to be flooded again, just like it was in ’74. It’s taken us almost four years to get the prices up from ’74, and if they go down again, well, a lot of diamond dealers are going to be ruined.’

  Barney laid a hand on Harold’s shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t worry. It’s probably only a wild rumour. Maybe somebody dug up a hefty piece of quartz.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harold. ‘I just don’t know. But keep it to yourself, won’t you? An imaginary diamond can cause almost as much of a panic as a real diamond.’

  ‘Well – you can console yourself with one thing,’ said Barney. ‘What we did this afternoon, buying up most of Rose Innes, that’s a step in the right direction. One day, you’ll have just two or three diamond companies controlling the whole of South African mining, and then we can fix the prices as high as the public will pay.’

  Harold held his hand over his chest. He was short of breath now, and he was sweating so much that his face looked as if it had been basted in honey. ‘I don’t suppose I shall live to see it.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Barney asked him, frowning.

  Harold nodded. ‘Too much work,’ he said, and each word was an abrupt gasp. ‘You get along now. I’ll see you on Wednesday, for your celebration dinner.’

  Barney stood in the doorway until Harold had climbed heavily back up the stairs to his office. Then he stepped out into the dull, humid afternoon, adjusted his hat, and walked slowly along the boardwalk to the sidestreet where his carriage was waiting. His new black driver, Michael, was sitting up on the box in shirtsleeves, ragged trousers, and a formal black opera hat. The staff uniforms had yet to be ordered from Capetown.

  ‘Back to Vogel Vlei, boss?’ asked Michael, twitching his whip.

  Barney said absent-mindedly, ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘Michael?’

  ‘Yessir, boss?’

  ‘Has anyone spoken to you lately about a diamond?’

  Michael whistled at the horses, and they wheeled edgily around in a semi-circle. ‘Diamond, boss? One diamond special, boss?’

  ‘That’s right. One diamond special.’

  ‘Well, boss, I did hear something.’

  Barney sat back in his seat, his legs crossed, trying to appear relaxed. ‘What did you hear, Michael? Did someone tell you about a giant diamond? Big as an eagle’s egg?’

  ‘You heard it too, boss.’

  ‘Was that all you heard? You don’t know who found it, or where?’

  ‘No, sir, boss. But what I did hear was that someone was paying money to keep the story q
uiet.’

  ‘And you don’t know who that “someone” was?’

  Michael drove the horses out along Main Street until they cleared the last of the offices and houses and lean-to stores. The day was as dull as a photograph. ‘If I knew who that “someone” was, boss, I’d be round to his door myself, asking for hush-me-up money. Not that you don’t pay me good, boss. You pay goodest in Kimberley.’

  Barney did not answer. He was trying to remember something that someone had said to him during the past two or three days. A word, a fragmented phrase. A feeling that something extraordinary had happened, and that he was being deliberately kept in the dark about it.

  Joel was out of bed when Barney returned to Vogel Vlei, but still in a difficult temper. He had ordered tea once and then sent it all back because it was cold, and because there were not any spongecakes. Now he was sprawled on the couch with his left leg propped up on heaps of cushions, drinking whiskey out of the neck of the bottle and humming to himself in an oddly threatening way.

  Barney came into the drawing-room and crossed the Indian carpet to the open French windows without even glancing at Joel. In the middle distance, like a scene from one of those perpetually enchanted landscapes by Claude Lorraine, two kaffirs worked at the stony ground with hoes, levelling the wide area which Barney eventually hoped to use as a paddock. There was a dry, aromatic smell in the air; a smell which, years later, would always remind Barney of Africa. The sun gilded the dusty furrows, and flashed on the blades of the kaffirs’ uplifted hoes, and Barney could hear the men talking from almost a quarter of a mile away.

  ‘Your lady wife is preparing her hair for supper,’ announced Joel, in a blotchy voice. ‘No!’ he giggled. ‘That’s wrong! She is not preparing her hair for supper – that is, she is not preparing her hair for us to eat for supper – she is – preparing her hair – in time for supper.’

  Barney closed the French windows and locked them. ‘How much have you drunk?’ he asked, flatly.

  ‘In proportion to the intoxicating effect of the Dover’s powders I have consumed, scarcely anything. This is only my second bottle, as a matter of fact, and I puked up most of the first.’

  ‘Give it to me,’ said Barney, holding out his hand.

  Joel clutched the bottle to his chest, and slowly and emphatically shook his head. ‘Not on your life, little brother.’

  ‘All right,’ agreed Barney. ‘But if you want to go on drinking, go back to your room. I don’t want you lying here, making an exhibition of yourself.’

  ‘Exhibition? Me?’ protested Joel.

  ‘Just get upstairs,’ Barney told him.

  ‘Oh, you can talk about exhibitions. You’re a fine one! As if the whole household doesn’t know that you kicked Nareez out of your bedroom the other night, and that you and Sara haven’t slept together more than once since you’ve been back! Exhibitions! You can talk about exhibitions!’

  ‘Just get out,’ snapped Barney.

  ‘I’m going,’ Joel cautioned him. ‘I’m on my way. But if I were you, I’d really try to keep my personal life a little quieter. I would, really! It’s not good for staff spirit, you know, all this argy-bargy upstairs.’

  ‘Get out of here before I kick you out,’ Barney ordered him.

  Unsteadily, hobbling and hopping from one piece of furniture to the next, clutching at the moulding on top of the cream-painted dado for support, Joel made his way to the stairs. Barney followed a few paces behind him.

  ‘You’re a fool, you know,’ gasped Joel, at the foot of the stairs. ‘The most contemptible fool I’ve ever come across.’

  Then, gripping the bannister rail, hand-over-hand, Joel began his agonising climb to the second-floor landing. Barney, tight-mouthed with anger and frustration and sheer despair, stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched him, not moving, not once attempting to help. The terrible part of it was that he wanted to help, he wanted to run up those five or six stairs and take Joel’s arm; he wanted to show that in spite of everything they were still brothers, borne by the same mother, alevasholem, and raised in the same tenement on Clinton Street. But Joel at last had reached the upper landing, and was leaning over the bannisters with a face as grotesque as a dried-clay gargoyle.

  ‘You hear me, gonif!’ he shouted. ‘You should keep your marital failures to yourself!’ And with that, he shuffled and stumbled back to his bedroom, colliding with the brassbound linen-chest as he went.

  Barney mounted the first stair, intent on following him; but then he stopped himself, and lowered his head, and turned back. He had followed Joel too many times after too many arguments, and he knew only too well how illogical and fierce his brother could be when he was drunk and drugged. Even if Barney did succeed in calming him down, and settling all of their differences, Joel would usually have forgotten by the following morning what they had talked about, and he would sit at the breakfast-table white-faced and incommunicative, eating nothing but dry toast, painfully attempting to overcome both severe morphia withdrawal and a pounding hangover. Dr Truter, who came to examine Joel every two or three weeks with his untidy brown leather bag and his green-corroded stethoscope, had whispered to Barney on several occasions that it was ‘an Act of God’ that Joel was still alive.

  As Barney crossed the hallway on his way back to the sitting-room, Michael came walking quickly towards him on slapping slippers, and said, ‘Mr Blitz, sir?’

  ‘What is it, Michael?’

  ‘Someone to see you, boss. In the kitchen.’

  ‘In the kitchen? What do you mean, in the kitchen? Who is it?’

  Michael hesitated, and then glanced cautiously up the stairs. ‘An old friend, sir,’ he said, in a confidential tone.

  ‘An old –?’ began Barney, but then he looked at Michael’s meaningful expression, and he realised who it was. At least, he thought he realised who it was. ‘Lead the way,’ he said, brusquely. Michael turned immediately and slip-slapped back towards the servants’ quarters. ‘One of those funny days, boss,’ he remarked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Barney, without even hearing him.

  She was waiting for him at the far end of the cluttered kitchen table, posed on a spare bentwood chair as if she were having her portrait painted. The dull daylight shone through the lacy curtains behind her and blurred the outline of her severe black travelling-coat and her small fashionable hat, so that Barney felt as if he were seeing her through tears.

  ‘Natalia,’ he said, walking forward and taking her hands. He kissed her fingers, and then he bent down and kissed her cheek, which was still just as soft, and perfumed with that same elusive musk.

  ‘Well,’ she said bravely, ‘I hear that you’re married.’

  ‘Yes,’ he told her. He cleared aside a tin cheese-grater and half of a red cabbage, and perched himself on the edge of the kitchen table. ‘I was married in Durban, to an English girl.’

  ‘Kitty told me.’

  Barney looked up at Kitty, who was ostentatiously keeping herself busy by scouring the baking-trays and clattering the milk pans. He smiled, and then turned back to Mooi Klip. He thought she looked tired. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and she seemed to have lost weight.

  ‘You can’t keep a secret long if you tell it to Kitty,’ Barney confessed. ‘But how are you? Did you just arrive from Klipdrift?’

  ‘This afternoon. One of the diggers had to come over here for equipment, pumps and shovels, and he gave me a ride.’

  ‘And Pieter?’

  ‘He’s staying with Mama and Papa.’

  ‘He’s well?’

  ‘He’s wonderful. He’s starting to read.’

  ‘You’re a good mother, Natalia.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Mooi Klip twisted the diamond engagement ring on her finger around and around and around, and did her best to keep up a collected smile. But Barney had lived with her long enough to know how unsettled she felt, and that she had something else to tell him. So he sat on the edge of the table and waited for her to come t
o the point. His father would have said abruptly, ‘What’s the tachlis, my friend?’ – ‘Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.’ For Barney, it was enough just to wait.

  ‘I had a visit from Mr Ransome yesterday,’ said Mooi Klip, at last. ‘That was right after he came back from talking to you.’

  ‘You knew he was coming here? I mean, before he came?’

  Mooi Klip nodded. The sun caught the curls on the top of her head, and made them shine like the shavings of lathe-cut copper. ‘It was his idea, to begin with. But I didn’t do anything to stop him. I didn’t know you were married, you see. Neither of us did. If I had – well, I don’t know what difference it would have made.’

  ‘I didn’t think you loved me,’ said Barney, quietly.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Not for quite a long time. I was frightened of you, believe it or not, and I was frightened of Joel, and I was also frightened by the things you used to say. You used to talk of owning the whole of Kimberley. That was too much for me. Too heady. Do you know how rich a man would be, if he owned the whole of Kimberley? He would be like a god. I used to lie awake, thinking about that. If you became as rich as that, I would have had to meet princes and maharajahs and even kings. We would have had to hold banquets! An uneducated Griqua women like me would have done nothing but shame you.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can talk like that,’ said Barney, standing up, and walking around to the back of her chair. ‘I loved you that day when I was going to marry you, and I love you still. You could have faced up to princes and maharajahs as well as anybody. In any case, don’t talk to me about maharajahs. It’s closed season for Indians in this house, right at the moment.’

  ‘Kitty told me about Nareez.’

  ‘Well, you’d better believe what she says,’ grinned Barney. ‘Nareez is a human curry. Better out of your system than in.’

  ‘I still wasn’t right for you, Barney, was I?’ said Mooi Klip, in the gentlest of voices. ‘At least, you didn’t think I was. I know you loved me, and I believe you when you say that you still love me, even today. But you didn’t try too hard to get me back, did you? That was what I was afraid of, that was why I always chased you away. You were always willing to admit defeat a little too early; you were never willing to come back and back and back until I didn’t have any choice at all but to say that I was going to be your wife.’