Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  He took his meals at a small Jewish delicatessen close to the docks, Weinmans, where he sat at a sticky marble-topped table surrounded by steamed-up mirrors, and ate fatty salt beef. The proprietor was bustling and unfriendly: Barney could scarcely understand his Liverpudlian Yiddish at all. But on the morning that Barney was due to leave, the proprietor waved him away when he came up to the counter to pay 9d for his breakfast. ‘Wherever you’re going, you’ll need the money,’ he said, dismissively. ‘Go on, before I change my mind, and good luck.’

  The Weser was a paddle-steamer of the Bremerhaven line, and almost twenty years old. Barney was allocated an awkwardly-shaped cabin close to the port paddlewheel housing, which he was to share with a Portuguese wine salesman, who sweated profusely, and gibbered in his sleep, and spent every day staring morosely at the ocean and picking his teeth with a quill. But after a choppy crossing of the Bay of Biscay, and a day’s delay at Corunna to repair a broken paddle, the Weser began to make a steady seven knots southwards on a calm sea, and each day that dawned through the porthole of Barney’s cabin was sunnier, and warmer, and more gilded with promise.

  As the paddle-steamer rounded the dim coastline of Sierra Leone, and then followed the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast, Barney stayed for hours on deck, even during mealtimes, to watch the misty green reaches of West Africa slide slowly past. The sky was streaked with cirrus, but the yellowy-coloured sea, stained with silt from the Niger delta, still sparkled with reflected sunlight.

  Off Cape Coast Castle, the Weser anchored for a day to take on fresh supplies of water and fruit. There was no harbour here, and everything had to be rowed through huge foaming breakers by native oarsmen. Barney leaned on the Weser’s rail and watched for almost the whole afternoon as surfboats came up alongside, and fruit was swung aboard in nets. Up above the scattered rooftops of the town, on the ramparts of a squat, hybrid building that was half castle and half country house, a huge Union Jack flapped idly in the wind. Barney could just catch the mildewed smell of jungle on the air, and the sweetness of overripe fruit.

  ‘Now, this is an interesting place,’ remarked an Englishman called Hunt, who had joined the Weser in Lisbon. Hunt was immaculately smart, quite handsome, but only four feet eleven, so that he looked like a ten-year-old boy in a false beard and a white tropical suit. He had taken to passing occasional remarks to Barney when they were out on deck, and to nodding courteously to him over the dinner table. ‘That castle there, Elmina Castle, used to be a great slave emporium. Thousands upon thousands of slaves were sent off to America from there – caught by the Ashanti and brought to the coast with chains round their necks. So you could say that this is where your Civil War started, couldn’t you, if you were to take a long view of things?’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Barney, cautiously.

  ‘You are an American, aren’t you?’ Hunt asked him.

  ‘Yes. An American. And a Jew.’

  Hunt drew back the lapels of his coat and tucked his thumbs into his neat white vest. ‘Well,’ he said, with a sharp little laugh that Barney did not really understand. ‘I’m sure you’re going to play that down.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  Hunt leaned his elbow on the ship’s rail. Behind him, another surf boat was being rowed up to the Weser’s side, with a cargo of lemons. ‘My dear chap, I don’t mind so much who my chums are, but there are plenty of fellows in Cape Colony who do. You’re not English, so they won’t worry so much about your school; but they’ll certainly give you something of a cold shoulder if they know you’re one of the Chosen. They won’t treat you as bad as a kaffir, but almost. So if I were you – word of advice – I’d play that side of things down.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Barney. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

  ‘I like you, that’s all. You look like a decent sort.’

  ‘Well, maybe I am, but I can’t deny my forefathers, just for the sake of socialising with a few bigoted Englishmen.’

  Hunt lifted his eyebrows, and let out a stagey little sigh. ‘The trouble is, old chap, that those few bigoted Englishmen are the only people out there, apart from the Boers, and they talk like ducks, and eat nothing but ham and cheese. There’s the blackies, of course, but you wouldn’t have much sport if you had nobody but them for company.’

  ‘My brother’s out there. He says it’s a land of great opportunity.’

  ‘So it is! But it all depends on your point of view. Opportunity, certainly. But opportunity for what? I work for the Governor, Sir Philip Woodhouse, and I can tell you on unshakeable authority that Cape Colony is more than a million pounds in debt. There’s no wealth there. Oranges, oxen, a few farms, and that’s precisely all. Everybody’s scratching a living. Why you’re going there at all, I can’t imagine.’

  Barney took out his handkerchief, folded it into a padded square, and wiped the sweat from his face and neck. The green canvas canopy over the second-class promenade deck was supposed to keep it cool, but instead if only served to trap whatever breeze there was, and make it five times hotter. It looked as if the Weser was almost ready to leave now. The surfboats had all pulled away, and there was a shudder through the length of the ship as steam was built up.

  ‘I’m looking for a fresh start,’ said Barney. ‘That’s the only reason I came.’

  ‘You’ll get that all right,’ said Hunt. ‘But you have to know people. Listen, I can help you, you know. Get you out to Oranjerivier with someone reliable – introduce you to Mr Pelling at the bank. You don’t drink, do you, you Jewish chaps?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason. I was just wondering if you’d like to come down to my cabin for a spot of brandy. Excellent stuff, French. Bought it in Lisbon.’

  ‘Thank you, no,’ said Barney.

  ‘Well, how about a game of rummy? Not for money, of course, just for the fun of it.’

  ‘I don’t –’ Barney hesitated. He didn’t like to be rude. Then he said, ‘All right. For a half-hour, maybe.’

  Hunt stood up straight, and fluffed up his beard with waggling fingers. ‘That’s excellent. I’m pleased. Why don’t you come down in ten minutes or so? It’s 23C, starboard side. Knock like this.’ He demonstrated a postman’s knock on the ship’s rail. Rat-tata-rat-tat – rat-tat!

  Barney watched Hunt strut off along the deck, and then turned back to the ship’s rail. The Weser’s paddlewheels were beginning to turn over, churning up the sea into a brown froth, and she let out a piercing whistle that echoed flatly from the shoreline. He was thinking deeply, as the Weser began to beat her way out to sea, through the Gulf of Guinea, towards her next port-of-call, Port-Gentil, less than one degree south of the Equator, in Gabon. He touched the yarmulka on top of his brown curly hair as if he were discovering it for the first time.

  After ten minutes, he left the rail and went down through the varnished doors of the front hatch to C deck, where the second-class passengers were berthed. All the portholes were open, and the ventilators were open, but the humidity down there was suffocating. He rubbed perspiration from his forehead as he walked along the starboard side of the ship, looking for 23C.

  He reached it at last, and knocked. Hunt called, ‘Come!’ and he hesitantly opened the door.

  The green canvas blind was drawn across the porthole, so that the tiny cabin was irradiated with a curiously submarine light. The table had been folded down from the wall, and a deck of cards was laid out, as well as a cut-glass decanter of brandy, a carafe of water, and two glasses. Hunt was in the corner, wearing a dark blue bathrobe. He was inspecting himself in the mirror by the porthole, and patting lavender-water on to his cheeks.

  ‘I feel quite faint,’ he said, without turning around. ‘It’s no wonder they call West Africa the White Man’s Grave. The heat! And you can get anything here. Portuguese itch, malaria, smallpox, Guinea worm, kraw kraw. You hardly have time to say you hope to God you won’t get it, before you’ve got it.’

  He suddenly
turned around. His hair was combed flat, and he appeared to have smeared rouge on his cheeks. ‘Well, my Chosen friend,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

  Barney stared at Hunt in disbelief. He had seen effeminate-looking men parading along Broadway, and soon after his Bar Mitzva his father had talked about some of the extraordinary sins of the flesh. But Hunt had transformed himself from a dapper little Englishman into something quite different altogether. A small and sinister clown, with a powdered beard.

  ‘Do you think I look debonair?’ demanded Hunt. ‘I was a Winchester boy, you know. It wasn’t Eton, but it wasn’t bad. The flower of pretty youth, innocent and hopeful. The bloom of the British Empire.’

  Barney stayed where he was, in the doorway. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think I’d better come in.’

  ‘But you must! The cards are all ready! And I’m sure I can persuade you to try some of my brandy.’

  Barney gave a gritty little grin. He was over the shock of seeing Hunt in his make-up and his robe, and now, in a way that he could not quite understand, he felt sympathy for Hunt, and even warmth; but he knew that nothing would persuade him to enter that green-lit cabin. It would not be fair on Hunt, for one thing; and Hunt was certainly more than Barney was capable of handling – at least, without hurting the man’s feelings.

  ‘I don’t feel too well,’ said Barney. ‘I think it must be the heat. Or maybe the fish we had for luncheon.’

  ‘My dear chap, if you don’t feel well you ought to lie down. Here – please – you can take my berth.’

  Barney raised a hand. ‘I’d really rather go back to my own cabin. Thank you all the same.’

  Hunt came forward, frowning like a wife who is beginning to suspect that her husband’s late business meetings might have been taking place behind the drawn drapes of the St Nicholas Hotel. ‘It’s very difficult out here, you know,’ he said, in a sensitive voice. ‘One’s superiors aren’t always very understanding of one’s …’

  He hesitated, and then said, ‘Predicament,’ as if it were the answer to a puzzle which he had been trying to solve all day.

  Barney said, ‘I think I know what you mean.’

  ‘Yes?’ asked Hunt, brightening.

  ‘Well … maybe not entirely,’ said Barney. ‘But you have to understand that I’m in a predicament, too. My predicament is that I don’t want to upset you, but I can’t accept your invitation. I’m sorry.’

  Hunt’s mouth tightened. His face flickered through a dozen emotions, like a moving-picture machine on a seaside boardwalk. Then, with a flourish, he opened his bathrobe, baring his flat white chest, with a scraggy plume of dark hair on his breastbone, and his soft crimson penis. He stared at Barney with bijou defiance, challenging him to say that he was not impressed and aroused – or at the very least impressed.

  Barney could not think of anything else to do but bow his head, and say, ‘Excuse me,’ and turn away. Hunt said quickly, ‘My dear friend –!’ But Barney began walking at a fast pace back along the second-class corridor until he reached the companionway. He climbed up to the promenade deck, and stood for a few minutes in the shade of the awning to collect himself, watching the ochre-coloured sea slide by, and listening to the endless slosh-slosh-slosh of the paddles.

  A steward in a tight, sweat-stained tropical jacket came up and asked him almost ferociously if he cared for a glass of lime juice and seltzer. He said, ‘No thank you,’ and went along to his stuffy little cabin to lie down for an hour or two, and read.

  The Weser steamed into Table Bay on Thursday, 3 December 1868, just as the sun was nibbling at the edge of Table Mountain. It was summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and even though it was only eight o’clock, the day was already windy and warm. Barney, along with most of the other second-class passengers, was crowded against the rail.

  The Weser gave a long whistle as she beat her way slowly into the shadow of the massive flat-topped mountain. There were already six or seven ships riding at anchor offshore, including two stately tea-clippers on their way back to England from Bombay. The crew of one of them, with clay pipes and pigtails, watched the Weser with casual interest from the foredeck, and whistled shrilly at a pretty young wife who was blushing under her parasol on the first-class promenade.

  Once the ship’s anchor had plunged into the sea, most of the passengers, chattering and shuffling, filed back to their cabins to finish their packing. Barney, who had already closed his single leather valise, stayed by the rail and took a long, unobstructed look at Capetown.

  Under the sheer sandstone ramparts of Table Mountain, which were already shining gold as the sun rose higher in the sky, the houses and churches and offices were clustered amongst glittering green oaks and mulberries. Most of the buildings looked Dutch – flat-fronted and painted white, with neat brown thatched roofs – although Barney could see several new buildings in the heavy, prosperous style of British imperialism, and a seventeenth-century sandstone castle. Two distinctive spires rose above the town – one like a slender wedding-cake, and the other with the plain sharpness of a Dutch Reformed church.

  Even though there was a strong smell of salt on the wind, Barney caught an aroma of flowers.

  ‘Well, home again,’ said a voice beside him. It was Hunt, in a formal grey suit, smelling of lavender-water.

  Barney nodded. He did not really know what to say. He reached into the pocket of his summer suit, freshly-pressed for his arrival by the Weser’s Chinese laundryman, and took out a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses, with tiny black lenses, which he carefully hooked around his ears.

  Hunt chuckled nervously, ‘You look rather sinister in those. Like a chap I used to know in Kaffraria, who used to shoot Bantus for the sport of it.’

  Barney took the sunglasses off.

  ‘You know,’ said Hunt, ‘I really want to say how sorry I am for what happened the other day. You were frightfully sensitive about it. I mean – quite a few other chaps might have reported me to the captain, or even to the Governor. You were very decent about it.’

  Barney looked towards the shore. Already, four or five lighters were being rowed towards the Weser through the surf.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Well, it was appreciated all the same,’ said Hunt. ‘And if you can ever forgive me for what I did, I really would like to help you. I can arrange for a guide to take you out to Oranjerivier, with a bearer, of course; and I’ll introduce you to Mr Hutton at the Standard Bank. It’s the very least I can do, considering.’

  Barney looked at Hunt for a moment. Then he held out his hand. For the first time since Joel had left him in charge of Blitz’s – or maybe as far back as the day when his father had died – he began to feel confident, and self-possessed. He was not quite sure why. Perhaps it was because he had managed to deal with Hunt in a way that he had never been able to deal with his mother, or with Moishe, or with David Stein.

  ‘It says in Genesis, Forgive the trespass of thy brethren,’ he told Hunt, simply.

  Hunt shok his hand, and then stepped back to show that he did not intend to try any further intimacies without being asked.

  ‘That’s excellent, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you somewhere to stay tonight, and then tomorrow I’ll look for a guide.’

  They were rowed ashore within the hour. On the rock-strewn beaches, knee-deep in the foam, black porters were waiting to lift their bags and their trunks out of the lighters and on to a motley assembly of ox-carts, horse-drawn omnibuses, and waggons. A rather shabby brougham from Government House was waiting to collect Hunt, and he enthusiastically offered Barney a ride into the town centre.

  ‘After Portugal, the Cape always strikes me as so civilised,’ said Hunt, neatly crossing his legs as the brougham jolted them over dry rutted roads. ‘It may not have Lisbon’s restaurants, or Lisbon’s opera, or Lisbon’s commercial life. But, by God, you know where you are with people. The order of life is clear-cut, and immutable.’

  ‘I thought you said Cape Co
lony was very poor,’ said Barney.

  ‘Oh, it is,’ nodded Hunt. ‘And that’s what gives life its clarity. No rich Latins of dubious parentage, trying to aspire to white society. No blackies to whom one has to be even the remotest bit polite. There are a few quarrelsome Boers, of course, but most of the really disagreeable ones have trekked out to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.’

  ‘No Jews?’ asked Barney.

  Hunt gave him a brief, uncomfortable grimace.

  ‘Not many,’ he agreed. ‘Not many.’

  They rattled their way into Townhall Square, a broad dusty plaza flanked by stately white Dutch façades, some of them supported by Ionic pillars and decorated with festoons of carved fruit and flowers. The square was thronged with people and animals in almost equal proportions, and an old man with a monkey on a chain was standing not far away from Barney’s coach with a Dutch hurdy-gurdy, so that the jostling of oxen and the fluttering of chickens and the constant to-ing and froing of the crowds was set to a strange, droning score.

  There were dozens of British soldiers around, in caps and blouson tunics, with their fashionable waxed moustaches and goatee beards; and nearly as many Jack Tars, with muttonchop side-whiskers and wide-brimmed boater hats. Around them, eager for their shillings, swarmed street-sellers with high-pointed straw hats and shoulder-poles laden with everything from sweets to live poultry. And across the square, walking with that swaying dignity that few American Negroes of Barney’s acquaintance seemed to have been able to preserve through generations of slavery, Bantu women made their way in their bright headscarves and their flowery Mission-school dresses that may have clothed them from neck to ground in Victorian modesty, but could never suppress the jubilant roll of their hips and the complicated jiggle of their breasts. Almost all of these women seemed to be carrying under their arms a huge bundle of assorted necessities, such as oranges, figs, fish, bunches of greens, and a bored child.