Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘Mooi Klip,’ said Barney, gently.

  ‘Oh, Barney,’ she sobbed, and clung to him tight. ‘How can I marry you now?’

  Barney couldn’t speak for a long time. His chest and his throat felt congested with anguish and grief.

  ‘You can marry me,’ he managed to say, at last. ‘I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.’

  She turned her head away, and he looked down at her dark profile on the white pillow. Her eyes, and the pretty curve of her nose. He wished he were an artist, or a daguerreotypist, because he wanted to remember the way she looked, framed by the pillow, for ever. Mooi Klip, on Tuesday, 14 November 1871, a day of hopes and joys and indescribable pain.

  ‘My mother and father will be here tomorrow,’ said Mooi Klip. ‘I will go back to Klipdrift with them.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Tomorrow, we’re going to be married.’

  ‘We can’t. How can we? You have to stay with Joel. Half of the claim is yours. You can’t give it up, just for me.’

  ‘I still have the farm.’

  Mooi Klip shook her head. ‘You want to make your fortune. The claim is the only way. If you give it up because of me, you would never forget and you would never really forgive.’

  Barney kissed her. ‘You’ve crazy,’ he told her. ‘Do you know that? You’re absolutely crazy.’ But at the same time, the thought of what he and Joel were going to do about their thirty-one square feet of diamond-bearing ground had already passed across the back of his mind like a ghost seen momentarily at the end of a long corridor.

  Mooi Klip closed her eyes. Barney said, ‘He didn’t hurt you, did he? He didn’t hurt you inside? I mean, the baby’s going to be all right?’

  She gave a slight shake of her head. ‘He didn’t get properly inside me. I fought him all the time. I’m just tired now.’

  ‘I’ll heat the water,’ Barney told her. He felt compelled to do something ordinary, something that required no thinking at all. Every thought in his head seemed to have been blasted out of him. He stood up and smiled at Mooi Klip with a smile that was meaningless, because it was neither loving nor reassuring. It was the smile of a man who is still suffering from shock, after an accident that has almost proved fatal.

  She bathed in the zinc tub in the living-room, amidst the wreckage of her ruined wedding-breakfast. She wanted the water so hot that Barney could scarcely dip his hand in it; and she sat upright, her face expressionless, her hair tied up with a yellow ribbon. She said hardly anything at all, except to ask him to bring her another piece of soap.

  Without looking at him, she knelt up in the tub and lathered herself between her legs over and over again, in a monotonous circular motion, until he felt like shouting out, ‘It’s over – it’s all over – you’re clean.’ But she went on, and after a few minutes he hung the rough towel which he had been holding for her over the back of his chair, and went to the hutch to pour himself a drink.

  Later, he made her some tea. She sat up in bed, wrapped in a blanket, and cupped the mug in both hands, like a child. Barney sat beside the bed with a fixed smile on his face until he realised that she was not even looking at him, and then his smile grew even more false, although he could not think of anything else to do. Should he frown? Or scowl? Should he shout at her to pull herself together? It was supposed to be her wedding-day tomorrow, the day that she going to be happy again, forever.

  He held her hand, and although she did not take away, it lay in his grasp like a glove. He said, ‘Mooi Klip?’ but she did not answer. Her eyes and her thoughts, were somewhere else.

  Sometime after one o’clock in the morning, after wedging the broken front door with a chair, Barney wearily undressed and slipped into bed. Mooi Klip was still awake, still sitting up with her eyes open. He put his arm around her but she was so unresponsive that after a few minutes, uncomfortable and embarrassed, he took it away again.

  ‘We’re still going to get married tomorrow,’ he told her. ‘We planned to get married tomorrow, and we will.’

  Mooi Klip stared down at her hands lying on the patchwork comforter as if she could not work out whose hands they were.

  Barney said, ‘You are going to marry me, aren’t you?’

  ‘Someday,’ she said, and nodded. ‘Perhaps someday.’

  They were woken up at dawn by someone shouting and banging at the front of the house. Barney threw back the comforter, and staggered naked to the bedroom door, where his cotton nightshirt hung on a cuphook.

  ‘Barney!’ a voice called loudly. ‘Barney, come quick!’

  He negotiated his way across the cake-strewn living-room, and tugged the chair away from the front door. It was bright outside, and still chilly with the dew that settled in the early hours of the night like imaginary diamonds. On the verandah stood Edward Nork, in grubby twill trousers and puttees, and a jacket that looked as if it had once belonged to the fattest man in Cape Colony. Behind him, two kaffirs were waiting with grins as orange as slices of sausage fruit, bearing a woven litter, on which was huddled the body of a man, smothered in blood and yellow mud.

  Edward Nork said, ‘You’re going to have to be calm, now, Barney. It’s Joel. There’s been rather a bad accident.’

  ‘Joel?’ asked Barney. He could not understand what Edward Nork was trying to tell him. Then he looked again at the gory body on the litter, and saw a hand that was unmistakably Joel’s hanging from one side. The shirt, although it was torn and basted with mud, was also unmistakably Joel’s. Barney crossed the verandah as if he were still asleep, and one of the kaffirs said. ‘He not dead, boss. He was screaming out just a while back. Screaming like blue murder.’

  ‘Take him inside,’ Barney instructed. But he looked up, and there in the doorway in her nightgown was Mooi Klip, her face pale, her hands crossed over her breasts.

  ‘Natalia,’ said Barney, and she could hear the question in his voice. ‘Natalia, it’s Joel.’

  She did not move, did not speak, but stood in the doorway waiting for Barney to make up his mind what he was going to do.

  ‘He’s hurt,’ said Barney. ‘He could be dying.’

  Mooi Klip raised her chin defiantly. ‘A funeral?’ she asked him.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. Look at him. He needs help.’

  ‘You can have a funeral or a wedding,’ said Mooi Klip. ‘Not both.’

  Edward Nork wound his loose jacket around him in discomfort. He was a geologist, and a drinker. He was always ill-at-ease in family arguments. ‘Dwyka tillite does not answer back, nor put one into embarrassing corners,’ he had told Barney over dinner, the night that Rhodes had first arrived. ‘Neither does whiskey. But wives and children unfortunately do.’

  Mooi Klip said, ‘I don’t care if he’s dying or not, Barney. I don’t want him here. And if you go to his funeral, I won’t ever speak to you again. You won’t get anything out of me but silence, for the rest of my life.’

  Joel whimpered. Barney looked down at his battered, mud-crusted face, and saw that his lips were blue and that his eyes were rolled up so that the whites were exposed.

  ‘What happened?’ Barney asked Edward Nork.

  Edward shrugged, as if to say that he knew, but he did not want to talk about it in front of Mooi Klip.

  ‘All right,’ said Barney. ‘Get him inside.’

  Mooi Klip retreated back into the house, and into the bedroom. She closed the door, and as Barney stepped in after her to clear the floor of cake and fruit, he heard her click the hasp into place.

  ‘Down here,’ he told the kaffirs. ‘And gently, for God’s sake.’

  The kaffirs laid Joel down on the floor, and then ran off. Edward Nork, pacing around the living-room in embarrassment, said, ‘Your wedding today? Looks like the food got a bit of a bashing.’

  ‘It was supposed to have been my wedding today,’ said Barney.

  Edward nodded his head towards the bedroom door. ‘Bit of trouble? I’ve heard some of those Griquas are rather hot-tempered.’

 
; Barney knelt down beside Joel and unbuttoned his shirt. From the lumpy bruises that protruded from Joel’s chest, it looked as if four or five of his ribs were broken. Joel groaned, and licked his muddy lips.

  ‘Edward – will you do me a favour?’ asked Barney. ‘Stoke up the range. There’s plenty of fresh firewood in the kitchen. I need some hot water to clean him up.’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear what happened?’

  ‘Just get the fire going, please. I’ve had enough grief for one night.’

  ‘Anything you say,’ said Edward, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  It took over half an hour to get Joel undressed and cleaned up, and laid on his bed. He whimpered and cried constantly, and Barney could feel that apart from his ribs, his left leg was badly smashed. His arms and legs were raw with cuts and abrasions, and the middle finger on his right hand was pulped almost flat.

  Between them, with Edward holding his head and Barney tilting up the bottle, they managed to force Joel to drink almost a quarter of a bottle of brandy. He brought up a couple of mouthfuls of vomit, half-digested meat pie, and whiskey, but he kept enough of the brandy down to send him to sleep for a while.

  ‘All right then, what happened?’ asked Barney, closing Joel’s door behind him. He glanced at Mooi Klip’s door, but then looked away again. Edward noticed, though, and gave a wry schoolboy grin.

  ‘We were all at Dodd’s Bar,’ said Edward. ‘None of us were doing very much. Getting drunk, playing billiards, you know. Another entertaining evening in Kimberley. But then Joel came in, and I must say he looked rather mad. Mad in the English sense, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘You mean he was acting crazy.’

  ‘Well, quite so. He had a pistol, which he was waving around, until Harry Munt took it away from him, and locked it in his safe. And I must say that Joel smelled, rather. Not too fussy about cleanliness, myself. You can’t be, out here, with water so scarce. But he definitely smelled.’

  Barney lowered his head and stood with his hands clasped at the back of his neck. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘That’s rather like asking an ostrich if it wants to fly.’

  Barney drained the last of the sherry bottle, and then topped it up with sherry from the cask which had been intended for the wedding. He paused for a moment and stared at the cake, a broken litter of almond paste and white frosting, and crushed silver horseshoes.

  ‘That looks a bit wonky,’ said Edward, trying to be conversational.

  ‘Yes,’ said Barney, picking up one of the horseshoes and then dropping it again, ‘I think that’s the word. Wonky.’

  Edward took his sherry, and drank half of it straight away. Then, wiping his mouth, he said, ‘The trouble really started when that lady from Capetown came in. Well, lady isn’t quite the word. Whore, is what she was. She was drunk as any of us, but the trouble was that she’d been waiting all night at Madame Lavinia’s, and nobody had given her a try. It really wasn’t surprising, to tell you the truth. Rather unfortunate boat race. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s Cockney rhyming slang for “face”; it always amused me, don’t know why. I didn’t even go to Oxford or Cambridge. But anyway, there she was – drunk, and red-haired, and very much in the mood for mischief – and she decided to auction herself to the highest bidder.’

  Barney poured another drink for himself, but right now his stomach felt too tight for him to swallow it. ‘Go on,’ he said, dryly.

  ‘Well, this is the ticklish bit,’ said Edward. ‘There was a Dutch diamond buyer there, and he bid £25, and then £30, and then £100. He was quite out of his mind with Geneva gin, of course. I mean, almost insensible. But Joel seemed determined to bust him. And, in the end, he bid his claim.’

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘He bid his claim. All thirty-one square feet of it, in return for a night with madame from down the road.’

  ‘But Joel doesn’t own the whole claim. We’re equal partners, fifty-fifty. He can’t sell out without offering me the option to buy his half, any more than I can sell out without offering him the option to buy mine. He can’t dispose of the whole claim on his own, and especially not in Dodd’s Bar, for some flea-bitten prostitute.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Edward. ‘And, merry as I was, I told him so.’

  ‘But?’ demanded Barney.

  ‘But, old fellow, I’m afraid that Joel has rather outsmarted you. If you can call it smart, of course, to hand over a £5000 diamond claim to a common prostitute, in return for a night of passion that you never had. Joel told me that he had never actually re-registered the claim in your favour at all. The claim is entirely his. So when he put in his bid for this drunken red-haired lady, he was entirely within his rights. And she will be entirely within her rights if she tries to enforce her ownership. Which, knowing her, at least from one night at Dodd’s Bar, she most certainly will.’

  Barney stared at Edward for a long time in silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Edward. ‘If only I’d known, I would have told you sooner. But, well –’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Barney, harshly and soft. ‘How did he get so hurt?’

  ‘There was rather an argument,’ said Edward. ‘Do you have some more of that excellent sherry, incidentally? Thank you. Good. Anyway, the Dutch diamond buyer declared that he was in love with this lady from Madame Lavinia’s, regardless of Joel’s winning bid, and hauled her off with him. I must say there was a great deal of amusement at this … you know the kind of thing. Laughing, and throwing bottles. So Joel led a whole gang of diggers out of Dodd’s Bar, and they followed the poor little Dutch fellow all the way to his tent … and when he was just about to stake his claim, if you understand what I mean … just as he was settling down with this lady from Madame Lavinia’s … the whole lot of them heaved out his tent-pegs, and whisked away his tent, and there the poor fellow was, caught in the act!’

  Barney looked away. He felt tired, and unreal, and Edward’s story fell on his consciousness like dead leaves.

  ‘There was something of a fight,’ said Edward, almost apologetically. ‘The Dutch diamond buyer wasn’t much of a pug, but of course Joel was incapably drunk. There was a lot of scuffling, and then Joel fell down the side of the mine, into somebody’s claim; and the ground being so wet, it collapsed on top of him. Rocks, winching-gear, everything. It took ten men to dig him out.’

  ‘What about a doctor?’ asked Barney.

  ‘We tried Tuter. We sent somebody round to his home.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He wouldn’t come. He couldn’t come, actually. He was drunk.’

  ‘So my brother’s going to die. Is that it?’

  Edward had been holding up his empty glass, but now he set it down again, abashed. ‘An awful lot of diggers die out here, Barney, It’s one of the natural hazards of diamond-mining. There’s malaria, dysentery, and cholera. There’s women and there’s drink. Your brother’s quite lucky he won’t linger.’

  ‘Lucky?’ said Barney. ‘Such a miesse meshina, and he’s lucky?’

  ‘Comparatively lucky,’ Edward corrected himself.

  Barney crossed the room and looked in at Joel’s door. Joel was lying just where they had left him, his face the colour of dirty canvas. His teeth were softly and endlessly chattering, and he twitched from time to time in pain. Barney knew only too well what would happen to him if he did not receive professional medical attention right away. Since they had started mining their claim, they had both seen scores of diggers and kaffirs poisoned by gangrene, or felled by blood clots to the brain. He remembered the time an Australian digger had crushed his left hand in the winding gear of his steel cable, and had tried to carry on working with his fingers bandaged up. He had died within two weeks of the foulest infection that Barney had ever seen. There were dozens of graves outside Kimberley, on the veld, and most of the men who lay in them had died for the want of a surgeon.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, then?’ asked Barney. ‘I just
have to wait here and watch him suffer?’

  Edward had been helping himself to more sherry. ‘I hear that Sir Thomas Sutter is in Durban at the moment, visiting his nephew.’

  ‘Sir Thomas Sutter? Who’s he?’

  ‘Only the most eminent surgeon and bonesetter in England, old chap. Barring the Queen’s physician, of course. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Sutter the Cutter?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. But he’s no use to Joel, is he, if he’s in Durban?’

  Edward sighed. ‘You could try to get him there. I mean, there’s no guarantee that he’d arrive alive, or even in an operable condition. There isn’t even any kind of guarantee that Sir Thomas would consent to operate. He’s frightfully particular about who he cuts up, and frightfully pricey, too. But … it may be worth a try.’

  Barney closed his eyes. This was supposed to have been the happiest day he had ever woken up to. Now, like his wedding-cake, it lay in pieces. He wished to God that he had been born somewhere else, to someone else, in another day and another age. It would have been better never to have met Mooi Klip at all, rather than meet her and love her and lose her this way. And all because of his ridiculous brother.

  ‘I suppose I should try to get there,’ said Barney. ‘As long as Joel doesn’t suffer too much.’

  Edward sat forward in his chair. ‘If he does suffer … well, Harry Munt’s still got your gun.’

  Shortly after nine o’clock, there was the sharp rapping of a cane on the front door. Barney had been bathing Joel’s forehead with a wet cloth, while Edward had gone over to Dr Tuter’s place to persuade him to prescribe some painkillers for the journey to Durban. Barney carefully propped Joel’s head with a pillow, and went out to see who it was.

  Silhouetted against the dazzle of the day, formally dressed in black, his hat straight and his walking-cane tucked under his arm, was Mr Knight.

  Barney wiped his hands on a towel. ‘Yes?’ he asked. ‘And what can I do for you?’