Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  Sitting together on those riempie-thonged chairs, close to the shuttered window, Barney asked Mooi Klip time and time again to think of coming back to him, to consider starting again. But each time she would smile at him and shake her head. Even when he suggested buying out Joel, and paying for him to go back to America, Mooi Klip declined to think about marriage.

  ‘I don’t understand why,’ he hissed at her. Her father was sitting in his big yellow-wood chair only three feet away from them.

  ‘Because I am not ready to marry.’

  ‘You were ready before. How can you possibly not be ready now?’

  ‘You know what happened,’ said Mooi Klip. Then, softer, ‘It changed everything.’

  ‘But I don’t understand what’s wrong. Is it because you don’t love me?’

  ‘No. You know that I love you.’

  ‘Well, I love you, and I can’t stand to be without you. So how can you stand to be without me?’

  Mooi Klip brushed back her curls. ‘Sometimes there are more important things than being together.’

  ‘Like what? I can’t think of a single consideration that could possibly be more important than our getting married.’

  She looked at him straight. The washed-out afternoon light caught the side of her face, so that she looked like a sepia photograph of herself. But Barney did not even own a picture of her, let alone the real thing.

  ‘It’s much more important that you make yourself rich,’ she said. ‘That is what is important.’

  Barney let out a short, impatient breath. ‘Do you really think that money matters to me that much? More than you?’

  She nodded. ‘It must matter.’

  ‘And what about Pieter? I suppose I don’t care about him? I suppose I’m not interested in being a father to him?’

  ‘You are his father. Nobody can ever take that away from you, nor from him.’

  ‘But how can I –’

  Mooi Klip reached out and touched his cheek, stroking it gently, calming him down. ‘You came here to Africa to make your fortune. You must make it. I have learned that I will only stand in your way.’

  ‘You think I care about those narrow-minded Englishmen, and those prejudiced Boers?’

  ‘You will do, when you are wealthy, and you have to do big business with them. What will they way, if you try to take a Griqua wife along to their garden parties, and their banquets? A wife who is as black as their servants? You are Jewish, and that is enough of a difficulty for you. Do not make it worse for yourself by marrying me.’

  ‘Natalia –’

  She raised her hand to hush him. ‘I can only say that because I love you and because I know that it is best for you.’

  They argued like that almost every time they met; but Mooi Klip was patient and adamant. She had been ready to marry him once, but not now. He could see Pieter whenever he wanted, and his fatherhood would never be denied him. But she would not marry him. Not when he shouted at her, and slammed doors; not when he tried to cajole her, or bribe her; not even when he cried.

  Little Pieter was all that he could have wanted a son to be. He had his mother’s dark curly hair, and dusky complexion, but by the age of four there was no doubt at all that he had inherited his father’s chiselled face and big-boned physique. ‘The little boxer,’ his grandfather called him, which in itself was a courteous acknowledgement of Barney’s rights.

  Pieter spoke mostly in Griqua-Afrikaans, but Mooi Klip taught him English, too, and insisted that he should always speak English to his father. He only broke into Afrikaans when he was excited, or angry, and then Mooi Klip would smack him on the cheeks with both hands, as if she were playing the cymbals, and tell him not to be rude to his father. Barney told Pieter long stories about his adventures on Alsjeblieft, and on long cool autumn evenings he would sit him up in the old horse’s saddle and walk him along the banks of the Vaal, with the sun spreading across the mud flats and the birds flickering up from the distant treeline like handfuls of cloves.

  His occasional visits to Klipdrift were days of great calm, and of great joy; and also of bittersweet sadness. But in the extraordinary times that were to come, he would always look back on them as if he were looking through a series of lighted windows at landscapes made tiny by the perspective of the years, each of them rich with warmth, and with happiness, and with precious regret.

  He found Edward in the far corner of Dodd’s Bar, his head resting on his arms, a collection of smeary whiskey glasses assembled around his elbows. An Irishman in a green Derby hat and a green silk vest was sitting at the upright piano, playing an off-key song about Paddy O’Leary’s party, and three other Irishmen had linked arms to dance a shambolic jig across the bare boarded floor. The air was thick with Empire tobacco, from cigarettes and pipes, since only yesterday an ox-waggon had arrived from Capetown with fresh supplies. The diamond diggers smoked what they could get, and sometimes, when the roads were barred all they could get was dried wild syringa leaves.

  Barney sat down opposite Edward, seized his hair, and shook his head around to wake him up.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Edward protested.

  ‘It’s me, Barney. You left me a note.’

  Edward raised his head and peered at Barney through eyes as bloodshot as garnets.

  ‘A note?’

  ‘That’s right. On the kitchen table. You said you were drunk, but I could find you here.’

  ‘Oh, did I? Well, that only goes to show what a foolish fellow I am.’

  Barney beckoned the barman, who came across in his blue striped apron and stared at Edward with a face like a leg of pork.

  ‘If you’re buying any more for him, then it’s up to you to drag him out of here,’ he cautioned Barney.

  ‘Just bring me a jug of water,’ asked Barney.

  ‘Five shillings,’ said the barman.

  ‘Just bring me the water, will you?’

  The barman went off, and Edward gave him an inebriated wave. ‘Never could stand that fellow,’ he said. ‘Too censorious.’

  ‘You left me a note,’ Barney repeated.

  ‘Oh, yes. I did,’ agreed Edward. ‘Well quite right, too. Particularly since I’ve set you back on the road to fame and fortune, prosperity and wealth.’

  ‘I see. And how did you manage that?’

  Edward reached into his inside pocket, and then into his side pocket. Eventually, he found what he was looking for in his breast pocket – a sheaf of crumpled claim deeds. He held them up, and gave Barney an unstable grin.

  ‘What are those?’ asked Barney, sharply.

  ‘These, my dear chap, are the tide deeds for claims No. 203, 202, and 233, as well as half of 201 and half of 232.’

  ‘Did you steal them?’

  ‘My dear old fellow, of course I didn’t steal them. I bought them. And what’s more, I bought them on your behalf. Here,’ he said, and pushed them across the table. ‘They’re all yours. Take them. Make the most of them.’

  Barney, very slowly and cautiously, picked up the deeds that Edward had laid on the table. He leafed through them, and then put them down again.

  ‘They’re genuine,’ he said. ‘Four genuine claims.’

  ‘Of course they’re genuine.’

  ‘But how did you pay for them? They must be worth forty thousand pounds!’

  ‘I gave them an IOU. In your name, of course.’

  ‘You did what? An IOU for forty thousand pounds? How the hell am I going to meet an IOU for forty thousand pounds?’

  Edward waved his hand. ‘My dear chap – wait. Hold your horses. The claims are worth forty thousand pounds, yes. But only in our opinion. The chaps who have been mining them have dug right down to the blue Norkite. They’re all ready to pack up and go home, simply because they believe that they’ve reached rock bottom. They were willing to sell for a very reduced price.’

  Barney stared at him. All he had in the bank was £3211 – the carefully-accrued profits from four years of kopje-walloping. ‘How much?’
he asked, in a thick whisper.

  The barman brought their jug of water, and banged it on the table. He held out his hand ungraciously, and Barney gave him four shillings. He spat on them, and then walked off.

  Edward poured himself a large glass with shaking hands.

  ‘Three thousand, one hundred pounds,’ he said, triumphantly.

  Barney picked the deeds up again. Four claims, right in the centre of the Big Hole. It seemed like a hallucination, the reappearance of his mirage. ‘Edward,’ he said, ‘you’re a genius. One day, I’m going to erect a statue to you. In marble, like a Roman emperor, right on the reef of the Kimberley Mine. Edward, you’re a genius!’

  ‘Well, yes, I know,’ said Edward, modestly.

  ‘I must go tell Joel,’ Barney said. He could hardly sit still. ‘Lord above, this is marvellous!’

  ‘The least you could do is buy me a drink,’ remarked Edward.

  ‘I’ll buy you a hundred drinks. But first of all I want to go to the bank and draw out enough money to pay off this IOU. I want to know that these claims are actually mine.’

  ‘One small snort of whiskey would do,’ said Edward.

  Barney snapped his fingers at the barman. ‘Bring this gentleman another drink,’ he directed. ‘And treat him like the genius he is.’

  *

  Joel was dubious at first. He was quite comfortable working in Harold Feinberg’s sorting-room, and a pretty young French girl had just come out from Natal to work with Harold on the commercial side. To leave the fine brick building on the main street and go back to the mud and the flies and the days of hard digging did not seem at all attractive, and he argued with Barney for hours before he finally gave in.

  ‘I think those claims are a waste of money, mind you,’ he said petulantly, once he had agreed to help Barney dig. ‘If Johnson and Kelly have left them, how can they possibly be worth having? Johnson’s the meanest man in the whole colony, if not the whole of Africa.’

  ‘I agree with you. But Johnson’s selling because he believes that his claims are all worked out.’

  ‘But other diggers have kept on going, and still found diamonds. Surely Johnson knows that.’

  ‘It’s a question of soil break-down, that’s what Edward says. The blue ground underneath the yellow ground gradually weathers into yellow ground itself when it’s been exposed to the air. It’s all the same kind of soil. But men like Johnson are usually in too much of a hurry to wait around and see that happen. They think they’ve reached the end of their claim, and they’re only too willing to make a small profit and get out fast.’

  Joel sniffed loudly, and tapped his walking-stick on the living-room floor. ‘I still think Johnson knows what he’s doing. I just hope you won’t be too sore about losing four years of hard-earned money.’

  ‘We’ll never get anywhere if we don’t take a risk.’

  ‘A risk?’ mocked Joel. ‘Moses took less of a risk when he led the Children of Israel out of Egypt.’

  ‘Moses had God on his side. Maybe we do, too.’

  ‘I’ll believe that when a divine Hand reaches out of the clouds and digs out a few cubic yards of soil for me. Get me a drink, will you? There’s a bottle of port on the hutch.’

  There was a cheerful rap on the bungalow door. Barney, halfway across the room, said, ‘Come on in!’ and Cecil Rhodes appeared, looking distinctly pleased with himself, in a creased cotton bush-jacket and jodphurs with mud-caked knees.

  ‘What-ho, Blitz!’ he said. He set his sun-topi down on the table. ‘I hear that you’re back in the diamond-digging business again! No more kopje-walloping?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ said Barney.

  ‘I always heard that you were a splendid walloper. Friendly, affable, and never wasted your time on dud claims.’

  ‘I have my horse to thank for that. Alsjeblieft wouldn’t go near an unprofitable claim, even if you filled it to the brim with oats and carrots.’

  ‘How’s life at De Beers?’ asked Joel, sourly. ‘I hear that you and your pals own half the claims there these days.’

  Rhodes pulled up a chair, and sat down. ‘Actually, now that the board have relaxed the rules on ownership, the whole show’s going very much better. It was so unprofitable, with all those tiny claims! Now we’ve consolidated fifteen or sixteen claims together, and that means we can dig them all at the same level, and dig them deeper. We can serve them all with the same cables and buckets, too, and drain them all with one pump.’

  ‘They tell me you’re really quite rich these days,’ said Joel.

  ‘Wealth doesn’t come into it, old boy. What we’re doing here is extending the Empire, and making sure that we manage things the British way. Efficiently, profitably, and in the best interests of all.’

  Barney brought them both a glass of port. ‘Well,’ he told Rhodes, ‘you once told me that we might have a scrap on our hands. Let’s see how we get on.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ said Rhodes, lifting his glass. ‘I have to go back to Oxford in the spring. I’m studying for my doctorate in law. But I have a splendid fellow called Charles Rudd who looks after things for me when I’m away.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad for you,’ said Joel, finishing his drink in two quick swallows. ‘It must be wonderful to be so rich, and surrounded by so many splendid chaps and fellows.’

  Rhodes stared at Joel levelly. ‘Yes,’ he said, after a while. ‘It is.’

  The following morning, Thursday, Barney and Joel negotiated their way across the uneven, crumbling pathways of the Big Hole to inspect their new property. Edward had been right: the four claims had been dug really deep, right down to the blue ground, which in spite of Edward’s constant efforts to christen ‘Norkite’ was now fairly generally known throughout the digging community as ‘Kimberlite’. Joel limped around the claims, morosely kicking the ground with his boot-heel, and prodding it with his stick.

  ‘Seems pretty well worked out to me.’

  ‘That’s what Johnson thought. But if Edward’s right, this is only the beginning.’

  ‘Edward’s a drunk. I don’t know why he impresses you so much. You wouldn’t have been impressed by a drunk cutter, back at the tailor’s shop, would you?’

  Barney propped his fists on his hips and looked around. Right beside him, in the next claim, which belonged to the Compagnie Française des Diamants du Cap, a kaffir was loading earth into the buckets which hung from one of the steel cables. Since Barney had last dug here, the cables seemed to have multiplied, and everywhere he looked there were dangling buckets being jerked slowly towards the rim of the mine, and down again. Few cables were wound by hand any more: most of the diggers had set up huge horizontal winding-wheels on the edge of the mine, which were rotated by horses in harness. These wheels were called horse whims, and apart from being more powerful they freed the diggers to attack the soil of the Big Hole with even greater speed and ferocity.

  ‘You really believe we’re going to make ourselves rich?’ asked Joel, dubiously.

  ‘Why not? Rhodes has. And Rhodes isn’t any cleverer than us.’

  ‘He may not be cleverer,’ said Joel. ‘But he’s English, and he’s been to the right school.’

  Barney walked across the claim and picked up an abandoned shovel. ‘By the time we’re finished,’ he said, ‘it won’t matter a damn what school anybody’s been to. It won’t matter if they’re Jewish or goyish. There’s only one human currency out here, when it really comes down to it, and that’s diamonds.’

  He thrust the point of the shovel in to the hard blue ground, and dug some out. Then he crumbled it between the palms of his hands, picking out the pebbles and the gravel. He was left with three small diamonds.

  ‘You see?’ he said, holding the stones up to the sun. ‘One of these is nearly a carat. And the other two are good-quality smalls.’

  ‘What are you waiting for, then?’ demanded Joel, with a smile. ‘Go get some kaffirs, and let’s get started.’

  ‘You’re sure?�
�� asked Barney.

  Joel made a face. ‘You don’t have to have me, you know,’ he told Barney. ‘I certainly haven’t done you any favours, and I don’t suppose I ever will. But we’re brothers, aren’t we, and I suppose that’s a good enough reason for working together.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Barney. Then he made his way up the slope towards the edge of the mine, while Joel sat on the handle of the shovel and watched him go.

  Diamond-fever caught them both. Every shovelful of blue ground they dug up from their four claims brought more gems, and more profits, and by the end of 1876 they were making more than £2000 a week. In 1877, on his twenty-ninth birthday, Barney reckoned that he was worth more than £75,000, and to celebrate he ordered an architect up from Durban to plan a mansion for himself and Joel on the outskirts of Kimberley, on a small kopje among the trees. He wanted a billiards-room, just like the Kimberley Club, even though he did not have the faintest idea how to play billiards; and a field for playing polo. He also wanted a long curving driveway, so that anyone who came to see him would have plenty of time to be impressed by the gounds and the house and the formal gardens.

  He began to dress, at weekends, in well-tailored frock coats which he ordered from Capetown, with dark blue silk facings on the lapels. He also ordered ten smart double-breasted vests, and a dozen white collars, and spotted ties, and tweed trousers. Joel bought himself a small varnished brougham, and a pair of frisky grey horses, and spent his Saturdays trotting up and down Kimberley’s main street in his smart white suits, raising his hat to all the girls.

  The house began to take shape, and when the foundations were laid, Barney broke a bottle of champagne over its brown Cape bricks and named it Vogel Vlei. Joel, who stood a little way off with a red-haired Scottish girl called Mary, gave him an encouraging wave with his stick.