Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  Gentleman Jack clicked his knuckles, one by one. His handsome black face was expressionless.

  ‘You taught me many things, Mr Blitzboss. Drinking, Pope Joan. All those things you taught me.’

  Joel nodded. ‘That’s right. That’s perfectly right.’

  ‘Well, Mr Blitzboss,’ said Gentleman Jack, ‘the trouble is that I was brought up by good missionary people. They always said to me, be honest. Don’t cheat. Don’t lie. Don’t consume the alcoholic spirits. Don’t fornicate.’

  Joel narrowed one eye suspiciously.

  ‘I didn’t always stay pure,’ Gentleman Jack went on. ‘I liked fornicating. I liked it very much. So, lots of times, I fornicated. No matter what it said in the Bible, I enjoyed it, and the women I took, they seemed like they enjoyed it, too. One Venda woman I know, she only likes it when church choirs sing, so when you fornicate, you have to take her to the back of the chapel, and hide in a bush. But that can’t be wrong. Fornicating for joy, and listening to God’s music.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ Joel wanted to know.

  ‘Only one thing, sir. This diamond mine is righteously half belonging to Mr Barney, even if he’s in Durban. And not to tell him that we have found this stone – well, sir, it seems to me like stealing.’

  Joel said, ‘Hmmph,’ and rubbed his left thigh with his hand. His face was fixed in a sour, abstracted mask.

  ‘I fornicate, Mr Blitzboss,’ said Gentleman Jack. ‘I drink, too, and play cards, ever since I come to work for you. But diamond-stealing – never. No diamond-stealing, sir. Don’t ask me.’

  Joel picked up his cane, and poked it towards Jack’s chest, two or three emphatic prods. ‘I’m not asking you, Jack. I’m telling you.’

  ‘It’s not right, sir. God’s punishment.’

  ‘You think God cares about one single piece of rock? God doesn’t cafe about rock. All His rocks are the same to him, granite or salt or diamond. Only men give them value. Look at this,’ said Joel, and raised the diamond in the palm of his right hand. ‘I could throw this diamond out into the bush, and you could never find it again. How much would it be worth then? Nothing. Nothing at all. And that’s the point I’m trying to get into your thick woolly head. This diamond is valuable only because Ntsanwisi found it, and because you brought it to me, and because I know how to market it. Mr Barney didn’t give it any value. What did he do? He wasn’t even here. This diamond is ours because it’s ours, and that’s all there is to it.’

  Gentleman Jack said slowly, ‘You’re going to take the whole thing? You’re going to have it cut, and you’re going to sell it, and you’re never going to tell Mr Barney what happened?’

  ‘You’re a perceptive man,’ smiled Joel. ‘I like perceptive men.’

  Gentleman Jack lowered his head. ‘Supposing I tell Mr Barney about it?’

  Joel stared at him coldly. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘But, supposing I did.’

  ‘You’re a kaffir,’ said Joel. ‘You have no rights, no legal standing, no soul. You may speak pretty fancy English, and you may dress up like a Capetown dandy, but that’s as far as it goes. Inside of that tailored vest you’re nothing but a primitive savage, and nobody’s going to credit your word for one single moment, not even if you swear to God that you’re going to cut your throat. But I’ll tell you one thing. If Barney gets to hear about this diamond, and he gets to hear about it through you, then cutting your throat is going to be one thing you’ll wish that you’d done.’

  Gentleman Jack stared at Joel wide-eyed. Then he let out a breath of resignation, and looked away, and smeared at his mouth with his hand.

  ‘You got that straight?’ asked Joel.

  ‘Straight?’

  ‘You understand what you have to do?’

  ‘I know,’ said Gentleman Jack. ‘I have to go back to work and I have to keep my mouth closed.’

  Joel held up the diamond again, angling it this way and that in the rapidly brightening sunshine. ‘You have to do more than keep your mouth closed. You have to tell yourself that you never saw this stone before in your whole life.’

  ‘I want my share, Mr Blitzboss.’

  ‘Your share? Your share of what?’

  Gentleman Jack’s expression remained unaltered – polite, subservient, restrained – but there was a barely perceptible tightening of his stance, a tension in the set of his shoulders.

  ‘My share of the diamond, Mr Blitzboss. You know that.’

  Joel dropped the diamond carefully into the pocket of his shirt. Then he looked at Gentleman Jack with the steadiest of impudent gazes and said, ‘What diamond?’

  ‘Come on, now, Mr Blitzboss. I got proof. Ntsanwisi will say he found that diamond.’

  ‘You call that proof? What Ntsanwisi found was nothing but a worthless lump of Kimberlite and quarts.’

  ‘Mr Blitzboss, I warn you, I want my share.’

  Joel limped around the table, and then grinned. ‘Of course you’ll get your share. You think I’m going to cheat you? You brought me the diamond, I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you for keeping quiet, too. How does five hundred pounds sound?’

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty, Mr Blitzboss.’

  ‘Five hundred and that’s it.’

  Gentleman Jack slowly nodded his head. His ivory earring flashed in the sunlight. ‘All right, Mr Blitzboss. Five hundred. But you have to pay me now.’

  ‘I’ll pay you when I sell the diamond.’

  ‘No, Mr Blitzboss. Now. Otherwise, I tell the happy tidings to Mr Barney Blitzboss, when he comes back. Good news! I’ll say. The Lord has smiled on you. A giant diamond!’

  ‘All right,’ said Joel, easing himself back into his chair. ‘I’ll pay you when I go to the bank. You want a drink?’

  ‘I don’t really think I’ve got anything to celebrate, Mr Blitzboss.’

  Just then, Kitty the Griqua cook came out to see if there were any dishes or glasses to collect up. She was a plump, friendly woman, a widow who had lost her husband and her two children from cholera more than six years ago, and who had worked as a servant in white people’s households ever since. She had come to cook and clean for Barney and Joel after her previous employer, Mr Oliver Peters of the British Diamond Mining Company, had hurried home to England to take care of his paralysed mother in Eastbourne. Joel hated her with considerable vigour, more for her Christian hymns than her pot-roasts, although he hated her pot-roasts, too.

  ‘I hear you talking about diamonds, sir?’ she said, tidying up the wickerwork table. Her head was tied up in a tight green scarf, and she wore a simple Empire-line dress in dyed green percale.

  ‘I’m always talking about diamonds,’ said Joel, loudly and slowly, as if he were addressing a backward child. ‘They’re my business.’

  Unabashed, Kitty grinned at him with her gappy teeth, and let out a wheezing laugh. ‘I know that, sir. Diamonds are your business all right, sir. But they’re not your principal business.’ She held up the half-empty whiskey bottle, and shook it so that it sloshed. ‘This here, this is your principal business.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned impertinent,’ Joel told her, but without obvious anger. ‘Go and make me some poached eggs before I kick your fat bottom out of this house for good and all. You hear me? And make sure they don’t come out like bullets, the way they usually do.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Mr Blitz,’ smiled Kitty. ‘I expect you’ve got yourself a whole lot of diamond business to talk over.’

  Joel scowled. He would have dismissed Kitty months ago if the decision had been his. He would not even have hired her. But Kitty was a distant friend of Mooi Klip’s family, and Barney liked to have her around because her Griqua accent reminded him of Mooi Klip, and she could remember the days when Mooi Klip had been a small girl, and because he liked to think that whatever happened, Mooi Klip was not irrevocably lost to him, or too far away.

  Joel thought Barney was showing all the signs of being soft in the head. One day, Barney would suffocate himself in the sel
f-propagating kapok of his own sentimentality, and it would serve him right. Barney did not seem to be able to see that his skills at business and his showy determination to lick Cecil Rhodes at his own game were nothing more than superficial tricks and varnish. Underneath it all, he was still a dewy-eyed Clinton Street Jew-boy, all bread-and-schmaltz, and hugging your mama, and hot plates of tsimmes on Sabbath eve. He had ambition, sure; but his ambition would always be limited by his boyhood. The Lower East Side was not easily forgotten, even out on the plains of Cape Colony. The kaffirs’ candles, as they dug during the long-drawn-out evenings, would always remind Barney of menorah, glittering in the darkness of New York.

  Gentleman Jack said, ‘I’ll go back to the Hole, then.’ It was more of a question than a statement.

  ‘Sure, go back,’ said Joel. ‘I’ll see you later on. After luncheon, maybe.’

  ‘Are you going to want lunch today, Mr Joel?’ asked Kitty, turning back, and keeping the screen door open with her foot.

  ‘Maybe a meat pasty, or some cheese,’ said Joel.

  ‘There’s some cold beef, Mr Joel. You could have that, with pickles.’

  Joel looked up. ‘Whatever you like. Now, will you let me get on with this diamond-talk that you think so little of?’

  Kitty inclined her head, so that her double-chin rolled out like a shiny bratwurst. ‘You know that the Griqua people say, Mr Joel, about where those diamonds came from?’

  ‘No, Kitty, I don’t.’

  ‘Well, whenever I hear any of those diggers squabbling about who owns a diamond, who it actually belongs to, I think of the old Griqua story; and that story says that a long time ago there was pain and sorrow and hunger in this land, and so some kindly spirit brought a basketful of diamonds down from Heaven, and decided he was going to scatter them all over the land hereabouts, to make people happy. So this spirit came flying across the Vaal River, throwing out diamonds, until he reached Colesberg Kopje, at the place they call Kimberley; and in those days there were plenty of tall camelthorn trees at Colesberg Kopje. The spirit caught his foot in the branches of the camelthorn trees, and dropped all of his diamonds in one place, right there on the hill, and that’s where the white people found them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Joel, testily. ‘It’s a very pretty story.’

  ‘It sets me to thinking, though,’ Kitty interrupted him. ‘I think to myself, if it was really a spirit who scattered those diamonds, then which man can rightfully say that any of those diamonds belongs to him? They were a gift from Heaven to the people on earth, and I believe they really belong to all of us, don’t you?’

  Joel tapped his fingers on the table. Gentleman Jack glanced at him, uncertain of what he was thinking, and bit his lip.

  ‘People have had all kinds of misconceptions about diamonds for hundreds of years,’ Joel said at last. ‘In India, they still believe that diamonds grow like crystals, and that every twenty years they’re going to be able to dig up a fresh crop. Even here, it wasn’t too long ago that some people thought they might be solidified dewdrops, congealed by the rays which emanated from a particular conjunction of the stars.

  ‘The truth is, though, that diamonds aren’t any of those things. They’re nothing more than lumps of carbon which have been heated up by volcanoes; and they’re lying around on the ground for anyone to claim as their own. They’re not magic, and they’re not mysterious. They’re just lumps of carbon. And now I’d really appreciate it if you went in and cooked my eggs for me. And don’t use too much vinegar.’

  ‘Anything you say, sir,’ nodded Kitty, and went inside. The screen door banged shut behind her.

  Joel lay back in his chair and looked at Gentleman Jack with his eyes as neutral as pebbles, his hand crooked in front of his mouth.

  ‘You know what I think, Jack?’ he said.

  ‘What’s that, Mr Blitzboss?’

  ‘I think it’s a mistake to educate the blacks. I think it’s the beginning of the end, when you educate the blacks. They’re happier when they’re ignorant, and living the life of savages. They used to sing ihubo. What do they sing how? Dreary Anglican hymns. You mark my words, Gentleman Jack, nothing but strife will come out of educating the blacks.’

  ‘She’s not a bad woman,’ said Gentleman Jack, nodding towards the bungalow.

  ‘You don’t think so? She’s inquisitive, that’s what I don’t like about her. And what was all that stuff about spirits and diamonds, and who they belong to?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘You think she overheard us?’

  Gentleman Jack shrugged.

  Joel monotonously stroked his bald patch, over and over again, and stared at a knothole in the verandah floor, through which he could see the sunshine glittering on the dust and the chaff beneath.

  Then he placed his hand on his breast pocket, where the diamond nestled already warm with the heat of his body; and he smiled at Gentleman Jack with widening amusement.

  ‘How soon should I leave for Capetown?’ he asked. ‘Next week, maybe? Edward Nork can take over the mine until Barney comes back, can’t he? Edward’s drunk, most of the time, but he knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘What would you say was your reason for going?’ Gentleman Jack wanted to know. ‘Just remember – if you get caught with this diamond, then I get caught too – and you know what they’ll do to me.’

  ‘I would say I was going to buy pumps,’ suggested Joel.

  ‘Pumps? You wouldn’t have to go to Capetown for pumps. Mr Rhodes has plenty of pumps at De Beers.’

  ‘Then I would say that I was going to find myself a wife.’

  ‘A wife, Mr Blitzboss?’

  Joel caught the tone in Gentleman Jack’s voice, and laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, softly. ‘We all have to think of getting married at some time or another, don’t we?’

  *

  The train of ox-waggons which brought Barney home to Kimberley with 54 chairs, 18 tables, 16 beds, a mile and a quarter of carpet, 23 Persian rugs, 31 paintings, 11 wardrobes, two miles of curtain fabrics, as well as an assortment of clocks, bureaux, sofas, birdcages, and tallboys, was generally considered by all who saw it pass, Boers and Basutos and diggers alike, to be one of the greatest spectacles of 1878.

  The Colesberg Advertiser described its arrival in Kimberley as ‘the nearest we have ever seen in this town to the visit of a travelling circus’, and its slow procession towards Vogel Vlei was accompanied by dancing barefoot black boys, jeering lay-abouts, and two Irish prostitutes who were eager to make the acquaintance of the drivers.

  The waggons brought more than furniture, though. They also brought Barney’s new bride, sitting ahead of the train in her polished brougham, shaded by a tasselled parasol of cream silk, tall and straight-backed and more composed than any woman that Kimberley had ever encountered. ‘The new Mrs Barney Blitz is a ravishing beauty!’ exclaimed the Advertiser’s social column. ‘She is Junoesque; she is feminine perfection incarnate! We eagerly await the privilege of her acquaintance!’

  While the drivers and the porters unloaded the waggons, Barney showed Sara in silence through the rooms of Vogel Vlei. Their footsteps echoed from dining-room to morning-room, from kitchen to stairs, from landing to landing, until they reached the main bedroom suite.

  Barney sat on the wide windowsill in his smart dove-grey suit, took off his hat, and watched Sara twirl around the polished wooden floor.

  ‘Well?’ he asked her, setting his hat down beside him.

  ‘Barney, it’s going to be entrancing! Far more entrancing than Khotso.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d like it.’

  She swept over towards him, her arms outstretched, and then she kissed him on the tip of the nose. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she whispered. ‘It’s like a dream. Wait until Nareez sees this beautiful room you’ve given us!’

  ‘I think Nareez is too busy unpacking,’ said Barney.

  ‘Unpacking? Where?’

  ‘In her own room, of course. Now, wh
at would you say to a cold bottle of that French champagne, and some antelope pie?’

  Sara was frowning. ‘Nareez is my amah,’ she said. ‘Nareez brought me up from the cradle, from the day I was born.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Barney, puzzled.

  Sara moved Barney’s hat and sat down on the windowsill beside him, spreading her skirts of her pale-blue travelling dress. Her plumed bonnet had such a wide brim that it almost touched Barney’s forehead, and he had to lean back a little to talk to her.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’ he asked her. ‘The way you talked about Nareez just then, I got the feeling –’

  Sara’s expression gave nothing away. She blinked twice – two feminine, exaggerated blinks – the pupils of her wide-set eyes as dusty-brown and dewy as the undersides of mushrooms in those first cold moments of morning. But she allowed Barney’s sentence to remain in the air unfinished, and unanswered, and when he inclined his head to one side, trying to show her that he expected some kind of response, she simply pursed her lips and continued to stare at him like the innocent, coquettish heroine of a bad amateur play.

  Barney attempted a smile, but he found it difficult. The whole trek from Durban to Kimberley had been difficult. It had thundered all through Natal, and their slow processional climb up the foothills of the Drakensberg had been constantly halted by mudslides and broken traces and collapsing axles. One Sunday afternoon, under a sky like splintered slate, they had found their way through the mountains blocked by a huge slanting landslip; and in torrential rain they had been obliged to dismantle the ox-waggons in the way the old voortrekkers had done, and ‘toboggan’ the hulls down the slippery rocks until they could rejoin the road. All through the journey Sara had been composed and English and almost completely unapproachable. She had slept in one of the furniture-waggons with her Bengali amah Nareez, a small woman with a ruby in her left nostril who drenched herself in musk and swaddled herself in crimson silk, and who insisted on setting up her spirit stove every evening, no matter where she was, to stir up rancid bhuna ghosth, and to fry parathas. Nareez may have smelled like brinjal bhaji soaked in cologne, but Sara adored her, and treated her as if she were her own sister, or even her mother. And during all of those weeks it had taken to cross the mountains of Basutoland and the plains of the Orange Free State; even on those nights which had been heralded by the most gorgeous and romantic of sunsets, with the clouds on fire and the syringa trees blazing with scarlet light, Barney had never been allowed near Sara’s ‘travelling apartments’ as she called them, and had never even seen her in her underwear. When he knocked on the tailboard of her waggon one morning, when the dew lay on the bushgrass like diamonds, he was greeted only by an indignant Nareez, who poked her head out of the canvas and cried out, ‘Go away! Ladies’ quarters only! No Peeping Toms!’